The Original Peanuts Characters, and The Peanuts Collection

 At the Millhopper Public library today I renewed Martinus Evans's running guidebook Slow AF Run Club while returning a large book listing and discussing every Beatles song ever recorded.  As we were finishing with our browsing, I noticed some compendium volumes containing very early Peanuts comic strips.  Charles Shulz created Peanuts, and as a little kid I was one of its biggest, most consistent readers. Poor underappreciated Charlie Brown was its main character..."Good Grief" may have been his motto.  For a period in the sixties I procured some of the earliest Peanuts collections and enjoyed going way back in time to the original strips that introduced the early characters.  Over the years some more were introduced, largely in the interests of promoting a DEI culture (diversity, equity, inclusion).  I will always remember the old kids like Patty, Violet and Sally...they fit the TV specials well.  Schroeder, with his toy piano featuring a stern-looking bust of his hero Beethoven, was never a primary Peanuts character but remained a valued member of the series, and he may have been phased out of some series merchandise for the sake of promoting a woke agenda.  I remember that Christmas special when Linus saved the day by quoting the Christmas story out of the Bible's book of Luke.  He was a great kid. I have some books I'm now reading, and The Complete Peanuts figures strongly in that mix.  The strips collections, which go back for decades, can be accessed almost at random, and I have no need for bookmarks here.  I don't intend to do any comprehensive book reviews, but if there is something I come across that makes a good impression on me, then i'm likely to discuss it in an upcoming article.  Looks like I shouldn't have much trouble being able to renew The Complete Peanuts...

Good-Looking Day Ahead

 On this fresh, brand-new day in late February, I am looking forward with optimism to how I am going to spend my time and attention with it.  The news is full of strung-out people taking out their frustrations and resentments on others, often with tragic results.  It seems that babies and toddlers are in the greatest state of danger, with grown-up negligence and even outright abuse threatening their fragile little lives.  Melissa is so kind, thankful, patient and generous.  Let's see if we can't generate a nice Dunkin' breakfast driv-throuh a little later! I have a computer appointment with Dr. Serendipity Rinonos this afternoon as we await my new chemotherapy prescriptions. Maybe I'll finally get to try driving the white Camry around the immediate neighborhood. Also, seeing and hearing from Anita and Jim sounds like a great idea.  And that home exercise. And, finally, I'll see if I can't get Melissa to take me down to change my voting party affiliation. Looks like I'm become bummed out on one of them while warming up to the other. In an event, I intend to alternate physical and mental activity with frequent rest breaks... 

Quote of the Week...from Katrina Mayer

 Books were my friends when no friends were around.                ---Katrina Mayer

On my Facebook page often appear certain sites that were provided for my viewing without me directly requesting them...I always assumed that the AI running the show over at FB thought I'd like them.  One of these is "Goodwill Librarian", which is spot-on in nailing my affection for books and reading.  Wednesday morning, they posted the above quote by Katrina Mayer, an author who conducts "positivity" workshops.  Checking out her website, she immediately won me over by this other quote: "I'm an avid fan of solitude, peaceful surroundings and simplicity." I am a big fan of books and reading, almost always in the middle of two or three at a time, both in fiction and nonfiction as well as novels and short story collections.  During some of the most negative periods of my youth, reading provided a solace and a sense of rational foundation that no doubt saved me from treading down more pernicious and self-destructive paths. I was blessed to have parents and an older sister who were avid readers, and I often secretly raided their storehouse of books.  My dad was particularly keen on science fiction, and through him I was introduced to old-time science fiction greats like Frederic Brown and Clifford Simak.  I was also partial to the inexpensive books I could buy after saving up my meager allowance, especially the Herbert S. Zim Golden Guides to science and nature...the one about stars has to be my all-time favorite.  The ironic thing about my reading is that, with a small number of notable exceptions, most of my reading assignments in high school were negative experiences...I'm convinced that my teachers and the educational system they worked under...at least back then...were clueless and that they saw me an annoyance they had to get past to get through their days, not as a valuable individual with future potential.  But back to the books: when I could choose them, I loved them...and still do.  Now, though, I'm putting more and more of them on my Kindle as well as reading a ton of audiobooks...but they're still books and they are friends...

Quote of the Week...from Gardner Dozois

When I was a boy in Salem, Mass., in the 1950s, if you wanted to buy a book, you had to take a train to Boston.  And when you got there, to a bookstore, there was no such thing as a science-fiction section.

