Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Well, the 2022 Winter Reading Challenge has a category Character/Author With A Disability category. I guess, were I a noble man, I would have maybe tried again The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, but instead of buying the university textbook store offering of it, I bought a Barnes and Noble or Waldenbooks omnibus copy that included that book amongst four in the volume, so I would not have counted it as a book in my reading. I also know I have The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time somewhere with an autistic narrator, but that’s in a Reader’s Digest omnibus (not a condensed book, although, you know, you don’t see them much in the wild anymore). So it, too, would not count as a book in my annual total, and I’m not sure whether I would count it as a complete book for the winter reading challenge. Wait a minute, Brian J., you say. Didn’t you count your own book in the challenge? Well, gentle reader, I didn’t actually think you read these book reports and would hold me to account! But I selected this book because I have enjoyed previous Monk novels (Mr. Monk Goes To The Firehouse and Mr. Monk Goes To Hawaii which I read last year), and I’d count his OCD and various phobias as a disability.

So this book takes place several books after Mr. Monk Goes to Hawaii, so we miss the set-up and activitites that get Mr. Monk somewhere over the sea again–this time, apparently, he goes to Germany because he absolutely needs to talk to his analyst immediately. But after he solves the murders in that missing book (Mr. Monk Goes to Germany), his assistant Natalie, the first person narrator of the books, Watson to Monk’s Sherlock, she manipulates/compells him to visit Paris on the way back.

Of course, he becomes a pest on the short flight to Paris, but solves a murder on the flight, which leads to introductions with the local police, which comes in handy when Monk, on a tour of the sewers of Paris, he discovers the skeleton of a recently dead man amongst a pile of other bones. The skull belongs to a wealthy American man reported dead by suicide after prosecution who, apparently, fled to Paris and joined a dumpster-diving, living off the grid movement with a charismatic leader with whom he might have fallen into conflict.

So we get a bunch of humorous set pieces playing fun on Monk’s, erm, habits, including one where he takes a sidewalk cleaner for a ride, and the city employee lets him ‘borrow’ the vehicle for the duration of the stay as long as he cleans the sidewalks with it twice a day. And then, Monk solves the crime.

So a fun book to read. I don’t think I have any more Monk titles by Goldberg in my library, but I do have several in the Diagnosis: Murder series that I will get to before too long (but I am more likely to finish other series/sets that I’ve started recently). And I’ll continue to watch for other Monk titles in the wild.

I am probably going to call a lid on the 2022 Winter Reading Challenge, though. I’ve read enough–six books, which is five if you discount my own, and the categories are just not leading me into the next book like they did with the 2021 Winter Reading Challenge, where I read 16 books in the 15 categories. I probably won’t turn the form in until the end of the month just in case I slip another one in, but I’m going to focus on other books for the nonce.

Also, as I look at the hardback copy of Mr. Monk Is Miserable, I see I have flagged some things for individual comment. What did I flag? Continue reading “Book Report: Mr. Monk Is Miserable by Lee Goldberg (2008)” →

You know, I have already read and reviewed my own play in 2016, but the 2022 Winter Reading Challenge has a category Makes You Laugh, and now as it did then (in 2016) and when I wrote it (in 1993 or 1994), it makes me laugh out loud at some joke I’d written thirty years ago that catches me by surprise and makes me chuckle anyway.

I should have flagged it, gentle reader, but I don’t know it would have worked for you without context. As I’ve mentioned, this play is rife with wordplay, in jokes for serious English or Philosophy majors, and general silliness.

In 1995, Stages St. Louis, which was really one guy, a courier by day and arts influencer by night who ran the open mic Tuesday night at the Oasis, but Stage St. Louis sounds better, presented a staged reading of the play one month of spring Sundays in the aforementioned Oasis coffee shop. A “staged reading” is when actors read from the script, and the stage has no sets, but they do kind of emote their lines. So I took over the production and shanghaied people I knew to play the parts. Mike played Todd. For balance, I had Todd, a high school acquaintance who went on to be Navy Search, an actor in actual productions in St. Louis shows, and later a Hollywood stunt man and actor with a SAG card, played Mike–although Mike wondered if I made him the villain because he might have matched the character in real life. Scott, the friend who told me of Mike’s passing played Mark, the main character. Nicole, my girlfriend at the time, played Jenn. Eve, who was a poet and the only one of us to turn pro–she teaches in the St. Louis area, although I think she’s touring other continents presently, played Barbara Holt. Dennis, a guy from our role playing gaming group, played Rick/Phil (the character’s name is Rick, but the character Mike calles him Phil because he’s a philosophy major and his last name is Specter; this was before the real Phil Spector killed his wife). Penny was played by…. Well, that was the one person associated with Stages St. Louis, so I don’t remember her name.

