Musings from Brian J. Noggle

As you know, gentle reader, I’m a bit of a fan of his for years (ah, jeez, I posted his video “Midwest Horror Film in October 2020). So when we saw (well, my oldest saw) this book in Baraboo, I had to have it. So we do. I have read it, but he has not yet.

It’s a large hardback running about 288 pages (including acknowledgements and credits) with a fair amount of imagery, photographs, tables, charts, and wingdings with chapters on The Basics, The Language, The People, The Setting, The Driving, Food & Drink, and so on. If you have seen any of his videos on YouTube, you’ve got the flavor of the humor.

Still, it works a little better in the short, three-minute videos than in a three hundred page book. I started it whilst on my vacation in Wisconsin, and I read about half of it, but I set it aside for a while to freshen it up a bit in the second reading. I had a couple quibbles with the book, first and foremost a certain love for Chicago that I assure you proper Wisconsinites do not have. Anyone from Wisconsin who expresses this desire to go to Chicago or any place in Illinois for that matter is suspect–but let us remember that Berens himself moved elsewhere and won an Emmy as a newscaster before returning home to be a Wisconsin-schtick comedian. Also, the book pays a little to self-consciously to recognizes native Americans, women, and other groups who might not have gotten a lot of recognition in the past, but now get all the recognition that’s handed out. Still, it’s only sprinkled in, but if you’re sensitive to the themes, as apparently I am in the 21st century, then you’ll spot it. But it’s just a little bit and not hectoring or particularly off-putting.

I only put a couple of flags in the book, all in the college section. First, my alma whattamattayou is not listed in the intro paragraph as an example of a midwestern university. Second, the book mentions Carleton College in Minnesota, and I remember that college was one of the first to send me brochures, which I liked to look at, but I was committed to going to my alma moneyforadecade since I was 10 years old–but I do wonder how my life might have been different if I had truly gone away to college (as I lived with my father, I was technically a commuter and more a resident of Milwaukee than a student bound to the university), and the last is a mention of Southern Illinois University, which threw me a bit–I did not realize that Southern Illinois University-Carbondale was technically “SIU”–I always thought of it with the town appended, but that’s because I’m a big fan of SIUE, which is Edwardsville, closer to St. Louis and home of the sound.

So a book amusing in spots, probably a bit long. Worth it at a book sale, although I’m not sure it’s worth $27. But I am a bit of a cheapskate when it comes to books. But I’ll keep an eye out for more from Berens, on YouTube and at book sales.

This book is a former library book from Palm Beach County that ended up at ABC Books (from whence I bought it in April). It runs 176 pages, with lots of pictures, but it’s really more of a training plan than an instructional guide. It starts with some conditioning exercises and stretches, and then it goes into punches and combinations, with progressions detailing what you should do in weeks where you work out three or four times a week.

It does talk about combinations using numbers, which is something my dojo has started recently (well, within the last three years), but our dojo’s numbering system differs from the book’s (and our dojo really doesn’t talk about tae kwon do strikes now at all). The book also has a couple of different punches that my dojo does not focus on–a straight right (which is a shorter right than a right cross) and an overhand right, which is a high hard one, like a straight or cross punch but coming kind of down over the opponent’s guard. And the book emphasizes a boxer’s stance, where the lead shoulder is turned more toward the opponent than my school teaches, as that position, although it puts you on a better guard as you can hide behind your lead hand/shoulder and present a smaller target, it pretty much neutralizes your rear arm and leg. Of course, left to my own druthers, I would spar this way all the time.

At any rate, not quite as informative as Boxer’s Start-Up: A Beginner’s Guide to Boxing–remember, that book had a lot of really good illustrations identifying body pivots and angles of motion. But I guess it makes me more of a martial artist that I can sit and read books about the subject when I’m too lazy to go to the dojo.

As you know, gentle reader, I am a sucker for these Marxist comic book introductions to various thinkers (see also Sartre for Beginners and Einstein for Beginners), so when I saw this book at ABC Books last August, I knew what I was in for.

So, yes, the book is a Marxist tract that basically implies that Machiavelli was in favor of a proletariat revolution of sorts, but aside from that, it does talk about, yes, The Prince (which is clearly not a satire) and provides context both historical and biographical to its composition.

It has paragraphs (and cartoonish illustrations) that describe Italy of Machiavelli’s time, including the importance of the d’Medicis, the Borgias, and the revolutions and counter revolutions in the city states of the time. So, as I was saying, good context for Machiavelli’s writing and a description of his non-writing career (and how he wanted his writings to ingratiate him to the powerful).

But it recognizes that The Prince is a small part of Machiavelli’s output–apparently, he thought his Discourses on Livy was a more important work–but it gets all the attention and draws everyone’s ire even though it’s a dispassionate study as much as a moral prescription for power. But the book puts it all in context and makes me want to read Discourses on Livy.

Oh, and of course it makes sure to erroneously say that national socialists/fascists are “on the right,” and it does lay out that Margaret Thatcher was pretty close to Hitler (although, the book is strangely hard on Bill Clinton).

So these books are plenty informative, and they’re quick reads since they have less actual text in them than a Diary of a Wimpy Kid book. And they’re funny when you can point at the obvious Marxist insertions and assertions.

I hate to say it, but I rather hope I find more of these books in the wild. I am not so enamored with them that I’ll order them full price, though.

