Better to light a candle than curse the darkness

Saturday, September 7, 2024

Charles Schulz, *Peanuts*, Sept. 9, 1965

My friend Alan Jacobs writes in response to a piece bemoaning the fact that nobody reads Arthur Koestler anymore:

You can curse the darkness, or you can light a candle. You can lament that people don’t know the value of Arthur Koestler’s work, or you can write an essay that seeks to call readers’ attention to his best writing. If young people today do not know of events or artists or thinkers or works that you think they would benefit from knowing, you can tell them. That’s one of the main things writers are for.

I am big on being a “curious elder” — and one way, I think, to expand the curious elder idea is to not just be curious about what young people are into, but to also share your curiosity about the world in a way that is generous but without expectation. To point out the things you think are good… just in case somebody, maybe even somebody younger, is looking for them.

(I should note I found the Peanuts comic by looking up the origins of the phrase.)

The only pure art form

Monday, December 19, 2022

Here is the back of a vintage mid-60s sweatshirt (Schroeder’s on the front) recently shared on the @schulzmuseum Instagram, along with this quote from Charles Schulz:

Music is what keeps us sane. Music would be equivalent to a sense of humor. Music is one of the things, like the ability to laugh, that has kept mankind going for all of these thousands of years.

And here’s a Snoopy button from the late 60s, suggesting that dancing is the only pure art form. (The panel is from a Peanuts strip published on March 16, 1963.)

Big mood

Thursday, March 25, 2021

I posted this yesterday and was met with a wave of positive replies. (“I feel seen,” “same,” “relatable,” “TRUTH,” “I thought it was just me,” etc.)

It was just a silly post, but it made me think of all the times on book tour when somebody would step out of the signing line and say, “You put into words what I was already thinking.” This should be taken as a compliment. Steinbeck said what we really want as readers is “corroboration,” for another human being to essentially say, “No, you’re not alone.”

Of course, the only way as a writer to get there is to truthfully articulate what you, in particular, think or feel. Then, hopefully, the readers who think and feel the same — or are inclined to — will find you.

A panel from Charles Schulz’s *Peanuts,* November 12, 1959

As for that torn feeling, between compassion and disgust, love and misanthropy: Always, always, I repeat to myself, “Be the light or reflect it.” (If you can’t be a sun, generating your own light, be a moon, reflecting it.) “I’m trying, Ringo,” Samuel L. Jackson says in Pulp Fiction, “I’m trying real hard to be the shepherd.”

Peanuts, remixed

Friday, October 2, 2020

It’s the 70th birthday to Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, one of the greatest works of American art. (The very first strip ran on Oct. 2, 1950.) In celebration, I thought I’d post a batch of my remixed Peanuts strips I make in my diary, which are made from cut-up Page-A-Day calendars I buy every year. Be forewarned: They’re pretty weird.

Links to four zines worth of them:

See also: “Cutting and pasting the comics”

Take this job and shove it

Wednesday, September 4, 2019

In his book, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials, Malcolm Harris writes about this paradox at the heart of American parenting: On the one hand, we think of childhood as a place that should be free of labor — we’ve decided, collectively, that it’s inhumane for our children to slave in sweatshops or dig in a coal mine — and on the other hand, between the classroom, homework, and the extra-curricular activities picked to make a child the perfect college applicant, American kids work all the time.

[I]t takes a lot of work to prepare yourself to compete for twenty-first-century employment. Adults are happy to remind kids of this, telling them, “Put your nose to the grindstone,” “Stay on the right path,” “Treat school like your job.” When it comes to the right to organize, the dignity of labor, or minimum-wage laws, however, students are forced to be students rather than workers.

Maria Montessori said that play was the work of the child, but it’s obvious, now, that we see school as their job.

I’m inspired by students who walk out on their jobs. Students like Greta Thunberg, who started school striking on Fridays, protesting her government’s inaction on climate change.

Last year she said that “a number of members of parliament have come out to the steps to express support for her position, although every one of them has said that she should really be at school. Her parents think so, too, she said—that she should really go to school.”

And yet:

Here’s a lighter, funnier story from legendary soul singer Jackie Shane about school as unpaid labor:

“I don’t like to be played… At school I was a fast runner. Ooh! Honestly, I’m not bragging, I could run. I just sort of leaped through the air. They asked me to run [in an inter-school competition]. I said, “How much does it pay?” They said, “Well, Jackie, this is your school.” I said, “No, no, no, no! I don’t own this school. If I’m going to perform, I want to be paid.” Everybody said, “Child you’re too much.” No, I found out early that you cannot be too much in this world. You can’t. It’s impossible. If you don’t get your gethers together, people will take advantage of you. I told them “What do you mean my school? I’m not getting a nickel. No, no, no, no honey, you’ve got to give Jackie some money.” All of that nonsense and patting me on the back and giving me a slice of pizza. Give me some money!”