Musings from Brian J. Noggle

This book is quite a downer.

I read America Alone almost six years ago (when this current title was still fresh). This one is less optimistic: in the interim, America Alone (ish) elected Barack Obama, and several years’ worth of his policies were underway, so Steyn is concerned that America has joined the rest of the west in entering its decline. So he talks about what the world will look like after the United States cedes its hegemony to other nations with less noble intentions.

The thing I said about America Alone also applies here:

Five years after the book, I’m not as gloomy as Steyn was (and is now, given the title of his latest book–After America for those of you who might not know). The sweep of history is broad and long, and its predictors are more often wrong than not. However, the book does crystallize, or should, that our Western traditions and heritage are better than all the others that have been tried and do require some conscious defense thereof. If you merely enjoy liberty without recognizing its sources, someone will quickly take it from you.

Right down to how long it took me to read it after its publication.

As I said, it’s pessimistic, and it’s too much like reading his blog in book length. Which is to say, depressing if you take it too seriously. He might be right, he might be wrong, and most likely he’s part both. But there’s no good spending one’s evenings before bed wallowing in it. Also, the recent past might suggest a change in the wind for the United States which, one way or another, will render its half-decade-past prognostications out-of-date.

So read it if you’re reading this blog post from somewhere in 2011 or 2012 when it’s fresh. Otherwise, stick to shorter, current doses on the Internet.

And remind me to stay away from current events books at the upcoming book sales.

As I might have mentioned, I found this book when I went looking for The Legend of Gilgamesh. This book was on the book shelf where I’d last seen the earlier work, so I read it instead when I could not find the epic. They’re almost the same: You’d have to explain to anyone under thirty-five who either of these guys is. Or was.

At any rate, this book collects a bit of Berra’s recollections from his life in baseball and presents a little life advice based on it. That’s about it. He talks about breaking into the big leagues, playing in New York in the days before baseball players made millions, and his youth in St. Louis. It explains how he got the nickname Yogi and, more importantly, his real name (which is probably available on his Wikipedia entry, but I’ve never looked at it). Both of which could help me should they come up in a trivia night. Which would have to be run by someone older than 35.

A nice piece of filler reading material. It won’t change my life, but it was pleasant. Also, take a look at that title page: It looks as though this book is signed by the author. How cool is that?

It’s unfortunate that the first Executioner book I picked up after reading Rated R was this book. Whereas Leon is funnin’ with the cartoonish violence in a bit of almost campy fun, I’m afraid the author of this Executioner book is earnest. Which is unfortunate, because we have ACTION! like this:

He encountered another two-man patrol walking its beat near the intersection midway between the blocks separating the high command from the checkpoint.

This couple did not know of their encounter with the Executioner until the heartbeat of their death.

He came at them fast, the edge of each stiffened hand slashing downward hard enough to break both necks. The soldiers crumpled to the pavement at Bolan’s feet with soft sighs.

And on the next page:

The Executioner tugged open the driver’s door, reached in and rapidly pulled the driver out, down into a raised knee that smacked the man’s face with such force, Bolan heard the neck snap.

I’m not sure the physics works out in either of these cases, but it’s sure like what you saw in the movies in the 1980s (and beyond). Old men’s adventure fiction was informed by authors who’d read classical literature. Some of these post-Pendleton Executioner novels are informed by authors who watched direct-to-cable actioners.

At any rate, the plot, ripped from Reader’s Digest reports: Bolan gets word of the Russians developing a new chemical weapon even worse than Yellow Rain at an out-of-the-way base near the Afghanistan/Pakistan border. Bolan hooks up with some mujahedeen and a CIA operative to find the location and put a stop to it. In a Bolanesque fashion.

It’s a cut below the average Bolan fare. I know what you’re asking: Does Bolan smoke? (As you may recall, gentle reader, Bolan did not smoke in the Pendleton novels, so I gauge how well the house author knows about the canon by whether Bolan lights a cigarette or not in any given volume.) Yes, yes, he does. And I get the sense he will more and more in the books to come.

I mean, look at this action bit in the wilds of Afghanistan:

He opened fire, the impact of so many bullets flinging the men off of their feet into shrubbery nearby where only their legs protruded, tremulous in death.

Leaving aside the comma splice which this particular writer loves to use, he describes bushes or brush as shrubbery (numerous times). Shrubbery is part of a garden or maintained yard, ainna? Not something you find in the woods or the mountains of Afghanistan.

Oy, vey. But the text of the book aside, we get some cinéma vérité or breaking of the fourth wall with the transcription of some espionage instructions from a numbers station in the front cover:

Lottery numbers, you insist? Maybe in your mundane world. But in my action-packed world, they’re espionage instructions.

Except I hope they’re not for me. We haven’t covered snapping two men’s necks simultaneously with knife hands in my martial arts class yet.

