Musings from Brian J. Noggle

This collection of short stories by Isaac Asimov could be considered Encyclopedia Brown stories for adults. They were published monthly in Gallery magazine in the early 1980s. Man, I wish I’d known about that when I spent a long, uncomfortable stretch of time pawing through magazines in the Adult section of a used book store looking for the Gallery magazine with Robert B. Parker’s “The Surrogate” in it. I could have amortized the time in scoring some original appearances of these Asimov stories. Also, Stephen King had numerous short stories in men’s bazinga magazines in the early 1980s–at one point I compiled a list of them and started ordering them on Ebay when they were listed strictly as bazinga magazines and whose sellers did not know what was contained in the words within them. But I know now. Not that any used book stores in southwest Missouri have those kinds of back rooms. I associate them with Milwaukee.

At any rate, the book is structured thus: A group of men retire to their club after dinner and chitchat about something. This awakens Griswold, a man whom they don’t really like, and he lays out a mystery or spy story of which he took part, and each ends with a dramatic pause on the part of Griswold, inviting the others to guess how he solved it. In the magazine, the ending would be printed elsewhere or upside down to give the reader a chance to guess, but, man, the reader of the bazinga magazines in the 1980s must have been pretty clever indeed as I think I got one out of 30.

Each mystery is only a couple of pages, which makes for a quick read and something easy to pick up and put down. It has been less than a year since I read a science fiction collection from Asimov (Nine Tomorrows). Given how the stacks here at Nogglestead are sprinkled with Asimov fiction and nonfiction, I shall probably accidentally pick up another before long.

So I see three little paper flags in the book. What did I mark to comment?

He said, “I obtained a very good set of Durant’s The Story of Civilization for a mere pittance and I was delighted. I read each volume from the library as it came out, and I had always wanted a complete set. The only catch was that Volume 2, The Life of Greece, was missing.”

I bought most of them in 2019 (minus Volume I and Volume VI), and I even started to read the first volume three years ago. Well, I picked it back up right before I read this book, starting over with Egypt (which might be the longest chapter/book in the volume). I’m pleased to say I’ve finished the chapter on Egypt.

“Yes, we have some idea. Indirect evidence leads us to suppose he’s a member of the Black Belts, a street gang.”

Me, too, brother, me too.

I’ve often thought to ask kyoshi what he’s going to do with the army of martial artists he has trained, but I have not. When the time comes, he will let me know.

At any rate, a quick and amusing read. Apparently, Asimov wrote 55 of these stories in total, but a second collection of them did not appear. And, sadly, if it hasn’t by now, it probably won’t. I know the blogosphere is very high on Heinlein, but, c’mon, man. If you could have dinner with only one of them, you’d have to pick Asimov, ainna?

I have to admit, gentle reader, that this book has spent many football seasons on the Sauder printer stand serving as book accumulation point for browsing during football games, and it has spent many off seasons on the lower deck of the table by my main reading chair. It had a bookmark not far into it for all those years. When I’d bought it at the Hobby Lobby, I’d hoped it would be an easy browser, but no. I briefly considered it for the Instructional category in the 2023 Winter Reading Challenge, but I opted for A Beginner’s Guide to Glass Engraving instead. And they both suffered from a similar flaw.

As you might recall, gentle reader, I do a little bit of woodburning or pyrography from time to time, but I’m not the sort of person who can do highly detailed work. See the work I did for Christmas gifts in 2017–as it had been six years, I felt comfortable doing a couple this year as well. And, whoa, the Make It Happen plaque was seven years ago? I probably picked up this book around then.

So, gentle reader, here are the flaws with this book, or at least the flaws at the intersection of what Brian J. can or wants to do and this book.

• The book is written in British. And by that, I mean that the chapters are full of thick, descriptive paragraphs that one does not generally find in craft books. At least not American craft books. In our craft books, you get a bit of introduction about the craft, and then when it comes time for projects or techniques, you get a photo, an introduction, and a numbered list of steps with only a couple sentences each. Which makes them skimmable. This book has, erm, richer prose, but it does take away a little from the pragmatic or practical application one gets with American craft books. Not a lot of discussion why the author made the choices.
   
