Painful Bits (I)
Que no se pierda. Eso es lo que pretendo con esta página. Que no se pierda, de lo bueno que se hace, lo poco que yo encuentro.
Belleza, inteligencia y humildad escasean en el mundo. Mi intención es que no lo hagan aquí. Lo único que yo haré será buscar, reproducir y conservar.
Mientras tanto pensaré.
Feb 13, 2000.
Charles Schulz, el creador de Charlie Brown, murió ayer mismo. La verdad es que estoy muy apenado. Recuerdo haber leído las primeras tiras de Carlitos cuando era pequeño. Tendría nueve o diez años, y no sé quien las compró... Venían en un librito, y en las cubiertas interiores aparecían los personajes con sus nombres adaptados, muy ingeniosamente, al castellano, y con una pequeña explicación de cada uno de ellos. Las tiras me atraían, pero sinceramente no me divertían, porque no conseguía entenderlas... Mortadelo y Filemón eran mucho mejores, para el caso. He buscado esos libritos después, pero por desgracia no los he encontrado. Schulz ha estado casi cincuenta años haciendo un humor tierno, inteligente y modesto. Millones de personas han empezado cada día sonriendo gracias a él... y no sólo sonriendo, sino también emocionándose, comprendiéndose, reflejándose en tres cuadros de humilde sabiduría vital... Y todo ello sin pronunciamientos ampulosos ni razonamientos aparentes; no sabiendo siquiera que lo estaban haciendo. Simplemente leían los Peanuts, cada día. Schulz nos ha divertido, y de verdad, nos ha hecho mejores. Muchísimas gracias, señor Schulz. No hay mejor homenaje para usted que sus tiras cómicas, que ahora ya son –siempre lo han sido– patrimonio de la gente de buena voluntad.
Algunas tiras
Peppermint Patty quiere ser urbanita
The secret of life is good planning
El website oficial
Peanuts. The best place I know about Charlie Brown and his ineffable friends. Learn about every member of the gang: Snoopy, the factual dreamer; Peppermint Patty, the school dreamer, with Marcie in the desk behind waking her up to the cry of 'Sir'; Woodstock, that endearing little bird; and Lucy, Franklin, Linus, Sally, Schroeder, Pig Pen and Rerun. In their profiles, you can see the strip in which they first appeared, along with other outstanding moments (don't miss the first time Linus wears his security blank, or when Snoopy quits walking on his four legs). Also, the Timeline section highlights the most important moments in the history of the Peanuts, beginning with the inaugural comic strip, appeared on October 2, 1950, which can be seen online! Last but not least, the site it's updated daily with the current day's strip. Get intimate with the Peanuts, while we Charlie Brown's devotees prepare to celebrate his 50 years making us laugh every day. Thanks a lot, Mr. Schulz!
Obituary
Read the obituary at United Media. If this link doesn't work, here's the content.
NEW 19-Feb-2000 Here is the Daily Telegraph's (and here the cached copy). Some excerpts:
Schulz was given to anxiety and low spirits, and there was an underlying sadness in his stories, a bittersweet quality that clearly fascinated many of his fans
Schulz was not very keen on the new name: to him Peanuts suggested insignificance, and in any case it would, he thought, confuse the readers, since there was no character in it by that name. He wanted to call it Good Ol' Charlie Brown
For all the anxieties, squabbles and fantasies, there were always recognisable landmarks: Snoopy, with or without flying helmet, on his kennel, sometimes accompanied by the little bird Woodstock; Lucy at her stall giving out advice at five cents a go; Charlie Brown always clapping his hand to his brow with the exclamation "Good grief!"
NEW 21-Feb-2000 The New York Times (cached copy here). A long obituary with interesting biographical notes. This is part of the contents:
His saga of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy and Linus "is arguably the longest story ever told by one human being," Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University, observed on the PBS "NewsHour" with Jim Lehrer, longer than any epic poem, any Tolstoy novel, any Wagner opera. In all Mr. Schulz drew more than 18,250 strips in nearly 50 years.
Mr. Schulz remembered waking up in the night many years ago and thinking, "Good grief, who are all these little people? Must I live with them for the rest of my life?" The answer was yes.
He also taught at Art Instruction Inc. There he fell in love with a redhead, Donna Johnson, and proposed marriage. She turned him down and married a fireman instead. He never forgot. Ms. Johnson became the Little Red-Haired Girl, Charlie Brown's unrequited love, who was often talked about but never seen in the strip.
"Peanuts" was based on repetition and predictability. As Mr. Schulz put it, "All the loves in the strip are unrequited; all the baseball games are lost; all the test scores are D-minuses; the Great Pumpkin never comes; and the football is always pulled away." One of the few innovations Mr. Schulz introduced was allowing Snoopy (after eight years) to stand on two feet and to have his thoughts written out in balloons.
Mr. Berger called Snoopy "an existential hero in every sense of the term," a dog who "strives, with dogged persistence and unyielding courage, to overcome what seems to be his fate – that he is a dog." He is "a bon vivant, he participates in history, he has an incredible imagination, he is witty, he expresses himself with virtuosity in any number of ways (eye movements, ear movements, tail movements, wisecracks, facial expressions) and he is superb as mimic and dancer."
Despite his large family and large success he was a melancholy man who worried and was often lonely, depressed and plagued by panic attacks, features that Rheta Grimsley Johnson brought out in her 1989 biography "Good Grief: The Story of Charles M. Schulz." Sally, Charlie Brown's sister, put it well in a school report on night and day: "Daytime is so you can see where you're going. Nighttime is so you can lie in bed worrying."