My beautiful wife bought this book from a Facebook friend because a portion of the proceeds went to help people recover from the Tennessee wild fires last year. She might have given it to me, or I might have taken it from her in a fit of kleptomania. Regardless, I started working through it during the football season as I often do such volumes of poetry, and I recently picked it back up from the stack of books beside the sofa where some of the books have been sitting for several football seasons awaiting my perusal. It’s like the Rooneyfication of reading materials over there.

At any rate, the poet is a three letter woman with this volume of poetry: She is a former professional singer and has appeared on stage on multiple continents; she followed that up with a visual arts (drawing and, one assumes, sculpture) period that included traveling to arts fairs (revealed in the book). Then she decided to take up poetry, and the result is this book.

It’s not a bad book, but it is a bit of a doodle book of poetry. The author includes a number of poems that are just noodling with words and poetry. Much of the work lacks a refining touch. There are some turns of phrase here and there that are pretty good, but mostly it’s just self-expression.

Hey, I’m not knocking it. I’m finta do my own collection of poetry one of these days. The meaning of poetry comes from what effect it has on you, the individual. This particular collection didn’t resonate with me, but I’m more of a classicist when it comes to poetry. Your mileage may vary.

This book is a short discourse on the development of weapons from the middle of the first millennium to the middle of the second, but the focus is definitely on the period from roughly 1000-1500 AD. It says “Knight,” after all.

The chapters are broken down into weapon groupings: Spear and Lance; Axe, Mace, and Hammer; Sword and Dagger; and Early Firearms. The individual chapters are told in a bit of rambling discourse style, as though the author were speaking off-the-cuff, although there are a number of black-and-white illustrations included to show the weapon innovations as he talks about them. Unfortunately, these illustrations are a bit crude and might have made the text clearer if they were not.

At any rate, it was an hour or two through, as it only is a shade over 100 pages plus glossary and index. I learned one thing, for sure: I need a glaive in my personal collection.

Also, even though Ewart Oakeshott sounds like the name someone would choose in the Society for Creative Anachronism, he was a weapons collector and illustrator who definitely knew his material. It’s just that the presentation in this novel could have used some improvement with some charts and timelines and some better organization. But if all you’ve seen is the illustration in the first edition of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, you could learn something. And by “you could,” I mean, “I did.” Although none of this material came up in the Geek Trivia Night I attended this weekend, unfortunately.

This book is definitely a MacDonald: It features a bunch of people in a marina on the east coast of Florida in the 1950s. You’ve got a businessman from up north coming down, looking for the man who seduced his wife and caused her suicide. You’ve got a number of individual characters living on the boats and/or chartering fish boats. You’ve got big businessmen putting the squeeze on the small marina owner, trying to get her property for development. And you’ve got a climactic party on the dock.

That said, it’s not a particular stand out volume in his work. It has his trademark outstanding writing and whatnot, but the elements of the plot and the characters fall into what would later become MacDonald stock.

One thing I get a charge out of, and a way I romanticise these older works, is how easily they drop in classical literature allusions and whatnot. For example, a woman performs the talent portion of many beauty contests she’s won, and she does it by reciting:

Ef yew keep yo haid when all about yew air a-losin’ they-yurs an a-blaimin’ it on yew?

And I’m all like, “Thay-ut’s ‘If’ by Kipling.”

Mostly because I just read The Grapes of Wrath (donchewno?), and it’s all a-rife with the vernacular (albeit a different accented vernacular). Also, I’ve read my Kipling, and that’s something MacDonald and I can share. I’ve gone on about this at length, I know, but it makes me thing the middle twentieth century was a time when an author assumed the reader had read Great Books with him. But I digress.

So I got that out of it. The older I get, the more I get out of reading these books and understanding more allusions (see also A Tan and Sandy Silence and Two Other Great Mysteries). Of course, I said the same thing to Robert B. Parker almost thirty years ago.

Read it if you’re a John D. MacDonald aficionado. If you’re not, start out with some of his other works and then read it, for you will by then have become a serious John D. MacDonald aficionado.

It took me two tries to read this book; I started it last year and got about halfway through it, enjoying it for what it was before taking it out of my pocket as my carry book and planning to read the last half of it all at once. That didn’t happen, so I started it again this year as my carry book and keeping it in pocket until I finished it.

The book is a collection of informal talks given by the author after sitting with students practicing zazen. The author founded the first Zen temple in the United States, and this book collects some of his insights into Zen.

So, to talk about Buddhism, I find it easy to break it into three parts, and perhaps this is something we could do with all religions. These parts include:

• The cosmological/theological/heavy philosophy (the eternal, the afterlife, interpretation of the texts).
• Practical philosophy (the guidance to everyday living).
• The practice (the things to do when you’re a part of the religion).

Although this book does lightly touch upon the first (that the individual is akin to a droplet of a stream in a waterfall–part of the stream, then alone briefly, and then part of the stream; that breaking out of the cycle of karma is the goal of Zen, as karma is a self-centered way of thinking), it focuses mostly on the last two, which is fitting: the talks were give after the practicing with an eye toward improving that. Basically, it’s to sit still, in the proper posture, breathe right, and clear your mind. Okay, there’s a bit more to it than that, such as dealing with distractions within and without, but that’s it. Strangely enough, although they’re from different schools, this book and Start Here Now don’t differ much on the practice of Buddhist meditation. Perhaps the difference between Shambhala and Zen schools lie at the higher levels of philosophy.

