M. Thomas Inge Transcript

December 15, 2007 | Leave a Comment


Dr. Kent Gustavson: Welcome to Sound Authors. I’ve been speaking to M. Thomas Inge. We’ve been talking about Charles Schultz. I’d like to divest from that for a second and chat about what you’re working on now. I’m sure it’s some interesting project.M. Thomas Inge: Well I’ve always combined my interest in popular culture with a so-called high brow series of culture so it’s a combination of those things. I recently published a biography of William Faulkner which was an illustrated biography which was a lot of fun because I got a chance to track down photographs and drawings and unusual book covers and things like that. That was published by the Overlook Press in New York.The one that’s about to come out is a volume in the new Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture came out over a decade ago. It was a big huge single volume reference work. Now it’s being revised in separate volumes and I edited the volume on literature so I got a chance to talk about the whole scope of southern literature from the beginning down to the present. Another project-that’s the University of North Carolina Press. There’s another project, a collection of humor from the old south through the University of Missouri Press.I’m also working on a book on Walt Disney. I’m particularly studying the process of adaptation in Disney’s films, the way he would take an original fairy tale story or novel and how he would change it in the process of animating it and what the meaning of those kinds of changes are.I continue to work on Faulkner relations between comic strips and American literature for another. I’m also doing a small book right at the moment on Poe in the comic books. He’s probably the most influential writer to be adapted to comic book stories. We’re going to have an exhibition at the Edgar Allen Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia based on my work on Poe in the comic books.So as you can see it’s a wide variety of things.

Dr. Kent Gustavson: You stay busy.You know it keeps me off the street and out of trouble. [laughter] At my age I don’t get on the street too much. I’ve always been a kind of workaholic. I enjoy every minute of it. I love my teaching too. I think, the academic world is a fine place to be. I love working with all these young people and trying to teach them a few things while you learn a few things from them. So, yes, I do love it all.

Gustavson: Another question for you. I teach as well and I’m part of the X Generation but there’s a huge striation between - there are so many differing generations and the Internet separates us all. I don’t really understand the Y Generation and the thumbers(?), the brand new ones, but how is it teaching Peanuts across the generations, teaching comics? How does that differ from teaching literature?

Inge: Well since Peanuts was around for 50 years and it was experienced by several generations during that period of time, you get a broad spectrum of people who know the strip and even if they don’t know the strip they know the characters because they’re on lunch boxes and napkins and comic books and film, the television series with the Christmas one coming up every year. They’re probably among the most widely known characters in the world except for Mickey Mouse and Superman. They’re probably more widely known. Therefore everybody has had some experience, been touched in some small way by Peanuts. So, that sort of appeals to the generations.But, if I talk to my students about the humor in Mad magazine or National Lampoon you get a blank stare. They don’t know that material. Talk to them about The Onion and they might if they’re staying in touch with contemporary humor and satire.One of the odd sorts of things about teaching as long as I have - I’ve been teaching about 45 years now - is that you stay the same over those 45 years because the students stay the same. The people sitting in front of you are the same age year after year after year and you get some sense that you’re the same age you were when you started teaching which you’re not.So, you have to remind yourself that there are things you know by experience that they can’t possibly know and even if they did they’ve heard of them, they’re only a part of past history. So, we have to take time and explain things I think, parts of our history that we take for granted and they don’t. At the same time they know a heck of a lot more about computers and technology than I ever will.So, while there are things they don’t know, there are things they do so there’s kind of an even exchange going on. They’re learning from me and I’m learning from them.

Gustavson: I guess the question is - they’re exposed to so much stimulation all day long - flashing screens-and it’s getting more and more all the time. Do they have the patience for comic strips anymore?

