Musings from Brian J. Noggle

In keeping with the tradition, I am tearing through the travel and art books I’ve bought this summer and autumn on Sunday afternoons, Monday evenings, and occasionally Thursday evenings as I “watch” football games (which is more and more meaning I look up from my book to check the score from time to time). The weather has again turned to autumn at Nogglestead, and I like nothing better than lighting a fire (okay, a Duraflame log as I have fallen back into all of my dollars-a-day habits even as I have left my full-time position), watching a little football, going on parenthetical digressions in my writing, and looking at pictures in books.

This short souvenir edition describes Notre Dame, that one, in the middle of the Parisian river. It has a pretty heavy text to photo ratio, and the photos aren’t actually captioned, so you have to kind of guess where the text refers to some of the artifacts depicted. The text includes a little history and a bunch of step-by-step, here’s what you see on the tour text which might help jog your memory if you took the tour, but if you have not, the words are wasted. And not helpful.

Still, a bit of an insight into the setting for The Hunchback of Notre Dame–a book that this book mentions on more than one occasion as perhaps the savior of the then-declining church.

It did not make me want to visit Paris as much as All Montserrat made me want to book a cheap flight to Barcelona. On the balance, though, there is a difference sometimes in travel books that are supposed to make you want to go somewhere and souvenir books that make you remember where you have been. The best of the latter should also have the function of the former, ainna? To make you want to go back? I don’t know. I am not a travel writer. For the nonce, I am merely a blogger.

I said when I reported on Milton’s Minor Poems:

These little hardback editions from around the turn of the century seem to have been fairly common–in addition to this volume, I have a couple of works from Alexander Pope in similar editions from similar series. This series, the Eclectic English Classics, look to have cost twenty cents. I wonder if they were the Walter J. Black books of the day.

So I was looking for a science fiction paperback this week on three of my to-read shelves, and I came across this book. A small collection of Milton’s poems from the last years of the nineteenth century still in print in the early years of the twentieth century but from a different collection than the previous one I reviewed. Still, for a couple of dimes, you could have a small hardback that would last at least a century (not that you would have known it). I wonder how popular these were as textbooks–each had some pencil notations in various places, but there’s no telling whether it’s from the original owners or succeeding generations that might have used them as inexpensive textbooks. Heaven knows I did, when I was not checking my English and Philosophy primary sources out from the library.

At any rate, this book contains the same four pieces as Milton’s Minor Poems (“L’Allegro”, “Il Penseroso”, “Comus”, and “Lycidas”) as well as a few others (At a Solumn Music”, “On Shakespeare”, “Arcades”, “On His Blindness”, and “On His Deceased Wife”). The introductory essay is different, of course, and the book includes the Matthew Arnold address I have previously quoted (here and here).

I didn’t re-read the four pieces I read last month; however, I did read the new bits (although I used “On His Blindness” as one of our coronacation family poems, so I had been exposed to it pretty recently).

I don’t have anything really to add to my previous appreciation of Milton; although he gets a pile of accolades from a pile of poets since, including Matthew Arnold, I find him a little longform for my current tastes, although reading a bunch of him in a row will dial me into the language and form than coming into it cold. So these short books are good intros into it before you decide you want to jump into Paradise Lost.

Not that I will anytime soon; I shall probably read some of the Pope poems I have in these editions first.

You know, gentle reader, for the last couple of weeks, most of my reading has been poetry, art monographs, travel books, and Christian self-help kinds of books (we’ll get to those by and by). Given the sheer number of those books that I’ve polished off in the last couple of weeks, it seems like a long time since I read any fiction (it’s not–I read The Widening Gyre only two weeks ago, but that was a dislocated finger and Exposure Notification ago). And it’s only been two months since I read the previous entry in the series (Combat Stretch). Still, it felt a bit refreshing. Maybe this is actually a better entry in this part of the series. Who can tell?

At any rate, Mack Bolan is summoned to Florida because some of the Cuban immigrants are setting up a crime syndicate, aided perhaps by the Cuban secret police. Thirty years after the revolution, some of the first generation refugees are happy with the lives they’ve built in Florida, but some of their children dream of returning to Cuba triumphantly. The police detective who summoned Bolan wants him to act as a mentor to these second generation warriors who have amassed a small arsenal of their own. However, when Bolan starts his probing and hitting, an expert team of hitters from New York comes to take care of him and a Cuban strike team comes to take care of the young second generation soldados.

It moves along well with the set pieces where Bolan is hitting the various criminal locations with only a few “he shot someone how far with a shotgun?” moments. All right, a few howlers: Selecting Ingrams and Uzis instead of rifles as the weapon of choice, and later shooting down two Mi-24 Hinds with the aforementioned small arms. I mean, I had trouble in 1987 playing Gunship winning against Hinds whilst flying a freaking Apache, for crying out loud–remember flight simulators, how you could sort of realistically fly real aircraft on computers before 2001?

At any rate, I enjoyed the book but for the usual flaws I complain about in the better books in the series: It gets well developed for 150 pages, and then the author remembers he’s running out of words, so the remainder of the outline gets short shrift. The stage gets littered with corpses: the soldados, the police detective and his wife, and the love interest die, Bolan hits a military commander’s house in Cuba, and Bolan hits the Cuban immigrant mobster’s fortified island, and finis.

A too quick resolution, but at least it didn’t go on too long, I suppose.

So I might not have finished these books yet, but I get ever closer, and I kind of want to read the next in my set. I’ll likely be disappointed, of course, which is how I end up with an average time between entries in the series: I read bad books really quickly after the good ones, and then I read the good ones after a longer gap following the lesser ones.