I was most interested in the middle point above; Practical philosophy. Buddhism focuses on recognizing the transience of this life and all of its moods, emotions, and events. Buddhism is much akin to Stoicism, so much that I checked to see if the sutras might have made their way back to Rome before Zeno (the other Zeno) founded the Stoic school. It was only about a hundred years, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the sutras might have made their ways west before the later thinkers made their marks. Both philosophies urge that calmness and detachment which, if you know me, you probably can tell I appreciate.

The Buddhists also talk about nothingness, but when they do not mean it like the Existentialists do. In the Buddhist sense, “nothing” is the eternal something from which everything is drawn. In the Existentialist sense, “nothing” is the opposite of that.

The book is written in the proper Buddhist style, wherein the koanesque nature might make you go “Huh?” The question of the sound of one hand clapping appears. Once you get it into your head that the Buddhist way is to see the gestalt and the particular at the same time, you can understand it better (the forest is the trees; the tree is the forest). Some of them do go into paradox territory, but as with any religion, eventually you have to make your peace and accept some paradox.

So I enjoyed the book and got some insights into detachment (and a couple of posts quoting the book–search for the wisdom of shunryu suzuki). But it’s a practical and practice primer on Buddhism, akin to the Max Lucado Christian books: A bit of how to live as a Buddhist, but without the implications and intimations of the religion that you get from the heavier books by Kierkegaard, Niebuhr, Tillich, and so on. If you believe Alex G. Smith, that’s how the Buddhists hook you, with their practical philosophy and practice, but that’s how the Christians hook you, too (Tolstoy’s favored religion features that sort of peasant, practical religion, and that explains why he equates religions based on this practical philosophy level.

Now, where was I before I started name-dropping other things I’ve read? Oh, yes: The book is a good primer into Zen Buddhist thought, especially the practical philsophy and practice components, and you could learn something from it. But don’t read it and declare yourself a Buddhist, as it really lacks a cosmological component that explains it all. Of course, the Zen would argue that you don’t need to know it, just to do Zen. But I’m a Western kid, and I expect a bit more in a complete belief system. Which is why I’ll never be a Buddhist.

You might be asking yourself, “Self, did Brian J. get this book because of its lurid cover?” Well, not just because of its lurid cover; I found it mentioned on some blog I read (I forget which one), and I found the back of the book material interesting:

Lily loves movies–especially the bloody ones. They distract her from her broken life, even if it’s only for a few hours at a time. But something unbelievable is about to happen in the backwards little video store where she works. Someone Lily knows is not who they say they are. And when she finds out their dark secret, she will be drawn into a world of violence and destruction as fantastic as any body-count blockbuster. She will be hunted by mercenaries, a ninja master, an invincible cannibal butcher and a psychopathic super soldier more bloodthirsty than death itself. If she’s lucky, she might still be breathing when the credits roll…

It’s a self-published bit by an author with a large number of books available, so I expected something akin to a men’s adventure paperback like the Executioner series or something you’d find on Glorious Trash but with a more modern bent.

The book details how Lily becomes involved with a stone killer hiding out from his past. But he’s just like seventeen or eighteen and is a super soldier. When he defends the video store where they work together from a robber with extreme prejudice, people from his past, including some other super elite soldier types (with gimmicks) come looking for him. And his brother, perhaps even a better killer, breaks out of his special prison and goes looking for a special MacGuffin which Lily and Sid (the super soldier) must find first.

So the book has its postmodern bent, where Lily calls the MacGuffin the MacGuffin. It doesn’t take itself too seriously, and it has its tongue in cheek. But, boy Howdy, is it lurid. Lily is promiscuous, and she has numerous encounters with Sid and others. They’re not Gunsmith-level depictions of human intimacy, but they’re not couched in the-train-whistle-blows-and-the-train-goes-into-the-tunnel-symbolism, either. The fighting sequences take the worst splatter-instincts of the Gold Eagle or Death Merchant metal-and-anatomy prose Pollock portraiture and amp it up. Which might be part of the post-modern winking of the book. Which is not to say it’s poorly written–the story and text pulled me along in spite of the purple. But it’s probably not for everyone, and I’m not entirely sure it’s for me. Which might be unfortunate, since I bought a second book by the author (not in this series). Both at full price.

I enjoyed it better than The Grapes of Wrath. Also, I phrased it that way to better serve as a blurb should the author search for himself and find this review. “Better than The Grapes of Wrath”–Brian J. Noggle, author of John Donnelly’s Gold. Because I’m working on marketing myself and my Internet brand even as I jot down thoughts on things I read.

What was my point? Oh, yeah. Recommended? Well, perhaps, if you want to experience what it is like in the 21st century to read something comparably trashy to men’s adventure fiction was in the 1960s.