Musings from Brian J. Noggle

This book is a movie script turned into a short almost-novelization, so it falls somewhere between a story book and a full novelization of a film. Also, the book was written by my old drama workshop teacher from Marquette, the workshop that say the germination of The Courtship of Barbara Holt.

It’s a meta book about the film making industry: within the film adapted to prose, Ethan Burns, the son of a famous Western star, works at a cable game show after a lackluster direct-to-cable acting career as his wife and agent manage his father’s legacy. A student approaches Ethan Burns with a script for a proper Western, which Burns finances by selling his fathers famous guns to an Italian fan who agrees to finance the film. They and assorted other motley characters venture to Paintbrush Valley to film it amidst sabotage. Everyone gets a comeppance that needs one and all’s well that end’s well.

The prose starts out with a little depth and characterization that it loses as it moves. Perhaps that’s part of being very closely tied to a screenplay where the characters are established and then it rolls. I dunno. Being more of a novel reader, I thought it could have used a little more through the last half or third. Still, it’s a pleasant read.

On the other hand, it makes me wonder if I could write something like this. I’ve had a couple of ideas for screenplays in mind; perhaps I could first blat them out like this and then screenplayify them. But on the other hand, that sounds like work, and I’d rather sit down with a book.

Fun fact, maybe: The book features a bar called Hegarty’s. Is Balestrieri paying homage to Haggerty’s, a bar near the Marquette campus? Maybe!

I’ve tried to pick up works br Hanson before, but I’ve never gotten far into them before putting them back. I thought I’d have better luck with this book because it falls into my specific interest of Greek and Roman history. So I got a good head start and then, when I wanted to put it aside, I was able to plow through it.

It’s not a long book; it is 213 pages plus some end material. Hanson’s premise is that the Greek way of war–farmers in Hoplite phalanxes defending their land–influenced Western warfare all the way to the present day. He talks about the the early tribes of Greece, the Dark Ages in Greece, and then the high point of Greek warfare, the aforementioned farmers in Hoplite phalanxes, and then beyond through the Macedonians conquering much of the eastern Mediterranean and then the Greeks being conquered in turn by the Romans who learned the lessons of the Macedonians well.

Unfortunately, it’s not a very good book.

Hanson repeats himself a lot. In a lot of cases, the same thought will be expressed in almost exactly the same way just sentences apart.

The book lacks a narrative or thematic cohesion: It doesn’t go especially in order, and the chapters are titled like they’re going to flow thematically, but they kind of wander.

Also, Hanson interjects a lot of romanticism of the Golden Age hoplite, and he really, really does not like the Macedonians. He calls Phillip II evil and Alexander the Great an alcoholic and a megalomaniac. Over and over (the author repeats the same thoughts, as I might have mentioned).

As such, I really didn’t enjoy the book, and I’m not sure I learned a whole lot from it. Of course, these days, I wonder if I learn anything from anything I read, but I hope that reading a bunch of the same material will drum something into my head. So I guess I did learn a little about the topography of Greece and how it affected Greek warfare.

This book is another turning point in the continuing Mack Bolan saga.

The first thirty-some books dealt with Mack Bolan waging war on the mafia; the next thirty some up until about this book (#64) dealt with Bolan working under the government aegis as John Phoenix fighting terrorists. This book changes that.

I’ve missed a couple of books in the series. The last one I read was #59, Crude Kill. So I missed the actual death of April Rose, although I knew it was coming somewhere. This book deals with the aftermath, as Bolan hunts the people responsible for the attack on Stony Man Farm. He can’t trust his government contacts, and some of the government is ready to end his Phoenix project.

Bolan has also been framed for the assassination of a Russian, so he’s being hunted by American forces as well as the Russians. He finds a tie between the remnants of the Mafia and the KGB, so he goes on the warpath against both, exposing a high-level Soviet mole after a couple of ambushes and hitting a couple of hard sites. Then he casts off the government and his pardon with them to return to his one-man rampage against the KGB.