This book describes the Montserrat monestary just ourside of Barcelona, Spain. The monestary complex sits upon a mountain that has a rather distinctive shape with multiple rock features with individual names; the first part of the book describes its formation and how the natives named pretty much every rock on it over the millennia.

The book then talks a bit about the religious buildings that have been on sight, which includes a couple of churches, monestaries, and hermitages amongst the rocks. However, given how long the site has been given over to religious use, the buildings on site and all the workings are of relatively recent vintage as they suffered in various wars, most notably during Napoleon’s time when they razed the whole site and carried everything off.

Everything except the Morenta, the Dark/Brown Virgin statue which was hidden away and is in place today. So aside from a few ruins in the pictures and some of the art collection, the buildings, the gold and silver work, and even the crypts tend to be a hundred and fifty or so years old. Which, I repeat, is odd for such a historical site, but history has not been kind to the particulars of the location.

As this is a European book, the contents are in the back where the index should be, and although it reads left to right and front to back, it’s only in the last pages that one realizes that this is not just a historical site but also a tourist complex that features hotels, apartments, a couple restaurants, a couple bars, and a market. So, feasibly, one could live there. I am not sure whether the apartments cater exclusively to pilgrims and the penitent. But I did notice that some of the rooms are only (according to the Internet) about $100 a night, which is about what it costs to stay in Poplar Bluff.

So I’m not saying that I’ll be in the area for sure someday, but you know what? It might not be too bad to visit some of these places. When I am old and will not enjoy them as much as I would now, where I still like to climb and run the hills. But unless that Publisher’s Clearinghouse entry that I just mailed turns out to, finally, be a winner, I don’t expect that I will be visiting Montserrat before I turn sixty.

Although the island in the Caribbean with the same name is closer and probably less expensive overall.

Maybe I will be ready for a traveling vacation next year if such things are available.

Instead of a single artist’s monograph, this book collects a number of paintings of the sea from Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s “Fall of Icarus” to modernist twaddle like Jackson Pollock’s “Blue (Moby Dick)”. So you can take one subject like this and kind of chart the evolution of painting through the depiction of sea-side scenes.

So if you’re not sure of whose art you might like, or if you can’t buy complete artist monographs for a buck each at a sale and don’t want to gamble, this might be the survey course to get you started. You can get a flavor of some old masters, some Impressionists, and some of those damned twentieth-century artists who made everything look like rubbish, and you can be reasonably sure that the blue somewhere on the canvas is supposed to be water.

I enjoyed most of it. I was familiar with some, like “Fall of Icarus”. It reinforced a bit of my taste and perhaps nationalism in that I think early twentieth century American artists were able to resist some of the continental foolishness for a while, but eventually succombed to the modern tastemakers, unfortunately.

So a nice browser between deeper readings or deep throws down the field.

Well, this is a relatively recent travel book. Most of the time, I find these old travel books are from the 1960s or the 1980s, but someone who went to France in this century brought this back, and this person or the heirs sold it to Calvin’s Books for me to pick up earlier this year.

At any rate, this book is a lovely collection of photographs of the French city grouped by neighborhood or local landmark. Introductory text gives a high-level history of the city from its founding as a Greek colony, its role in holding out against Caesar (as depicted in Last Seen in Massilia. which is an old name for the colony), its stalwart independence through the Middle Ages, and its relatively recent joining into France. Of course, we get to hear about the creation of the fortress on the Isle d’If (immortalized, as this book acknowledges, in The Count of Monte Cristo). So the book has many pictures where this island is in the background.

The pictures are wonderful, and the description of the city does it credit.

I’m not sure I’m inclined to go, though. As I said to my beautiful wife, “I don’t need to go; I’ve seen the pictures.” And although I am a bit of a homebody, if we end up wildly wealthy, she will probably convince me to cross an ocean at some point. But England is higher on the list; perhaps the Cotswolds since I not only liked The Cotsolds, and I have another picture book of that region that I bought at Calvin’s Books that I will pick up this weekend or next.

Yes, I am “watching” footbal, which is really a pretext for “reading books during the day.” I set myself up pretty well between this trip to Calvin’s books for travel books and the visit to the Friends of the Library Book Sale for art monographs. I might make it to mid-season before I have to scour my to-read shelves for eligible books.

You know, I wanted to really dislike Frida Kahlo’s work because she’s so celebrated by modern tastemakers because she was a foreign Communist bisexual back in the day. Because that’s what titillates a lot of people who want to be seen as right-thinking more than their response to the art itself, their response to the artist as celebrity. Which Frido Kahlo was and might well still be. I mean, I’ve seen ads for merchandise with her on them even in this twenty-first century.

So I really wanted to dislike her work, and, well, it’s still not my favorite–she’s of the surrealist and brutalist stripe from the early 20th century like Matisse and Madigliani and Picasso, and some of her works are pretty gory. But some of the portraits and the still lifes are not bad.

But that’s not what she’s known for, unfortunately.

So I didn’t hate her work, but it’s probably not for the Nogglestead decor.

Have you heard the name Modigliani? I had not. He lived a brief consumptive life around the turn of the century in France, and his art work is somewhere between the Impressionism or whatever Gauguin did and Picasso; the images are representative but distorted in proportion and brutal in execution. He was only starting to get some recognition when he passed away from tuberculosis, so he’s really only known amongst art people, and perhaps fewer of them as we go along.

It’s probably fitting that if you talk about art that everyone kind of knows and artists who a lot of people have heard of, the names really taper off in the twentieth century.

Perhaps a twenty-first century reboot of the Teenage [sic] Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Next Generation with turtles named Matisse, O’Keeffe, and, uh, some other lesser know artists would re-inject them into the zeitgeist. Or not.