dual personalities

Tag: Charles M. Schulz

January 6, 2015

Under the tree: “Big brothers know everything…Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown!”*

by chuckofish

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My dual personality blogged about her haul of Christmas gift books the other day, so I thought I would follow suit with a list of mine.

My big brother gave me the new biography of John Wayne by Scott Eyman and I dived right in. (Middlemarch was unceremoniously shoved to the back of the bedside table.)

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I read the whole thing and enjoyed it very much. It supported my previously held view that old Duke was the greatest. I always knew he was intelligent, hard-working, kind, humble, and dreamy, but it was nice to have that opinion validated. Here is a good review of the book by Peter Bogdonavich in the New York Times.

When everyone goes home tomorrow and I am bereft, I am going to binge-watch John Wayne movies. This is what I call good therapy.

My sister gave me a new book about Raymond Chandler–another favorite of mine–The World of Raymond Chandler in His Own Words edited by Barry Day.

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Chandler, as we all know, wrote not about crime or detection, as George V. Higgins once observed, but about the corruption of the human spirit. He is a man after my own heart: “Philip Marlowe and I do not despise the upper classes because they take baths and have money; we despise the upper classes because they are phony.”

As you can imagine, this book is chock-full of great quotes by the master of simile. “Soot…was down-drafted into the room and rolling across the top of the desk like tumbleweed drifting across a vacant lot.” (The Big Sleep)

An old friend (and a reader of this blog) gave me

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which is full of good things to remember:

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And, of course, I can always count on daughter #2 to give me something intellectually stimulating. This year it was a copy of

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I can’t wait to delve into this one! Emerson is one of my favorites and you know I always like to look at the spiritual side of things.

“Travelling is a fool’s paradise. We owe to our first journeys the discovery that place is nothing. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern Fact, the sad self, unrelenting identical that I fled from.” (Self-Reliance)

(P.S. I received some wonderful non-book presents and I hope the people who gave me these will not feel slighted that I did not mention them today.)

What are you reading?

*Charlie Brown’s Christmas Stocking by Charles M. Schulz

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October 2, 2013

Good grief, Charlie Brown

by chuckofish

The comic strip Peanuts was introduced on October 2, 1950 and ran for nearly 50 years. The final original strip ran on February 14, 2000.

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According to Wikipedia, Peanuts is the most popular and influential strip in the history of the comic strip, with 17,897 strips published in all. At its peak, Peanuts ran in over 2,600 newspapers, with a readership of 355 million in 75 countries, and was translated into 21 languages. It helped to cement the four-panel gag strip as the standard in the United States, and together with its merchandise earned Schulz more than $1 billion. Reprints of the strip are still syndicated and run in almost every U.S. newspaper.

Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson wrote:

“Peanuts pretty much defines the modern comic strip, so even now it’s hard to see it with fresh eyes. The clean, minimalist drawings, the sarcastic humor, the unflinching emotional honesty, the inner thoughts of a household pet, the serious treatment of children, the wild fantasies, the merchandising on an enormous scale — in countless ways, Schulz blazed the wide trail that most every cartoonist since has tried to follow.”

As a child, I was a great fan of Peanuts. My 5th grade friends always compared me to Lucy, but I definitely related to the misfit Charlie Brown who didn’t get invited to parties and never got Valentines, and to the spiritual, but uncertain, Linus who sucked his thumb and had a blanket. So had I. I kept a scrapbook of clippings and had many books and several stuffed Peanuts character dolls. My brother once made me a balsa wood dog house for a Snoopy figure. It was painted to look like his WWI doghouse-fighter plane.

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It was probably the nicest present he ever gave me.

Although a “comic” strip, I always had the sense that it was inherently sad. Life is sad and the knowledge of that is what ultimately binds us together. Clearly Charles Monroe Schulz (November 26, 1922 – February 12, 2000), even with a nickname like Sparky, understood that too.

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March 18, 2013

Happiness is…

by chuckofish

happiness is

Remember this book from 1962? It reminds us that it’s the simple things that make us happy. Things like warm puppies and walking in the grass in your bare feet and knowing how to tie your own shoes and my favorite: “some black, orange, yellow, white and pink jelly beans, but no green ones.” (I am okay with the green ones.)

Charles M. Schulz certainly understood what makes a happy life. To this I would add a few things, such as a full tank of gas

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and a stack of new magazines in the mail.

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I had a happy weekend–did you?

I batted “0” at the only estate sale I went to on Saturday, but that’s okay. I had a text exchange with daughter #2 who was at an estate sale in Bethesda, Maryland, which warmed the cockles of my heart. (I taught her something!)

The boy came over to carry a chair upstairs for me. He was wearing one of his “coach” shirts.

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Now I can sit by this sunny window and read or work on my blog.

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We went to lunch at Qdoba Mexican Grill. I had a naked burrito–yummo.

Although snow was in the forecast this weekend, there were plenty signs of spring in our yard.

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And the Christmas Cactus surprised me yet again!

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I spent a good part of my weekend reading a book by Hilary Mantel published in 2000, Every Day is Mother’s Day. The book cover announces that it is “an accomplished novel of striking originality” and describes it as having certain elements of a “suspense thriller.” Really. Never in a million years would I confuse this book, although it is riveting, with a suspense thriller. Clearly prior to Wolf Hall no one knew what to make of Hilary Mantel. She defies pigeon-holing. She reminds me a lot of Shirley Jackson.

The characters in this book have no claim on happiness. One even admits: “Happiness seems a bit ambitious. I’m not sure I can see my way to that.”

England, we are reminded, is a depressing and dreadful place. One of the main characters describes his life thusly:

“I am a history teacher, a teacher of the benighted past to the benighted present, ill-recompensed for what I suffer and despairing of promotion. My feet are size eight and a half, and I belong to the generation of Angry Young Men, though I was never angry until it was too late, oh, very late, and even now I am only mildly irritated. I am not a vegetarian and contribute to no charities, on principle; I loathe beetroot, and the sexual revolution has passed me by. My taste in clothes is conservative but I get holes in my pockets and my small change falls through; I do not speak to my wife about this because she is an excellent mother and I am intimidated by her, also appalled by the paltry nature of this complaint or what might be construed by her as a complaint. The sort of writing I want to do is the sort that will force me to become a tax-exile.”

Terrible things happen. Funny things happen. As always I am in awe of Hilary and her amazing powers, but I really think I need to revisit the high, green hills of Mitford now, where the air is pure, the village is charming and the people are generally lovable.

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