One weekend, Steve from Stages St. Louis brought along a camcorder (that’s like a thing that takes video like a cell phone, but it records it to VHS videocassette, you damn kids) and recorded the performance. He set up with his back to the front window, which meant that the performers had their backs to most of the coffeeshop. But several people I’d known came to see it. Dena, a classmate from Marquette with whom I’d traveled to Memphis, New Orleans, and Biloxi right after our graduation, came down from Chicago to see it and to bang Mike even though I’d said, c’mon, man, you hit everything else, don’t nail this girl I’d gone to school with, but as I’ve mentioned, he was a horndog and might have enjoyed nailing girls I was interested in just because I was interested in them. A guy I’d worked with at the Price Chopper brough his girlfriend and their toddler. And some woman came in and watched of her own volition. On a previous week, I’d invited a Washington University student with whom I’d worked at the car ad measuring place to see it, and I remember that my then-girlfriend (who did not become my beautiful wife) referred to her as “that dancer” (I knew a lot of people pursuing advanced art degrees at Washington University in those days).

At any rate, I can say this with certainty because I found the MPG file I’d transferred from the videocassette several computers and probably not a whole decade ago, and I shared the said MPG file on Google Drive with Scott and Todd, and they passed it around with other players that they were in contact with. Scott said:

You were a really good writer even way back then. It’s funny that my memories of the scripted reading revolved around my own stress of reading the script, never really stepped back.

The banter between the characters.

I sold a copy of it in December; it was probably him.

Oh, yeah, and Dennis Thompson Goes On Strike? A bit self-indulgent, but I had to have a certain number of pages to get the flat spine, so there it is.

I wrote a pile in that era; most of it was–oh, not that bad. Compared to what I see in the literary magazines these days, anyway.

So, um, by my book? Or not. In a couple of years, I shall re-read it and laugh in spots.

Hey, maybe I should write something else, too.

To be honest, when I finished Star Trek, I went looking for a Chuck Norris memoir I have somewhere in my office, but I came across this book instead, so I read it to fill in the Celebrity Memoir category in the 2022 Winter Reading Challenge.

Although, to be honest, I might be stretching the definition of memoir a bit to include this book since it’s not focused solely on the life of William Shatner. Instead, it talks about the production of the original Star Trek television series. Shatner (or Kreski) interviews a number of the people involved, including not only the actors (Leonard Nimoy, Nichelle Nichols, DeForest Kelley most prominently, although George Takei and Walter Koenig also appear–but James Doohan does not, as Shatner explains in the epilogue), but also some of the behind the scenes people, telling stories about Gene Roddenberry (recounted by Majel Barrett), Gene Coons (writer), D.C. Fontana (writer/secretary to Roddenberry), Bob Justman (producer), Fred Freiberger (producer), and even some of the lighting men and gaffers.

So it’s an interesting and insightful look into the show and its origins in the late 1960s.

You know, I cannot help but to compare it to the Firefly books I’ve read (Firefly: The Official Companion Volume One and Two and Firefly: Still Flying). While we don’t get shooting scripts or “new stories”–that’s what the Blish and Foster books are for–we do get paragraphs and stories with greater depth and emotion than the Firefly books which plumb to the equivalent depths of Entertainment Weekly sidebars. This book talks about The Kiss, political struggles to get the show on the air, details about the timelines of writing versus actually shooting the episodes (writers had weeks to come up with scripts, which the crew would then have five or six days to shoot), and even admits that the other actors didn’t appreciate Shatner’s approach and belief that he was the star of the show (Roddenberry admitted he was, but Nimoy got more attention as Spock, not necessarily to Nimoy’s liking–his autobiography of the time is called I Am Not Spock). So it’s got some dirty laundry–well, reality–mixed into the hagiography.

I flagged a couple of bits. Below the fold since this is getting long. Continue reading “Book Report: Star Trek Memories by William Shatner with Chris Kreski (1993)” →

I mentioned that I might pick this book up after discovering that Firefly: Still Flying as that book was not a collection of short stories (and I need a collection of short stories for the 2022 Winter Reading Challenge). So I could not find the Leah Holbrooke Sackett book I bought in Old Trees last summer, I actually did pick read this book.

As you might know, gentle reader, the original Star Trek series aired for only three seasons in the late 1960s, but it developed quite a following. After its cancellation, the IP owners had James Blish write the episodes as short stories collected in, what, a dozen paperbacks (The Star Trek cartoon was likewise written up in Star Trek Log books by Alan Dean Foster). Fans had to get by on these books, the early novels, and on the syndicated shows for what seemed like a long time, but it was really only a decade until Star Trek: The Motion Picture came out, and Star Trek: The Next Generation a couple years later. So it really wasn’t that long, but it seemed longer, most likely because it was, at least for me, the long, long years of youth.

