Musings from Brian J. Noggle

As you might remember, gentle reader, when I bought this book last month, I said that the back of the book called this a “sprawling erotic thriller.” So of course I jumped right on this book–as you know, I am a sucker for the smut. But wait, Brian J., you bought Fanny Hill a year and a half ago? Well, gentle reader, I like to cover up my propensity to read diry books by spacing them out a great deal indeed.

So is it erotic? Well, on page 30, we learn that the love interest read de Sade in college, so one might expect the book to turn into Fifty Shades of Ninja, but it does not. It has a bunch of sex scenes with some brief explicity, but we’re talking only a couple of sentences or paragraphs per, and they’re spread through 500 pages. We do get a variety of sex scenes that would have been called deviant in 1980, including incest, pedophilia, lesbian sex with a firearm as sex toy, and male anal rape. The book might have been shocking in 1980, but it’s definitely less titilating than a Gunsmith novel.

But is it sprawling? Oh, boy, Mister, is it!

All right, so the plot: A guy from an ad agency has quit and is living in the suburbs when a neighbor dies from what looks to be an accident, but a World War II veteran medical examiner finds traces of metal in a puncture wound, reminding him of an experience in World War II when he met the ninja. Our hero, Nicholas Linnear, is really a ninja! Spoiler alert, but, c’mon, man, the “twists” are pretty obvious as we go along. He meets the modern love interest, the daughter of a tycoon, soon after the murder (who turns out to be a former co-worker of Linnear). He becomes involved with her, but we also get long, vivid flashbacks of his upbringing in post World War II Japan by an English (Jewish) father and a Chinese mother (who might not be his real mother).

So we’ve got the past and the present interwoven; in the present, we have the good ninja agreeing to guard the tycoon from assassination by the ninja and collaborating with the local medical examiner and talking with some of his Japanese friends in New York, and they’re all systematically killed by the bad ninja, leading the good ninja to realize that maybe the bad ninja is targeting him as much as the tycoon. Whoa! And in a twist you can see hundreds of pages in advance, the bad ninja is his cousin! Or is he really Nicholas’s brother?

And then we go into a flashback of Nicholas’s young life in Japan, with some Nipponophilia and Japanese history worked in along with his love for a Japanese girl, Yukio, who might be playing him for a fool and in the service of his cousin, a student at the same ryu as Nicholas until Nicholas beats him–at which time he goes to a black school to learn the dark arts of bujistu. To be honest, a lot of words in the book are italicised to emphasize their exotic flavor.

But the backstories–each character gets his or her pages or paragraphs, if only to flesh out a character to be killed later–really chonk this book up. I mean, it goes into greater detail about the characters than classical literature which often weighs in at 500 pages or more. But I prefer my genre fiction a little punchier, and this book could have lost probably half of its words to tighten it up.

Oh, and the book is broken into five sections–rings based on The Book of Five Rings, and the author is name checked a bunch. I felt smaht for knowing this as I read the book earlier this year.

At any rate, not my kind of “thriller.” Overly long and wordy. I will probably not bother with the rest of the series which spans six novels through 1995 and two e-book short stories in 2014 and 2016.

Definitely the second-best book entitled The Ninja that I’ve read recently (The Ninja and Their Secret Fighting Art, which I read in 2019, was the best–I was surprised to see I already had an image called theninja.jpg for book reports).

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This book, the less expensive of the books by this author that I spotted at Hooked on Books almost a month ago, is the work of a professional poet. The author is the assistant editor at The Ohio Review at the time, so he’s definitely a pro. But for all that, it’s not so bad.

Some of the poems to do fall to the two-to-four-syllable-lines problem. How can you develop a thought or image in lines that short? Short answer: unless your name is Issa and some of the beauty of the poetry is in the brushstrokes themselves, you can’t. But modern poets lurve it, and when I read poems like that, I can here them reciting a couple of short words and then pausing ponderously at the end of the line. Eesh.

At any rate, many of the poems contrast growing up on the farm with today, which although it was then was later than growing up on a farm. I liked it a little more than I thought I would, but I found enough in it to not dislike it.

But none of the poems really touched me. You know, I’ve read a lot of poetry this year–what, about 20 books, give or take how you account for some of them–and not many of the poems or poets stick with me. I liked some of the Mary Phelan and John Ciardi I read this year, the poem I remember most en toto and even quote bits of to myself comes from Robert Hayden whom I read in 2020. So I guess the best I get out of most poetry is that’s nice and move on.

Perhaps that’s the best I can hope for from people reading my poetry. Or people reading my poetry at all.

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This hardback comes from Carleton Press, a self-publishing firm, in 1973. Not only is it a hardback in a dust jacket, but the dust jacket is Mylar-wrapped, so someone thought highly of it. Perhaps Ellen Massey, the teacher extraordinaire, to whom the book is inscribed.

One might think of this as grandmother poetry, based on the photo on the back, but the author bio indicates that she still has a child in the house. I certainly made that mistake; she’s likely in her late thirties or early forties when this book came out, so not grandmother yet.

It doesn’t touch on the normal grandmother poetry themes of religion, patriotism, and so on. Instead we get short (well, terse is right in the title) bits about personal relationships and whatnot. The poems’ lines are not short, so she’s not a Professional, but many of the works are light on imagery and heavy on abstractions and explaining emotions.

So the poetry is not very memorable or compelling to a poetry glutton like me, but she must have been very proud of it, and she pursued her dreams, spending likely thousands of dollars in the process.

Instead of some grandmother poetry, how about some grandpa poetry instead? Ah, but for the depth of grandmother poetry. This volume has 51 pages of landscapes with little beyond describing the flora of East Central Illinois. Many of the poems within are cinquains, which are short five line verses. Longer than a haiku, but not by much.

Still, the book I have is autographed and is from the third printing, somewhere in the 601st through 800th copies made available. So the fellow sold or gave away more books of poetry than I have amid my two chapbooks and one self-published print-on-demand title, and like At the End of the Rainbow, it’s available on Amazon almost fifty years after publication.

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Now this is what you would expect of good grandmother poetry. The book, comb-bound when I was but two years old (but not by my grandmother) runs 94 pages on high-quality cardstock for the most part. It touches on themes of holidays, religion (lightly), family, and patriotism, but not unalloyed with a touch of pain (apparently, she lost a son in World War II). We get the gamut of history in the poems: She married in 1918, in the shadow of World War I, lost a son in World War II, and wonders about kids these days in the 1970s.

The poems are tidy little bits with end rhymes; the introduction says that the author had pieces published in the newspaper; I remember when newspapers published poetry. I will have to admit, of all the papers I take these days, only one drops in a poem from time to time, and of all the magazines I take (which, to be honest, is fewer than the newspapers), only one or two have a poem from time to time. But in the olden days of the last century, gentle reader, you might get your little ditty in the paper, read by people, enjoyed a bit and mostly forgotten. Unlike today, where you pump the poem into a database somewhere to be eventually discarded with a click of a No button instead of a nice form letter, and even if you get it published in a proper place, only other poets will read it.

You know, that’s why I read grandmother poetry and old Ideals magazines. Because I remember when poetry like this was a staple of the people and not The Poets and Power. 1974, maybe 1980, might have been the high mark of this; by the time I was dropping chapbooks in 1994 and 1995, nobody at the coffeeshops was buying.

Compare and contrast: Although you can get a print-on-not-much-demand copy of Coffee House Memories on Amazon, you can actually order a print copy of this book on Amazon. Unrequited and Deep Blue Shadows, my laid-out-and-printed-at-Kinko’s chapbooks, are not available.

Or maybe that’s because they’re more collectible.

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