cc  >> Jonathan Overby: Fantastic  reading and it's a whole new  dimension for working.  And I think from what little I  know of Studs Terkel he would  really have enjoyed this format  for his great working.  And of course, we're here about  graphic arts in general.  Comics in Wisconsin raises some  fascinating questions, how far  back do comics go?  All the way back maybe to  Hieronymus Bosch; I never would  have thought of that.  I think maybe all the way back  to those cave paintings in  France.  But it's going to be a  fascinating subject to explore.  Especially because it has such  strong Wisconsin roots.  So who better to look into the  past and the present, maybe even  the future, but Paul Buhle  and Harvey Pekar.  Welcome, please.  (applause)  >> Paul Buhle: You're not doing  introductions?  No, okay. 

 Or are you?  >> Overby: No.  >> Buhle: Okay.  Very good, then I find myself in  the introductory row.  We have an hour and a half which  I think is really good because  in astute comic audiences, as  opposed to audiences made up of  people all wearing superhero  outfits, there usually is some  really good discussion because,  for a lot of reasons.  Clearly the book world is in  some serious trouble and graphic  novels, so-called, even  nonfiction things are called  graphic novels which indicates  how vague the whole business is,  graphic novels seem to be a  great interest to critics and  widely appreciated in many parts  of the world even including the  benighted United States.  Since the year 2000, almost  inexplicably comics, graphic  novels, have been accorded the  designation of art.  There is such a thing as comic  art which serious critics  scarcely ever accepted as a  notion before 2000.  Maybe Artie Spiegelman's Maus,  maybe Crumb's drawings.  But hardly anything else at all  and only in the last ten years.  Satrapi, Mary Jane Satrapi's  "Persepolis," "Fun Home," Alison  Bechdel, and a succession of  other things have been seen,  reviewed seriously and so forth  and so forth. 

 It's no longer true, as it was  in the '90s, that I thought I  knew all five of the underground  or alternative comics, artists,  people who were making a living  from it.  There must be more now.  Although not so much more and  it's a struggle for most people  just to get by and not have a  straight job and manage to  squeeze in over a weekend.  Well, it's interesting that  since 2000 some people have been  doing things for an awfully long  time are now getting more  attention in a new way.  Maybe the most important point  for us here, along with Studs  Terkel and the question of  adapting oral history and so  forth, is the affect of the film  American Splendor with Harvey  Pekar introducing a new  dimension of animation, also of  oral history, you might say, and  where do comics come from and so  on and so forth.  The effects of that we're still  feeling now.  But I want to come straight to  the big questions for today or  for this morning, why Studs  Terkel and why Harvey Pekar and  why bother to make a great oral  history book into a comic.  And what does it mean for comic  art that we would try to make it  into a comic.  Let me say a few things.  I will be pretty brief, I'm not  sure how long Harvey will go on,  but we'll leave plenty of time  for you to ask these questions,  so get them in your mind and get  prepared to ask them without  fear or trepidation. 

 Boy, if you had been, as I was,  an oral historian since the  1970s and both a field worker  interviewing a whole lot of  people over 80 years of age and  others and teaching oral history  in a classroom, as I was for ten  years or so at Brown University,  you would know that Studs Terkel  is so far above any other figure  in oral history it's almost like  no other figures in oral history  exist.  The kind of aura around Studs  Terkel's work, the ability to  find perfectly ordinary people,  a lot of them in Chicago, and to  get from talking to them what  the real story of their life is,  not the incredibly famous people  who are interviewed on  television and whose names we  forget within a year or two  because they aren't famous but  for a moment they are  celebrities, but ordinary  working class, lower  middle-class and seemingly  anonymous people.  Studs Terkel is a radio guy as a  theatrical guy from the 1930s  and candidly as a left wing guy,  was the perfect person to create  this genre as much as anybody  has ever created a genre.  And just to go on about this for  a moment, the field of oral  history didn't exist as a field,  as an academic field, it  scarcely does now, it's not much  of a profession, until the 1960s  and then suddenly it gained a  lot of participants and then a  very high percentage of those  participants were social  movement activists in one way or  the other.  They wanted to document the  Civil Rights Movement, the  Anti-War Movement and so forth,  and they went around with tape  recorders and sort of tried to  figure out what the importance  of these things were that never  were treated justifiably as  legitimate movements in the  commercial press and so forth on  television.  They wanted to get the stories  behind the stories.  That was the point of oral  history.  And then oral history grew,  surprisingly, to sort of  localists.  People who didn't have PhDs  or even MAs necessarily but  wanted to document some  community around them of some  kind that was disappearing as a  generation past.  Or some incident that had  happened and seemed terribly  important but that had never  really gotten documented. 

