Musings from Brian J. Noggle

This is the second of the two little Salesian fundraising giveaway collections that I bought in last year; I read another, The Way, in June. Which means that I have another floating around here somewhere. They’re awfully small, so who knows when I will find it. This volume comes from the middle 1990s, which means that they were still coming in the mail to potential donors as far as that. The Way was from 1983, so they certainly had a run that spanned decades. Which means I might be able to find a bunch of them out there, not that I need to collect another series intermittently. Or perhaps one does not find them so often because they are little cheap giveaways that most people did not save (or, probably, even read).

So: There’s not too much to say about this that I did not say for The Way, which was:

This volume is 32 pages of grandmother poetry focusing on religious themes, but generic Christian religious themes–you get Jesus and you get God, but no Mary. The small pages are akin to Ideals magazine, with the poems set on pages surrounded by illustrations of homey and old-timey scenes and landscapes. Basically, the target crowd overlapped a lot with people who would subscribe to Ideals. They’re poems, too, not prayers; some are addressed to God, but most of them talk about God instead. Quality varies from meh to okay, but really, this is everyday poetry, the kind that people who were not academic poets or kept by patrons wrote. Normal people. I mean, jeez Louise, my father wrote poetry not unlike this. So it’s not designed to be profound, meaningful, or obscure to differentiate the Poet from the Rubes without advanced degrees in literature. So it was nice, and a quick read, and I suppose it could fit into one’s daily devotions if one were so inclined.

It comes from a time when everyday people read middlebrow poetry, and it was not seized by academics and obscuratans who decided poetry is only for them. Of course, it kind of tracks also with the decline of education and the replacement of books by other media (television, the Internet) which means that regular people turn to other things seeking the meaning and the sense of life rather than poetry. Which is a shame.

Most of the poems in this volume are nice, which is probably a step below not bad, but they’re not aiming for Literature. Not that the Literature that has replaced this sort of poetry will be any more remembered through the centuries if nobody is reading, sticking on their mirror or fridge, or memorizing them either.

At any rate, I will probably pick more of these books up when I run into them.

Well, I recently read The Quest of Kadji, and in doing some research on him (reading the Wikipedia entry), I was reminded that he edited the Flashing Swords anthologies, two of which I bought in 2014 (along with the volumes of the Agents of T.E.R.R.A. series, The Golden Goddess Gambit and The Emerald Elephant Gambit, both of which I have also read this year, which means I’m clearly catching up on my reading from the last decade, slowly). Given that I’d read a Carter original, I thought perhaps no time would be better to read these anthologies which I’ve passed over many times in the past.

When I bought The Quest of Kadji in 2018, Friar said, “Carter worked in the same vein as ERB, in many cases to a degree of homage that rose to pastiche.” In the introduction to this book, Carter uses the word pastiche, which can just mean that it’s a conscious imitation like an homage. But the word has come to take on a more purple prose definition since then. I also said, “I did read some of John Jakes’ Brak stories, though.” in the comments, which is amusing given that this book has a Brak story in it.

Carter explains that he is part of a small group of sword-and-sorcery writers with some twee name, and he has started anthologizing some of their works. Strangely enough, I ended up with the even numbers of the series which filled the 1970s.

This book includes:

• “The Rug and the Bull” by L. Sprague de Camp which features a group of travellers similar to Gypsies who try to sell a flying carpet to a king.
• “The Jade Man’s Eyes” by Michael Moorcock wherein Elric is enlisted to travel West to his homeland in search of the ancient fabled city of his people, but disasted befalls the expedition as it often does when Elric is involved. You know, I might have heard the name Elric in my youth, probably on BBSes when the material was fresh, but I have not read any of the related novels. I’ve read The Black Corridor and An Alien Heat twenty years ago, and they put me off on the Moorcock. But the Elric stories might be interestinger.
• “Toads of Grimmerdale” by Andre Norton wherein a woman seeking revenge for her ravishing and impregnation at the hand of an invading army’s man asks help of unholy creatures only to learn that she might have marked the wrong man for revenge.
• “Ghoul’s Garden” wherein Brak the barbarian encounters a woman and a cleric travelling and finds that a man pursuing the woman has a rug which contains its own dark world in the embroidery.

At 200 pages, it’s not a long read, but it does require some context-switching between each story. It might help, I suppose, if I were versed in the sword-and-sorcery of the era, as they’re all part of pre-established worlds.

But I do agree that sword-and-sorcery comes best in short stories or novellas (as these anthologies contain). Too much world building would bog things down. Too bad that all genres (and modern representatives therein) did not learn the lesson. People want to read quick escapes, not plunge into hundreds of pages of world building. Or, probably, I’m speaking for myself, more a fan of Hemingway than Faulkner.

I bought this book way back in 2018 at ABC Books on a trip that only patriated 7 books. This is the fourth of them I have read. Perhaps I should not buy any books until I read at least the other three from six years ago, but I’m not sure I could find them quickly. Also, there’s another Friends of the Christian County Library book sale in about three weeks, and I cannot miss that. So, anyway….

