Musings from Brian J. Noggle

This book, read a couple days after Black Hand, brings Wuthering Heights‘s Bolan Number up to 2 the easy way.

This book is a better entry in the series–better than Black Hand anyway. In it, Bolan is on the trail of stolen nuclear triggers that are on their way from California to Iraq (which has just restarted its nuclear program after the first Gulf War). So set pieces include a couple shootouts in California, the Irish coast, and Iraq after getting smuggled in via Turkey.

At any rate, the author clearly has read some of the other Executioner novels at least–he blends some Bolan philosophizing sections into the story and uses similar phrases like “numbers running down” that undoubtedly are mentioned in the outlines of the books given to the house authors but some handle them more deftly than others. The tactics and firing Uzis from the hip to great effect are more informed by watching movies than, I don’t know, serving in the military or firing an actual gun–much less playing realistic military games from the 21st century. As I’ve not done two of those three, I am an armchair novel writer when I criticise that, I know, but still.

A quick read, and then back to the moors of Scotland briefly.

Strangely enough, I started this book before I read Boxer’s Start-Up (which means this does not count against Wuthering Heights‘s Bolan Number either). However, I put it down and on my chairside table to read towards the end and quite forgot about it for a bit. Enough to push it from the 2020 reading list to the 2021 reading list, which, combined with starting the Reading Year in the last week of the preceding year, explains how I have read four books already in 2021. Through government and corporate accounting rules.

At any rate, this book, as it indicates, includes a number of techniques and drills, kata even, for practicing sparring. It focuses a lot on tae kwon do style kicks, which means really pretty big kicks to the head or higher; my school teaches them, but the crescent kick is a sweeping front side kick where your leg comes up sideways and strikes with the instep, and although it’s a nice distraction–I use it to hide a second strike following it–it plays a large role in a lot of the drills and kata here.

As I have mentioned, these books are best for people who study the arts and want something to review when not in class. This book formerly belonged to a student at a martial arts school–he has written notes beside different techniques along when he should be proficient at them and minor variations (knife hand instead of a punch, for example).

So I didn’t get a lot out of it myself; I am familiar with many of the strikes, and as far as the sparring drills go, I’d have to have a partner to put them into effect–and my school has its own drills, so when I’m partnered up, I’m doing things my kyoshi has selected. I got bogged down in the last bit of it. The last section–60 of the books 140 pages, not quite half, is some thirty different kata that are attack/counterattack drills this are between six and ten sentences and six and nine photos of the two-person kata. So I set it down and might have forgotten about it except I finished an Executioner novel and did not want to pick up Wuthering Heights again right before bed–and I rediscovered this book instead.

So it was probably more worthwhile for the preceding owner. Who might well have been studying martial arts even before The Karate Kid, if you can imagine such a thing.

Technically, this book does not count against Wuthering Heights‘s Bolan Number as I started reading this book before Wuthering Heights. Also, it’s not a cheap paperback the likes of which will fill my time between chapters of Wuthering Heights. Which, I assure you, I am actually reading.

At any rate, I picked this book up in December at ABC Books. As you know, I work my way counter-clockwise through my two aisles, the first of which is the martial arts/football/artist monograph aisle (with the local authors at the front of the store at the end of the aisle). This book was in the Boxing section which is mostly biographies and auto-biographies of boxers. So I don’t tend to look too closely in it, but by this time I have basically bought all the martial art books that are not about Tai Chi Walking, whatever that is. Come to think of it, somebody else is buying martial arts books up there–some of the ones I have seen in the past but have not bought aren’t there any more, either–which means nobody likes the Tai Chi Walking books, I guess. Me or this other guy. Come on, we know it’s a guy.

I digress. As I mentioned I looked over the boxing section and picked this up because it’s a how-to book about boxing. #9 in a series, presumably about taking up a sport you’ve never done before. The author here talks about his experience fencing, so I presume that he has also done the article about fencing in the book.

As I might have mentioned (or mention all the time), my martial arts school emphasizes boxing over tae kwon do hand techniques, so I am a bit familiar with the strikes in the book–the jab, the cross, the hook, and the upper-cut. Boxing, apparently, does not emphasize as much hip rotation as our school does.

