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...

Quote of the Week...from Ludwig van Beethoven

The true artist is not proud: he unfortunately sees that art has no limits; he feels darkly about how far he is from the goal, and though he may be admired by others, he is sad not to have reached that point to which his better genius appears as a distant, guiding sun.                      ---Ludwig van Beethoven

No one is exactly sure...other than Charles Schulz's piano plunking little Schroeder from Peanuts...exactly which day the great classical composer Ludwig van Beethoven's birth falls on.  Heck, they're not even sure which year he was born in! But for the sake of this article, I'll bow to fictional Schroeder's high opinion of his idol and say it's today.  I rummaged through some of Beethoven's more famous quotes and found that they were a mixture of extreme narcissism and pride for his own greatness with times of self-doubt and recrimination.  The above one is actually right in the middle, and pretty profound at that.  I doubt there are few of us who were so specialized and extensively skilled and accomplished in our chosen life endeavors as he, so here's someone who knows what he's talking about.  The more skillful and productive you get in an area, the more knowledgeable you are about it and how painfully much you lack in ability to fully master it.  A little baby who finally learns how to walk may suddenly feel he or she can do anything, but artists, athletes, scientists, or anyone else or who have dedicated themselves to their special field can feel a deep personal lacking and feeling of shortcoming that others may be confounded at, seeing only how they excel.  Not that I am remotely as accomplished in any of these areas as, say, a Beethoven...I am horribly spread out over many areas and with my skills and works in any one of them much lower than if I had decided to concentrate my efforts. But it's true: pick up a beginning foreign language book and after the first two chapters you'll think you can speak the language... a couple of years later you may think you never will.  As for Schroeder and the rest of his Peanuts buddies like good ol' Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus and Snoopy, they were always on the front of my Sunday newspaper comic section as a kid, but I really got into the strip when I bought a couple of paperbacks featuring nothing but the oldest Peanuts comics going back to the 1950s.  I'm grateful both for Schulz and Beethoven...and others whose dedication to their crafts have enhanced my life's enjoyment over the years...