 And between these two kinds of  milieus oral history grew into a  field, and then people developed  all sorts of techniques and all  sorts of issues and problems of  doing oral history and all the  little tricks that I would try  to help my students with.  But like for instance women are  almost invariably best  interviewed by women  interviewers.  And one of the few truisms in  oral history is worth talking  about that some time.  But so throughout all this work,  whether we're doing the field  work and had Studs in the back  of our mind or whether we were  doing the teaching and had his  text in front of us as a way to  instruct people to do oral  history, Studs Terkel was  incredibly important, and for  people doing oral history today  remains incredibly important as  no one else.  That's Studs the interviewer.  As Studs the personality, almost  impelled by publisher Andre  Schiffrin in the early 1970s to  turn his work on to the printed  page to make it into the book  called "Working,"  was a literary phenomenon.  For the first time an oral  history became a literary best  seller.  Wow, amazing.  And there's been a lot since, by  no means all of his, but he  created the genre of oral  histories as serious best  sellers.  Well, he went on from that to do  a whole bunch of oral history  books. 

 He lived to 95 and was working  right till the end in Chicago,  as well as supporting  progressive causes.  And his work continuously is  fabulous and great and always  has that quality of finding  people famous or, generally  speaking, unfamous, heading  right to the heart of the way  they feel about themselves, the  way they understand themselves  and being able to convey  that story to readers.  So it was a really, really  natural thing for us, Harvey and  I, to think of going to Studs  Terkel and to think of doing  "Working."  If we get a chance to do this  again with the same publisher,  New Press, it's very likely to  be "The Good War."  I suspect my choice would have  been "Hard Times" about the  Depression, but "The Good War"  is the second most famous book,  and it's a great book, like all  of his books it's a great book.  So we're hoping  that's in our future.  Why Harvey Pekar,  would be the next question.  And I've been inclined, although  I didn't think about this at the  time when we were working on it,  to imagine Harvey Pekar as a  Studs Terkel continuator, or  almost a Studs Terkel in the  flesh in some other way for a  succeeding generation.  Harvey spent 36 years in a VA  hospital, as a file clerk and  other things, in Cleveland, and  was exactly the kind of person  that Studs Terkel was looking  for, exactly the kind of person.  Because you don't really expect,  or intellectuals don't expect,  the file clerk at a VA hospital  to be able to tell stories that  are fabulous as stories.  But Harvey's a natural born  story teller, because he's a  great listener, that's the best  thing about being a story  teller, the most important  thing, and there's some way in  which Studs Terkel to Harvey  Pekar is a beautiful, natural  flow.  And I guess the last thing I  want to say along these lines is  that we're able to find, it  wasn't too difficult, really,  really great artists. 

 For some of them Harvey did the  adaptation from Studs, but  others, like Sabrina Jones who  did the comic on a prostitute,  it was something that they were  impelled to do themselves.  They didn't want Harvey or  anybody else to write the script  for them.  So maybe half of them are  self-scripted by artists.  In every case, in any case, the  art, the idea of the art, the  idea of comic art, emerged as an  expression of an art form which  is just beginning to be accepted  but which was terribly important  for the artist to develop for  this kind of specific project.  There are half a dozen projects  that Harvey and I have done  together or plan to do together,  beginning with a comic on the  history of Students for  Democratic Society, and a lot of  that about Madison stuff,  including the Dow police riot, a  book called "Beats" about the  beat generation, a book we're  now working on called "Yiddish  Land" which really is about the  inheritance of 800 years of  Jewish culture in Europe and its  meaning for secular Jewishness  in the US but also for  commercial popular culture, and  some other ideas that are sort  of bubbling on the back burner  and we're hoping will move to  the front burner.  But it's, in my estimation, a  splendid partnership and working  with Harvey and the artists is a  way for me as a life long social  historian to get back to comics,  my first love, the first books I  ever got to buy with my own  dimes, and also to make a  venture into popular culture,  and most especially, by no means  only, reach readers under the  age of 25 for whom the visual  world, as my students read less  text each year that I taught,  was more and more real as the  world of prose became less and  less real or less and less  compelling.  So with those words and coming  back if you want some questions,  let me turn it over to Harvey.  >> Harvey Pekar: Thank you.  And it has been a pleasure  working with Paul, and it's  helped support me too.  So no small fee. 

