Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Unlike the first biography of Gainsborough I read, this books pages are all separated, so I got a better sense of Gainsborough, the man, and his rise amid the world of British painters, his preference for painting landscapes and common folk instead of the portraits that paid his bills and kept his family in the good life, eventually. So I have more respect and understanding for the artist this time around.

Unfortunately, the reproductions of his work herein are all in black and white, so it creates a bit of a chasm between the vivid descriptions of the paintings and the images themselves.

I posted the review of the first book a week and a couple days before my mother died. Oh, the new normalcy into which we’d found ourselves with her sickness and her daily treatments, but where I still had time to sit in my reading spot in my home in Old Trees and read every night. Now, some years later, a new new normalcy, maybe even a couple normalcies beyond that one. I mention this in a book report about a single volume just to emphasize that a book and its reading experience can resonate in one’s memory. Can a Kindle representation do that for you? Given how much I remember about reading things online on the computer, I’d have to think not.

This book is a collection of photographs from the Reagan administration and grouped around events or topics in his presidency like the inaugurations, the attack on Libya, the firing of the PATCO air traffic controllers, Iran-Contra, and so on. Each section/chapter runs 2-4 pages and has a couple paragraphs from each event or period.

It’s a nice trip back to the 1980s. I was but a boy then, of course, so my growing awareness of the political world was rising quickly. I don’t remember many of the things from his first administration, but by the second, I’m familiar with the themes and the events. The photos show Reagan, of course, but they are also photos of the period, with the fashion, blocky glasses, big hair, and whatnot.

I have to say, aside from the weird stuff in the urban areas, the 1980s fashions that trickled down to Missouri weren’t hideous enough to scar us, unlike the things that Boomers did to themselves. I mean, plaid pants? Really?

I inherited this book from my aunt Dale, I deduce, because it was sent out to her beau in 1994 and has a letter from some Republican fundraising organization or another in it and a certificate of authenticity that says this is a numbered copy of the deluxe edition that was limited to 125,000. I’m pretty sure that that must have been the whole initial press run of this book.

The book is worth a browse for the nostalgia and for its mood lifting potential: 8 years of Reagan lifted the national mood quite a bit and ushered in several decades of positive growth and national mood. These times we’re in, they too will pass, and the end result might be a better world instead of Mad Maxville.

Well, if you cracked open this book and expected to see a bunch of Flemish women in revealing clothing patterned upon the traditional garb of the region, you would be disappointed as I was. The “beauties” of the title are, in fact, the old buildings, art work, and religious artifacts in this Belgian town that dates back to the early Middle Ages.

The photos are beautiful and the things in the beautiful photos are beautiful, but the most interesting things in the book are the captions, which tell of the city’s history as it was a commercial center and its position under the various dukes and kings that had dominion over what later became Belgium. The poor country gets short shrift in European history, and sometimes these low-level focused photo books are great gateways to knowledge about overlooked regions.

So I liked the book.

The title pretty much says it all: it’s a collection of easy crafts you can do with your children or your children should be able to do themselves, assuming they’re old enough to handle glue and scissors without inventing any new hair styles or gluing scissors to the light fixtures. That is to say, if you have boys, when they’re old enough to think crafts are for girls, but girls and girl things are icky.

Sixteen projects range from light woodworking in making a keyhanger to simple painting things and glued felt. The project materials don’t look to be too expensive and could probably be assembled from scraps if you’re a crafty person. However, if you’re a crafty person, you have ideas and craft books you can use to think up your own crafts for kids.

I guess the market is people who want to come up with something to do to occupy their little girls for an hour at a time. Not exactly me. But, hey, the Packers won the game during which I browsed this book.

It’s hard to know what I expected when I picked this book up; probably a collection of poems in a chapbook sort of thing. It definitely carries that vibe, as Armbruster talks about Christianity, humility, and taking care of your fellow man in poems and bullet-pointed type musings.

However, the book has an essay on creativity, wherein the truly creative person thinks far ahead of others. The creative person sees the problem, sees that he is the one to solve it, sees the solution, and only then fills in the blanks to make that solution possible. 1, 2, 5, 3, 5, Armbruster calls it. In a recent piece, James Lileks describes Steve Jobs in those terms, although he doesn’t mention that he got it from Armbruster. He probably didn’t, but two pieces I’ve read ran in parallel.

