Musings from Brian J. Noggle

I got this book in Sparta in 2024 with a couple of other loft interior design books. I read the others, Small Lofts and Minimalist Lofts, not long after I got them. This one, however, languished partially complete beside the reading chair for quite some time before I recently finished it as part of my drive to finish up (or reshelve) books that have been there for a long time.

It’s because it has a high copy-to-photo ratio. It has these chapters:

• the loft look
• space
• light
• materials
• color
• styling
• outside in

Yeah, not capitalized, because that’s stylish.

Each two-page spread has three photos, generally a larger one and two smaller ones, but a lot of gushy, purple, catalog-style prose. Each chapter has a “case study” which is slightly more specific, more of the same. Although the book did not depend upon the word liminal quite as much as the others.

So, to underline (as this book does), the loft style of the early 21st century (and maybe beyond) is to create open floor plan condos that look like Scandinavian museums with their light and neutral colors and simplistic furniture and art presentation (a limited number of things per room), objects chosen for how well they conform to the contempraneous concepts of style and nothing else. Architectural elements like floating steps which look like they might last a decade, but don’t most loft dwellers, especially those buying bespoke lofts like those depicted in books, make me wonder what they’ll be like in five or six years. To say nothing of twenty. But, again, I imagine lofts turn over a lot, and everyone who’s buying a pied-à-terre is going to pay designers and architects to redo it in their vision anyway.

You know, I prefer craftsman to almost lodge design, so for me, a loft has exposed brick and industrial elements but also thick wood accents and tend toward the dark colors. And as for décor, the chapter “styling” opens with:

The key to styling urban spaces is balance. Balance between personal treasures and cohesive, clear and contemporary home style. With our choice in furniture, fabrics, and a hundred other details, we stamp our personality upon a room, we make it ours.

I mean, if you cannot trust a philosophy described with a missing serial comma and a comma splice, what can you trust?

So much of interior design, it seems to me, is self-referential and artificial within the industry itself. Making spaces look like other spaces, with external indicators substituting appearance for meaning. Of course, when I look around Nogglestead, I see things and decorative items with meaning. Going along the mantel on the oversized brick fireplace in our family room, for example, we have a needlepoint girl which was a gift to my beautiful wife; a pair of replica dueling pistols which belonged to her uncle; her acryllic plaque for being on the park board; a shadowbox containing duck and goose calls belonging to her father; a time/thermometer/barometer bit which was a gift; the flag from my mother’s casket; the little crystal lamp I bought in 2018; the cartridges from the salute fired at my father-in-law’s funeral in a triangle flag shadow box; a scale that belonged to my sainted mother; a shadow box containing three garrison caps from my mother’s veterans organizations; a mirror which belonged to my favorite aunt; a marble chessboard that belonged to my grandfather and then my mother; a tin cat garden decoration I bought for my wife; two cat sculptures that belonged to my godmother aunt, including one I bought for her; a fireplace tool set which was decorative at my mother-in-law’s house but is functional (some times) at Nogglestead; and a porcelain cat sculpture I’ve named Darla which belonged to my favorite aunt. I look around the rooms, and I can tell you why the things are here. Some elements do not scream Brian J. did this–mostly gifts consumer art from my godmother aunt or chosen by my beautiful wife (although we have one set, down from two, of cheap consumer art I bought in my Ebaying days). So no balance between personal treasures. All personal treasures.

Should I someday have a loft, it will not look like this. It will look like Nogglestead but probably with a more open floor plan. And I will invent industrial lodge cluttercore.

Ah, gentle reader. I have picked this short book to be a mild distraction whilst I work through That Hideous Strength, The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Pamela, and the second book in the Story of Civilization set by the Durants. Well, mostly, That Hideous Strength right now, which I thought might go better/go faster after reading the Gothickish mess of The Unloved, but, oh, no. Still slow going there–a couple of segments of a chapter or a chapter of it a night. So: This book, which I acquired at ABC Books in 2023 (along with two books on how to play guitar, strangely enough–clearly this is a sign that I need to learn to play guitar).

