Monday, January 09, 2006

Home, sick

The seasonal onslaught continues. First Natalie yesterday, then Graham today, shared the contents of their stomachs with the rest of the household. Now I feel not too far from it, squished here on the couch between the languid Graham and the somewhat feistier Natalie, running through the Charlie Brown archives, half wishing I could find a porcelain god of my own, half cursing Mary for not having taken her cell phone on her walk so I could have her get some ginger ale.

I had never tapped Charles Schulz as a huge influence on Matt Groening, but there's a lot there, in terms of drawing style, if not quite a dissertation's worth. Though Peanuts is distinctly more kids' fare.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You think that's bad. The doc yesterday gave me two sets of steroids: one for my sinuses and the other for my broncheal passages. I just took a hit of both and now they're grunting and bench-pressing and considering penis-englargement therapy. I'm a chick, by the way.

Anonymous said...

You should read Umberto Eco's essay on Schulz and Charlie Brown. It's heart-rending. I've been reading Peanuts in Italian as a way of learning the language. The committee responsible for the translation -- evidently a bunch of lawyers with small children -- was faced with all kinds of decisions, like how to render "Good grief" and "marshmallow." For the first, they wavered a bit before settling on "misericordia." The second is (thank God) a non-existent concept in Mediterranean culture. So they invented a word: "tofoletta." On the basis of onomonopoeia, I guess.