• The author is an artist, with a degree and numerous awards to his credit. Which introduced some distance between us as I am not an artist, and my fine motor skills preclude anything but thick kindergarten-crayon lines in pyrography.
   
• The author uses a wire-nib pyrography machine instead of a cheap solid-state one like I have, although I bought a unit that’s a little more advanced with a stack of Hobby Lobby gift cards I’d gathered over the years. But it was a lot like in A Beginner’s Guide to Glass Engraving, where the author used grinding wheels instead of a rotary tool (or acid etching) to make the marks. One wonders how much the techniques can be transferred from the artist’s tool to the rudimentary tools that the barbarians are using. Some, I am sure, but it still builds distance between the reader and the work.

The author also focuses a lot on small works, like keychains, napkin rings, and keepsake boxes–which I guess are good ways to practice, but of somewhat limited utility either as items for sale or for gifts. Perhaps these are best for practice while honing skills for larger things.

He also talks about working with a lot of different woods, which means he has a better craft store than Hobby Lobby to source from. At Hobby Lobby, it’s all pine, all the time.

At any rate, ultimately not that helpful for me. I’m going to end up hanging around at chapter 3, Silhouettes, for most of my woodburning hobby career.

Which does kind of strike at one of the conundrums I have with woodburning and hobbying: I make these things, and they languish in boxes in my garage, and I’m not sure what to do with them. I deluge my shrinking number of gift recipients with whatever I’m trying out when I try them out, but other than that, I’m reduced to putting things in silent auctions from time to time. I could do holiday bazaars or try Etsy or a booth somewhere, but that would probably only indicate how much money I lose per item.

I mean, I kind of enjoy making something, but I hate learning how little value my skill is to others. I mean, gentle reader, that’s what this blog is for, to keep me humble.

This book has been languishing on the most ignored to-read bookshelf at Nogglestead, the small little bookshelf in the hall between our offices. The three full-sized bookshelves on the opposite wall command the attention when I’m looking for something to read, and so I rarely draw a book from there. Even when I’ve looked at that shelf for something to read, I’ve sometimes considered this volume, but it’s a bit of a chonker–it’s 400 pages, and with Playboy on the cover, it’s not like I was going to carry this book to the dojo or to church. I guess I was saving it up for just the right moment when I would want to read it. Which finally arrived.

The book contains over 30 humorous articles and essays that appeared in the magazine up to the middle 1960s. Some of the articles are about sex, but not all of them. Remember, younglings, back in the 1960s, Playboy was a premier literary magazine as well as a place to see bazingas.

So this book includes pieces by Woody Allen, Allan Sherman, Art Buchwald (who must have been young once, ainna?), Jean Shepherd, and others. And aside from Art Buchwald, I could hear the enumerated authors’ voices in my head as I read (after all, I did listen to Pomp and Circumstance, a collection of Shepherd’s radio programs, in 2019). In searching for the link to the musings on that radio program collection, I externally remembered that Shepherd Mead, also in this book, was the author of How To Succeed In Business Without Trying (which I have not seen or read) as well as How to Live Like a Lord Without Trying (which I have read). So, clearly, I am in the target demographic of this book although I was born five years after it was published.

Overall, an up and down collection. Some pieces are funnier than others. Some rely on being an insider on publishing or movie-making. I was going to say that a few of them are dated, but, c’mon, man, very few overtly political sneers and no mentions of modern technologies or mindsets, so they’re all dated, but some of them fall into the anachronisms of my lived experience. I am sure that if you handed this to a kid today, he wouldn’t be scandalized because he wouldn’t know what Playboy represented in the 20th century, and he probably would not understand much of the humor within the book anyway. Not that he would want to read it. Not if there was a good, or any, TikTok or YouTube video available.

Which is unfortunate.

At any rate, Playboy collections from the 1960s are probably worth picking up even if they don’t have pictures. So one can remember a time where men aspired to some sophistication or at least think wistfully about a time when men might have aspired to some sophistication but were probably mostly all about the bazingas.

Although the cover art, man. That gives me nightmares.