Inge: Well I don’t that the comic strips are as popular as they once were because newspaper are disappearing. I mean we used to have two newspapers in every town. Now there’s one at best. So, this limits the number of comic strips that can be carried. I have a feeling that it’s the older groups that still go back to the comic strips every day. Because the other kids they do get their humor off of the computer screen or their iPods or wherever.But there’s a kind of a shift in sources of information. For my generation it’s always going to be print. With future generations it’s always going to be mainly visual with print coming along. I don’t know you know whether we’ve lost or gained anything by these changes. They’re a natural part of the scheme of things and for us older people it looks like well you know, they don’t know how to read anymore. But, sometimes buying all those books that Barnes and Noble and Borders are selling you know. And they’re doing big booming business in books so somebody must be reading books somewhere. So, there are people still holding on to the printed word. And of course you still have to read the instructions on the computer to set it up.So, there is a need for words, so I don’t know where they’re, I mean, when I grew up the best we could do was listening to the radio.Get the comic books and comic strips. We could have used a little more stimulation, to tell you the truth. Now maybe they’re getting too much, I’m not quite sure. But, I have a feeling it’s just the times are changing and maybe we’re not.

Gustavson: Absolutely. I also have a question for you. It seems you’ve taught in many foreign universities. What’s the difference between cultures in comics? I know there’s political satire, there’s every day comics. What have you seen in other countries?

Inge: Well, they don’t have as much freedom. They don’t have that bill of rights that guarantees us freedom of speech. You know, nor do many countries have that strong separation of church and state. In fact, we have both of those meaning we can make fun of any institution. Religious, political, educational, whatever. And that’s an important part of the democratic system here in this country.So when you teach humor in another context, you find that the whole sets of morals and the ways they can find things funny differs because in a totalitarian country, I’ve taught in the Soviet Union for example, humor of the party is discouraged. In fact, it could put you in prison for life. So, you had to be very careful in circles. But, I found that in the oral tradition, and that’s where a lot of the humor resides, there is always an oral tradition.In that oral tradition, there’s a great deal of more freedom and flexibility to do what you want. And so the humor is there, it’s just not seen in evident print. And the cultural reference points change. I was teaching my Soviet students in those days an exert from a Groucho Marx film A Night At The Opera, and Groucho and Chico are doing this comic routine about contracts that come with signing up an opera singer.And they get down to the last part of it and Chico says what’s that, and Groucho says, oh that’s the sanity clause. And Chico says that you can’t fool me, there ain’t no sanity clause. Well, my students had never heard of santa clause so the humor went over their heads, so I had to explain the joke. Also, at the time I was teaching, we had a lot of Polish jokes circulating, and the Russians said why are you making fun of the Poles? They’re great, educated, talented people.And I said you’re right. But, then I found that they had something called Armenian radio jokes, and these were jokes at Armenians apparently told over the radio that made them look stupid. So, I said well wait a minute, you have your Armenian radio jokes. And they said yeah, but the Armenian’s are really stupid.[laughs]

Inge: So the reference toward change, but they is still some humor there. And I think, those Russian students were among the best I ever had, in fact.

Gustavson: Well, that’s something to think about. In Charles Schulz’ comics he rarely, over fifty years, he didn’t write strips that people wouldn’t like for some reason. There were no groups of people that disliked Peanuts.

Inge: Well, how can you?[laughs]

Inge: It’s like, as I said Peanuts is so underwhelming in a sense. Poor Charlie Brown, you can’t help but feel sorry for him. And he never got into political, though he did get into religious themes sometimes. But, it’d be by way of a Bible verse that would show up in the strip or something like that. And he did go through a period himself when he was affiliated with the Church of God, which is kind of the independent evangelical group.But he came away from that later on, and towards the end of his life he called himself a secular humanist. And I think, basing the strip is more oriented that way anyway. That is, it gets into the problems of mankind without necessarily providing the kind of solutions that religion tends to offer. And politics he stayed away from because he was not a political person.In fact, I’m not quite sure that he belonged to any political party ever.

Gustavson: So what can we learn. What kind of conclusions can we draw from Peanuts? What can we use to live our lives?

