Musings from Brian J. Noggle

This book marks the fifth and completing one of the Summer Reading Challenge. I picked it up from the free book cart at church which again has some books on it–the powers that be emptied and closed the library at the satellite church campus and had a mega-free-book giveaway a couple months ago, and that emptied the free book cart as well when the remainder got donated to whereever they went after the tables in the narthex. After I picked it up, it lay on my desk for a couple of weeks because I couldn’t be arsed to shelve it. Which made it easy to pick up.

I called this book a Christian self-help whitepaper, and that’s not far off. The author is a pastor of 13 years, and he has led some research in how congregants characterize their “gifts” from God. So the book is equal parts generic self-help Bible quoting, not far off of what you would get from Joyce Meyer followed by a set of charts and text explaining what the surveys said when the researchers asked churchgoers about their gifts.

The book has a couple of personal anecdotes: One is about how he misjudged the man his mother would marry; about a man who was important as a liason for students on mission trips in Argentina, a large guy with a neck tumor; and a Russian who has been a gangster, but turned his life around (and somehow ended up “running” his Russian town). The anecdotes are pretty high-level and impersonal and don’t necessarily reflect well on the author. And they’re just not that punchy or real like you would get from, say, Norman Vincent Peale whose little personal narrative asides and examples were far more effective.

I mean, I did get some good ideas from the book. He distinguishes “spiritual” gifts from “common” gifts and says that churches tend to over-emphasize and target the former rather than celebrate and share the latter. So I thought about some ways that our church could do some fellowship and neighborhood outreach by focusing on skills-based seminars and knowledge sharing.

But this book, ah, this book, is a pointer to a complete non-profit sales funnel, and wants you to complete its EveryGift survey itself (even before the author whipped out the first chart, I could tell where we were going because it talked about “research” and came up with a copyrightablemanteau for its program). And here’s the Christianeagram where you’ll find yourself:

You have one category for “technical” gifts which, presumably, would cover a hella lotta gifts from woodworking, carpentry, good with animals, gardening, understanding motors and mechanical things, and so on. But most of them are white collar or academic-style gifts, and most of the time when he talks about using your gifts, he talks about art and making music, and going to conferences. Not so much about serving at the food bank or vacuuming the sanctuary.

I dunno. Seems a little upper middle class consultant comfortable to me.

So I got a couple things from it, I guess, but probably not what the author wanted. I did pass it on to my beautiful wife who is more into this sort of thing than I am. AND! I get to take my completed Summer Reading Challenge form to the library to see what my free gift is. I wonder what it will be?

I got this book from the diminished (in more ways than one, apparently) philosophy stack (not plural, and not much of a stack) at the Midtown Carnegie branch of the library recently. Oh, my. I am not sure if it’s a step up or a step down from the British Marxist comic book biographies I’ve read (Einstein for Beginners and Sartre for Beginners). Maybe a step up because it has quotations from the original sources, but maybe a step down because it–I was going to say “just misses,” but it misses on the side of Marxism and embrace of contemporary policies of a certain idealogical (and culturally suicidal) persuasion.

The book has chapters on a variety of topical matters, including life, money, work, happiness, beliefs, you, health, feelings, love, education, politics, and death. Each chapter is mostly the author’s summation of Stoic thought on the topic along with some compare/contrasts with other philosophies and/or religions, but without any actual quotes or citations to back up the assertions. The chapters are leavened by a couple of quotes from Stoic sources, almost exclusively Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Seneca, with several paragraphs of the author explaining what the quote means. The chapters conclude with “Think About” thought exercises and “Going Further” which are ways to put (the author’s view on the) Stoics’ insights into practice.

I considered doing a thoughtful response to it, but I can’t be arsed, so here are some of the quibbles I have.

Ancient Athens was an intellectual melting pot, a Mecca for those who sought to imbibe philosophy at its source, and so drew students from far and wide.

