Nowhere Band News

So, David Foster Wallace. Wow, that was tough; I’ve rearranged a whole lot of my mental furniture in response to stuff he wrote. His story “Good Old Neon” fundamentally changed the way I think about depression.  Disturbingly, “Good Old Neon” is all about the suicide urge and how depression is really a weird sort of intense internal war, devastating to the person it’s internal to and generally kind of opaque and impenetrable to people on the outside. It’s a little disconcerting when the man whose opinion you respect the most on these matters dies by suicide. Read more

So, I’ll say this about bus commuting: you get a hell of a lot of reading done. With a pile this big, I thought I’d revive an old tradition and print out the list of what I’ve read so far, with brief comments. The thought of going through and doing proper italicization gives me hives, so we’ll just skip that.

1.    Complete Peanuts, volume 1 (Charles Schulz)- More interesting than fun, really. There’s good stuff, but the elements that made Peanuts so special aren’t anywhere near to gelling in this early stuff. It’s pretty amazing to see how rigid Schulz’s early style was, and how much more expressive he got when he loosened up and simplified.

2.    Cartoon History of the Universe, vol. 1 (Larry Gonick)- If anyone’s ever done a better job with nonfiction cartooning, I haven’t heard of it. Gonick serves up great, great stuff—this volume gets you as far as Alexander the Great, and it’s a really informative blast all the way.
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First off, some exciting news: the folks at McSweeney’s have asked me to do an audiobook version of Journal of a New COBRA Recruit; after all these years, I finally get to do some voice acting. I never even knew I wanted to do voice acting, but suddenly I’m stoked. So right on.

And it continues to be weird to me that the COBRA piece has such long legs. For something that popped into my head while I was at a stoplight on my bike 7 years ago, it really winds up opening a lot of doors.

Second, I just finished the David Michaelis biography of Charles Schulz. To which my final reaction is “huh.”

I can’t help but feel like this book was one hell of a missed opportunity, on a couple of levels. For one thing, Schulz’s family has been coming out of the woodwork to denounce the way their family life has been portrayed, and even just looking at page counts, it looks like they’ve got a case– if you compare the amount of the book devoted to Schulz’s (unhappy) first marriage to his (happy) second one (note that the narrative pretty much ends with Schulz’s second marriage, skipping ahead 30 years to his death!), or the amount of space devoted to his one extramarital affair versus the amount of space devoted to his kids, it starts to look like Michaelis had an editorial bent towards the negative in Schulz’s life. Which starts to cast doubts on the reliability of the whole enterprise.

I’m also sort of amused at the reaction, both on the part of Michaelis and by many readers, to the “shocking revelation” that Schulz dealt with insecurity and depression; even if it wasn’t always right there in the open in the comic strip (which it is), insecurity and depression are so common among creative people I know that I’ve just come to assume they’re part of the essential makeup (I have a hard time thinking of an artist I admire in any field who hasn’t dealt with some combination of depression, substance abuse, or suicide attempts: Vonnegut, Hemingway, Robbins, Cash, Tweedy, Westerberg, Thompson, you name it. Maybe Walt Kelly, although I don’t know too much about his personal life…).

I _did_ enjoy the book– the glimpse of life in the Twin Cities in the 20s-50s was cool (and it was a thrill, recognizing a bunch of addresses), and it is pretty interesting to go back and reread old Peanuts strips with an eye for what the real-world raw material for that strip might’ve been. But it should’ve been a masterpiece, and plainly wasn’t, and that’s too goddamned bad.

Next up: reading Jim Walsh’s oral history of the Replacements, which will pretty much inevitably have repercussions on Nowhere Band.