Inge: Well, we learn in the first place that we’re not alone in the universe. And no matter how deep or troubling our problems are, we’re not by ourselves. And Charlie Brown, in other words, is there too at least. And we can identify with him, even though he has a bunch of friends around him giving him a hard time, he also knows when push comes to shove they’ll be there to help him too.I mean, some of our strongest critics are among our best friends, very often. So, it teaches us that, you know, we’re not in our problems, and also it teaches us that no matter how difficult these problems become, if we can maintain a balance in a sense of humor and not take ourselves too seriously, then there’s still a possibility of life in the tunnel of kicking that football.Of getting up that next day and accomplishing the thing we set out to do, so it’s that kind of positive affirmative message, I think, that comes out of what is basically a comic strip for despair and failure. That message that comes from the strip is one we take to heart and one we need. I mean, the whole twentieth century is a pretty insecure century with the cold war and then the other wars we got into after World War II and are still in today.These are scary times, and in a sense some days I feel we’re almost back to the nineteen fifties in the cold war feeling of our country because we’re so concerned about possible terrorists and things people are going to do to us. So, you know any kind of entertainment that speaks to those fears and makes us feel better about ourselves, that’s something worth keeping around.

Gustavson: So, we’re all hoping that the red-haired girl will sometime fall in love with us. And thank you so much for chatting with us today, M. Thomas. In his book published several years ago is Charles M. Schulz Conversations, he’s got a William Faulkner biography and many other publications. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Inge: It’s a great pleasure to talk with you.

Gustavson: My next guest is Dave Praeger. Be right back.

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M. Thomas Inge Transcript (2)

December 15, 2007 | Leave a Comment


Kent Gustavson: Welcome to Sound Authors. Today is the eighth anniversary of Charles Schultz’s official retirement from creating the “Peanuts” comics strip. The strip that ended the 49-year-old run of our favorite comic, here in America, had a farewell letter from Charles Schultz attached with Snoopy at the typewriter. The end of this letter read: “Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy, how can I ever forget them?” Indeed, none of us will ever forget them, and we still read them every week in classic “Peanuts”.On the show today are two authors and legendary pianist, George Winston. My first guest is the author of “Charles M. Schultz: Conversations”, as well as many other publications. Welcome to the show.

M. Thomas Inge: A pleasure to be here.

Kent Gustavson: It’s M. Thomas. How do you pronounce your last name?

M. Thomas Inge: Unless somebody tells you, it’s hard to know. It’s Inge. It rhymes with words like ‘fringe’ or ‘hinge’. There’s no nice word it rhymes with, but nevertheless, it’s Inge.

Kent Gustavson: There’s no nice word that rhymes with ‘Inge’?

M. Thomas Inge: I can’t think of a positive word that rhymes with ‘Inge’, but nevertheless, that’s OK. I’ll make it a positive.

Kent Gustavson: Well, welcome to the show. Now, it was a few years ago you wrote this collection of interviews with Charles Schultz. He was a personal friend of yours?

M. Thomas Inge: Yeah, he and I came to know each other over the years because I was writing about comic strips, and he, of course, had “Peanuts”. “Peanuts” is the best comic strip of the 20th century, so naturally, I would write about that. And, he saw an essay I had written, and so, we began to communicate, and I would go out and visit from time to time. But, the problem we had was that he wanted to talk about literature and I wanted to talk about comic books and comic strips, so we sort of talked at cross-purposes.But, he was a fine human being, and he cared very much that people, like myself, found his strip of interest. He was a little puzzled when we told him that we thought it was an intellectual strip, and that existentialism was at the base, and he said, well I don’t know what that is.But, whether he knew it or not, intellectually, we certainly felt it. And, that strip sort of touched the souls of all of us in the 20th century because he knew how to put his finger on that basic human situation - that we’re all alone in the world, we’re all insecure, we need a little help. And, more often than not, we’re disappointed, like Charlie Brown, every time Lucy pulled that football away, but we still have the hope, as he did, to try to kick it, nevertheless.

Kent Gustavson: And, he never did kick it over all those years.

M. Thomas Inge: No, and he thought about it at the end, before he retired the strip. He said it’s sad that Charlie Brown’s never going to get a chance to kick that football. And of course, he couldn’t let him do it because it was that kind of frustration, which was at the root of the humor of the strip.

Kent Gustavson: So, maybe that’s what kept Charlie Brown going was that he could never kick that football.

M. Thomas Inge: Exactly. Isn’t that what gets us out of bed every morning? We think maybe today we’re going to kick that darn thing, and we have to try. We know we’re going to fail, but nevertheless, if you don’t have that hope in the possibility, it makes for a pretty dreary day.

