Musings from Brian J. Noggle

I bought this book because it’s in the sidebar at Bayou Renaissance Man because he, the BRM, has a story in it.

It is a collection of military sci fi stories set in the Kratmanoverse, where the UN has settled undesirables on a planet called Terra Nova; the colonies are created by nation/ethnicity in different places, so they sometimes come into conflict (Muslim wars of conquest) but mostly the colonists resist the United Nations who runs the colonies corruptly. The colonists are not supposed to be armed, and they live near sustenance level in many cases, as technology is too expensive to import to the colony–and the UN wants to keep it restricted.

So even though the macro story has been decided elsewhere (in the novels in the series), the setting provides a fertile ground for smaller short stories in the millieu. We get murders and factionalism on a multi-year colony ship; we get a cleric who helps a fishing colony escape Muslim raiders; we get a helicopter pilot who defects; we get black mercenaries who come to help pacify an Asian province but come to sympathize with their fellow colonists; we get a couple of hackers who help a drug lord break UN smugglers’ hold on him; and more. As I mentioned, there’s a lot of room between the broad strokes of the novel series for interesting stories. It’s a little like how I was introduced to Dragonlance in the old days, although the collections of short stores I got my hands on mainly still focused on the main characters of the stories, and these stories likely deal with people who don’t show up in the Big Picture at all. Although I cannot say that for sure.

So the stories have different perspectives, styles, and themes, but they share a certain realistic outlook as to human nature and societies. It is a Baen book, after all, and if you’ve read any of the author’s blogs, you’d know they’ve got their heads on straight.

I wanted to read something in the military sci fi genre since I’ve got a military sci fi novel started around here somewhere. So it was research, and a pleasure.

I did not flag a lot of things, but I did mark this one:

“I was entirely comfortable with his questioning,” retorted Champlain. “I rather obkect to the murder of noncombatants. Sir.”

His last syllable rhymed perfectly with “curr.”

C’mon, man, that’s right out of the Marcinko.

So, as I said, I liked it, which is good, since I paid full price for it. I’ll even think about getting some of the other modern military sci fi as I mess around with it myself. Maybe some Kloos, maybe some Kratman. Or maybe I should just read the Ringo and Drake and other books I already have on my shelves. What a novel idea that is!

I get a little money if you click here and buy:

This short book of poetry, 39 pages, contains, what, a single poem or prayer spread over the 39 pages with a spiritual theme that presents the One as a female figure, so it’s not a Christian spiritual collection. Given that each page or poem faces a mandala, the poetext might be to support the mandalas instead of the other way around.

A mandala, as you might remember, gentle reader (not that I’ve ever mentioned it here before), is an Eastern art form that uses geometric shapes and whatnot designed as a meditation aid for Buddhists, Hindus, and whatnot. The mandalas in this book are not so geometric as much as abstract art with an Eastern flavor. I guess the author would make mandalas for people–her bio says that she was divinely guided after a near death experience and that she wants to help everyone just get along like Susan Polis Schultz. The author’s Facebook page was active until 2015, so she was probably creating mandalas for people well into our century.

So, the poetext, meh, but the mandalas are interesting. Given that I got this book in one of the dollar bundles of chapbooks available at the at the library book sales, I think it was worth the 18 cents I probably spent on it. After all, I counted it as a whole book in my annual goal of reading 100 books.

This is a large-sized Crescent book covering the design styles of art deco which were early 20th century design and architectural movements around the world, but notably the United States. I say styles and were in the plural because really Art Deco includes subdesign styles called the Aztec, zigzag, and streamlined styles. The book breaks things up into sections on Architecture, Furniture, Art, and whatnot. Each chapter has a page of text that name drops people who popularized the style, and then includes photos and illustrations.

You know, I like Art Deco, at least in the design and the architecture–we have some Fiestaware at Nogglestead–but not the art-art, which has a bit of Sovietism to it. A lot of it comes from the WPA and NRA programs coming out of the New Deal, so that’s probably appropriate.

However, Fiestaware aside, I like to look at it, but when it comes to design that I like to have around Nogglestead, I go more for classical looks and cheap pressboard. Not stylized modern things, or at least how modern was envisioned a hundred years ago. Even though it’s cooler than what a hundred years later would generally produce, particularly in architecture.

So that’s what comment you get from me in this regard. You want depth in discussion of design, go seek your Lileks and Driscoll.

These are two more chapbooks, or short books of poetry, that I bought bundled recently. Actually, the Shultz book was in a bundle, but I bought the Javan book alone for a buck. It seems that I’ve seen a lot of books by Schutz and Javan around, and then I thought it might just be at ABC Books, but my recent trip showed that the poetry section there was not rife with either of these poets. So I don’t know where I’ve seen so many of them before that I thought I should finally give them a try.

I have grouped them together because they both suffer from the same thing: Too much abstraction with line breaks, announcing a feeling or thought without poetic imagery to back them up.

Javan’s poems are of a personal nature, with musings on relationships and some “Hey, Girl” kinds of poems. The Schutz book deals with macro themes of reconciliation between different peoples and “Can’t we all just get along?” More than that, though–can’t we all just love one another for our differences? Reading them together is a little like listening to a U2 song: First, we get the personal, which is more relatable (although U2 is generally more poetic), and then all of a sudden in the third or fourth verse the personal relationship morphs into a song about feeding the world or something.

The stories of the poets is more interesting: Javan self-published his books in the days before computers, and he didn’t have the Internet, so he drove around, bookstore to bookstore, to get his works carried. Given that I’ve seen and now bought one of his works far away from his native Georgia, it seems to have worked. Schutz, on the other hand, is a mommy poet of some note who then put this book out as a public service such as it was. She and/or her husband founded Blue Mountain, whose early Internet greeting card company they sold to Excite in 1999 for $780,000,000, so she had some money and time to write a bunch of poetry, and she’s the mother of the current governor of Colorado. So she probably did not have to drive widely to disseminate her work.

At any rate, they both come out of that 70s poetic tradition like, say, Rod McKuen or Jon Francis or James Kavanaugh. The wording is conversational and not very self-consciously poetic. Which is probably to say not poetic at all. But, hey, some people might go for it. I prefer more poetic, but perhaps not self-consciously “We’re doing poetry!”

UPDATE: I discovered when I was entering this book into my library database that I’ve read something edited by Susan Polis Schutz before: A Friend Forever also published by Blue Mountain–which means they’ve been at this for a while.