Musings from Brian J. Noggle

I’ve had this book atop the bookshelves in the hall facing out for a while. Well, I guess we did just move/reorganize the shelves out there last autumn when we had some work done at Nogglestead, so it might not have been looking down on me every time I passed through the hall since I bought it ten years ago. But for some reason, I’ve passed over it time and time again. Except this is the year of Sword and Sorcery at Nogglestead (or a year of Sword and Sorcery as the stacks have enough of the genre to support many such years), and the book has a man with a sword talking to an ogre on the cover, so now was the time.

The edition I have is from 1982, so I was going to expound upon the rise of the “normal people from earth go to a fantasy world” subgenre which I would have posited was a mainstay of fantasy in the 1980s, drawing upon my familiarity of Rosenberg’s The Guardians of the Flame series and Chalker’s Dancing Gods series, but further reflection indicates that the subgenre goes way back to the Chronic (what?) cles of Narnia and the Gor books whose reviews pepper the last 20 years of this blog, so instead of a thesis easily disproven, you get this paragraph. Also, this book was originally published in 1964, but thematically it seems later as we will see.

It starts out in that fantasy genre: An early Vietnam vet musters out and bums around, eventually answering an ad in a European magazine. He finds himself transported to a magical universe with a beautiful woman and a short sidekick. Apparently, he’s the hero that the woman needs to complete a quest which takes them across vast distances and through strange environs so that he can help her recover an artifact she needs as queen of the multiverse.

However, after a couple of set action pieces befitting a fantasy novel, we veer into Heilein polyamory philosophy. And then the quest is completed two-thirds of the way through the book, and after that, it explores a bit of what it’s like to be the queen of the multiverse and to be her consort. So it gets a little blowsy in the last third as not much actually happens besides a little politics, musings on male/female relationships, and a visit home by the hero who has changed on his journey.

So: A quick read, well-written but not necessarily action-packed. Not remembered as one of Heinlein’s best, and probably a transitional work between the rocket jockey stuff and the adult stuff with the alternative lifestyles. But perhaps that transition preceded Stranger in a Strange Land more than I commonly think.

After finishing Houses of Worship, I wanted another book to serve its purpose: Something a little light to read or browse not during football games (probably not going to watch many again this year) but in the fifteen or so minutes between finishing a chapter in a longer work and actually going to bed. I didn’t find a similar coffeetable book immediately, but I did pick up this book which I bought in April 2022, and, as it happens, I read the whole thing in one sitting.

Not because it was compelling nor particularly good poetry.

Instead, it’s a litany of poems written about specific lovers and wives whom he cheated on with named and poetized lovers (and the wives, apparently, cheated on him as well). But it’s written as a bit of a retrospective, a lyin’ in the winter of his years, trying to recapture a bit of his youth and/or maybe brag.

Although published in 1984, this book is a bit of a throwback; the author’s first (of only a handful) collection appeared in 1957, and he went into teaching in the 1960s. So he was in academia in the free love era, when poets were sexy, and he took advantage of it. Yet I can’t but characterize him as Rod McKuen without the depth.

How did this signed copy come to Missouri from back east where the author taught? Apparently, he was a Springfield native (although he did not live here for most of his life). So it’s not like finding Bernard O’Donoghue’s copy of Five Themes of Today here.

I bought this book at the end of June, and I selected it as my end-of-night, I-don’t-want-to-start-another-chapter-of-a-longer-book book. What are those longer books I deferred whilst paging through this book? In order of time spent on my chairside table without my planning to throw them back into the stacks, they are The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, The Life of Greece (the Story of Civilization Volume 2), The Rape of the Lock by Pope (not a long book, but eighteenth century verse is harder and slower to read than nineteenth), and whatever bit of fiction I’ve got. I have other books on the side table, but I’m going to one day soon clear them from that table and throw them back. It’s been long enough that I’ll want to start from the beginning again. Well, maybe not The Innocents Abroad.

At any rate: This is a hardback publication by Ideals Publishing, the firm behind Ideals magazine (at least in those days). It has 36 different entries on old churches and cathedrals not just Christian or Catholic but also including a synagogue, a temple of the Bahai faith, the Church of Latter Day Saints, and Christian Scientists. I guess, depending how ecumenical your faith is, the latter two are Christian faiths of a sort as well. But anyway.

They’re broken into chapters grouping them as old churches of New England (and a little west), missions, modern churches, and whatnot. Each entry has one to three pictures about it as well as a couple paragraphs of the location’s importance or origin. Many of the locations were by then (1977) abandoned by worshippers and picked up, sometimes after some time, by foundations or historical societies for restoration as museums.