Kent Gustavson: When did you start to be interested in comic books and comics?

M. Thomas Inge: As a child, I grew up with them; they came along at the same time I did. And, I read them, loved them, could draw, and therefore, wanted to be a cartoonist, naturally, the way many kids did my age. I drew cartoons through high school and through college, but I began to realize that I was never going to be a great cartoonist. I was never going to be a Walt Kelly, an Al Capp, a Milton Caniff or Charles Schultz. And, I thought well if I’m not going to do that, maybe I should try something I’d be better at. So, I became a professor of English instead because I love literature too.

Kent Gustavson: And, what do your colleagues think about the comics? Have you had some struggles over the years?

M. Thomas Inge: Well, being in English departments, which are fairly traditional - where Shakespeare is the high-water mark, and nothing else seems to matter - they think what I do is rather odd and peculiar, so they look askance at it. But, the way they put it when they speak to me about it, they say, well it’s nice to have a hobby, Tom. And, they don’t realize, I suppose, it’s serious, maybe more serious than my work on William Faulkner and traditional literary subjects, which I do love as well, incidentally.I like the ‘high brow’ literature, the ‘low brow’ literature, the comics and everything in between. So, they don’t quite understand, but I think with time and the publication of more studies, the attention of the academy, the attention of museums to comics, the point will be made that these are extremely important cultural artifacts. They’re not ephemeral, but very central to our cultural experience.

Kent Gustavson: Well, I think culture is turning around a little bit right now with a lot of these graphic novels coming out, and a lot of these movies that are coming out. They look like living comics. What do you think about all of that?

M. Thomas Inge: Well, the comics and movies have been related all along. Some of the very first live action films were based on some of the popular comic strips, so they had a parallel development. And, they both use words and pictures in order to convey the story or the information, therefore, they’ve always been allied. And, the fact that the movies are so popular simply shows that we want more of those characters than we get out of the comic books, per say. We want to see them in real life. We want to see them three-dimensional.And, we also enjoy the same fictional context in which there are the good guys fighting against the bad guys, and you can tell which is which, which is not always true of much of our culture today. We can’t tell who the good guys are, or the bad guys are. And, that whole business of a superhero sort of standing in and trying to bring about a sense of justice, we know it’s not going to happen too often in the real world, but we like to see it happen in the fictional world, at least. And so, there’s a strong narrative appeal there that the films answer to.But, the graphic novels now, while they are outgrowths of the comic book, this is really a very interesting new phenomena, in a sense, is the fact we’re calling them graphic novels is not just an effort to make them sound ‘high brow’. It’s an effort to try to identify that it’s something quite different. And this notion of telling stories, lengthy narratives about complex issues and problems through words and pictures has been a part of our cultural impulse all along.But it’s reaching fruition in a very different kind of genre, and there will be a whole new set of ground rules there. What amazes me is that there are so many young artists and writers who are stepping forward and want to participate in this creation. And were I a younger man, that’s what I’d try to be too. But as it is, I’m going to have to settle for teaching literature and teaching comics, at least in the context of American humor.

Kent Gustavson: How would you compare, I know you’re an expert on Faulkner, how would you compare Faulkner and Schulz? Do they live in the same world?

M. Thomas Inge: Probably not.[laughs]

M. Thomas Inge: In a certain sense, because the kind of worls where Schulz lived was kind of rare world which he built around himself, where as Faulkner immersed himself deeply in that whole southern experience down there in Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner was trying to deal with the dilemma of mankind, let’s say, in the larger universe. Schulz didn’t quite shoot for that high an aim. But what they both did in a sense, there are a few similarities.What Faulkner did was to renew the whole genre of the novel for another hundred years. He showed you could do things with fiction that nobody thought was possible. So he experimented and opened up the novel so a lot of other writers could step in and build on what he started. Schulz has come along and taken the common strip and done something very unique and special with it. After he started doing Peanuts, we began to notice a kind of direction humor took in the other comic strips.Look at the comic strip today, and they are all more or less directed toward satire and humor. There are hardly any adventure strips, any serious strips. Those strips disappeared. And what Schulz demonstrated was you could treat complex issues in that very brief form with a minimalist kind of art. And that you could do it in that space, appeal to readers, and communicate and provide good for the world.And so in that both renewed the art form, you see, made it novel for the present. In that sense they’re similar.