Using Mecca as a metaphor for melting pot where all students are welcome seems, erm, dumb because in reality, Mecca is not those things. Only in common, uninformed idiom is (was) it viewed as a good thing, and generally as a point to aim for, like a North Star.

In her book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Japanese author Marie Kondo askes that we apply the simple criterion (the KoriMari method) to each thing we own: is it either useful or does it ‘spark joy’? If neither, then we should discard it.

This is probably a useful exercise for us all, especially book hoarders (yes, I’m looking at you! Ahem…)….

Ah, the Marx/Kondo connection. Prepare your mind for having less. Not what he meant here, but, no, my books remain until a tragic fire or my estate sale, mate.

One of the benefits of wealth is that it allows us to help others. In 2009, the philosopher Peter Singer (1946-) published The Life You Can Save, which argued that people living in affluent Western countries have a moral duty to help those living in poverty around the world.

Again, the Stoic direction to non-attachment means send your money to nonprofits, have less, and Elon Musk should not be a trillionaire (implied, and probably on his Twitter feed even now). Citing Peter Singer is a nice touch.

Utilitarianism (at least, in its original form) is mainly concerned with happiness in terms of how certain outcomes make us feel.

Okay, cog. Serve others and die when your utility is spent. That should make you happy.

We should try to treat others fairly and live within established legal codes (justice).

Legal codes != justice. C’mon, man.

I don’t want to presume as to what views you currently hold as to the nature of life, the universe, and everything, and nor do I want to prescribe what those should be.

42, of course. But I’m pretty sure if he doesn’t want to prescribe justice via legal codes, he’d be happy to nudge you in a behavoral economics way to his preferred viewpoint.

But what do we do when we feel overwhelmed, or sense the creep of unwelcome anger, lust or depression [sic–he is so egalitarian that he doesn’t use the Oxford comma because it’s elitist, one presumes]? Aside from false judgements [sic–have an extra E in that word since there’s no room for a U], we should do our best to avoid, prevent or suppress the growth of the harmful passion. Your partner has left the toilet seat up (again) or done a shoddy jb with the dishes; your boss continues to ignore your worthwhile contributions while favoring the pretty new recruit; your racist auntie has again outlined her views on asylum seekers… you get the idea.

Strangely enough, like Marx, asylum seekers are mentioned more than once in a positive light. Stoics should love them!

The problems most of us face in the matters of love is that they often stir up negative emotions. Drawing upon and developing existing Greek concepts, Christianity divided love into four main types: érōs (sexual love), storgē (parental and familial love), philía (love for one’s friends), and agápē (unconditional love for God and one’s fellow humans). As you can see, apart from agápē, all the other forms involve potential conflict. Sexual desire can lead to lust, deviancy, jealousy and envy; familial relations between children and parents can lead to grief, betrayal, coercion, resentment; even friendship or a feeling of communal belonging can create rifts and internal disputes or animosity towards those we consider ‘other’ or outside our group or tribe. It is only selfless universal love that avoids these issues.

So, basically, a good Stoic is a liberal who prefers asylum seekers to his auntie.

What fooking balderdash, mate. Also, someone press him on what he defines as deviancy, and we’ll see whom he offends.

Applying this in more practical terms, we may break it down into two main concerns: conmtrolling the passions and eradicating prejudice. We must guard against the power of erotic love to overwhelm our reason and will, and we must try to extend our concern beyond the borders of our own family, tribe and nation.

You see, he meant it.

This wonderful quote reminds me of a Zen Buddhist parable, where the teacher is pouring a cup of tea for his student. When the tea reaches the top of the cup, the teacher continues to pour, causing the student to point this out. “It’s a bit like you, isn’t it?” says the teacher.

I came not to say “What an intellectual yob,” but to point out this is the third book this year that has included this parable. The other two were Be Water, My Friend and The Secret Power Within: Zen Solutions to Real Problems.

