Musings from Brian J. Noggle

For some reason, I had gotten it into my head that this particular play was one of the most popular plays produced by high school theatre groups. I have no idea where I got that idea–I am pretty sure it predates wide adoption of the World Wide Web–but if it’s true, I can see why. The play has a lot of characters, and most of them have a manageable (that is, few and easily memorized) set of lines. Perfect for kids getting their feet wet on stage with a couple of more involved roles for those who are natural at it and will go to Hollywood in a couple of years to have their dreams crushed. Also, it’s a play within a play!

So, about the play: It’s a high-level view of a town in three acts. The main role is the Stage Hand who narrates and breaks the fourth wall to exposit a lot about the town and its inhabitants which are kind of treated like it’s a play, but the people in the play don’t know it (hello, Mr. Shakespeare). The acts focus on two families at home, the town doctor and the paper editor, with wives and two children each. A bit slice-of-lifeish, with the first when the kids are young, the second when the son of one family is going to marry the daughter of the other, and the third at the too-soon funeral of the now-married daughter who communes with townspeople who have predeceased her.

So it’s not a very plot-driven play, as there’s no central story to it. A lot of characters walk on and have a couple of lines, sometimes about irrelevant other towns people (threads that are knit loosely into the play, but aren’t central to it). It reminded me a lot of The Time Of Your Life by William Saroyan, and I see they are contemporaneous (have I used that word in two straight book reports? Indeed.). Too many characters, too little intensely driving them.

Although I guess I liked this one a little better since it sort of celebrates bourgeous values more, although the overarching message might be one of subtle Existentialism.

This is the second of the four books that I bought this month at ABC Books (the first, of course, was The Heart in Hiding, a poetry collection). Given that the other two are also plays, it is entirely possible that I will have read them all by the next time I go to ABC Books. At which time, should it be so, I will proudly announce it to Mitchell and/or Mrs. E. So now it’s a goal (much like my goal to read all of the books I bought at Calvin’s Books last year before the end of the year–a goal I met, gentle reader).

I had thought this might be a good book to browse during football games, but it turned out not. The book is actually weighted heavily to text, in small print, that talks about the photographer and his trips (well, trip to India which lasted roughly seven years) and the hardships of taking piles of photographic equipment of the middle nineteenth century into the Himalayas and around the Indian subcontinent.

In most cases, I decry a heavy text-to-image ratio in art and photography books, but in this case, I found it suiting since the story of his treks and whatnot were more informative and interesting than the photographs themselves. I mean, we have a couple mountain passes, a couple portraits, and a couple forts/monasteries, with an occasional figure thrown in to give a sense of scale (and sometimes the best part of viewing a photo was playing Where’s Waldo? in trying to pick out the tiny human in front of the great mountains). But they are mostly landscapes, interesting undoubtedly in their time to viewers who had not actually seen photographs of these places before. But here in the 21st century, we have it all in IMAX.

So I found the photos themselves less interesting than the contemporaneous Civil War pictures of Matthew Brady as the latter has historical significance. But the story of getting the images from this book are far more interesting than Brady’s photography given that Brady had pretty level ground and roads to get there.

Bourne was a principle in a photography shop called Bourne and Shepherd that sold prints of the photos Bourne and his partner took as well as doing portraits and official photography and whatnot. Founded in 1863, this business just closed in 2016. Which itself is fascinating.

So worth a read (22 pages, but two columns and small type) even more than a browse. It helps if you can remember the historical context, though: people seeing actual pictures of far away lands and being able to buy them for their own homes.

This is a former Springfield Art Museum library book which I just picked up last May, but the last date stamped (!) into the book is 1990. So no one has (probably) looked at this volume in thirty years. Which seems kind of sad, but it will probably languish on my bookshelves for that long as well unless my estate sale is sooner than that.

This comb-bound book has a 1981 copyright date, but the author’s autograph on the title page is dated 1990, so nine years later, she’s still signing them for people. At poetry readings/open mics? For friends? For the little bookstore down the block? I cannot tell, as it’s just a signature and the date, but that makes it seem like it was a less personal occasion and something more formal. Still, working it nine years later. I wonder if she printed that many of them in 1981 or was reprinting them as needed. It’s a lot to speculate about on a simple chapbook.

