Reprinted on Facebook recently by Jeff Bowles, Charles Schulz’s Peanuts cartoon from 11/3/1988, in which Snoopy the writer upbraids an editor — someone I think of as the powerful but irrationally unappreciative son-of-a-bitch Ed — for failing to print his stories and make him rich and famous:
Me, I share with Snoopy a history — in my case, long past — of having my articles callously rejected by Ed. I did not seek riches, though I was happy to get some royalties from my writing; the currency of academia isn’t financial but reputational: having an audience for my ideas and my creative writing.
I have been writing humor for publication since my teenage years; the posting “Lizard warning” I just made is entirely in the mold of the material I began publishing 70 years ago. But I do it as entertainment rather than a source of income.
Meanwhile, once I discovered linguistics, analytic philosophy, stylistics, and later, gender and sexuality studies and also popular culture studies, I embarked on a series of programs in research and also in conceptual analysis, churning out a huge body of work, much of which was idiosyncratic enough to make publication difficult.
Eventually, I faced a wall of rejection from Ed, so I just gave up on conventional outlets for my ideas. I became the online entertainer — a public intellectual performing for free, but with real passion and a willingness to talk about anything, no matter how personal, with as much openness as I can muster — the guy you now see. You now get commitments I made as long ago as 1970, but with many of the technical topics abandoned, so that I’m sometimes inclined to think of the guy who published “Auxiliary Reduction in English” in the journal Linguistic Inquiry in 1970 as having died. While the guy who survives is given to posting occasionally on auxiliary reduction in English, but no longer for an audience of academic linguists.
What I have now is in fact a surprisingly happy life of the mind and a largely appreciative audience — sometimes, omigod, I change other people’s lives. With a very small slice of fame and enough money to get along on. I could not have wished for anything better than that.
Listen up, Snoopy.
(And yes, this strip is a critique by Schulz of Snoopy’s moral world. It’s funny because Snoopy, despite his charm, is so foolish.)
Leave a Reply