Musings from Brian J. Noggle

I bought this book in February along with three other books at ABC Books, and I predicted I would read it first since I read The Tao of Pooh in 2016 and The Tao of Elvis in November of 2017. However, of the four books I bought that day in February, I have already read two others (The Virtue of Happiness and The Beauty of Gesture); the other, a history of the Celts, joins another history of the Celts that I bought in 1993 floating around in my backlog.

Well, that’s a lot of bookkeeping. What about this book?

I hoped, as I mentioned, that it would be an insightful comparison of the parables of Christ and the teachings of Lao Tzu, identifying similar thematic elements in each as well as a contrast where appropriate. With a focus on how the Bible is better, of course, along with some little hope that people interested in the Tao might find their way to Christianity through this book (as opposed to Buddhism through Christian Eyes which warns Christians about the sweet seductive lure of heathen philosophy).

Oh, but no.

It’s more of a daily meditation structure. Each of the 48 lessons presents a teaching of the Tao, a parable or Gospel teaching, and then Keim’s own meditation, some of which seem to have nothing to do with the preceding. Many of them rely on an, erm, contemporary translation of the Tao Te Ching, such as:

When a country is in harmony with the Tao,
the factories make trucks and tractors.
When a country goes counter to the Tao,
warheads are stockpiled outside the cities.

There is no greater illusion than fear,
no greater wrong than preparing to defend yourself,
no greater misfortune than having an enemy.

Whoever can see through all fear
will always be safe.

Strangely enough, the original does not mention factories, tractors, or warheads. So I started comparing the translations of the Tao in this book with another translation that I have, and it has quite a bit of variation in it. I didn’t compare the translations of the parables, though, but the stories themselves were familiar and not updated to modern contrivances.

But Keim is not traditional in the Christian sense as he often refers to God as She; I thought perhaps it was only a translation thing as he refered to the Tao Te Ching Master as either he or she, but, no, he was probably equitably translating the same there as well.

So I was going to say that the best thing about this book was that it got me to reading the Tao Te Ching again and the parables, but now I’m even not sure I read them in honest translations.

So I’m going to have to say the best thing about reading this book is that I’m done.

I bought this book a couple of weeks ago and delved right into it. I hoped it would be a football browser, albeit something I could browse during night games to hopefully not expose the nude model photographed on the back to my children. But it turns out this book has a lot of text that includes not only biographical information about Matisse and a broad discussion of his artwork as it relates to trends in the art world and whatnot but also lush descriptions of the images that explain why the images are awesome.

Text like this:

In 1944 the Argentinian diplomat Enchorrena, who was resident in Paris, commissioned a door to connect his bedroom and bathroom. Initially Matisse opted to present an idyllic theme: a nymph sleeping, observed by a faun. But both subject and composition left the artist dissatisfied, and his work was a trial to him and stagnated. The diplomat persisted, and Matisse tried again. He chose a new subject, and this time succeeded. The mythological ‘Leda and the Swan’ (p. 82) has been stripped of all narrative content. Jupiter, who according to the myth came to Leda in the form of a swan, can be seen in the upper part of the picture, his arabesquely curved neck and head bending across a black space to Leda, who turns away. The monumental female nude has been fashioned sparingly and vastly. The empathetic, streamlined figure has something heroic, and restores the dignity to the myth. To right and left, red panels with a leaf design provied the triptych’s frame and give Matisse’s interpretation a revelatory flavor.

Which describes this:

The text contains a lot of art criticky words about the colors (the subtitle of this book is “Master of Colour”), flattening of the foreground, the additional complexity of the patterns when a table is turned in perspective in an otherwise flattened picture, and the wonderfulness of simple geographic patterns (sometimes repeated!).

But, come on. This stuff is insipid and stupid.

I have mentioned that that I don’t grok primitive art, and I really, really don’t care for the early 20th century’s descent into simplistic, unrefined brushstrokes as art. I mean, looking at a lot of this, I conclude that individual choices in the strokes, lines, and coloring doesn’t really matter. If that crescent had been an inch to the right, what difference would it make? My beautiful wife said she could probably not do better, but I don’t think she could do worse, and she and I are not fine artists with devotees and collectors and some influence (for some reason).

I’m starting to wonder if my beloved Impressionists, even the good ones (Renoir, Manet, Cassatt, and I suppose Monet) irretrievably broke art when they diminished the reliance on clean lines. The bad ones (Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, and so one) might have led to Cubism and whatever ism Matisse is. In celebration of the hundredth anniversary of World War I, a lot of commentators told us that the war broke Western civilization. Looking at Matisse, I expect the cracks were already there.

So don’t expect to see Matisse prints at Nogglestead nor any other monographs of his work reported on in these pages. A Good Book Hunting post from 2015 indicates that I have another Matisse title around here somewhere, it might be akin to What Makes A Picasso A Picasso?–that is, a children’s book. So that might be the exception–I’ll certainly not buy another Matisse monograph.