I enjoyed the book more than others, but that could be because I read it amongst other books instead of reading a bunch of them together, or it could be partly because it represents a shift in the story arc that promises some freshness to the continuing series. But just to be on the safe side, I’m not going to read a bunch of them in a row. It’s not like I would jump into the next one anyway; I read Cambodia Clash (#65) in 2010.

This book is a collection of photos taken of New York, especially Manhattan, in the early 1980s. Clearly, this is a companion piece to New York At Night and, and author of the text introduction is also the author of Florida: A Photographic Journey. So it’s the same thing: A brief fluffy essay talking about the history and dynamism of New York and then a bunch of pictures of it. Or, more to the point, Manhattan.

Unfortunately, given the number of things one could take pictures of in New York, this book is a bit limited and repetetetive. We have a page dedicated to the Statue of Liberty and then other pictures of the statue and Liberty Island throughout. We have a number of pictures of Central Park from various high places. We have a page dedicated to the rangers in Central Park, which is the same four women on horseback in various poses and profiles. The same four women on horseback appear on other pages scattered around. As a result, it looks as though the book is really compiled from a limited number of photo shoots and set-ups shuffled together thickly to make it look like more than it is.

Which is a real shame, since New York and even just Manhattan are bigger places and could have included more things.

So I’ll think about steering clear of another of these books. At least until such time as I come across one on my to-read shelves or cheap at a book sale and a football game comes on. But, still.

This book is a collection of drawings by William Blake. William Blake, if you have an English degree, is best known for his hit Eye of the Tiger. But apparently he was also a painter and artist as well, but we didn’t cover that in my poetry classes.

At any rate, this book collects a number of sketches of his, some of which were doodles essentially and some which were studies for later paintings. Unfortunately, this is a sketchbook of raw material for those paintings, so the finished pieces aren’t actually included.

So it’s like looking at a notebook of Stephen King with a couple bits of outlines, a few phrases here and there, but nothing complete and finished. So it’s more for serious, serious fans of William Blake or artists, I suppose, that like to look at techniques from other artists. Perhaps scholars would be interested. But if you’re looking for something interesting to flip through and marvel over, this is actually less useful than Hand Shadows To Be Thrown Upon The Wall. Which, if I am not mistaken, was also published by Dover Publications.

It’s football season again, which means it’s time for the annual parade of picture books I flip through during football games. Sometimes, I watch extra football games just so I can page through picture books at the same time.

This book is a tourist take-away from the Forbidden City in Beijing. Its text comes in six or seven languages, and strangely enough the English text is often much, much shorter than the text from other languages. I have to wonder if the information is truncated for English speakers or if it really just takes that much longer to caption photographs in other languages. I mean, German, I can understand. But Spanish and French and the Asian pictogram languages?

At any rate, the book includes many full color pictures of the palaces and halls within the Forbidden City (but no terra cotta warriors, but I guess that’s a different place. The palaces look more opulent than the castles and other things I’ve seen from Europe, but the Forbidden City is a Ming creation, which means it’s a little younger and more modern than many of the medieval structures I might have previously seen. They’re still a head and shoulders above the things I’ve seen in Korean books (like this, this, or this), but China, especially Ming China, was a bigger and better empire than Korea’s kingdoms.

Also, I look at them, and I think, Man, those must be hell to heat. I’ve got a big house, and it can be expensive to keep it toasty in the winter especially if propane is expensive and the winter is cold. But, of course, these palaces did not use wasteful forced air heating. Instead of heating empty spaces, they heated the rooms where people were at any given time with fires and whatnot. So it was much less expensive to heat. But there was the risk of catastrophic fire, and one of the pictures shows evenly spaced well-decorated urns containing water to be used in case of fire.

So it was an interesting thing to look at during commercials in a football game. And, as an occasional Sinophile, I wouldn’t mind seeing it someday assuming it’s not destroyed in any upcoming military conflict.

Keeping with the “Is the person in the mental institution crazy or really a science fiction protagonist” subgenre reading I started with this book.

12 Monkeys is a novelization based on the screenplay (from the Bruce Williams/Brad Pitt film). Now, novelizations from screenplays can go one of two ways. You can get some additional depth that you don’t find in the film, or you can basically get prose from the screenplay. Unfortunately, this is the latter.