I am continuing my, well, I would call it a march through the children’s classics that I have in the Children’s Classic series (such as Hans Brinker, Black Beauty, and Heidi). Given that I’ve only got four or five in the set, it’s a pretty short walk indeed.

You know, I started reading this book to my boys when they were younger, but we didn’t get very far–Alice did not even make it to Wonderland before we put it aside. I passed the bookmark where we’d left off, and Alice was still in the hallway.

So if you don’t know the arc as it were, Alice is out with her sister one day, and she follows the rabbit with the pocket watch down a rabbit hole that leads to a hall with a door to wonderland. She has some adventures in the hall before getting into Wonderland proper, and then she gets right-sized to go through the door into Wonderland, where she meets the royal court of cards and whatnot.

They’re simple, kind of silly little bits of whimsy, but when you stop to think about how many tropes and allusions to the stories one knows without having actually read the book–I mean, I knew about the bottles changing Alice’s size, the cards and the Queen saying “Off with their heads!”, and the white rabbit with the pocket watch amongst other things. Maybe I saw parts of the cartoon when I was a kid or read a kid’s book about it when I was actually a kid. One wonders if anything by Dan Kinney or Dav Pilkey will have similar cultural reach. The books about today’s current thing written to teach kids the current party line certainly won’t.

You know, I actually flagged something in the book. It must have been the time Alice used a gun chambered in something other than the ammo she purportedly used. Let’s open the book and see:

‘Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.’

That’s advice from the Duchess to Alice, and I think they’re words to live by.

As you might remember, gentle reader, I watched the Gary Cooper film Sergeant York with my boys in 2020, and I bought this book shortly thereafter. I took it on vacation with me to Wisconsin earlier this month, and I read it in a night or two. It’s a pretty fast read, as I assume it’s based on notes taken while York talked to the biographer (Skeyhill). This leaves York’s voice in the vernacular, which might diminish the readability a bit, but it’s not hard to follow once you’re used to it.

When I saw the film, I found it odd that the film focused so much on York’s youth and his draft and subsequent attempt to get a conscientious objector excuse. But it follows the book, which talks a lot about York’s region, family, and upbringing before getting to the war three quarters of the way through the book, and then it’s presented as his diary and official documents about the battle that earned him the Medal of Honor, so that’s really only a small part bit of the book. The book does go on into greater detail of York’s philanthropic endeavors after the war, supporting education and building a school in his county.

So I enjoyed the book a lot.

I did mark some things in it, though.

Continue reading “Book Report: Sergeant York: His Own Life Story and War Diary by Alvin York / Edited by Tom Skeyhill (1928, 2018)” →

This is the best Mormons In Space Love Story I’ve ever read!

Well, that’s a twee oversimplification of this book, but twee oversimplifications are a blogger’s stock in trade.

This book centers on a Martian secret agent, Cody Greene, who is on death row for not getting married by a certain age. He’s rescued by a beautiful engineer who herself was reaching the mandatory marriage age. But, as a twist, he is to investigate her for resource theft–specifically air stolen from one of the domes making up the different colonies on the planet. They’re married at first sight, and they find themselves attracted to one another, which gives the book the majority of its motion–will they give into their desires/love for each other, or will the secret agent continue to keep his new wife at arm’s length to investigate her? Also, Cody’s mother, from whom he is estranged, is a powerful politician/government official who might be pulling strings and manipulating him. Oh, and the new Mrs. Greene is a blonde, blue-eyed beauty, but she is half Korean and was raised in the Asian colony, so she tries very hard to look Korean and has a Korean mindset–spartan domicile, Korean cooking and dining, and so on.

So the book has a lot of interesting plot things going on, but it’s definitely weighted to the romance angle, which culminates rather disappointingly. The actual intrigue, presumably who is actually stealing the resources and who is pulling the strings behind the scenes, is kind of on the back burner to the “Do I give into my attraction?” and “I was about to give in, but now my suspicions are reset!” dithering. We get a couple of incidents and little to tie them together, and the book’s climax is more of a cliffhanger to the yet-unavailable second book in the series.

So it was a quick, light read, and for the most part, it worked, but a bit long on the dithering in the romance. Hopefully, the next book in the series will be better balanced in that regard–after all, the will they/won’t they Dave-and-Maddie tension (c’mon, you damn kids, that’s an allusion to Moonlighting, which was a television series in the 1980s) was resolved, so that dithering can’t be reproduced. And I’m looking forward to seeing how Farnsworth works in the other genres (fantasy and straight ahead romance).

If I can find the books; they’ve disappeared into the stacks, only to be rediscovered decades hence.

I read this book over a week ago, before my vacation, and just a little after Thin Ice and Other Poems. This, too, is a chapbook, with poems on the right page and photos by the author on the left.

Unfortunately, the printing quality does not do justice to the photographs. The poems are, however, a cut above Thin Ice and Other Poems, with some imagery and fairly clear points–mostly about the cycle of life, with a lot of thematic influence on plants growing and dying and a lot of reliance on colors, especially yellows and greens. But the poems at least have imagery and try to evoke things, although again, I would say the lines are too short, broken too often by line breaks for ponderous pauses.

Of course, I find myself writing fairly run on poetic lines these days, so I can’t really complain too much about the line length. No, wait: This is my blog. I will complain all I want.

So overall middle of the road; average. Which is not something to sneeze at in poetry, given all the bad poetry I read.