But as with my score visiting the best book shops in the world, I found that I have been to three of these locations as well:

• The Joan of Arc Chapel on the Marquette campus. Although I spent many hours reclining on the wall between the chapel and the Memorial Library, I only visited the chapel while showing the campus to someone else, either my mother at graduation or a girlfriend after. But I’ve been in it.
• The Church of Annunciation, also in Milwaukee, which was the location of an annual Greek festival. Maybe I’ve only been on the grounds, but I have a sense that I took a tour at some point.
• The new cathedral in St. Louis, where I attended the funeral of the father of one of my beautiful wife’s co-workers.

Which is a surprising number, actually, as I don’t tend to seek out old churches when travelling (active Missouri Synod Lutheran churches when staying over on a Sunday, but not old churches). And I have not been to the southwest (home of Spanish missions) or much to New England.

So an interesting little browse, especially for the purpose I use it: To pad out fifteen minutes before bed and to pad out my annual reading count.

I mentioned when I bought the book that it had an inscription. Here it is:

In it, Mrs. Gamble apologizes to the Barner family for “crashing their party” and hopes that they enjoy their retirement.

Internet stalking says the Gambles founded a gift shop in the 1960s that sold Waterford Crystal and that they later sold the store in 1984 to a local poet/children’s book author and his wife. The shop closed in 2018. Mr. Gamble died in 1990; Mrs. Gamble died in 2021 at 101. Mr. Barner was a local banker who died in 2021 at 100. Given that the inscription is dated 1986, he had a nice long retirement. Mrs. Barner died in 2009.

I really have become an Internet stalker of people whose books I later own, and this seems really weird because unlike Mary Ovenshine, these people could have been neighbors. Well, probably not, but some of them lived in Springfield when I did.

Well, after reading Flashing Swords #2, I picked up the other entry in the series of anthologies (there were five total) that I had (and that I bought at the same time ten years ago).

Again, this is a collection of sword-and-sorcery novellas by a small circle of writers from the time period with an introduction by Carter.

The stories include:

• “The Bagful of Dreams” by Jack Vance, a story of Cugel the Clever. Cugel is down on his luck, and he meets up with a wizard with a bagful of dreams on his way to impress a royal personage and win a prize. But Iolo and Cugel beset and try to best each other beforehand and before the Duke.
• “The Tupilak” by Poul Anderson is part of a series about human/merfolk hybrids seeking to find their vanished kind. They come to a cold land where colonists from abroad are suffering and are hounded by invaders from the north, and the merfolk intervene to try to save them.
• “Storm in a Bottle” by John Jakes, a Brak the Barbarian story which starts with Brak as a captive brought into a strange town under threat from a dark mage who might be leading barbarians in the hills against them. Brak breaks free and finds that the threat comes from closer to home.
• “Swords against the Marluk” by Katherine Kurtz which is part of the Deryni series. Apparently, it’s an event that the books mention but did not cover, and it’s how one new king defeated a magickal rival with magic of his own and a Deryni on his side. I didn’t get much out of it because I haven’t read the books.
• “The Lands Beyond The World” by Michael Moorcock wherein Elric finds himself in another world having traveled through a gate and having had some adventures there. He is on his way back when he encounters a woman in trouble, on the run from an ancient sorceror who wants to resurrect an old love in her, and Elric tries to protect her.

I liked the Cugel story; I might have read the Brak story in middle school or high school; and the Elric stories are growing on me. I don’t know that any of it will stick with me, but it was for the most part a pleasant passage of a couple of hours. The context-switching between the stories, with completely different rules and whatnot, was kind of difficult. Probably easier if one is more used to anthologies and definitely easier if you’re familiar with each story’s particular mythos from other works.

So will I pick up the other three books in the series? Well, if I see them at a book sale, perhaps, but I don’t think I’ll order them.

So will this conclude Brian J.’s year of sword-and-sorcery? Maybe not.

This book is classified as humor, and undoubtedly it was designed to be a quick, fairly inexpensive, gift for someone you know who has a cat, whether that person (or cat) is a Taoist or Buddhist or not. It’s structured like a set of sutras (or suttas, depending upon your particular flavor of Buddhism) where a story or teaching of the titular cat is presented and then you get some explanation/exegesis (including disputes amongst the experts who study the titular cat).

So I think it’s supposed to be satire, but it’s actually pretty close to the mark as far as how books of this stripe go (remember, I’ve read some of Thich Nhat Hanh’s commentaries on Buddha’s teachings and other work, so although I am not a scholar, I recognize the structure). And, I mean, some of the life lessons that the book presents are actually helpful life lessons even if you’re not a cat.

So I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be arch commentary riffing on Eastern philosophy or if it’s a gateway to Eastern philosophy, or at least the self-help elements of popular Eastern philosophy. Nothing in it is absurd or laugh aloud funny. I’m not sure anything even rises to the level of amusing, actually, as much of the book is fairly earnest.

It looks as though the author has a couple of cat-themed books, a book on runes, and wrote something for Wonder Woman comics. So I don’t know what to make of the book based on the other things that the author has written. So very, very odd.

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.