Kent Gustavson: So when you had conversations with Schulz, as in your book Charles M. Schulz Conversations, did you talk as friends? Was it a little more formal? What did it feel like?

M. Thomas Inge: Well, he was the kind of person who made you informal when you were around him. What I would call Mr. Schulz, I still do, in fact, but he said “No, you have to call me Sparky.”. I still have a little bit of trouble with doing that because I revere the man so much. Somehow just calling him Sparky felt like putting him on an equal plain, and I didn’t feel like I belonged there.But he made everybody around him relax, and he was so unassuming, so humble about what he did. Some arguments we would have would be about the comic strip as an art form. He felt that no it’s not art, and I would say well if anything in the world is art, what you’re doing is because for me what art is, is something speaks to succeeding generations. People come at it later on.You go look at the Mona Lisa generation after generation and people find interesting things in it. Are you going to be able to do that with the strip too? So, our discussions might more often than not be sort of arguments about that sort of thing. And then he would want to know why I like Faulkner and why I read Faulkner. One interesting writer we did have in common was F. Scott Fitzgerald. He was a great admirer of The Great Gatsby.And there are countless Peanuts panels in which you’ll find Snoopy pretending he’s the great Gatsby at one of his parties. Or Charlie Brown approaching the little red-haired girl in a way Daisy Buchanan was approached by Gatsby. I forgot his name there for a moment. In The Great Gatsby, there was something about the poetry and power of that particular novel. And they both came from Saint Paul, Minnesota, too, so they have a similar background.But that particular novel attracted his fancy, and his copy is marked up and you’d find quotations appearing there. So, that was one writer that he particularly enjoyed and one we shared.

Kent Gustavson: What is the importance, you know, for Schulz, what was the importance of having that classical connection? Having the literature in his work.

M. Thomas Inge: I don’t know that it was necessarily important to him. Only in the sense that great books are important to all of us. But he admired the kind of effect that Fitzgerald could achieve in a few words. He aimed to achieve that same kind of effect in a few pictures as well as in a few words. So, in other words, it sort of tutored him. I mean, one thing about Fitzgerald is that his books were brief; he was to the point. He was concise.And that’s what you have to do in a comic strip. That’s why Faulkner would not be a good influence, because Faulkner was all over the place. Fitzgerald gets right to the point, as Hemingway did. And so for him I think he learned how to write and how to draw, but at the same time he was the self educated person. He did make it through high school, did not attend college. And I believe he, as often the case who don’t go to college, they somehow feel like they missed something and they regret not having had that opportunity.I think his reading is deep reading, and he read lots. He read Dostoevsky, he read all the great books. It was never his part to get the education he missed. Which is a way you can do it. I often tell my students that I’m a guidepost, and I’ll point you to the library and point to the books to read, but you have to go there and read it for yourself. That’s where education takes place, where the learner takes initiative to learn, and he was a learner all of his life.And to me, it was interesting that he wanted to know about great music, about great books, and you know, he couldn’t even read music but you remember how many times he brought music into that comic strip.

Kent Gustavson: Oh yeah.

M. Thomas Inge: When Schroeder’s playing piano, what he’d do is get a piece of sheet music that he wanted and just copied it into the comic strip.[laughs]

M. Thomas Inge: He was so pleased when someone wrote a symphony based on the character’s that played it kind of all those years ago. Because he loved music but he didn’t really know a lot about it. And he loved literature, even if he didn’t know a lot about it in the practical critical sense.

Kent Gustavson: I’m excited to talk much more about Charles Schulz in a minute, here we got to stop for a dish identification. I’ll be back in a second.

