Musings from Brian J. Noggle

I said when I reviewed Georgia O’Keefe earlier this year:

I think I confused her with Grandma Moses when I was young, as she was still alive but was very, very old–both she and Grandma Moses lived to about the century mark (Grandma Moses a little older, Georgia O’Keeffe a little younger). And both of their names started with G, which means to a young man not steeped in the arts, they were practically the same person.

Well, I have now completed my education into the differences between Grandma Moses and Georgia O’Keeffe (with a little Frida Kahlo thrown in this year for a bit of spice). Grandma Moses was what they call a “primitive” artist, meaning in the art world that she was not trained in the arts. I tend to use the term incorrectly, meaning that she’s kind of folk art, with some good representation of nature in a distant landscape but with diminishing skill on buildings and then on people and animals. I mean, much of her work is about what you would expect from a paint-with-wine class, maybe. Not quite up to Bob Ross on the landscapes, even.

I think she became famous because she was a novelty: She started painting at about 80, and a New Yorker visiting upstate spotted her work and worked to make her famous (and that he was an early collector and made money on her is purely coincidental). Soon, she was having exhibitions around the world and appeared in a documentary film and an appearance on Murrow’s See It Now television program.

This book is not just a monograph, but rather a comprehensive treatment of Moses and her work. It includes a biography, information about her career, several letters in her own hand reproduced, and a complete catalog of her known works (at the time of publication–it’s possible they have found and/or authenticated more in the almost fifty years since this book’s publication). It’s a bonzer–356 pages, although it’s not small print and has extensive indexes and a complete listing of her work with small photos where available). Very complete.

One gets the sense that Grandma Moses herself did not take the whole thing too seriously and did not let her fame go to her head. Of course, as a child of the 1860s and a resident of Virginia in the reconstruction era (perhaps considered a carpetbagger by the Virginians) she would have more perspective than a young artist who was 20 something at the time of “discovery.”

So although I appreciate her work a little more than Kahlo or O’Keeffe, I would still not decorate my house with Grandma Moses prints.

This book is of unknown provenance; it has no title page or copyright page, and the Internet has never heard of it. I’m guessing that it was written in the early to middle 1970s because it refers to Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon. It has the feel of small town paper’s humor column (or maybe something from the Springfield papers at the time, but it’s before the Internet), and a later entry does start out “This week” which lends credence to the belief.

And it’s quite an enjoyable little book. The “author” is purportedly a barber in a small town who tells stories about the local residents, mostly made up characters so I guess this is more an example of a collection of flash fiction than the actual reporting on what is going on in a real small town, but it’s amusing and sometimes humorous. I actually laughed out loud at a couple of the bits, including a man who corrected a nagging wife by slapping her bottom with a carp (it must be the Ozarks, as no self-respecting northerner who catches a carp brings it home to eat–because even when we’re poor, we’re not barbarians).

Given the size of the book, I probably bought it in a packet of chapbooks for a buck at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale at some point. I will keep my eyes open for other volumes by the author, but I’m not sanguine–this looks like a self-published low run number (although it’s signed and inscribed to Theodore), so it’s probably a one-off for a larf.

This is the second of Joshua Clark Chase’s military science fiction novels; I read the first, Triumphant Empire a week or so back, and I will likely read the third very soon. So that if I ever see him at a convention again, I can proudly by the next book or two in the series since I will have finally found and read the ones I bought three years ago.

So.

The copyright date is 2014, two years after Chase published Triumphant Empire, and I think I see some improvement in his writing. The book still jump cuts a bunch not only between chapters, but in chapters between the various characters and perspectives. We see the Primary of the Ordeon Empire (the triumphant one) as he meets with the emperor and deals with some light intrique with the leader of the Star Knights by commissioning an apprentice and assigning her to his task force. We get some of her perspective as well. On the other side, we focus mainly on the leader of the resistance and his brother the pirate, but also amongst some others as the resistance foments rebellion on a slave planet and meets with other leaders. The resistance discovers alien tech and captures an imperial dreadnaught to try to reverse engineer it. The empire helps the weaker side in a conflict to actually pull both into its orbit and then launches an audacious attack on three systems at once–only to be thwarted on one such attack by the resistance.

So there’s a lot going on, and the books might have fit together as a single novel. Or, perhaps, the plots could have been fleshed out to make each book bigger than the roughly 130 pages of action. The next book looks to be longer and even more recent, so I’m looking forward to it after a brief interlude. It’s best to read them all very close together, as the books might not stand alone very well as the plots are so completely linked.