So: It is a rather recent book as the books I acquire goes. It is a basic instruction book on Kendo, Japanese swordfighting techniques for a hand-and-a-half sword, focusing on fighting armored opponents. It has a list of exercises and drills and a couple of illustrations, but mostly it directs the user to YouTube videos for actual demonstrations. Which is atypical for the books I read on martial arts–most of them are old enough that they precede YouTube. I haven’t watched the videos, though, as I’m still a fencer more than a kendo guy, and that will be all right until people start wearing armor again. Good enough for duels, anyway.

And, as I mentioned, or meant to, it’s a slash and chop martial art, designed to cut through samurai armor. Try this on full plate, and you’re probably in a world of hurt. So some stepping and chopping from overhead strikes. I wonder how well I could pick it up from some of the diamond footwork drills I’ve learned (and included in Boxing Drill Companion, available on the Apple App Store!). Simple research indicates there are three kendo dojos in Missouri, none in Springfield, and my dojo only trains sticks these days (in the past, we did some sword work, other weapons, and other styles, but that was a long, long time ago).

I’m thinking about going through some of the thinner martial arts books I’ve got to continue with the breaks from the homeworkish reading. It makes me feel like a martial artist in a period where I’ve gone through a little lull in my studies due to many circumstances, only one of which is that I’m lazy and feeling old at the same time.

I don’t know where I got this Book Club edition; as it does not show up on any Good Book Hunting reports, I’ll assume that I inherited from my aunt who passed away 20 years ago whose few bookshelves were packed with 70s and 80s horror and thrillers. You know, in my Ebay peddling days, she came along to estate sales a time or two and tried the Ebay thing for a while as well–at least, she listed, sold, and shipped a few things from what she picked up, mostly the collectible statuary of the era. She did better than Pixie, who more frequently accompanied me, who collected items but didn’t generally get around to listing them on Ebay.

At any rate, I read Creature in 2019, and I thought it was okay. But this book? Absurd. Absurd. I did not like it.

So: A prodigal son is called back to his childhood home, Sea Oaks, as his mother is dying. So he brings his nuclear family to the island and its antebellum mansion off the coast of the southern United States. His mother is a harridan who has been hard on his sister who wanted to be a dancer but fell down the stairs and broke a hip which put off her dreams, which to be honest were as much her mother’s dreams. The old woman dies, and then the daughter goes crazy (again) and begins to kill everyone one-by-one. The wife. Her dance students. Her housekeeper. Her brother. And so on. Somehow, the fact that these deaths are piling up on Sea Oaks in a relatively short time (like a couple weeks) doesn’t draw any attention, and somehow, this middle-aged woman with a pronounced limp can get the drop on a whole bunch of people and can handle corpses like a professional coroner, and….

Oh, for Pete’s sake. I have recently dinged authors for having their plots too informed by video games; this book’s plotting seems ripped from contemporary (then) direct-to-video slasher films. Eesh, one of the first video cassettes we owned in 1985 was Alice, Sweet Alice, and this book is right on par with it.

I mean, Saul is an adequate writer. He spends a little too much time, perhaps, setting up the tropish Southern Gothic setting (the first hundred pages of the 300 page book are setting the scene, it seems). But.

Yeah, you know, I’ve often, at least in person, commented on how some writers of the past who are wildly successful in their time are forgotten now. When I was hitting the estate sales around the turn of the century, as the, what, Silent Generation and maybe Greatest Generation were cleaning out, I saw a hella lotta Frank Yerby novels. A lot of Harold Robbins novels. Probably my share of John Saul novels. But you don’t hear much about them now, and reading this book written and published in my lifetime, I can kind of see how it happens. Wildly popular, a product of its time, but not timeless in any sense.

I don’t know how many other Saul novels I might have floating around here; however, I can say that it will probably be another seven years before I get to one. Unless I decide I must read all the John Saul books right now like I sometimes do. But I hope not.