NEW 21-Feb-2000 Washington Post (cached copy here). It highlights some religious interpretations that have been made of Peanuts. Some excerpts:
Schulz's friends and associates said the cartoonist captured in "Peanuts" the anxiety of an age underscored by evolving social and political unrest. His innocent children were fraught with adult-proportioned disappointments, yet their perpetual optimism, and such values as faith, friendship and wonder, sustained the strip with a timeless gentle humor and irreverence.
Reflecting on childhood, Schulz once said: "Being a kid is not easy. It's a fearful world out there, and the playground is a dangerous place. Going to school every day is not easy. If it isn't the teacher, it's the bully. Most adults forget about these struggles and ignore the problems little kids have. As an adult, you learn how to get around these problems and how to survive. But little kids are struggling with that survival."
"The most terrifying loneliness is not experienced by everyone and can be understood by only a few," Schulz wrote. "I compare the panic in this kind of loneliness to the dog we see running frantically down the road pursuing the family car. He is not really being left behind, for the family knows it is to return, but for that moment in his limited understanding, he is being left alone forever, and he has to run and run to survive."
News coverage
CNN. If this link doesn't work, here's the content
NEW 19-Feb-2000 Slate, in its International Papers section, made a good gathering of Schulz's death's international news coverage and titled it The Death of a Poet (cached copy here)
Newsweek (cached copy here) included some tribute letters from readers around the world. This is one of them:
As an eight-year-old in 1974, I turned to Peanuts to help to ease the pain of my parents' absence. To whom should I turn if I miss Peanuts? Abdul Rahmat Omar, Malaysia.
Also, what we all are looking forward to:
The pathos and wisdom of Peanuts are timeless. I just hope I'm still around when some savvy publisher decides to release a "Complete Peanuts" compendium containing every strip Schulz ever created. I'd be the first in line to buy it. Rick Horndasch, Peoria IL.
NEW 19-Feb-2000 Reuters dispatch about US House of Representatives authorizing US President to present a Congressional Gold Medal (one of Congress' highest honors) to honor Mr Schulz.
About his work
Against Snoopy (cached copy here). Read this interesting article at the New York Times in which the author expresses a strong criticism against the Snoopy character, whose increasing stardom in the Peanuts series he considers as having ruined the whole strip. I think he's completely mislead about it, being Snoopy on the contrary the very heart of Peanuts –the only indispensable character on it, with that wonderful mix of madness-bordering idealism and food-in-the-plate life-likeness which makes him such an endearing character. But I love the way the author describes all the other character –he's very insightful, especially about Lucy:
NEW 21-Feb-2000 In the arena against Lucy. Schulz once said that Lucy "almost immediately developed her fussbudget personality." That only shows that artists are not always the best judges of what they’ve wrought, for Lucy is no "fussbudget." She’s an American nightmare, a combination of zero brains, infinite appetites and infinite self-esteem, who is (for that reason) able to run roughshod over all her playmates. At her best, she is the most terrifying character in the history of comics. She is like the godless ones of Psalms 73: 5-6,9: "They are not in trouble as other men, neither are they plagued like other men./Therefore pride compasseth them about as a chain; violence covereth them as a garment… They set their mouth against the heavens, and their tongue walketh through the earth." It is in the Psalms that Lucy’s little brother Linus, unsurprisingly, takes frequent refuge.
NEW 19-Feb-2000 The Funny Thing Is ... It Hasn't Always Been. (cached copy here). Again, a critical but discerning approach to Peanuts. Let me excerpt one paragraph which pays due tribute to Schulz's drawing finesse:
At about the same time, the drawings themselves–which had evolved dramatically over the first 15 years–found more or less their final, graceful form. Schulz has always been lionized for his inspired characters, but he seldom gets his due as an artist. His drawing ability not only made his strip more entertaining, it allowed him to find the core of some slender, but resonating, human truth.
NEW 21-Feb-2000 In defense of Snoopy: Peanuts Requiem (cached copy here). Mark Alan Stamaty wrote a deep at heart article in Slate with a marvelous accompanying phony Snoopy drawing (please go and see it).
NEW 21-Feb-2000 The cartoonist who drew from experience (cached copy here). Some excerpts:
The terrible truth about Charles Schulz was that you didn't laugh at his comic strips because of his madness [...] No: You were startled into laughter by his harrowing sanity, by his peeled-nerve understanding of the truths we prefer to ignore about the innate depravity of the world and the apparent indifference of God. It's not so much that bad things happen to good people in "Peanuts." At least in the Bible, God is testing Job. In "Peanuts," bad things happen for no reason at all [...] He once had his alter ego Charlie Brown say: "Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, 'Why me?' Then a voice answers, 'Nothing personal. Your name just happened to come up.' "
In a strip with two characters looking at a sky full of stars, Charlie Brown says: "Let's go inside and watch television. I'm beginning to feel insignificant."
This is the American sadness.
In a country where the common man rules, but nobody is one because everybody is special and all children have to be above average; stars, heroes, famous for 15 minutes–Charles Schulz redeemed the ordinary, lonely, forgettable, hopeful person at the core of all of us by invoking the kind of laughter that comes when you realize you're caught between the rock and the hard place of fame, existence, whatever.
One strip has Charlie Brown saying: "That little red-haired girl has lots of friends. . . . I don't have any friends. . . . They say that opposites attract. . . . She's really something and I'm really nothing. . . . How opposite can you get?"
Like Gary Cooper's Will Kane in "High Noon," Charlie Brown is spurned by everyone but has to keep braving the fates. Meanwhile, the strip's other characters are often branded as neurotics, but they're not. They're normal, average, ordinary. Schulz had the courage to look at their absurdity, and the wit and art to make us look at them and see ourselves. What a genius.
This page written by Torribio Blups. All comments welcome.
Since Feb 13, 2000.
This in an old entry of Painful Bits. Go to the current entry at http://www.torribioblups.net/painfulbits