I’m starting to realize that my year’s reading log is coming to an end. I will finish, what, three or four books that I have in process? I don’t know that I’ll read a whole other novel–aside from Total War, the third in this series, this year. But I guess it’s only the middle of December. I might.

I have a confession to make: Despite the fact that I have bought several years’ worth of Christmas novels at book sales past, when Christmas time closes in, I can’t find the Christmas books I already own (and this year, I am certain they are not by the Joshua Clark Chase books). So last Friday, I headed to the northern wastes of Springfield, where ABC Books is an oasis on the distant horizon to buy one such novel for this year. Ms. E. keeps her holdings in far better order than I do; although she did not have a special display of Christmas novels set up, I quickly found one in the extensive Christian Fiction section. I recognized the name Melody Carlson as I started to read it; her novel The Christmas Shoppe was the first Christmas novel I read in 2012, when it and I were young.

This book focuses on a college-aged adoptee whose natural mother died shortly after her birth and who was adopted by an older couple who befriended the natural mother who fled from her family for some reason. Although they look a little to try to find her family, it’s only now (sixteen years ago, so then already) that the young lady gets a lead on her birth grandmother in the very town where she is attending college. As she rings the doorbell, the embittered old woman thinks she is a housekeeper/caretaker she has hired because she has sprained her ankle. So the young lady does not correct the misinterpretation and hires on as a housekeeper/caretaker and grows close to the woman without revealing her secret. She tries to learn a little about her mother and why she left–apparently, she took preggers a couple weeks before her graduation and left after a row with her family about whether she should keep the baby or not.

About the midway point, she talks to her pastor and decides to tell her family–her grandmother, her step great aunt, her step-uncle and his family–which left me to wonder where the book was going to go after the big reveal. Welp, it had one family secret too far: You see, the adopted girl is the product of a union between the stepfather and the (of age) step-daughter. So the second half of the book is the family members coming to terms with this revelation. The book uses the word rape a lot, but neither of the participants are alive in the book to say whether it was really rape or just a drunken hookup. I read enough Agony Aunt things where that sort of thing happens to think it possible, but the book calls it rape, so let it be rape, I guess. As I said, that’s a family secret too far, and it makes for the most macabre Christmas romance I can think of (actually, there’s no romance in this book: no love interests for the grandmother or the granddaughter, wait, I mean stepdaughter, I mean, whatever she ended up being).

So, yeah, that might not have been the Christmas novel I was looking for.

As I’m listening to a lecture series on the English Novel, I can’t help compare this book to the themes found in traditional English novels. An orphan, a rich family, mistaken identity, a family secret, and at the very end, the revelation that the orphan is a blood relation inheritor. It reads a lot more modern than, say, Jane Austen, but one can easily see the influence of the typical, and generally much longer, classical English literature story arc.

Or at least I can, right now, because I’m listening to the lectures that I mentioned.

Of the two, I think I prefer the later work that I read earlier. I won’t dodge her Christmas books in the future. Likely because I won’t remember until I’m researching book reports on them that I’ve read her books before.

I hit my bookshelves looking for a Christmas novel to put me into the mood for the holidays, and I did not find one. Instead, I found this play by a playwright whose name I didn’t recognize. Of course, whilst I was reading it, I spoke of it with my beautiful wife, and we got to naming modernish–that is, twentieth century, playwrights. She could only name, sort of, Alan Ayckbourn, “The Norman Conquests” guy, and Neil Simon. I could name a couple more, being a reader of twentieth century drama, but not this fellow, so I thought he must have been pretty obscure. Although “pretty obscure” does not generally get a Random House hardback and Book Club Edition.

David Storey was something in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s. The son of a coal miner, Storey was a professional rugby player for a bit before turning to painting, novels (his first won a prestigious award and was adapted for the screen in 1963). Then he turned to plays. At the bottom of his Wikipedia entry, you find references to several textbook type academic works covering his plays, mostly, so some university (or maybe several) must have mentioned him in class at some time or another. This particular play opened in London and then ran on Broadway for a while. It was even revived for a run several times in this century (and has its own Wikipedia article). So he was not obscure–I just hadn’t heard about him.

Sadly, that’s a more interesting story than this particular play. It starts off with two men taking a seat and talking, which makes it a bit more difficult in reading than watching, as they don’t have too much distinction on the page or in what they’re saying. They’re passing time, not working toward a goal or problem. So I thought it was a bit Waiting for Godotish, and sometime toward the middle of the first act, I realized they were in prison or something. Spoiler alert: They’re in an insane asylum. In the second act, another man character is introduced who comes in and picks up the table and chairs at various times, and a couple of women characters, one of whom is round-heeled, I guess, and they… talk. About nothing, really, and then the play ends with no real resolution.