At any rate, it was a pleasant read after At the Mountains Collections of Madness. As you might recall, I didn’t care for that previous volume very much. It’s too modern, where the poems are mainly free verse which, at their worst, are inscrutible verbiage (sometimes) and, at their best, are brain dumps with little apparent craftsmanship. I also saw that the editor of the Marshfield Mail, the current Missouri Poet Laureate, posted a piece of free verse in the paper and defended it a bit as poetry a week or so back, and I thought, “Meh.”

So some better-than-average Grandma poetry was in order. Well, some Grandma poetry, which I am taking to calling the poetry written by housewives in the middle of the 20th century. The sort that filled Ideals magazine. The kind of thing Leah Lathrop and Bobbie J. Lawson, amongst many other examples scattered over this blog, wrote. Formal, rhythmic, and sometimes with an insight or two into the human condition.

This collection was written by a Long Island housewife and deals with tending to children, continuing to be in love with your spouse (and working at it), and other mid-life (that is, the bulk of life) concerns. Some are quick little hits, bits of humor about phone use back when the family only had a single phone connected to the wall and family members contended to talk on it. Some are longer reflections about family and long-term romantic relationships. Some drop contemporary references to movies and soap operas whose titles and players are forgotten in the 21st century.

Overall, a better than average collection of Grandma poetry. Some workmanship and some insight, but it doesn’t rise to the level of high art. But better than most of the dreck produced by professionals, who will also be forgotten in the ages, wherein “ages” might mean “couple of years.”

It’s been two years since I read The Tao of Pooh, and I mentioned I had this book around somewhere, maybe. I’m not entirely sure if I found it or if I bought it in the interim, but its absence on the Good Book Hunting post in the interim suggests the former.

Like the predecessor, this book seeks to illustrate Taoist thought through a whimsical mash-up with Winnie-the-Pooh stories. The title character in this case is Piglet, who is small but Taoism would suggest (as the book asserts) that he is the right size. So we get a little of the author interacting with the Pooh characters, a little bit of text from actual Pooh stories, and chapters on different personality types demonstrated by the Pooh characters and how they’re not properly Taoist (Eeyore is too negative, Tigger is too positive, and so on). We get helpful quotes from other sources, such as Henry David Thoreau as well as actual Taoist thinkers.

It’s okay; a little less informative than The Tao of Pooh and a little more, erm, practical and contemporary in its descriptions of kids these days and how modern life isn’t very Taoist. He foreshadows a bit when he laments about the government whipping up a frenzy to remove the foreign tyrant of the day. Looking at the publication date, we can tell that this was Saddam and the first Gulf War (Desert Shield/Desert Storm).

Then we get to page 214, and we get completely into how the Republicans are going to cause the Taoist apocalypse through their rapacious greed and desire for profit/conquest. No, really. The harms done by Reagan, G.H.W. Bush, and their supporters were going to cause Nature, the Tao, or the Nothing to violently respond and swing the pendulum back the other way towards harmony. Perhaps that was the election of Clinton later in the year. Maybe we’re still due for a reckoning, since we had George W. Bush. Friends, the narrative sucker-punch gained precedence in the early 21st century when authors dropped in unwarranted political commentary in books to prove they hated Bush like any right thinker would. This one comes from a decade and a whole Bush earlier.

So, yeah, I can see why this book would not have been as popular as its predecessor.

An easy enough read, but the author’s interactions with the Pooh characters detracted from it in spots, such as the introduction of a, what, mob-connected hardman, into an otherwise engaging exploration of Taoism. Well, engaging when it wasn’t completely off-putting with a misplaced and misguided tirade.

I thought I might browse this book of photography during football games, but it’s more than a book of photography. Although it does have a lot of great photos of native animals and landscape around Missouri, it also offers photography tips and discusses various habitats and geographical types we have in Missouri, from the different types of forests (and what constitutes an actual forest as opposed to a woodland).

So I enjoyed it. Every once in a while, I think about getting into photography, but books like this might daunt me as I learn how much effort a professional photographer puts into it.

Although he did admit that for some wildlife, he puts them into an enclosure designed to look like their habitat and then gets pictures of them doing their thing there instead of out in the wild. Which probably makes sense when you’re on a deadline. And it tells me if I want to become a nature photographer, I should start at the zoo.

At any rate, I enjoyed this book more than a simple book of photography. Like The World of the Polar Bear, it informed me about the process as well. Which is more interesting sometimes than the mere photos.