The book itself came with two local papers’ obituaries for Armbruster from the middle 1990s clipped and tucked into them. I’ve noticed that’s a trend: putting authors’ obits in the authors’ books. I wonder where that started and why so many people do it.

At any rate, this book is worth a quick read. It’s an hour or so of realtime sports or a magazine-browse length of dedicated time, and the essay on creativity is worthwhile if you don’t get much out of the rest.

I remember reading another book in this series, and I was surprised that I bought two. I’d have been more surprised if I had bought the second after I read Missouri Bandits, Bushwhackers, Outlaws, Crooks, Devils, Ghosts, & Desperadoes earlier this year. But I bought them both at the same time.

It’s more of the same: a couple things native to Missouri, many more things that were not native to Missouri but were instead made relevant by appending phrases like “folks in Missouri” to them, wingdings in words, and all that business.

Maybe I’m in a slightly more charitable mood in October than I was in January, since I will say these books might not be a complete waste of about an hour of a baseball game’s in between pitches time. I did find at least worth investigating for a written piece. But I won’t cite this book as a source, as you cannot take anything in it as truth.

You remember when I bought this book four years ago? Me, either, but I remember I bought of books about the little British automobile at the time. I thought it might be a good little picture book to flip through while watching sports.

Well, I was sort of wrong.

This is not a mere picture book with lots of loving plates depicting the automobile. This is a very detailed history of the automobile and its evolution over the decades of its history written by a high-level employee of Triumph. The book pretty much enumerates the stock parts on every Triumph built based upon serial number. It will tell you that the Triumphs up to his serial number had this engine, and then to this number they had that suspension, and all the way up from the original TRs to the TR7. To be frank, I’m not a gearhead, so most of the information just rolled over me.

I say the author was a high-level employee because he has a low view of the labor that built the automobile. No, strike that: he had a low view of the organized labor that stopped the production of his beloved TRs at various plants at various points. He calls them suicidal and bloody minded at one point. Also, he has no truck with the United States government and its safety and emissions controls that start shackling the automobile’s performance in the 1960s. This guy is a Tea Partier, between the Tea Parties and drinking tea.

So what did I take away from this book? Well, I have a favorite TR body (the TR6, which was built in the 1960s and looks a little like the American pony cars of the era), and I have some insight into the importance of rally cars and those races to automobile dealers and manufacturers in Britain in the early 20th century. Also, I have a pile of research, so sometime, somewhere, a character in a book might drive a TR.

So it’s a worthwhile read if you’re into British cars or if you’re just out-of-control in your reading habits.

This book is the second of the two in the Three Aces omnibus edition I’m reading (remember, gentle reader, I have begun to break out the individual novels within omnibus editions for individual review, but when I’m done, this will still only count as a single volume for my annual book count).

At any rate, the plot: A businessman from the midwest comes to New York, seeking his son whom he drove off after the businessman thought the son had embezzled some money. Now that the real culprit has been identified, years later, the father wants to reconcile. Well, the mother wants to see the boy again. However, the police cannot find the son, so either he’s long gone or he’s changed his name. Wolfe guesses that the son will still retain his initials, so he has Goodwin place an ad in the paper that says, “P.H., we know you didn’t do it.” Strangely, that is the name of a recently convicted murderer who couldn’t be the guy, could he?

Of course he is. He’s taking the fall for killing his twue wuv’s husband, mostly because he thinks she’s done it. She thinks he’s done it. Since someone has begun to follow Goodwin, Wolfe suspects that the real culprit might still be out there. So he cogitates and Goodwin and the other bit players start running down leads. Other deaths during the investigation confirm Wolfe’s suspicion, so the book progresses until Wolfe unmasks the real killer in a sitdown in his (Wolfe’s) office.

It’s a good book for the genre. Those olden days mysteries, especially the good ones like this one, keep it moving, don’t get too detailed, and come in under 200 pages. Remember those days? Modern authors don’t, but I guess if you’re going to drop $30 on a hardback, the authors want to give you 140,000 words to make it worth your money. I think ebooks will change that for the better, make reading less of a daunting undertaking. Or so I hope.