 I really don't have a great deal  to say about working so maybe  you could interrupt me at any  time with any question about  anything, baseball, whatever.  (laughter)  And I'll, so we can  make the time limit here.  It's an hour and 45 minutes.  >> Buhle: Ask him about  the Indians,  he always has something  to say about the Indians.  >> Pekar: I already wrote that  down, that's hopeless.  (laughter)  I don't want to visit  depression time after time.  Okay, there is a connection that  I see in retrospect between  Studs Terkel and me in that  we're both interested in the  mundane and first person  interviews or autobiographical  stuff which I guess falls into  that category.  I was aware of Studs Terkel for  a long time but never really got  into his work.  I would flip through some of his  books and I'd like it.  It was fine. 

 But I never really sat down and  read one from cover to cover  before "Working."  And obviously Studs  was a precursor of mine.  I can see that.  But the guy who really, whose  influence really affected me  back when I was starting to get  into comics and things like that  was not Studs but Henry Miller  who did autobiographical stuff.  And there was some stuff I   didn't like about Henry Miller.  I always thought he was a  bull ######.  (laughter)  And kind of a wind bag  with his pronouncements  about American society this and  American society that.  But still what he was doing sort  of fit, I mean I look back, I  had a notebook when I was 19  years old and I was trying to  write some kind of Henry Miller  type prose narrative so I guess  that would probably be maybe my  single greatest literary  influence.  As far as this project is  concerned, I had been working  with Paul for a few years and I  find that it's real comfortable  for me to work with Paul.  There's a lot of mutual respect  and it's a real pleasure  compared to some people in the  industry.  (laughter)  And so I'll work on  practically any project that  Paul proposes because I'm pretty  sure that I'm going to be  interested in it just from jump. 

 We have a lot of similar  interests and stuff like that.  So then what I was supposed to  do was adapt some stories for  comics, some of his stories.  As far as I'm concerned that's  perfectly fine just as it's  perfectly fine to adapt a novel  to a movie.  You move stuff around from one  art form to another, they're  basically the same material, you  get a little bit different view  of it each time, and it's  certainly justifiable.  But my job here was to adapt  this stuff to scripts that the  artists could use, adapt   Terkel's prose.  So I read the book through and  then I just started, I did a  certain amount of stories, as  many as I thought that they  would need from me, and I just,  like when you read you kind of  read, you take a breath after  you've read a certain amount.  And that's how I like to layout  my stories and stuff, like pause  after one of these breaths that  I have in my head.  And so that's what I did.  I also made the, I put more  words into a panel than I  normally would because I was a  little concerned about space  limitations, but nobody's  complained about that yet, don't  start now.  So knock on wood about that. 

 The guy was very important guy,  and his work is very, very  enjoyable and it will keep on  being important.  He gives you a view of the times  that practically no one else  gives you, a view of his times.  So having said that, maybe I  could open this up for questions  and you can ask me, like I said,  really about anything.  I just want to make the time  limit so I get paid and stuff.  (laughter)  >> Buhle: I guess I'll  moderate and start on the left,  on my left, you first.  >> Harvey, did you find  yourself, you were talking about  because it was a snapshot of the  time, did you ever find yourself  when you were adapting it to try  to make it more contemporary?  >> Pekar: No, I didn't mess  with his stuff at all.  It's a classic work and I don't  go about changing or abridging  stuff like that.  It was never in my mind.  Every word is his word.  >> You mention the idea that  translating a story from medium  to medium kind of gives you  possibly new perspectives on it  and provides maybe different  angles that the viewers or  readers may have not previously  had. 

 What do you think your  translated work has done for  this story?  >> Pekar: Well, I think for  one thing it's sort of put it  more up front in people's minds.  Because you're looking at  specific characters now,  illustrated characters, and in  the sense that it's sort of more  alive.  This is not to put down prose  because prose is as great an art  form as there is, but with the  additional illustrations, and  I'll tell you they are very good  illustrations, I was really kind  of surprised at how good they  were because there were so many  artists involved in it and yet  the stuff was pretty much  universally a solid.  So I think the comic book thing  is like you get more of an  immediacy to it.  And I don't know, that's what  comes to mind.  >> Buhle: Still staying  on this side, yes?  >> I was reading "The Good War"  last night, the next one, and I  wanted to ask you a little bit  about how Terkel found people.  And also if anyone ever  interviewed Studs Terkel about  his -- and how he did his thing.  >> Buhle: Well, on the first  point, I just don't know,  I don't know how he chose them.  And no one has ever  been able to ask successfully  when he was around why he chose  these particular people  and not others.  There's one other issue that  comes up with students in class  always which is are these as  they were spoken. 