At any rate, this book contains:

• “Charlie’s Law” which is The Twilight Zone‘s “It’s a Good Life” in space. The crew finds the only survivor of a disaster at an outpost, and he has survived somehow from a very young age in an inhospitable environment and has developed great mental powers.
• “Dagger of the Mind” which is the one where the Enterprise crew goes to a penal colony and discovers that the leader is doing some unauthorized experiments on the patients designed to make them more docile.
• “The Unreal McCoy” which is the one with the salt-sucking monster.
• “Balance of Terror” which is the one that introduces the Klingons and their cloaking device for their Birds of Prey warships.
• “The Naked Time” which is the one where the Enterprise picks up a contagion where everyone acts like their fantasies. C’mon, man, the one with Sulu swashbuckling.
• “Miri” which is the one where the Enterprise goes to the planet where only the children are left because once they hit puberty, they begin aging rapidly, and the away team (although I don’t think they were called such until TNG) has to find a cure before they succomb.
• “The Conscience of the King” which is the one where a member of a touring theatre troupe might be a presumed dead brutal dictator.

I say “which is the one where” because if you’ve read this far, you’re probably a science fiction fan of a certain age, and you’ll recognize some of the episodes.

The book is a very quick read; it’s only 136 pages, and the stories are basically scripts put into paragraphs with a little dash of flavor to them.

Strangely enough, though, Blish must have been working with early scripts or didn’t read much outside of the scripts, as he calls Spock a Vulcanian throughout and once mentions the Enterprise landing on a planet (although that might have been a typo, or he meant one of the shuttlecraft).

But, still.

I read a bunch of these a long, long time ago in a trailer park far, far away–I think I got the paperbacks from the volunteer-run Community Library–and I have picked up a number of the books (1-8 and 11) in recent years. I also have a number of the Alan Dean Foster books as well, and I think they’re all grouped in the stacks here at Nogglestead. I think I’ll dip into them as I run out of Executioner novels for those in-between-other-book books. They’re fast, and they’re enjoyable, and they’re a bit of a nostalgia blast for me. And they’re likely to make me buy original Star Trek episodes on videocassette when I next come across them.

I can slot this book into the Winter 2022 Reading Challenge in either the Celebrity Memoir or the Love Story category; I’ve tentatively put it into the Love Story category because I have a lot of celebrity memoirs I could otherwise read, and most things I have in my library that one could consider a love story are probably 500 pages long.

As you might recall, gentle reader, I read an omnibus edition of his work called The Most of George Burns in in 2016, when I thought I might pick this particular volume up soon. Well, apparently I have reached a certain age where six years later is soon. Although I am pretty sure that my boys would tell you that whenever I say Soon to them, it can be up to never years later.

This book is a memoir of his marriage and act with Gracie Allen, although I guess they came in the opposite order. He is very flattering of her talent and as a person, making light of the fact that she was the star of the show and he was just the foil and straight man. But oh how he glows in his description of her throughout the book, and talks about her attitude towards show business (she was eager to leave it when they’d made bank) and her heart problems and eventual death. When this book was written, he still lived in the house they shared and went to visit her at the cemetary frequently–twenty-five years after her death.

In talking about the movies they made together, he mentions many by title, and they’re not available any more. He mentions his friendship with Jack Benny, but you don’t see a lot of Jack Benny DVDs on the dollar rack in grocery stores (or you didn’t in the day). I guess you can find the Jack Benny show on Amazon Prime….for six more days from today. (Also note that Burns mentions Benny’s wife, Mary Livingstone, which is know they’re married and whatnot). I think Burns got his modern notice, at least my notice, because of his films in the 1970s and 1980s and because that spurred public domain dumpster divers to put his taped shows out on DVD.

At any rate, I loved this book and his adoration for his wife.

I flagged a couple of things for comment:

Opening night was Monday at eight-fifteen. That’s when the critics came. We packed the audience with friends like Jack, Mary, Rena, Blossom Seely, and Benny Fields, dress designed Orry-Kelly, Archie Leach–a handome necktie salesman who was trying to break into show business with a stilt-walking act. He eventually changed his name to Cary Grant and after that was never much good as a necktie salesman.

You and I know Cary Grant was originally Archie Leach–he mentions the name in a bunch of his films. But this illustrates how Burns and Allen knew a bunch of people in vaudeville, radio, and early television–Burns mentions a lot of them by name. In the 21st century, many of the names are unknown (although Cary Grant makes infrequent appearances in memes about how men dress poorly these days).

Bibelots, or as we call them in English, chatchkas, are little trinkets. I suspect they’re called bibelots because if they were called trinkets, or knickknacks, they wouldn’t dare charge the prices for them that they do. Bibelots is a French word that, literally translated, means “overpriced trinket.”

I have learned a new word: Bibelot. Although since it’s a French word, I will likely mispronounce it when I use it, like so many words I learned from books.

She read everything, but she loved philosophy and trashy novels. I always figured that reading one helped her understand the other.

Sounds like what you find in the Book Reports category here at MfBJN unless the Winter Reading Challenge is on.

318 pages that breeze by, a pleasure to read, and it two sections of photographs of Burns and Allen and the whole Burns family.

I hope I do find more George Burns books in my stacks. They are a hoot.