This is one of many remarkable letters in "Letters of Note" - a hefty volume of facsimile letters of all kinds sent by famous and not so famous people. Maybe you can't see too well, but the little drawing is of Charlotte Braun being axed by Schultz. Charlotte was loud, brash and opinionated. The readership of Peanuts didn't take to her at all and Charles M. Schulz had to terminate her (as above) after only ten sightings. I have never seen her but would love to find out more about this unacceptable personality. I mean, displeasing Peanuts readers is something to The full letter reads: Jan. 5, 1955 Dear Miss Swaim, I am taking your suggestion regarding Charlotte Braun and will eventually discard her. If as he appears anymore it will be in strips that were already completed before I got your letter or because someone writes in saying that they like her. Remember, however, that you and your friends will have the death of an innocent child on your conscience. Are you prepared to accept such responsibility? Thanks for writing, and I hope future releases will please you. Sincerely, Charles M. Schulz (copied from Letter of Note, Unbound Edition. You can find out more about the book here: http://www.lettersofnote.com/p/the-book.html And so it is: there are days like this, when a word in the wrong place makes it all go awry. I mean, yesterday, my toothbrush ran out of charge; the bottom element of my kiln gave up the ghost; the rabbits have gobbled my favourite plant; and I appear to have gone from tonic to toxic in someone's life overnight. Today, none of it matters; but for a while, yesterday, I was disconcerted.
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When the badger glimmered away
into another garden you stood, half-lit with whiskey, sensing you had disturbed some soft returning. The murdered dead, you thought. But could it not have been some violent shattered boy nosing out what got mislaid between the cradle and the explosion, evenings when windows stood open and the compost smoked down the backs? Visitations are taken for signs. At a second house I listened for duntings under the laurels and heard intimations whispered about being vaguely honoured. And to read even by carcasses the badgers have come back. One that grew notorious lay untouched by the roadside. Last bight one had me braking but more in fear than in honour. Cool from the sett and redolent of his runs under the night, the bogey of fern country broke cover in me for what he is: pig family and not at all what he's painted. How perilous is it to choose not to love the life we're shown? His sturdy dirty body and interloping grovel. The intelligence in his bone. The unquestionable houseboy's shoulders that could have been my own. This head was made from a memory, some years ago. I have long known the importance, for me, of remembering and recuperating the past and so, as soon as I started doing sculpture I had the idea of picking up a head a knew well and ageing it, as in one of those photofits they do for lost people many years later. The poor craftsmanship is a given, this poor man has lost his cheekbones, but then that was a result I intended to a certain extent. The real head has emerged now and I have something to compare although the thought strikes me that the recollection I have of facts and events is also not quite in focus. I have become more proud of my head now (it stands in my dining room!) and will never part with it, not because of the person it represents, but because it represents the person I was and became. Alan Yentob was interviewing Edmund de Waal a while ago for Imagine... The name of the program was "Make Pots or Die". I have been mulling things over for a bit.
I have tremendous respect for Edmund and I always admire the way Alan Yentob allows his guests to express themselves, and coaxes out of them a good extra scoop of thoughtfulness or feeling. I have read and loved The Hare with the Amber Eyes. I know this potter is serious, committed, very knowledgeable....can you hear the heavy hooves of my BUT approaching? ...I always see him, making pure white cylinders, little ones, tall ones (never fat ones), by the hundred, by the thousand. Sometimes they have a slight tremulous rim and last night there were having their foot shaved a bit. But I wait for the next thing. I wait for him to do the next thing and he does: he positions them in little groups on pure white shelves against pure white walls. They are never anything other than pure white cylinders, standing about together in groups or on parade, lost in space, cold, looking perplexed. My friend Jill says: you cannot know the mind of another person. Quite so. I completely believe that. But I do know my own mind: what comes next is my question and I can ask that. I guess I am expressing my mind in saying that the netsuke tell me more, and they were made so long ago, about now than what I can read in Edmund's cylinders. I can talk to them. I have an unsophisticated, illiterate mind, and I need a lot more explanations than I am getting from pure white. The netsuke are garrulous, dirty, convoluted, sneaky, so many things. But Edmund's pots are just there. They are frozen, waxy, and still. They do not scream, they do not question, they do not dance or lie down. He spoke os his first reaction to the netsuke, when uncle Iggy first showed them to him: each object would make the old man remember a story, a tableau, an episode of family life in those fabled times of old, when they were stupendously rich and very affable and well known. Edmund described how the object, handled, passed on to the new hand the story of all those hands that had caressed it over time. Also, how these perfect little gems can bewitch people, possess them. hence their great value. So, Edmund did not really like them, he could not make sense of such objects or the making of them. But now he owns them and he makes the connection between speaking in objects and building with words. His white porcelain tubes continue to multiply, referring to old jewish loss, to adversity on an unimaginable scale... I just don't get it. Where in those thousands of white tubes is all this? Is blank the ultimate end of the story? I will continue to look for that meaning: He says he tells stories with his pots; he has to make pots or die; I feel so stupid not understanding at all what he says but clearly see that making those cylinders is a must. Perhaps if I sit at the wheel and make a few?... |
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