Austin Kleon

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Cold feet

My first Peanuts collage of the year. It hits me over and over again how there’s rarely anything “random” about collage — your eye is caught on images because of who you are, what you’re inclined and trained to look for.

It reminds me of Tristan Tzara, describing the seemingly unoriginal cut-up method as a way towards originality, or Kenneth Goldsmith in Uncreative Writing, who writes that “the suppression of self-expression is impossible” and that the “act of choosing and reframing tells us as much about ourselves” as anything else. “It’s just that we’ve never been taught to value such choices.”

And, of course, there’s what you choose to share…

How beautiful they go to their graves

Production cel from It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

“How pleasant to walk over beds of these fresh, crisp, and rustling fallen leaves…. How beautiful they go to their graves!”
—Thoreau, October 12, 1853

Thoreau, our great chronicler of the seasons, wrote a lot about the falling leaves in October, noting all the different colors and hues. Their colors aside, he thought, like many things in nature, they could teach us something about accepting our own internal seasons, and our mortality.

October 22, 1853:

Consider what a vast crop is thus annually shed upon the earth. This, more than any mere grain or seed, is the great harvest of the year. This annual decay and death, this dying by inches…. The year’s great crop. They teach us how to die.

October was a the time he thought about the end of life. On October 20th, 1857, he meets a poor old man who has gathered apples in his shoes. “This man’s cheeriness was worth a thousand of the church’s sacraments and memento mori’s.”

October — Harvest Time — was also a month for Thoreau to contemplate his “harvest of thought.”

October 14, 1857:

I take all these walks to every point of the compass, and it is always harvest-time with me. I am always gathering my crop from these woods and fields and waters, and no man is in my way or interferes with me. My crop is not their crop. I am not gathering beans or corn. Do they think there are no fruits but such as these? I am a reaper; I am not a gleaner.

And on October 24, he writes, “My eye is educated to discover anything on the ground…. It is probably wholesomer to look at the ground much than at the heavens.”

***

[Update: 4PM: I had no idea that Thoreau actually collected his thoughts on fall in the 1862 essay, “Autumnal Tints.” See this piece, “Revisiting the Splendor of Thoreau’s ‘Autumnal Tints,’ 150 Years Later.” This is one of the amazing things about reading Thoreau’s journal before you read the published work — he pilfered so much from his daily writing that you know exactly where sentences and sections come from, and it’s fascinating to see how he changed them.]

Cutting and pasting the comics

One of my favorite prompts inThe Steal Like An Artist Journal asks the reader to remix a comic strip:

My son got a daily Peanuts calendar for Christmas, so for fun I’ve been taking the old pages and making collages out of them:

I like to take two or three strips and mash them up: this one has a panel from January 16, 1968, text from Jan. 10 and 13, and most of the January 12th strip:

This one is made up of a bunch of extra leftovers:

I really love how surrealistic they get when you squeeze two images of the same character into one panel:

And how just swapping a few bits of text can change a strip’s meaning completely (and make it autobiographical — this was originally about Charlie Brown waiting for his dad to get off work):

This one starts with a piece of text from some litter I found on my walk:

It’s interesting how in the process of cutting it up, you really learn a lot about Schulz’s strip: how wordy the balloons are (something Nancy creator Ernie Bushmiller famously complained about), how everything belongs to one world and is easily re-arranged and re-combined. Heck, even the characters can be spliced into each other: here’s Charlie Brown with Linus’s hair:

It seems like this kind of thing would be a great exercise for the classroom. I’ve done a variation in workshops in which participants take single panel cartoons from the comics section and swap the captions, like this example in Gary Larson’s The Prehistory of the Far Side:

The Far Side and Dennis the Menace used to be side by side in the Dayton Daily News. One day, back in August of 1981, someone “accidentally” switched their captions. What’s most embarrassing about this is how immensely improved both cartoons turned out to be.