Oh, and since this the Internet, I know you’re all jonesing for the back cover. I’ve put it below the fold.

Continue reading “Book Report: Matisse by Volkmar Essers (1989, 2002)” →

This book is a collection of 14 poems about living on a farm and then losing the farm. It comes out of the 1980s Farm Aid era of family farms lost to corporate interests, a genre that somehow was a big thing in the middle 1980s (a response to President Reagan, perhaps?) but has dwindled (although, apparently, Farm Aid is still going, so perhaps it’s just my awareness of it that has dwindled).

Apparently, the purchase of this book in 1984 included a raffle ticket to win the Hirst farm. The author and her husband, faced with debt and foreclosure, tried to sell 50,000 copies of the book to pay off their debts, but ultimately they cancelled the raffle. 50,000 is a pretty lofty target for a chapbook. Take it from a poet who thinks 100 copies is a stretch goal.

At any rate, the poems are lyrics, generally over 12 or 16 lines long and end rhymed. Opposite pages have photos of the family farm and the livestock, so it’s a quick enough book to read. Nothing that sticks out, really. A little more meat than Under the Sunday Tree but that’s mostly because the lyrics are lyrics and longer.

More interesting for the story behind it, though.

When I found this book at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale this spring, it must have been misclassified as Literature (that’s what the first page says) or maybe Art, but it’s actually a children’s book of art and poetry. I think it’s based on the art of the Bahaman artist Mr. Amos Ferguson with some verse by Eloise Greenfield added.

The verse is light and simple, which is not a bad thing in itself, but its depth is aimed at children, so it lacks real poetry meat to it. As does most of the poems I read in cheap chapbooks anyway.

The art, though, is primitive/folk art, and I really don’t know how to appreciate it. I mean, the paintings kind of look like the stuff I painted on the recovered white-coated cardboard tops of doughnut boxes that I used as my canvases when I lived in the trailer park and watched my first episodes of The Joy of Painting. I mean, I can look at Renaissance paintings and judge, knowing that it’s my opinion alone, good and bad, what moves me and what does not. I can do that with Impressionism. I can do that with a lot of European figurative painting. But with primitive and folk art styles, I really lack an aesthetic vocabulary to say whether one thing is good or better than another. So all I can say here is that it ain’t my bag, baby.

Which is weird, because most of the “art” I do in woodburning or etching is pretty primitive and folk-artish. Which explains why I have no idea whether I am any good at it or not. Which probably means “No.”

With a title like Ozark Mountain Humor and a subtitle of Jokes on Hunting, Religion, Marriage & Ozark Ways, you might think that this is a humor or joke book. As I did. But, ah, my foes, and, ah, my friends, it is an academic study of jokes as folklore.

Which means that half of the book is end notes describing where the joke was “collected” (via field work, where intense academic types transcribed jokes). Each joke is numbered for easy reference, and each joke is called a “text” when described in the end notes. Motifs, numbered academically according to one or more humor motif codexes, are cross-referenced, and some of the jokes are delineated from humor manuscripts in 15th century Renaissance Italy or old English joke books printed immediately after the Gutenberg Bible.

And one or two of the jokes are funny.

But reading an academic book about jokes that includes jokes adds a bit of remove from the actual jokes, so perhaps I was less prepared to laugh. Also, I don’t tend to laugh at many jokes in these books, and I’m infrequently actually amused.

Here are the notes that I flagged in the book as I was reading:

• One joke deals with a young girl saying her prayers prior to moving to St. Louis, and she says at the end of her prayer, “This is goodbye, God. We’re moving to St. Louis.” (Text 117.) Even though I was a longtime resident of the St. Louis area, it was a bit reluctantly, so I can empathize.
• One joke (Text 126) deals with a barber whose shop is visited by a notorious outlaw; this reminded me of a shorter version of “Lather and Nothing Else” albeit with a punchline instead of a moral lesson.
• Texts 202b and 204a/204b look to be the source material for the Ray Stevens song “Sitting Up with the Dead”:

I didn’t flag the footnote that jokes about black people were removed at the publisher’s request. The jokes about nuns enjoying being raped, however, remained in the book. In 1989, our official sensibilities were only starting to be refined. Although one of the nuns being raped jokes relied on the inclusion of a black nun who speaks with a hyperbolic accent and who already knows a thing or two about sex. One wonders if this text was excised in later editions of the book.

Also, the author refers numerous times to Asimov’s Treasury of Humor (which I don’t think I own, but I will be on the lookout for), but never refers to Lecherous Limericks. Limericks are not part of the native Ozarks oral tradition, apparently.

At any rate: I read it, and it counts as my 75th book of the year. I even read the End Notes, or skimmed them, anyway, as some of them detailed the local people who told the joke, including many people who were born in the 19th century and saw the early 20th century changes to their corner of America.