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M. Thomas Inge | Peanuts & Faulkner

December 14, 2007 | Leave a Comment

 
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The first author guest featured this week is M. THOMAS INGE, an authority on popular culture and the history of the comic arts. He is the author or editor of over 50 books. His three-volume Handbook of American Popular Culture was cited by the American Library Association as an outstanding reference work in 1979 and was issued in a revised and expanded edition in 1989.From Booklist, the review of his book “Charles Schulz: Conversations”: 

The media tributes that followed cartoonist Schulz’s death in February gave fans a glimpse at the quiet, unassuming creator of the beloved comic strip “Peanuts.” Those seeking additional insight into Schulz and his work can turn to the 16 interviews collected in this volume, which range from a 1957 Saturday Evening Post feature portraying Schulz as an unsophisticated, Middle-American everyman to the collection’s highpoint, a lengthy late-career dialogue with the Comics Journal, a publication known for applying critical rigor to the lowly comics medium. Christian Herald and Psychology Today interviews focus on aspects of Schulz’s work that were of particular interest to their readers, and a Los Angeles Times sports pages piece examines Charlie Brown’s losing record on the ball field. Schulz’s comments touch upon everything from his drawing technique and work habits to theological ruminations. In all the interviews, his basic decency and commitment shine through, and the modest Schulz refuses to admit that his work could be considered art. The thoughtfulness and creativity he demonstrates in these pages belie his demurrals. Gordon Flagg

 

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M. Thomas Inge | Comics & Literature

December 14, 2007 | Leave a Comment

 
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M. Thomas Inge, Ph.D. is the Robert Emory Blackwell Professor of English and the Humanities at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia. A native of Newport News, Virginia, he received his B.A. degree in English and Spanish from Randolph-Macon College in 1959 and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in English and American literature from Vanderbilt University in 1960 and 1964 respectively. After teaching at Vanderbilt University, he became a member of the Department of American Thought and Language at Michigan State University from 1964 to1969, when he joined the Department of English at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. He served as Chair of the department from 1974 to 1980 and then was Head of the Department of English at Clemson University in South Carolina. From 1982 to1984 he was appointed Resident Scholar in American Studies by the U.S. Information Agency in Washington.As a senior Fulbright Lecturer, Inge has taught at the University of Salamanca in Spain (1967-68) and at three institutions in Buenos Aires, Argentina (1971). On a third Fulbright appointment in 1979, he offered courses on American humor and literary regionalism at Moscow State University in the Soviet Union. As resident Scholar with USIA, he consulted and lectured abroad in eighteen countries, including France, Italy, Portugal, Japan, New Zealand, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the People’s Republic of China. More recently he has lectured in Poland, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Finland, Denmark, England, Germany, and the Czech Republic. At the invitation of the Gorky Institute, he returned to the Soviet Union to participate in conferences on Sholokhov and Faulkner and the works of Eudora Welty. He has led travel-study courses to the Soviet Union in 1988 and China in 1989, and in 1994 he taught at Charles University in Prague on a fourth Fulbright lectureship.Among others, Inge teaches courses in American humor and satire and is the author or editor of over fifty books. His three-volume Handbook of American Popular Culture was cited by the American Library Association as an outstanding reference work in 1979 and was issued in a revised and expanded edition in 1989. In addition to his continuing interests in literature, Inge is also engaged in research on the history and development of American comic art, which resulted in his book “Comics as Culture.”More recent publications include “Anything Can Happen in a Comic Strip,” a study of self-referentiality in the comics, and “Charles M. Schulz: Conversations, a collection of interviews with the creator of Peanuts,” the first in a series of such collections for which Inge is serving as the general editor for the University Press of Mississippi. Works in progress include books on the relations between American literature and the comics and the adaptation process in the films of Walt Disney. From  http://www.wittyworld.com/bios/bioinge.html 

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Dave Praeger | Poop Report

December 14, 2007 | Leave a Comment

 
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The second guest is DAVE PRAEGER, the editor of PoopReport.com, a site dedicated to “the intellectual appreciation of poop humor.” He’s been seen on National Geographic TV and the BBC, interviewed by Esquire and the New York Press, and heard on everything from Sirius Satellite Radio to NPR. Find out more at www.poopreport.comThe latest news from Dave Praeger and his book “Poop Culture” is below (from www.poopthebook.com) 


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