There are countless small ways in which a citizen might do this [help out in the polis]. Neighborliness is a good one–offering to mow the lawn of the old coule who live nextdoor, or pick up their prescriptions, helping someone mend a fence or move furniture. The same obviously applies to colleagues, friends, and family. You might write a letter of recommendation for your boss’s niece to help with her application to university, or volunteer to help an asylum seeker deail with intimidating government bureaucracy.

No, seriously, fook you auntie, mate.

All these incidents [Stoics falling on their swords] emphasize not only the Stoic belief that death is nothing to be feared, but also the idea that, if done at your own time and choosing, it is possible to have a ‘good death’ (which is the actual meaning of the modern term ‘euthanasia’).

All righty, then. Stoics thing Canada’s MAID idea is a good idea (perhaps especially for your auntie to make room for some asylum seekers).

Ah, gentle reader. This book almost let my passions rule me in my, erm, disagreement with the author (but, as he does not know me, he loves me more than I love him, I must acknowledge).

This book is unnecessary and probably counterproductive, seeking to introduce people who are curious about Stoicism into Stoicism as Liberal political thought. The original sources, at least in good translations, are easily accessible and don’t need exegesis, especially of this sort.

On the other hand, it did make me want to go back to the primary sources. My oldest and my mother-in-law have started working their ways through the Marcus Aurelius. And I did “just” (three years ago) score a paperback copy of Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic. I should definitely look for that once I get my current chairside accumulation of in-progress books under control.

And it did make “Taylor-Swift-Loving British Pseudo-Stoic” into my new go-to insult, and when I use it here in the United States, I fully expect it to be fighting words.

Ah, gentle reader. As you know, I am a fan of Bill Cosby even now. I’ve read his books (Time Flies in 2004; Love and Marriage in 2004 and in 2011; Cosbyology in 2010; Fatherhood in 2010) and ‘ve watched his videos (including :49 last year, which indicates that the copy of Himself which I purchased in 2024 awaits viewing). And I know it is contemporinternetguache to still appreciate Cosby’s work, but I have expressed my concern about decades-later accusations of sexual impropriety in an post on Brett Kavanaugh when he was a nominee–therefore but for the grace of God go I, and you, too, gentle male reader.

So: This book tackles some stories from Cosby’s youth in the projects of North Philadelphia, when he ran with a group that those of us of a certain age would recognize as the models for the characters in Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids. The book was written after the long run of the cartoon series and after some of the stories likely appeared on Bill Cosby’s comedy records, so I guess in 1991, it might have seemed like recycled material. The anecdotes and their lessons deal with family, siblings, kids playing on the street and amusing themselves, and growing up. Cosby compares his youth to that of the contemporaneous kids (of the 1980s) who get bored and play a lot of Nintendo instead of roaming the streets, inventing their own games with their friends, and improvising amusements. His parents might have said it, but I am sure every generation since has said it, and it’s probably truer now than even in Cosby’s curmudgeonly parenting days.

One chapter, though, is a little, erm, poignant given his 21st century woes: It’s about the pubertyish proto-Junkyard Gang trying to score some Spanish Fly and to dose some of the young ladies of the neighborhood with it. It turns out they’ve bought cornstarch from a Navy sentry, so no hanky-panky occurs, but although in the 20th century, this bit would have been a boys-being-boys story, especially as the ploy did not work, in the 21st century it’s doubleplus ungood wrongthink–and, probably, such spirited hijinks have been trained out of our youth. But, Brian J., they could have poisoned and/or sexually assaulted those girls! Yeah, but they did not. And their failure to do so and the fact that they were taken advantage of makes it funny. Well, amusing.

Ah, never mind. If you’re offended, you’re probably not reading this anyway.

So I’ll watch Himself someday, and I’ll pick up his other books if I see them–it looks like I’m halfway through his written oeuvre, and the 21st century books might be lesser sellers and harder to come by. This particular book is a paperback, but it’s a Deluxe paperback, which means it has a stiffer cover. I thought it had flaps simulating dustjacket flaps for extra copy (as did Hour of Lead), but I was mistaken. Also, note the cover: Emmanuel Lewis, another 1980s sitcom star (Webster, which was an Alex Karras vehicle re-written and re-titled to focus on the adopted son, clearly to piggyback on the success of Gary Coleman’s similar show Diff’rent Strokes). He’s still alive, by the way, but his height and young looks have limited his options in acting, so he has become an entrepreneur over the years.