I have a bit of a confession to make, gentle reader: when I was younger, middle school or high school perhaps, I was prone to confuse Saki with O. Henry. Mostly because I knew that both were short story writers who used pseudonyms. I am pretty sure that I only had O. Henry stories available in the giant reusable English textbooks of the day, but it certainly wouldn’t have helped that I only read “A Retrieved Reformation” and maybe “The Gift of the Magi” and no Saki whatsoever. Because the styles are quite different.

One wonders if young people today, or even college English majors, could tell the difference between the two or know just that much about them (short stories, pseudonyms) to confuse them. Probably not.

It doesn’t help that Saki short stories are rather short, with a bit of a twist to them kind of like O. Henry stories. However, they are very British. They reminded me of Chesterton’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, as it too deals mostly with upper crust members of society at their particular concerns and country manors. Several deal with Clovis, a young sophisticate and how he punctures some of the more fuddy-duddy members of his class.

The book also plays upon the trope of aunts, childless women in the family who insert themselves into the lives of their families (or who end up raising the children in the family for various reasons). Kind of like a relatively recent Progressive insurance commercial I’ll post below but which will be yanked from YouTube within a year as its rights expire or something, and we’ll all wonder what I was talking about when viewing this post in 2026:

One had to wonder if the shrinking size of the American family has put all of that aunt energy into the political arena to our detriment.

At any rate, an enjoyable read at 178 pages in a cheap college-reader paperback edition.

I did flag a couple of things:

The baddest word
The book does feature the baddest word, and even in Britain in the late 1800s or early 1900s, it’s used to show the speaker in a bad light. In this case, a man who would like to be known as an expert in religious architecture has moonlighted as the writer of poems that are set to popular music of the day, and he’s afraid that he’ll be known as the writer of music that, erm, black minstrels sing. So it’s not the main character (Clovis) using it, but a bit of a ridiculous fellow.

Although, to be honest, the word “minstrel” is probably already on its way to being a bad word, and I should probably be banned from polite society for using it. Not that 1) there’s any part of society that’s polite these days, and 2) I probably would not be part of that world anyway.

I’m right there with you

“It’s not the daily grind that I complain of,” said Blenkinthrope resentfully; “It’s the dull grey sameness of my life outside of office hours. Nothing of interest comes my way, nothing remarkable or out of the common. Even the little things that I do try to find some interest in don’t seem to interest other people.”

Ya know, I spend my off hours reading books I only post about on this blog, writing poems that I’m not sanguine about placing with magazines, and doing various crafts that end up in boxes in the garage because I’m not sure they’d be of interest to anyone but me, and I’m not eager to open an Etsy account to determine if that’s truly the case.

Hopefully, though, I won’t have the comeuppance or resolution that Blenkinthrope has which involves a fictional chicken.

Walmarts Dollar Generals in 1910 England

“The outlook is not encouraging for us smaller businesses,” said Mr. Scarrick to the artist and his sister, who had taken rooms over his suburban grocery store. “These big concerns are offering all sorts of attractions to the shopping public which we couldn’t afford to imitate, even on a small scale–reading-rooms and play-rooms and gramaphones and Heaven knows what.”

I guess it was not the Dollar Generals back then, but the same complaints are heard today, ainna?

The solution, devised by the artist, involves having some actors in to provide some intrigue which the housewives spread amongst themselves and that pretend intrigue draws them in to shop.

I’m not sure if it would work at the Pricecutter–it’s hard to keep the story lines straight when the employee turnover is accellerating (Dusty was in produce for a number of years, Ira and Debbie’s pharmacy is gone, Ron, the retiree who worked at Pricecutters as a bagger for fifteen years after retirement from his real job, and Linda, the sour checker, are gone; even Andrea and Ryan, the later replacements who checked and worked their ways up to the courtesy counter, have been gone for–years?)

But it’s a good example of how the stories have their twists, and how they might have been ahead of their time. Or how, perhaps, I did not give enough credit to stories and concerns that were nearly universal in industrial/modern societies that might have been shared by people or writers before my time (random thought: My brother and I offered this rejoinder to our sainted mother back in the day: “It’s the 80s, Mom.” which is an anachronism now).

I guess that’s why I read: to broaden my horizon and to realize that my experience is not so unique.