For those of you who haven’t seen the film (I had not), the main character is a convict from the future “volunteers” to collect samples from the contaminated surface and then to go back in time to find the source of a deadly virus that wipes out half of humanity and compels the remainder to hide underground in uncontaminated facilities. In the past, Cole arrives six years too early and gets taken to a mental institution where he meets a psychiatrist and the son of a famous virologist. He looks to find the source of the infection, gets yanked back into the future and reinserted in the past a couple of times, and begins to question whether he actually is crazy.

At any rate, it’s all right, but I didn’t like the ending much: I’m not sure if it was intended to be throught-provoking or was just sloppy storytelling (on the part of the screenwriter(s) more than the novelist). Actions don’t make sense, and the thoughts that are provoked try to explain the nature of the ending result in “That doesn’t make sense.” To be honest, I hoped for an ending not unlike the ending to the Kris Kristofferson film Millennium (book review here). But no.

A better novel would have explored more of the interior and back story of Cole, the convict, explaining where he came from and what he was convicted of. That’s not germane to the plot of the story itself. Also, it seems that mankind develops time travel really fast while recovering from a serious extinction-level event. So all the questions the book raises are with the story and plot itself, not with any philosophical things. Again, this is not the book author’s fault, but I wonder if it could have been handled better in the depths of a novel.

This book is about as 1990s of a book as you can get.

The cover purportedly is a stereogram, which was a fad of crazy prints you were supposed to stare at to see a three-dimensional image. They were the big thing in the early 1990s, with complete shops in the mall selling nothing but Magic Eye products. I was trying to explain this to my beautiful wife, but she’d never heard of such a thing. Coupled with the fact that the spellchecker doesn’t know the word, I’m beginning to question whether it was a real thing. But it was.

I say this cover is purportedly a stereogram, because I am too smart to see them. At least, that’s what I told my friends in that era. They could see them. So if you see something in the book cover image to the right, let me know. Or you could just make something up, and I would never know.

I felt like that one guy in the film Mallrats.

 
 
 

The struggle was real.

Where was I? Oh, K-PAX. As you might remember, this was made into a Kevin Spacey film. Which is all I knew of the Kevin Spacey film except the basic conceit. The book is better than the conceit: It tells the story of the psychiatrist, the head of a small institute in Manhattan that works with hard-to-handle cases. The case at the core of the book: a young man calling himself prot who claims to be from the planet K-PAX. The psychiatrist works with him, and the book is structured around sessions the therapist has with the patient along with the psychiatrist (named “Gene Brewer,” which is the author of the book) musing about his relationship with his father and his family. The spaceman (played in the film by the Spacey man) offers some information that supports his assertions that he is from K-PAX, including sky charts from his homeworld, that check out to be true. He gets other patients to open up and start to heal. And he’s very good with animals. But as the doctor and an interested reporter investigate, they discover the disturbing story behind the patient.

The narrative switching up between the sessions and the doctor’s life were interesting and paced the book well. The story the spaceman told had enough contradiction and ambiguity that one wondered whether it would prove to be a spaceman or just a really gifted mentally ill person. Heck, there was a similarity between the doctor’s youth and the disturbing story so that I briefly considered whether the doctor himself might be the crazy one (hey, forgive me, I just watched Fight Club for the first time, and that was the most 90s of movies). But the resolution at the end was a bit disappointing, I guess, as it tries a bit to leave the ambiguity.

I see that the author has five books in this series. Well, I enjoyed most of this one, but I have to wonder whether I would enjoy more books in the story. They cannot all follow the successful plotting and framing this book has, so I’ll probably not hunt them down. They’re not the kind of thing that you see in book sales anyway, which leads me to believe that the others were not as successful as the first.

Oh, and above, I mentioned that this was a very 90s book. That’s because the Buddhist-flavored perfect world and communist society described by prot fits with the zeitgeist of the time, with the end of history and all that, but it really doesn’t resonate in the 21st century.

So worth a read if you’re into the whole “Is the person in the mental institution crazy or really a science fiction protagonist” subgenre.