I got this book two years ago in a bundle for a buck at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale. So I didn’t pick it specifically, but the book was facing out, so I did not ignore the bundle on account of it.

As such, it is a 32-page gifting excerpt from an earlier, full-length book called Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead. This excerpt deals with handling grief; the title comes from an Emily Dickinson poem, one of the ones in my repetoire when I was doing open mic nights. I presume it is–this excerpt never mentions it, but Anne Morrow Lindbergh is a poet. A poignant story behind this particular book is that the space for gift-giving inscription is to Mom for Mother’s Day from Tracy in 1987, which might indicate a loss in the family in the spring or a little earlier.

Lindbergh, in addition to being a poet, was Mrs. Charles Lindbergh, and her 1973-ish musing on grief is based on the kidnapping of their child and discovery of its body. Hope, then dashed, and then the aftermath. The author find her journals from those days decades later and produced Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead from it.

A quick read, a bit helpful if you’re dealing with someone’s death. Better than A Very Easy Death by Simone de Beauvoir, maybe not as good as Love’s Legacy by Stephanie Dalla Rosa–but this book is but an excerpt, so maybe the whole thing is better or more broadly focused than these two.

But as a gift. On Mother’s Day. Man, I feel that.

After listening to the fifth part of the Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition lecture series, which included a lecture on Pope, and specifically on “The Rape of the Lock”. And, brother, did that come in handy.

Ah, Pope. The man is more the parts than his sum.

This collection has three poems: “The Rape of the Lock”, which is a poem in five cantos totaling almost 800 lines that depicts an aristocrat who takes a lock of hair from a young woman for his collection, but the poem seems given over to a very detailed description of a card game which is not a game I’m familiar with; “An Essay on Man” which is written to a Henry Bolingbroke (not the Shakespearean Henry Bolingbrokes, though, as Pope was writing in the first part of the 1700s which was 100 years after Shakespeare who himself was writing 200 years after the Henrys in question) and comprises about 1500 lines in four “epistles” which describe man’s nature, nature, and God and the interrelationships and proper places of each, including reason and instinct/passion/what have you; and “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot” is a shorter piece, 419 lines, and covers some of the same themes.

Pope writes in couplets, and many of them are eminently quotable. But the individual poems themselves are long, and you might wonder where it’s going–which is why the lecture helped. Pope helps himself by including a summary of the contents of each epistle in “An Essay on Man”, and footnotes by Pope himself and editors of various editions (the original and this edition, presumably) tell us the names of the contemporaneous people Pope is talking about, but that’s not exactly a help or driver into reading large stretches at a time. I exercised some discipline in reading sections, cantos, or epistles completely, much of the time, but this is mostly drawing room poetry to amuse or irritate aristocrats of the time. So while one might want to and actually quote Pope on occasion, it’s not something that many in the 21st century will read for pleasure (see also the complete works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, the second and longer part of The Complete Works of Keats and Shelley, set in a holding pattern behind a stack of literary magazines and Ideals).

At any rate, let’s see what I flagged during my slog.

• Trough worlds unnumber’d though the God be known,
  ‘Tis ours to trace him only in our own.
  He, who through vast immensity can pierce,
  See worlds on worlds compose one universe.

  From “An Essay On Man”, early in Epistle I. Given all the headlines about UFOs in government files recently, one question is how religion would adopt. In the 18th century, Pope was nonplussed by it. I imagine the Judeo-Christian religions would adapt.

• Who wickedly is wise, or madly brave,
  Is but the more a fool, the more a knave.

