Visual note-taking

ON SCHULZ AND PEANUTS BY DAVID MICHAELIS

Monday, January 14, 2008

Schulz: All of the things that you see in the strip, if you were to read it every day and study it, you would know me.

Rose: To read your characters is to know you.

Schulz: Isn’t that depressing?

—Charles Schulz on The Charlie Rose Show

Good grief. David Michaelis’s Schulz and Peanuts. A grueling 565 pages of book that exhausted and disappointed me. So many details, so many of them not significant. I never get sick of Peanuts, but by the end of the book, I was sick of Charles Schulz.

Jeet Heer has written a really brilliant post about the strengths and flaws of the book, almost 100% of which I agree with. Jeannie Schulz and the Schulz kids have also been really outspoken about the fact that the book, in their opinion, is just downright wrong.

Whether it’s factually inaccurate or not, I didn’t find it to be a pleasant nor a particularly great read.

The major innovation of the book is the way Michaelis weaves examples of the strips into the autobiography. This works because—as Schulz said—to read the strip is to know him. It’s all there. This book would’ve been a helluva lot better if Michaelis ran with this technique, and just collaged the strips in a way that reflected the chronological order of Schulz’s life, stating the plain autobiographical facts alongside them, leaving out his psychological “insights.” Now THAT would be a cool book.

Here are some materials I recommend instead of the Michaelis book for those interested in Schulz and his work:

	Good Grief: The Story of Charles M. Schulz Rheta Grimsley Johnson’s underrated and unfortunately out-of-print 1989 “authorized” biography. Nobody seems to be interested in this book now that the Michaelis biography has come out, but I think it hits all the significant details and deals with Schulz’s depression in a very straightforward and explicit manner. Plus, the writing is way better. Worth tracking down. (Great Amazon customer review.) Check out an excerpt from the book in my post, THE TWELVE DEVICES OF PEANUTS.
	Peanuts: A Golden Celebration Probably the best introduction to the strip: contains, for better or worse, strips from all five decades, including commentary here and there by Schulz himself. It’s a big, coffee-table size book, and about 200 or so pages. You can get it used for dirt cheap. (Even better might be an earlier edition, Peanuts Jubilee, but I think it’s pretty hard to get a hold of…)
	Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz Chip Kidd designed this beautiful little book. It concentrates on the early part of the strip’s life and development, and contains numerous beautiful scans of actual newspaper clippings (a lot which come from the personal collections of Kidd and Chris Ware) and photographs of Schulz’s tools.
	ON THE CHARLIE ROSE SHOW This is a good interview with Schulz from near the end of his life, and you can watch the whole thing for free.
	Charles M. Schulz: Conversations This is a great book which includes Gary Groth’s excellent, 100+ page interview for the Comics Journal. A few more thoughts about the book.
	An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories This might seem like an odd choice, but Ivan Brunetti includes a whole slew of Peanuts tributes, including a piece penned by Schulz himself on how to be a cartoonist.
	THE COMPLETE PEANUTS Finally, if you really want to know the man, just read his strips. Fantagraphics has done an amazing job with these books — I’ve been slowly building my set. (And I’m hoping, hoping, hoping, that they will chose to release it on DVD at some point, a la The New Yorker.)

If any of you dear readers read the book, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

CUTTING AND PASTING THE GOSPELS

Friday, December 21, 2007

Among the sayings and discourses imputed to [Jesus] by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being. I separate therefore the gold from the dross; restore to him the former, and leave the latter to the stupidity of some, and roguery of others of his disciples.”
—Thomas Jefferson

When, at the age of fifty, I first began to study the Gospels seriously, I found in them the spirit that animates all who are truly alive. But along with the flow of that pure, life-giving water, I perceived much mire and slime mingled with it; and this had prevented me from seeing the true, pure water. i found that, along with the lofty teaching of Jesus, there are teachings bound up which are repugnant and contrary to it. I thus felt myself in the position of a man to whom a sack of garbage is given, who, after long struggle and wearisome labor, discovers among the garbage a number of infinitely previous pearls.”
—Leo Tolstoy

In The Gospel According To Jesus, Stephen Mitchell sets out on the quest of Jefferson and Tolstoy: to separate the “diamonds” of Jesus’ teachings from the “dunghill” of the gospels (Jefferson’s words).

The resulting gospel is 25 pages long.

The rest of the book is a wonderful 100 page introduction, an exhaustive 140 page commentary, and a 25 page appendix of words on Jesus by Spinoza, Jefferson, Blake, Emerson, Thoreau, Tolstoy, Nitezsche, Gandhi, and more.

Of course, Jefferson himself produced a collaged gospel text, commonly known as The Jefferson Bible:

“During the evening hours of one winter month late in his first term as president, after the public business had been put to rest, he began to compile a version of the Gospels that would include only what he considered the authentic accounts and sayings of Jesus. These he snipped out of his King James Bible and pasted onto the pages of a blank book, in more-or-less chronological order. he took up the project again in 1816, when he was seventy-three…pasting in the Greek text as well, along with Latin and French translations, in parellel columns. The “wee little book,” which he entitled The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth,” remained in his family until 1904, when it was published by order of the Fifty-seventh Congress and a copy given to each member of the House and Senate.”

Speaking of presidents, it was Bill Clinton who recommended reading this book…

More reading:

The Gospel According to Jesus by Stephen Mitchell
More on the Jefferson Bible
Stephen Mitchell on Jesus and the Christmas Legend

THE POLITICAL BRAIN BY DREW WESTEN

Thursday, December 13, 2007

This book blew my mind. I read it based on the recommendations of both George Saunders and Bill Clinton. Saunders’ recommendation pretty much sums it up:

“It deals with the way our brains process political information, and particularly with the need for people on the left to become more honest and direct in the way they talk about things – to stop trying to appease the growing right-wing movement and really say, flat-out, what they believe and why they believe it, directly and fiercely. Westen includes an incredible “here’s-what-he-should-have-said” speech that Al Gore should have made when Bush questioned his character during one of the debates. Really a mind-expanding book…”

Highly recommended →

NOTES ON A SCOTT MCCLOUD LECTURE

Thursday, September 27, 2007

Meg and I stayed late after work/school and went to see Scott McCloud tonight at UT:

scott mccloud presentation

UPDATE: Here’s the Daily Texan on the talk.

HECTOR CANTU, BALDO WRITER

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

On our lunch break, Adam and I went over to the Texas Union and listened to a lecture by Hector Cantu, the writer for the comic strip Baldo. Honestly, I could care less about contemporary newspaper comics, (although Adam pointed out The Comics Curmudgeon, which makes me actually want to read the comic section), but it was interesting to hear from someone working within the form. I kept thinking how odd it would be for me to write a comic strip and not draw it. I asked Cantu who inspired him as a writer writing for comics. Funny enough, he said Harvey Pekar, and told a funny story about meeting Harvey while at a convention in Ohio. We had to go back to work, so I didn’t get to talk to him more. Seemed like a good guy. (And my drawings don’t really look anything like him.)