Of course, I’m all about the comparisons to the martial arts as I’ve been trained. The biggest difference is the fighting stance–this book emphasizes a more fencing-style stance, which presents more of your side to the opponent. It closes off target areas on your own body, but it also puts one side of your body out-of-range for attacks–which might be a bigger deal in martial arts, where feet are employed and where you’re supposed to be ambidextrous, being able to attack with the same combinations (but reversed) if you present your other side.

So the book was a bit of review for me in spots, but it did give me some ideas for drills, such as a head movement drill–I am not so good at head movement (and given how sparsely I’ve attended class the last year and a half, I am probably not so good at sparring at all), so I have started doing some of the rythmic movement that I read about in the book. I watched some boxing a while back, and those guys slip punches very fast indeed.

One definite improvement in this book versus other martial arts books I’ve read is instead of a pair of photos showing before and after the strike, the book includes at least three, with one in process, and the images often have callouts and lines to indicate focus or planes:

That is very helpful, indeed.

The book runs 150 pages plus a glossary; only about two-thirds of it is technique and whatnot. The last third are a history of boxing up until the turn of the century and a journal of the author’s individual lessons with a boxing coach. Interesting, I suppose, but not what I am looking for. Although also interesting is that the book has an AOL email address for the amateur boxing group and a fax number to contact them. Wow, twenty years, huh? I cannot imagine that I would have picked up a book like this for practical information twenty years ago. To research for a novel, perhaps, but to hone my technique? Who knows what the next 20 will bring? Sorry, that’s a little extra reflection you get in a book report around the turn of the year and the turn of a duodecade.

Well, gentle reader, I now have a new metric for Classical literature. Out: The Anna Karenina moment where I’m reading a long piece of literature and determine I could have read a whole other book by that point. The new metric is the Bolan number: The number of Mack Bolan or other paperbacks that I read while reading another piece of literature. This is the first Bolan book that I’ve read while going through Wuthering Heights, and Wuthering Heights will have a Bolan Number greater than 1.

But we’re not here to talk about Wuthering Heights; we’re here to talk about Black Hand, a novel that finds Bolan in Turkey after an attack on the American embassy that is laughably underguarded ten years after Beirut. He teams with a director of counter-terrorism and then an attractive sub-director of terrorism to free some hostages and smash the terrorist group, which is five people. Well, clearly, a diminishing number of people once Bolan gets involved, but they certainly seem to punch above their weight.

So it’s not one of the better entries in the series. One incident in the book that I read out loud to my poor long-suffering but beautiful wife was when a terrorist invaded a hospital to kill the anti-terrorism director. He bypasses a supply closet, shoots a surgeon in the head while the surgeon is in a break room, hides the body, and puts on the surgeon’s white coat as a disguise. Except why hide the body after making a mess in the break room? And just how white is the lab coat going to be after that gunshot luridly removes the surgeon’s head?

Yeah, not one of the best entries in the series, but it helped get me through another couple chapters of Wuthering Heights.

I picked up this collection of poetry at ABC Books on one of the classified gift card runs this December. I didn’t do Good Book Hunting posts on them because I bought only a couple of books each time and a handful of gift cards. I mainly hang out in the martial arts, poetry, philosophy, local, and now the classical literature sections over there. I tend to start with the local and rotate counter clockwise through these sections. I’m prone to picking up inexpensive poetry collections. I think I got this one because it’s from Coffee House Press in Minnesota, and the title is similar to my collection Coffee House Memories. So I spent $3.50 on it.

Which might have been too much.

Even though it’s from 1988, it’s still too modern for my tastes. The short line breaks and the choppy mouth feel don’t lend themselves to good, evocative images or pleasure in reading aloud (even if it’s just in your head). The poet is Native American, so there’s a lot of Mother Earth, Brother Crow tropes in it; given that there’s not much else, it really stands out in not a good way.

So someday I’ll have to pen my “What makes a good poem?” essay, and it’s the contrasts with material like this that help me really dial in on the good stuff. Most of which comes from the ninteenth century.