  I think I will put this on my business cards. If I ever order any again. The last batch has lasted almost 17 years, and the box is still half full, which is how a pessimist describes his box of business cards.

• One from Grubstreet will my fame defend,
  And more abusive, calls himself my friend.
  This prints my Letters, that expects a bribe,
  And others roar aloud, “Subscribe, subscribe!”

  Shades of the modern Internet culture in penny publishing in the 1700s.

I had a couple other things flagged, but I didn’t remember what I wanted to say about them.

As you can see, the couplets are generally a little epigramatic, flow together, and as I was reading along, I was following; however, at the end of a piece, I was like, “What’s that all about” even though at a high level I knew what and I enjoyed a couple of couplets along the way, the whole did not strike me as greater than the sum of some of the couplets.

Ah, well, I am a product of my times, prefering short, punchy, and pointed poems.

After I read this book, I came upon, shelved just a couple of similar Riverside Literature Series down, “An Essay on Man” in a similar Maynard’s English-Classic Series edition. Unlike the Walter J. Black Classics Club editions, which were marketed to middle class adults, these editions were college textbooks, and it shows. The book I read has faded pencil notes on the front flyleaf, and “Rape of the Lock” has underlining and margin notes. Which, gentle reader, probably means that more than one student used this as I’m pretty sure “dialoging with the text” was not an early 20th century thing. An LLM indicates it was mentioned in an influential 1940 volume called How to Read a Book and became widespread in the 1960s, and this tracks with my experience–editions of classics I have starting in the 1960s start showing this juvenalia marginalia about then. Essay on Man, this other edition, does not indicate such.

I will just move this second book to the read poetry shelves with the one I read, and I’ll put it in by the old and mylar-wrapped complete works of Pope. I have a paperback copy of the complete works of Pope as well around here somewhere, but I won’t be in a real rush to read the rest now.

Like Look Who’s Here, the Family Circus collection I read before this book, I could not find the book listed in a Good Book Hunting report, and it is in really good shape, so I think I bought it for my boys a decade ago and they didn’t read it a bunch. Which is a shame: Heathcliff was fairly big in the 1980s–I remember watching the cartoon series, and we took the St. Louis Post-Dispatch which included it. So perhaps it was just big for me in that moment of my youth. Apparently, it’s still in syndication, although not in The Licking News, the only paper I took until recently which had a comics page.

Ah, gentle reader. Unlike The Family Circus, I’ve read a lot of Heathcliff collections over the years, including:

• Sweet, Savage Heathcliff in 2008
• Heathcliff Strikes Again in 2009
• Heathcliff At Home in 2012
• Heathcliff Round 3 in 2013
• Heathcliff Tresure Chest in 2013
• Heathcliff Smooth Sailing in 2015

And the Heathcliff comic book I received for my birthday this year (not reviewed).

Although this book was published in 1984, the copyright dates and the dates on the comic panels themselves indicate 1976 and 1977, and we even have a couple bicentennial-themed panels. Which means that they’re fifty years old now, but aren’t we all?

If you know Heathcliff, you know what you’re going to get: He’s going to dump trash cans (which is what we used back then instead of wheeled bins); he’s going to woo Sonya; he’s going to fight Spike; he’s going to sing on the back fence; and so on. According to Wikipedia, the comic only started in 1973, so it’s very early in the run, so everything feels fresh and not dialed in. Of course, I’ve not read a collection of the paper cartoons in eleven years, so all the tropes would seem kinda fresh just because I’m older than the cartoon itself (aren’t we all? If not, do not taunt in the comments). I probably mentioned before in one of those other book reports that I favor Heathcliff over Garfield (although I have read a Garfield collection in my time) because Heathcliff is more of a Byronic hero than Garfield. Well, perhaps I’m trying too hard when I say “Byronic,” but he definitely was more dynamic.

Ah, gentle reader. That’s really all I have to say about that, and, good news/bad news: I have several more collections I will probably knock off in short order, which is good for the annual book count but I’ll probably have as little to say about them as I do about these last two.