                                                                  ---Gardner Dozois

Gardner Dozois (1947-2018) is probably best-known for his anthology series The Year's Best Science Fiction...which I'm currently reading and reviewing (I'm up to the year 1989), as well as being the editor of the acclaimed Asimov's Science Fiction magazine.  He's also written science fiction in both novel and short story form, but his fame has been as the role of a collector and editor of quality stories written by others.  His above quote places him a decade ahead me, but I couldn't tell you very much about bookstores even during the sixties, other than the book and supply store at my public school.  Then again, I tended to go more for libraries in my early youth, and liked those old children's series they sold at my nearby G.C. Murphy like Power Boys and Bobbsey Twins (I read all my sister's Trixie Beldon and Donna Parker books, too).  But sure, once bookstores, both new and used, began sprouting in full force during the seventies, I caught the bug and began buying paperbacks, mostly nonfiction. I picked the above quote because nowadays bookstores sadly seem to be in a state of retreat, both new and used. And for those that are still around, it's funny that now the science fiction section is often the biggest one.  I'm not bemoaning the advancement of digitalized books like Kindle or audiobooks, mind you...I make liberal use of both forms. But I also know that for some reason book publishing...unlike with music or movies/TV...lags far behind in the availability of bygone and out-of-print works for digital reading, while much is unavailable in libraries as well.  Which means you go to a used bookstore to find them...assuming there are any used bookstores.  Gainesville's number has steeply declined in recent years, but we still have a couple of them, along with a crazy used book sale that happens every (pandemic-free) year in April and October.  I'd say take a train to Jacksonville, but you can't do that from Gainesville anymore, either...

Radio, Vinyl, Cassette, CD & Streaming Forms for Music

The forms through which I have listened to music over the decades of my life have greatly changed.  Part of this has to do with my money-making ability, nonexistent in my childhood and easy to come by later on, that enabled me to purchase albums and singles...the other part concerns the changing forms themselves.  In the beginning, during the 1960s, I got most of my music straight from the radio, initially a portable family model that was usually tuned in to either WQAM/560 for music and WIOD/610 for talk.  Then in the Christmas of 1964...I was eight...my sister and I each received our own little transistor radios, and I was inseparable from mine, that is when I wasn't at school.  My parents liked to buy albums back then, all in the traditional vinyl format of course, and were partial to the Beatles...later they bought stuff from the Bee Gees, Byrds and the Mamas and Papas, among other favorites of theirs.  When eight-track cartridges came out none of us used them...we skipped straight over to the innovation of cassette tapes: I bought quite a few of these in the 1980s and 90s and often recorded my favorite songs straight from the radio for my personal listening.  Back in the 1990s I decided to explore the complete works of some of my favorite acts, and so I went through period of buying vinyl used albums (one of these I'm discussing tomorrow).  For years they've all been lined up on a high shelf in one of our closets, never being played anymore although I don't have the heart to get rid of them.  I guess in a way that's hoarding, which I intend to make a topic for a future article. It took me a while to adapt to compact discs when they began to be used, but to this day I prefer them to MP3s and streaming audio whenever I have access.  Nowadays, though, it is easier to search my favorite albums and artists on YouTube and endure the necessary ads between each track...but when I find an album to my liking, I'll either go over to Amazon and purchase the CD or check it out when available from my local public library.  Listening to CDs for me is completely tied in with driving...sometimes it takes a few listens to an album to really know which songs resonate with me. This summer I've discovered a number of good CDs that current acts have released and having been listening to them in my car...makes commuting with the never-ending construction and distracted/aggressive/impaired drivers easier to endure.  I'm aware that there will always be newer ways for music to be conveyed...I'd just like to retain the choice as to which ones I get to use...

Quote of the Week...from Beck

I think you have to keep a childlike quality to play music or make a record.          ---Beck

Beck Hansen, or simply "Beck" as he is better known for decades, has been one of my favorite recording artists. Based originally in the Los Angeles area, he combined technical acoustic wizardry in the studio with offhand and sometimes off-base lyrics in many of his earlier songs like Loser, Deadweight and Novacane.  He has long said that anything goes with his music, and it reflects his fearless experimentation, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse.  His above quote struck me not for its specific application to his craft, but rather because it has universal relevance in everything we do. There is a substantial difference between immature childish petulance and the wide-eyed innocent wonder children have about life and the world around them...it's the second of these qualities I extoll. I also think that a large part of both what Jesus preached and today's mindfulness movement direct us to return to that early mind state of our lives and become more rooted in the present and in what is immediately around us instead of obsessing on past regrets or future worries and struggling through the morass of abstraction and overthinking.  The greatest music has those childlike elements of simplicity and repetition, whether it's a Beethoven symphony or a funny Beck track...the greatest of anything goes the same way, in my opinion...