 And the answer is no.  He turned everything over to  archives in Chicago, finally,  toward the end of his life, and  he heavily edited the material.  So in his mind, and it's big  debate methodically among oral  historians, but in his mind he  was getting the quintessence.  But he did it in his own way.  And my experience, including old  Hollywood people, reds mostly,  people who were on the black  list, they wanted you to do  this.  They thought you were better at  editing them down and capturing  that than their voices, as such,  their exact words and phrases  would be.  We can debate that heavily, and  I'm not sure who's right, but  that was his method in any case.  And the second question was?  >> Did anyone interview him?  And I also want to ask for every  person whose interview was  published, how many were not?  Like for The Good War?  >> Buhle: Again the archives  are in Chicago.  I don't know, I haven't been  reading the Oral History Journal  in the last few years.  There's only one which shows you  how tiny the field is. 

 Maybe somebody has discerned  that, not that I know of.  And why did he choose some  people over others?  I got to assume they were the  voices that seemed the most  vibrant and so on and so forth.  Maybe you have an answer, is  that what your hand is raised  for?  >> I don't know if I have an  answer, but I used to live in  Chicago and I was home with a  young child so I listened to  Studs Terkel every morning and I  listened to his interviews on  the radio and there was an  interview five days a week.  >> Buhle: He did thousands.  >> And of those he extracted  certain ones.  >> Buhle: That's right,  I think that's right.  >> (inaudible)  >> Buhle: Yeah, that's why  he was a folk hero in Chicago  and deserved to be a  larger than life figure.  Way, way back there.  >> The individual stories of    workers seem to be far more  interesting than organized labor  as a whole.  That's my impression. 

 >> Buhle: That's an  accurate observation.  (laughter)  >> Is there anything  in the labor movement over the  past 30 years, and if so, could  it have the same type of power  of the individual warfare.  >> Buhle: Well, I wrote  one of those books called  "Taking Care of Business,"  which was a long criticism,  attack, on the history  of labor bureaucracy in the US.  Not very well liked at AFL-CIO  headquarters.  (laughter)  But does it have the,  or do other books, have the  vibrancy of Studs' interviews?  N-O.  Madison's own David Newby is one  of the only interesting labor  leaders I've met that I know of  for the last 40 years,  practically since the labor  movement got purged of reds in  the early 1950s there.  They've been, generally  speaking, a very dull bunch.  This is like 1970 that Studs did  these interviews.  There could be interviews done  today that would be incredibly  interesting.  Sometimes you see a little  moment of it in "Roger and Me"  where Michael Moore turns to an  average worker or in  "Capitalism" where he interviews  his uncle who was in  the Flint sit-down strike. 

 It's just moments that seem  incredibly vibrant.  But the truth is with the  collapse of the labor movement,  the voices of working people  have been fairly silenced,  fairly successfully silenced.  >> Pekar: I'd like to add  to that that as good  as Terkel's work is  there's probably somebody out  there, maybe he won't do it, or  she won't do it, but that's  perceptive enough or talented  enough to come up with  interviews that equal Terkel's  in quality.  If you got the stuff, man, and  you want to use it, you can do a  hell of a lot.  >> Buhle: It's encouraging.  Just one more point of how the  people in this volume are  different, how their lives are  different from working people  today.  It's a simple point, but once  you hit it it's very memorable.  There are a lot of people before  1970, and I knew many of them  very well, who would say I got a  great job because I never think  about it when I go home at  night.  People made a lot less money,  but they were a lot less  stressed at their jobs.  Their job pace was a lot slower. 

 And if I could think of a  contrast with today where  obviously people are still  working on their jobs until they  go to sleep at night and  probably in the middle of the  night dreaming or having  nightmares, that really is a  contrast and when you read this  book, that will come home to  you.  I'm not saying they're happy,  I'm not saying they're not  exploited or upset in many ways,  but the pace is different.  Yes?  >> Someone had a question on  somebody interviewing Studs  Terkel on his method.  (inaudible)  An article asking him  about how he would talk  about particularly he would  fumble with the tape recorder.  (inaudible)  Make it more of a conversation  and he was not  an expert at anything  and say they were the experts.  My question is on "Working" how  you chose, there's so many  stories in that or were you just  going for the most visual  stories?  >> Buhle: Harvey chose the ones  he wanted, and he'll  speak to that in a moment.  The artists, who I admire  greatly, a number of them  connected with "World War 3  Illustrated," a real great forum  for comic artists.  It's hard to find but it's a  very important magazine.  They all had copies and they  went and chose the stories that  meant the most to them.  But Harvey you say something  about why you chose the  particular stories you scripted. 