Here’s a Lynda Barry caption from One! Hundred! Demons! pasted on top of Charles Burns’ “The Smell of Shallow Graves” (both reprinted in this NYTimes article):

The demons hate fresh air

That’s Linus taking a walk, from a Peanuts strip published on October 8, 1970. Here’s Linn Ullmann, in an interview with Vogue, on her father Ingmar Bergman:

 My father was a very disciplined and punctual man; it was a prerequisite for his creativity. There was a time for everything: for work, for talk, for solitude, for rest. No matter what time you get out of bed, go for a walk and then work, he’d say, because the demons hate it when you get out of bed, demons hate fresh air. So when I make up excuses not to work, I hear his voice in my head: Get up, get out, go to your work.

Get up, get out, go to your work.

(Thanks to Matt.)

On this day


I bought this handsome NYRB edition of Thoreau’s journal a few months ago when I saw that John Stilgoe had written the preface. (I took it as a BUY NOW sign: I’d read his book Outside Lies Magic earlier this year liked it quite a bit.)

It’s a highly edited and condensed version of the complete 47 volumes of Thoreau’s output, but I still wasn’t sure how to read the thing. I couldn’t imagine actually reading it front to back. Then I noticed that the left-hand page headers refer to the approximate date, but the right-hand page headers refer to what age Thoreau was when he wrote the entry. This seemed like a fun game: Let me see what Thoreau was writing when he was exactly my age.

Then I thought it’d be fun to just follow along with his life day-by-day and year-by-year, almost like turning The Journal into one of those 5 year diaries that you see in stationery stores. I’d stick post-it notes on the current date of each year of the journal, then check the tabs each day to see if there’s an entry.

This turns out to be a terrific way to read Thoreau, because he was so obsessed with observing nature and the changing seasons. You see, for example, how Thoreau repeats himself, noting the fallen leaves in October. (“How beautifully they go to their graves!”)

Yesterday, I read the entry for October 20, 1857, exactly 160 years ago, in which Thoreau writes beautifully about meeting a barefoot old man carrying a dead robin & his shoes full of apples:

I got such a kick out of reading this way I wondered what other books I had lying around the house that I could turn into a daily devotional. How about my Big Book of Peanuts?

I mean, of course a collection of daily newspaper strips, originally written to be consumed on one particular day, makes for good daily reading. (Think of all the “Page-A-Day” Peanuts calendars.) But there’s another reason they’re so great to read day-by-day: Peanuts function as a sort of coded diary for Schulz. This is explained by Bruce Eric Kaplan in the introduction to his collection, This Is A Bad Time:

[T]hese drawings are really my journals. I use them to explore whatever I find interesting, confusing, or upsetting on any given day. But here’s the beauty part—these private thoughts are filtered through the prism of moody children and blasé pets, disillusioned middle-aged men and weary matrons, among others. And so I get to work through whatever I am thinking about in a coded way. No one but me will ever know what the real seed of each image and caption was. So I can be free as I want to say whatever I want, and no one can catch me. It’s great….Every morning… I sit down and think about why I am disgruntled or why I am not as disgruntled as I was yesterday and out come these little drawings…

This connection between daily comic strips and diaries is made more explicit in the work of someone like James Kochalka in his sketchbook diaries, American Elf. I have all 14 years on my iPad now, so it wouldn’t be hard to read them in the same way I do the Peanuts collection. Strangely, I find that having a digital collection of the strips makes me want to reorganize the entries in non-chronological ways, like, reading every strip that includes leaves or clouds.

I have an ebook of Andy Warhol’s diary, and I like to search it whenever I’m in a spot that I know he had some connection to. (When I was in Milan, I typed in “Milan,” and landed on his entry for Monday, September 17, 1979, which contains the question, “Why would anybody want to go to Milan?”)

Anyways, I’m wandering towards a point: To read collected works is to also grapple with the question of how (or when!) to read collected works.

This, by the way, is the end of the Peanuts strip published on Oct. 20, 1962, 56 years ago:

Sound like someone you know?

