Musings from Brian J. Noggle

I bought this book at ABC Books earlier this month; the author was in the store with a book signing, so I stopped by and picked up a copy of his book. ABC Books has signings on a lot of Saturday afternoons, but I haven’t had much luck slipping up there when an author was actually in house until then.

In this case, the book is more of a chapbook (for $6.50) that contains a single short story. It’s a a spooky sort of story, kind of a speculative bit of fiction dealing with life after death. Something handled better by The Twilight Zone.

Back when I was a publishing mogul, I would have run a story like this–as a matter of fact, I did, but I was desparate for prose. This story kind of falls into that category. It’s okay, but proably not worth $6.50 unless you particularly want to support local book stores and local authors. Which I do.

I must have bought Baldilocks‘ book when it was fresh and new, as it’s autographed and everything, but it’s been floating around my to-read shelves for a while. But, in my defense, such as it is, I have not actually had to move the book unread.

It’s a literary novel set in the early 1990s at a university in New Mexico. A black young woman who has gained some notoriety for past behavior has decided not to leave school and to stick it out meets the white quarterback of the football team, and they like each other and start dating.

That’s the plot in a nutshell; the execution of the book is a slightly talky exploration of how this affects the protagonists, their families, their friendships, and their standing within their communities. It’s a pretty frank set of musings and interactions, and they do have a conservative/classical Liberal bent, so I agreed with the sentiments for the most part, so I didn’t mind them much but I would expect readers with a different, more modern perspective would not be convinced.

It was a quick, pleasant read and worth my time regardless.

I bought this book for a buck earlier this month, and I had the opportunity over the last couple of weeks to browse it over a couple of football games that I watched parts of because I’ve been disappointed in the Packers’ play this year.

As I alluded to in the Good Book Hunting post, this book is part project book and part catalogue.

As it’s published by the parent company of Writers’ Digest, which also has a number of other art and crafts magazines in its stable, this book has a number of art project discussions of how to make the painted objects, including the colors on the palette and brush stroke techniques to mirror the project originally painted by the artist. I learned how you build up from the background with basic colors and shapes and then add lines, shading, and highlighting to give the actual depth. This is a lot different from the flat way I did painting when I was in school and trying to get extra credit in my art classes, but I wasn’t doing it like Bob Ross told me to even then.

Then we get into some items in the Decorative Arts Collection, which is a 25-year-old (then) club/consortium of decorative painters that got together to promote and to collect historical art of the stripe. Well, not stripe: It’s painting flowers and walking men on various practical articles to tart them up a bit. A lot of painting on tin, a little less kitchy than pure folk/country art, but along those lines.

Prettier to look at than, say, Matisse but with a little less depth than real Art. But still, pleasant to look at, and certainly not something I could do.

I’ve been haunting the antique malls the last couple of weeks, looking for gifts for different people, and I’d seen something I thought I would pick up last Sunday at Ozark Treasures, a cat-themed game, and I thought it would be good for a friend, but we’ve already taken care of that particular friend this year, so I let it go. But I thought of another friend it would be perfect for, so I returned Friday to look for it. But I didn’t find it. Instead, I picked up this book, which is also cat-themed and would be a good gift for either of the aforementioned friends. But in a stunning turn of events, I decided to keep it because I also like cats.

The book is a picture book of classic through the middle 1980s stars with cats, and there’s a caption telling you who it is. Most cats appear only once, although Morris the Cat and Orangey, who appeared in several movies, appear more than once. We’ve got the cover woman Carole Lombard, we’ve got Marlon Brando, we’ve got Sigourney Weaver with the cat from Alien.

It’s an interesting book to browse mostly if you’re in the intersection of old movies and cats like I am, and, in retrospect, only one of the friends to whom I thought to give this book. So perhaps it’s for the best that I kept it after all.

Although I could, I know, give it away now that I have read it. But that would be most unlike me of all.

I might have read this in another form before (I have read plenty of Millay before, which probably lead to my fondness for clunky language and line).

The preface gives the book’s history:

This powerful and deeply moving dramatic poem is as contemporary today [1972] as it was in 1942 when Edna St. Vincent Millay was commissioned by the Writers’ War Board to write a poem immortalizing the village of Lidice, Czechoslovakia. This verse-narrative, arranged as Reader’s Theatre Script, very eloquently voices the protest and horror of all peoples of the world at the wanton destruction of the small village during World War II by the Nazis who claimed that the citizens of Lidice were harboring the assassin of Reinhard Heydrich, a Nazi henchman. Opening on the peacefulness of the village and daily activities of a peasant family, the action soon draws us into its suspense and mounting tension as Nazi soldiers enter Lidice, destroy every structure, kill every man, drive the women into “concentration camps,” and her the children into “educational institutions.” Written in a white heat of outrage and fury after news of the cold-blooded mass murder, Miss Millay’s poem has become one of the great literary classics opposing all war atrocities.

You can read more about the actual event on Wikipedia. Note that this is what actual Nazis did, and that the literal Nazis did not stop their reprisal with this one village. Contrast with political figures compared to Hitler in the modern world.

At any rate, this version of the poem is broken into different narrators so that different sections are told in different voices and sometimes the individuals mentioned in the poem can have a distinctive voice to present the sections of the narrative. I kind of ignored that because in reading, there’s little difference between Woman 1 and Woman 2 or Woman 1 and Man 2. The poem itself delves into the lives of a family in the village, two parents whose oldest daughter is getting to marrying age and is getting courted by two local lads when the Nazis arrive. It’s 32 pages of verse, so a pretty quick read, and it’s pretty well executed.

But it’s more interesting as a snapshot of a time in history where a group of writers came together to promote national unity in a war effort. A sepia-toned and faded snapshot when compared to the behavior of “poets” in the 21st century.

The copy I have is in a library binding from a local high school whose theatre program I support through my business. The book itself stems from 1972, and the checkout form in the back cover shows 11 checkouts in the 1990s. People who went to school with my wife checked this book out. Whoa.

This book isn’t a complete waste of time, which was the wish I expressed in the report for Twisted Path. Mack Bolan doesn’t smoke a cigarette, for example.

The plot: Someone is killing off the Saudi royal family, and it looks like the Iranians and the Russians are working together to install a puppet monarch on the Saudi throne. Bolan goes to Saudi Arabia to uncover the plot, and it leads him and Grimaldi into an assault on a compound at Mecca.

It’s an odd duck of a book; I was first pretty satisfied with it, but then the set pieces in the plot were kind of clumsy. I don’t know how much to ascribe to the writer or to the people who prepared the plots. But the set pieces don’t really seem like they’d be a good idea to advance to the next, and then Bolan charges in with guns blazing. So the writing was okay, but the set pieces were faulty.

Although the book contained a couple of mistakes:

The men were Arabs, probably with the ayatollahs–Iranians in Western dress carrying compact Russian automatic weapons.

Iranians are not Arabic. As I was reading, I wondered if I could tell Arabs from Persians and Semites based on appearance. Maybe, maybe not. But in plain text and history, I can.

Also, at the very end, they crash land a plane that has run out of fuel, and it explodes. Which is one of the nice things about an airplane running out of fuel: The explosions are much lesser.

Still, not a bad entry, but it might be until next year until I get to another, especially as I realize I have not read a Christmas novel yet, and I will have to do so on an emergency basis.