 >> Pekar: It had to do  with like maybe one story  complementing another,  or maybe one thing being  either too skimpy an interview  or maybe too broad  to put in the book  without crowding out two others.  That sort of thing,  pretty mundane kind of  considerations actually.  >> Buhle: Since there was  so much great stuff any choice  would have been arbitrary.  Of people who read the book and  of things that I saw, before it  was a musical it was little play  performed locally for humanities  council, state humanities  council, and I was the humanist  at one of these in a YWCA in a  little blue collar town in Rhode  Island, it must have been 25  years ago.  The waitress and the prostitute,  those would be the two people  were interested in forever.  More than that, I can't say.  >> Pekar: Sex sells.  >> Buhle: All the way  over there, Norm.  >> Two things, I wanted to echo  the bit about Studs putting  himself on the same level as his  interviewees because I think  that's a really important point  in his style.  I too grew up listening to Studs  on the radio in Chicago, and  when he talks about sitting down  with somebody and fumbling with  his tape recorder until they  feel at ease, that's a really  important part of it because  it's just like what Harvey said  a few minutes ago about working  with you is important because of  the mutual respect, when Studs  interviewed somebody he wasn't  saying I'm the expert and  you're, I'm drawing this out of  you, it's tell me about your  life. 

 The question I wanted to ask  though was something you said,  Harvey, about the pauses, and  I'd really like to hear you  expand on that a little more  about the breaths and where you  put those breaths and how  important that is as far as  setting the book and the story.  >> Pekar: Okay, that's the way  I generally do things, not just  with Studs Terkel's stuff.  A lot of the dialogue in my,  and other aspects of the story.  In my books the way, I just  think about what I want to say  and I just, like, listen in my  mind's ear, I guess, to what I  say to get it straight  and then I'll write it down.  Timing is really important to  me, it's important just like  it's important for a comedian or  any other kind of story teller.  You want to get the maximum  impact out of the words.  So sometimes,  there are all kinds  of little breaks you can make.  You can use ellipses and you can  use dashes and periods, and when  I went over this stuff in my  head I tried to determine where  the breaks would come  and how long they would be.  And I also, another thing I did  was, for example say you want to  set up a punch line, but say it  comes at the end of a fairly  fevered discussion or something  like that, and throughout the  thing has been real fast paced.  If you come up with a last line,  if you want to call it a punch  line call it a punch line, call  it something else if you want  to, but I would sometimes use  dialogue-less panels where a guy  would just stand there and stare  at the reader for a second just  to calm things down and  set him up for the last line. 

 That's another thing  that I work a lot with.  >> Buhle: Let me add actually  a comment and a question,  among the things that  Harvey and I have on the  back burner is a book on jazz by  Harvey with some of his essays.  He's better known as a jazz  critic than as a comics person  in the 1970s.  And I'm just wondering whether  your self-education, writing  about jazz, has had anything to  do with your sense of timing in  comics?  >> Pekar: Probably so  but where I can really tell  it coming from is I was in love  with comedy starting  with radio comedy in the '40s,  and I used to really like  guys like Jack Benny  who were really creative  about timing their stuff.  I'll always remember this one  story, a guy comes up to him  and says,  "your money or your life."  And there's a pause.  (laughter)  And then, "I'm thinking,  I'm thinking!"  >> Buhle: That was great.  (laughter)  >> It's interesting  that you mention comics and jazz  because that's really, people  say it's the only two American  forms of art that we created.  So I find it interesting.  I've always found that music and  comics have a certain kind of  connection in terms of the  timing aspects.  The question I was going to ask  you is the way you approach  writing, when you go back to the  American Splendor stuff in your  autobiographical part of your  writings compared to when you --  to a third party like with Studs  Terkel, do you approach it  differently?  Are there some similarities?  >> Pekar: Well, when I'm doing  a piece, like if I'm doing  a history of something,  that I want to make sure,  first of all, that it's coherent  and that I let the reader know  why I'm dealing  with this subject. 

 Like if I do something about  myself I just assume people will  think it's because I think I'm  important.  And they're right.  (laughter)  But then we're all like that.  >> Buhle: That's right.  Let me add to that that the  nastiest, stupidest critics,  fanboys and otherwise, are  really pissed off at Harvey for  deserting the American Splendor  narrative and being so  presumptuous as to do take on  historical subjects.  I had come from a comic history  of the industrial workers of the  world called Wobblies and  something a local artist Mike  Konopacki drew, an adaptation of  Howard Zinn's A People's History  of the US, and I was stuck in  the middle of this history of  Students for Democratic Society,  maybe because I was too close to  it having published a magazine  for SDS here in Madison and a  comic, and I just broke down.  I couldn't seem to go any  further with the big, big story,  and Harvey happened to call me  for a completely unrelated  reason and I dragged him into  it.  This about 2005 or 2006.  And then it just came to me in  desperation, as many good  thoughts do, that Harvey's  ability to tell stories was just  as good in history as it would  be in the stories in American  Splendor, and it's absolutely  turned out to be true.  Which tells us something about  history telling being narrative  after all. 