ON SCHULZ AND PEANUTS BY DAVID MICHAELIS

schulz & peanuts

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:

goodgrief.jpg

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

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

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.
charlierose.jpg

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.
conversations

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.
graphic fiction

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.
complete peanuts

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.

CHARLES SCHULZ ON HIS PROCESS OF MENTAL DRAWING

doodles of peanuts

While I am carrying on a conversation with someone, I find that I am drawing with my eyes. I find myself observing how his shirt collar comes around from behind his neck and perhaps casts a slight shadow on one side. I observe how the wrinkles in his sleeve form and how his arm may be resting on the edge of the chair. I observe how the features on his face move back and forth in perspective as he rotates his head. It actually is a form of sketching and I believe that it is the next best thing to drawing itself. I sometimes feel it is obsessive, but at least it accomplishes something for me.

—Charles Schulz

meghan sketching at mandolas

THE TWELVE DEVICES OF PEANUTS

So-called creative people understand better than most that there is nothing new under the sun. Working with boulders of granite, with empty stages, with blank paper, they are credited with making something out of nothing, but that isn’t exactly what they do. All art is derived from what is in actuality a remarkably finite human experience. Whatever the medium, the creative person’s task is to interpret an essentially unchanging reality, a dog-eared reality pondered by Homer and Mel Brooks and everyone in between. The artist succeeds if he or she can present something familiar from an unfamiliar angle.”

— Rheta Grimsley Johnson

While everyone else is reading David Michaelis’s new biography, Schulz and Peanuts, I’ve decided to wait and ask for it for Christmas. Instead, I’m reading Rheta Grimsley Johnson’s underrated and unfortunately out-of-print 1989 “authorized” biography, Good Grief: The Story of Charles M. Schulz. People have called the book “innocuous” and “flattering”, but I think it deals with Schulz’s depression in a very straightforward and explicit manner, and the writing is really great. Worth tracking down.

Chapter 6 of the book is dedicated to Schulz’s “12 devices”—the twelve ideas that Schulz considered essential to the success of Peanuts:

1. The Kite-eating tree.

01

2. Schroeder’s music

02

I was looking through this book on music, and it showed a portion of Beethoven’s Ninth in it, so I drew a cartoon of Charlie Brown singing this. I thought it looked kind of neat, showing these complicated notes coming out of the mouth of this comic-strip character, and I thought about it some more, and then I thought, ‘Why not have one of the little kids play a toy piano?’

—Schulz

charlie brown and schroeder whistling

3. Linus’s blanket

03

4. Lucy’s psychiatry booth

04

5. Snoopy’s doghouse

05

In the beginning, Snoopy actually slept in his doghouse, and a three-quarter view that worked in perspective was the readers’ most familiar angle….The emergence of Snoopy’s doghouse as Grand Device centered not on actual depictions of the humble abode but on allusions to its fantastic contents…the only view the reader is ever given is a left side view. Yet as its graphic depiction became severely restricted, its function became limitless.

—R.G.J.

6. Snoopy himself

06

7. The Red Baron

07

8. Woodstock

08

9. The baseball games

11

10. The football episodes

12

Besides losing, the running (and falling) gag is a pure example of another element that has worked so well for Schulz: repetition…Nothing else in Peanuts is so mechanically repetitious as the football joke….One newspaper editor canceled Peanuts, complaining that the author did the same things over and over. He was forced to reinstate the comic strip, with an apology, when his readers set up a postal howl.

—R.G.J.

11. The Great Pumpkin

09

12. The little red-haired girl

10

Hank Williams’s plaintive ballad “I Can’t Help It If I’m Still In Love With You” spurred the inclusion of the little red-haired girl in Peanuts. After listening to the song over and over again, Schulz was inspired to include in his cast of characters the unrequiting lover….The littler red-haired girl has never been depicted…and he believes she never will be.

—R.G.J.

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