This is a little pulp paperback sword-and-sorcery book a la Conan the Barbarian–apparently, I am just surrendering 2024 to low fantasy fiction. It opens with a defeated band of nomads retreating to their secret valley. They’ve been bested by a new claimant to an ancient throne, and the chieftain tasks his son, Kadji, also called the Red Hawk, with getting their revenge. So he, Kadji, is given the sacred axe of the tribe to slay the king–who might not actually be the rightful heir to the throne. So he goes on the vengeance quest, and he ends up in the capital city, getting closer to the king, when a rebellion sends the king to flight. He, the king, flies to an eastern land where he presents himself as an ancient prophet to a pampered emperor who wants to restore his empire’s glory. Until Kadji catches up, ruins that plan, and follows the false king and prophet to the end of the world. Literally.

It’s set on a different planet with a named sun and seven moons, so it’s not like Howard’s stuff from ancient (undocumented) history. Its writing is a bit thinner than the Howard, but that kind of tracks with my new, soon-to-be-abandoned thesis that pulp and genre fiction became thinner between the 1930s/1940s and the 1960s/1970s (only to become bloated in the 1980s and beyond). It also features a red-haired fighting lass whom Kadji has to rescue a time or two and whom he cannot completely trust…. But they fall in love, but cannot be together because of their independent vows….

You know, it’s not bad. Friar has thrown out the word pastiche (when I bought the book), but Carter himself uses the word (which we’ll get to at a later date). Originally, it meant a respectful copying of, but I’m sure it has later taken on a more deriding sense. But it’s not a bad read, but probably targeted to younger men than I. I really need to study the Howard and the Carter (and the like) to figure out how I can write more like the former (should I pick up my pixels seriously again).

But: I will note that this is the second book this year featuring “The Red Hawk” and a flame-haired fighting woman. The other was Conan the Invincible by Robert Jordan. Which was richer than this, but not terribly bloated even though it came out nine years later (before the Clancification/Kingification of genre fiction).

Like Post Scripts Humor, I picked this book up in Clever last month and used it as a break from reading Walden (which itself is a break, a long break, from The Life of Greece and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, both of which I will finish this decade, maybe). I’ve read fewer Calvin and Hobbes books during the lifetime of this blog (The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes in 2004 and Calvin and Hobbes: The Sunday Pages in 2015) than Dilbert for some reason, which is odd, as Calvin and Hobbes would be more universal and timeless. Well, except that sometime in this century, Calvin’s adventures would have been nothing but staring at an electronic device of some sort.

So this is a contiguous arc of stories dealing with Calvin duplicating himself and Calvin locking the babysitter out as well as shorter, one-offs or couple of days’ worth of Spaceman Spiff and whatnot. Given that the book itself came out in 1991, presumably these appeared in newspapers while I was in high school. A couple of years later, they’re still relatively fresh and amusing.

I mentioned in one of the other book reports (for The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes) that you could still find unlicensed decals of Calvin peeing on auto logos and whatnot–ten years after the strip ended. Well, I guess it’s twenty more years later, and you don’t see them around much any more. So the hold on the public imagination is fading. The more the pity. But I have used the word transmogrify in conversation recently, and it’s not because I ran across it in a 17th century tome. Although with me, I suppose that’s not out of the question.

Ah, gentle reader. I have tasked my youngest with reading Walden this summer (unlikely), so I have started a re-read of it myself. What that means, though, is that you’re likely to see numerous short humor book reports before a report on the Thoreau.

I just picked this book up at the end of June, so it was on top of the stacks. Unlike The Best Cartoons from the Saturday Evening Post from 1998 and “One Moment, Sir!” Cartoons from the Saturday Evening Post from 1957, this book has not only cartoons but little gags from the one page of jokes that the Saturday Evening Post ran. Do they still? I am pretty sure I let my subscription lapse a decade ago by now, so I cannot speak to what the magazine offers now. But back then, it was increasingly left pablum, medical advances and ads for old people (older than I was then, and even still older than I am today), and the Post Scripts page.

Again, some of this material was inner chuckle-worthy, but it’s all dated by now and based on what would have been situations to poke fun at in the middle of the last century. So it’s probably best read by someone who would, you know, have read The Saturday Evening Post.

Aside from that, one noteworthy bit about this book is that a previous owner, perhaps Mr. Brengel who signed his name inside the front cover in 1979, marked the margin of some of the jokes and wrote some one-liners based on the gags in the margins. One must presume that he was mining this particular book for gags that he could include in his own talks, whether professional talks or his turn at the Toastmasters or something. I mean, he could just have highlighted the ones he particularly liked, but something about it suggests a more practical application. I’m not sure that it’s common practice any more to look to books for humor bits for talks, but back in the 20th century, a whole genre of books existed for it–I almost remember the name of one such series whose material often appeared also in Readers Digest. But that was a long time ago.

At any rate, something to fill a little time after reading a segment of Walden and going to bed.