 Without stories we got nothing.  >> Pekar: Look at Herodotus.  >> Buhle: Look at Herodotus,  there you go.  >> I was just wondering about  the role or not of the WPA and  the federal writer's project.  (inaudible)  If anyone knows  anything about the WPA, all  people know about it are the  photographs and some people  might know about the theatre.  But the federal writers did go  out, people were sent out, I  know people did work on every  single state in the country at  that point.  And do you think that had any,  that informed Studs at all?  >> Buhle: Yes, yes, Studs Terkel  came out of WPA theatre.  And WPA theatre was a big  center, some people know about  Hallie Flanagan who was an  organizer of a federal theatre  within the WPA, Works Progress  Administration, was just full of  creative left-wing people.  A fabulous thing which was  abolished by Congress in 1942 or  1943 because it was much too  dangerous as a mechanism to  reach popular culture.  The beaver story came out of  that, "Revolt of the Beavers."  >> I liked hearing the other  lectures about this. 

 I was wondering what the most  difficult part about adapting  the story was for you guys?  >> Pekar: I didn't think  it was difficult.  I had my way of working  and I applied it.  Sorry.  >> Buhle: I guess I can  respond differently  by making a contrast.  The decisions that had to be  made to do a story about SDS  were very, very difficult.  It was a very decentralized  movement.  It had a terribly tragic and  stupid ending.  And likewise, something like  industrial workers of the world,  there are so many different  things you can tell.  Generally speaking if a comic is  about history, non-fiction  comics, nobody even has a name  for them.  They're called graphic novels,  and they're obviously not  novels. 

 So we're in a vague zone of  defining things or an exciting  time of new things being  created.  How do you take some big book  full of facts or big article  full of facts and choose the  specific narrative that will  make sense to the reader.  How do you not overload it?  Somebody sent me some reprinted  classics, illustrated comics  from the early 1950s that are  now being reprinted, and some of  these stories like Les  Miserables, which I was looking  at the other night, so many  things that are going on that I  remember as a kid having  disconnect and being totally  confused by it.  Likewise, if there's too much  stuff in it then it can't  possibly work as a comic.  In my mind comics are somewhere  between plays on the one hand  and films on the other.  At any rate, the necessity to  reduce the number of words to  indicate action without it being  a superhero action comic in  which nothing is said except the  banal is a real narrative issue,  and perhaps it's always  approached in one way or another  in the sense of writing a script  for film or writing a script for  theatre.  It isn't that different.  Harvey just has this incredibly  instinctive, wonderful  sensibility of how to carry it  off.  None better.  Yes?  >> When you first started  writing your stories, did you  immediately understand how to  express your ideas on the page  or was there a long learning  process?  >> Pekar: It wasn't a real long  learning, well there was a long  learning process, but the long  learning process didn't involve  writing comic stories since I  was a teenager until finally I  met Robert Crumb and he liked my  work and he said he'd illustrate  it. 

 That's what actually, the event  that got me started writing  comics.  But when I was a kid, even in  elementary school, I wanted to  be the class clown.  I wanted to break up everybody.  And I was always getting sent  out of the room for interrupting  the teacher and stuff like that,  with my little one-liners and  stuff.  From that I developed a story  telling technique which involved  memorizing stories.  I wanted to get as many laughs  as possible so instead of  telling a story to 50 people at  once I would tell it 50 times to  one person at a time so I would  get more laughs.  (laughter)  But anyway, the first  comic book stories that I wrote  were just adaptations of stories  that I used to, when I was out  on a street corner or something  talking to people.  >> Did you really draw  the stick figures?  >> Pekar: No, no, no.  It was all in my head.  It was all in my head, but the  sense of pacing and everything  like that that I referred to,  that all came through that and  also through listening to radio  comedians. 

 I mentioned Benny.  Another really big influence on  me, and these guys are still  very underrated today,  are Bob and Ray.  >> Buhle: Right, right,  great radio personalities.  But his scripts are still stick  figures with inside panels.  They'd be worth something some  day, but as he observed last  time we were in a big forum  together, only after he's dead.  (laughter)  >> Could you explain  a little about how  your relationship  with the artist worked?  (inaudible)  >> Pekar: When possible I meet  with them face-to-face  but if I'm working with somebody  in California  then I use the phone.  I'll send it out  or read them the script  and then send it out to them.  And I'll talk over the story.  I write instructions in the  panels to the artists but I  realize they may not be plain.  So I'll just go over it, if time  allows, panel by panel with the  artist and just tell them what I  had in mind. 