So I didn’t like it that much, but to be honest, I am coming to sense that I don’t like too many plays that I read cold; I guess I am more charitable to them when I see them on stage, but even then it’s about fifty-fifty. The ones I like, I really like, and most of the rest are kind of meh.

One thing, though: Look at the book cover. Now, understand that the play describes one of the characters as a middle-aged man in his forties. Brothers and sisters, I am older than that (what? when?). Why do the people on the cover look older than that? Is it because they’re English, and Americans tend to look younger than Europeans? Is it because in the fifty years since, people have taken to looking younger? Both of these? Is it because the directors chose actors who were older than the play text stated? All of these? Or worse: I do kind of look like that? Sadly, and fortunately, that’s what I see of myself reflected in this book–and not someone in an asylum.

Well, gentle reader, I have found these books which I ‘lost’ on my to-read shelves after I bought them in 2017. I have had to avert my eyes when I have seen the author at subsequent LibraryCons (in 2018 and 2019) because I had not read his first three books yet. I had even mentioned that I could not find them. He had no idea. On this humble blog, this has been the story of the mythical Joshua Clark books, which I have sometimes mentioned when I reported on other books that I had purchased at cons since then (such as Elton Gahr’s Spaceship Vision: The Impossible Dream earlier this year or Miracle in the Ozarks last year).

But now it becomes clear: From that very first day, when I bought his books three and a half years ago, I got his name wrong. It’s Joshua Chase, not Clark. Not that it made the books any easier to find. Which they were–when I was looking for a monograph or collection of poetry to browse this weekend, I found the three books in this series on the outside rank, but on the lowest shelf on the leftmost book case in my office (seen here before they got really full and started to break down). I don’t think it was the mistake in the name that made my eyes pass over this set for the last three years; I think it might have been because I often have something (sometimes book-things) stacked in front of the book shelves, and the best time for me to find a book is when I’m looking for a different book.

At any rate, the book: You can tell when an author, especially a young one, has played a lot of role-playing games. The fantasy story describes characters in such a fashion that you can almost see their rolled-up scores. This book reads as though the author was big into miniatures and wargaming. The story itself is about 130 pages long with 30 pages of appendixes about the main characters, the factions, and the weapons on each side. It looks like the next book has the same set of appendixes, so it, too will be a quick read.

In the book, the last holdout base of the Vehlan Union falls to the forces of the Ordeon Empire; escaping remnants of the Vehlan forces link up with space pirates whose supreme leader happens to be the brother of the leader of the Vehlans. A small special forces team has been holding out on a conquered planet, and when they’re forced to hide out when one of the members’ estranged family, they learn the Union has fallen. And the Ordeon leader who led the final assault on the Vehlan Union gets promoted to a supreme military leader position and starts his assaults on the remaining non-Ordeon systems in the galaxy.

The writing focuses on the plot and the battles more than individual characters or setting the scenes. As you know, gentle reader, if given the choice between a book which favors a moving plot and a book that focuses on the writing, I’ll pick the book with the plot every time–I do read a lot of genre fiction for this very reason, after all. This book has probably enough plot for a more modern 400 page book, but it’s stripped down perhaps even more than your common men’s adventure paperback.

But it was a quick read, and the plot was engaging enough. So I will read the other two books soon, and I will probably pick up the other(s) in the series if I get the chance just to see how this young man’s writing evolves over time.

This book is a small collection of newspaper column-length text accompanied by one of the artists’ drawings of people and places near Alley Spring in northern Shannon County, Missouri. Self-published in 1980, this book includes interviews with local figures who were born around the turn of the century and remember traversing the county in wagons, in cooling their perishables in springs, and who used or restore old mills and steam equipment.

So, yeah, it was right in my wheelhouse.

I take a paper, the Current Local, which is just south of Shannon County and is also on the Current River, so some of the place names are familiar. And my favorite bits in that paper are the columnists, so the book fits into what I’m reading every week anyway.

So I enjoyed it. It’s a little saddle-stitched 59-page collection, so about 20 or 25 “columns.” The drawings are good, too, and the author is a painter by trade, I take it. She’s from before the Internet, so searches on her name bring up a variety of “We found Tania Gray for you, cyberstalker” sites but no examples of her paintings. I’ll have to watch out for them at local antique malls and garage sales, I suppose. As well as perhaps other similar collections, which would be a treat to find.