 That's my ultimate, that's the  thing that I use to where I try  to catch mistakes I've made in  relating the story.  >> Buhle: Email is not  in Harvey's world.  >> Pekar: I don't know  how to email.  (laughter)  >> Buhle: Way back there.  >> I was wondering how your  collaborations are being  received by academics and using  them as teaching tools?  >> Buhle: Very good question,  very good question.  Let's see, when I was teaching  the big lecture course before I  retired called "The '60s Without  Apology," always and forever the  most important book to students  was "Stuck Rubber Baby," a comic  by Howard Cruse that's about the  south in the early 1960s, and  has to do with race, civil  rights struggles, homosexuality  and a whole bunch of other  things.  And the only graphic novel  Howard Cruse ever did, it seems  like it's thinly  autobiographical.  It's just magnificent at pulling  everything together.  So I never, our books, mine and  Harvey's together, have only  been emerging the last few years  so I didn't get to read them and  use them in classes as teaching  methods.  So much I used the SDS comic in  a couple of my classes and it  was good, it was good but the  power of "Stuck Rubber Baby" is  something that sticks in my  mind. 

 I would say there's a lot of  crabby comments from English  professors about the beats.  Either they loved the beatniks  and we were traducing them by  even the idea of having a comic  about Jack Kerouac is just so  horrifying they couldn't deal  with it.  Or you get a lot of people who  hated beat writing all their  life, which means they were  envious that they didn't become  famous writers and have a lot of  sex and so forth.  And the whole idea of making  them popular again, horrifying,  terrible.  And I guess this comes down to  the question of comics and  classrooms.  The person who occupies my  office at Brown University,  probably at this moment if he's  working over the weekend,  teaches a graphic novels course  with an attendance of 200 and if  he would let it would be 300.  It would be 300.  I think the Hernandez brothers  are the giant faves in that  class.  Obviously, that level but also  at the level of comics used for  the purpose of teaching  literacy.  There's a guy who was a Daily  Cardinal comic artist named  James Sturm. 

 He runs a comics academy in  White River Junction, Vermont.  If anybody wants to go and learn  from the best, they would go  there for a year.  But any rate, he also founded an  association for educators and  comics.  And there's no limit to what  comic art can do for literacy in  the time ahead.  There's so many things that it  can do, and it's only begun to  do those things.  Those seem really big, big  issues for me for comics.  Way, way back there.  >> Given the recent -- that  we've seen with underground  comics and comics in general.  (inaudible)  And there was one in  Milwaukee about two or three  years ago.  Related to the question about  academics, I think, is this the  greatest threat to the  underground nature of the form  or is it kind of -- things?  I worry about when I see these  types of things that, once it's  put behind glass, while it does  expose people to it, there's the  whole deadening effect of the  institution. 

 I struggle with that because I  enjoy all the pieces but I was  concerned about, wait,  this is our secret.  (inaudible)  >> Buhle: Let me respond to  that and then Harvey can.  First to mention one of the two  curators of that show is James  Danky over there.  And I don't think it's a  negative thing at all.  Underground comics died because  people stopped buying them.  By 1980 the whole field was  dead.  Some stuff was trickling on.  But American Splendor and a very  few other things were lifelines  for what remained.  Some of the wonderful artists  stopped drawing for 10 years  because they weren't being  published anywhere.  So this is something that needs  to be recuperated. 

 The second thing is that the  masters of American comics, that  was the phrase exhibit started  in the Hammer Museum in LA and  then moved to Milwaukee in 2006,  was fabulous for many reasons,  but among those was that for the  first time for comic art all  thing in art exhibits in museums  showed process, what were the  processes like in the creation  of comic art.  What were all the complications  in various aspects of it.  And that show was fabulous to me  because it legitimated a whole  lot of comic art as being a  serious and meaningful art form.  Somebody in Madison said to me  40 years ago poets are always  talking about money because they  don't have any.  I think the same thing is true,  a struggle to make a living for  comic artists who aren't drawing  for the daily papers because  it's disappearing fast, is so  severe that the idea that  something legitimates them and  means they might get an advance  on a book and all this other  stuff is hugely important.  So if there is a down side, I  don't perceive it.  Harvey.  >> Pekar: Yeah, there's  a couple of points  I'd like to make about  academics' reactions to comics.  And actually it spreads  beyond academics.  So the first thing I want to say  is, and I think Paul will agree  with me, is that we've had some  pretty crabby reviews but in  general the vast number of  reviews we've gotten have been  favorable. 

 And it's like I guess when you  write about anything that  somebody else knows something  about or somebody else is a  student about they think they  got, it's their territory you're  invading or something like that.  And you don't have any right to  say this stuff and you don't   have any right to vary from what  they say and things like that,  and it really gets people mad  because they think they got a  monopoly on whatever it is  you're writing about.  It's something you want to not  only watch other people about  but watch yourself about.  Because there's always this  well, who does this guy think he  is kind of thing that pops up in  your mind.  I knew about this 10 years ago.  I didn't even think it was worth  mentioning.  (laughter)  >> Buhle: It's good.  And many questions that come in  forums like this behind many of  the questions, many really good  questions, is should I be doing  comics.  And the answer is yes.  Ben Katchor, a really good  artist and a really good friend  of mine, insists that anybody  who wants to draw comics and  keeps at it can draw. 

 I would draw the line at myself.  As I realized at age 8 or so I  was not going to be one of the  talented or untalented artists.  And Harvey doesn't draw either,  except stick figures.  But people can teach themselves  to draw, there's some great  places to learn.  And, moreover, scripting is just  as important as drawing.  In some ways the story is the  most crucial thing in comic art.  A tiny portion gets published in  books, but the field's opening  up.  It's not paying but it's opening  up.  And there's plenty of  opportunity to publish on the  web, and there's plenty of  places to connect with other  people who are doing things.  Smith Magazine, an online  magazine, is doing continuing  stuff about Harvey and people  drawing caricatures or stories  from Harvey's stories and so  forth and so forth. 

 It's a very, very interesting  experiment.  I mention my pals at World War 3  who publish one issue a year.  And there's other kinds of  experiments going on and people  can connect and maybe me only  having really retired since July  there may be a great local comic  artist scene that I just don't  know about but you'll find out  about if you network.  So be encouraged.  If you want to think about doing  comics, do think about doing  comics.  It's a way to reach a lot of  young people among other people  and find a new art form, create  a new art form.  Yes, back there.  >> Will there be an opportunity  in the future to have you do a  similar talk while we're  actually viewing some of the  illustrations and comics?  >> Buhle: Oh, you raised  a good point.  If you're a professor these days  and you're not showing  PowerPoint people think you're a  hopelessly aged figure.  >> I don't mean PowerPoint, I  would like to see the images or  examples that you could actually  talk about. 

 >> Buhle: Generally PowerPoint  is the way we would do that.  Yeah, probably.  It just doesn't happen now.  And maybe in an hour if Lynda  Barry brings a flash drive that  can happen.  I think it didn't occur to me.  Yes?  >> Are any of your scripts,  Harvey, available for viewing?  Like the scripts for "Working,"  available in any publication  or anything?  >> Pekar: Well, I mean,  once in a while  somebody will ask me for,  I send them a Xerox of a script  of mine with their writing  an article about me.  I didn't really think there was  that much demand for it, and in  fact, there hasn't been.  People aren't that interested.  At least they don't come up to  me and say I'd like to see the  original thing that you did.  I have no objection to them  doing that. 

 >> Buhle: Yes.  >> Have you ever been approached  for television?  Like doing comics on television,  the Simpsons, American Dad,  stuff on Adult Swim?  (inaudible)  >> Pekar: I'll tell you  about one deal that's cooking  now and it's not exactly what  you might think it is.  As Paul mentioned, I'd been a  jazz critic for years and years  before I started doing comic  stories.  I started doing jazz criticism  in 1959, and I started doing  comics in 1972.  So I had something of a  reputation as a jazz critic and  the better my reputation as a  comic book critic, I mean as a  comic book writer became the  more highly people thought of my  jazz criticism, maybe not  surprisingly.  But now there's a guy in Ireland  who wants to do a thing about  the history of jazz where I  would be writing the script and  I would be narrating it.  So we're working on it.  And he's already apparently  gotten the BBC to commit money  for a pilot or something like  that.  And I guess most of the action  when musicians are playing and  stuff would be animated.  So that's about as close as I've  ever gotten. 

 There have been people that have  said things from time to time  about my doing stuff for TV but  nothing really close.  >> Buhle: Patty Elson.  >> I saw you on TV on the travel  channel with Anthony Bourdain.  Do you remember?  >> Pekar: Yeah, yeah sure.  Who can forget.  (laughter)  >> That was one of  the most unusual and clever  programs that I've seen on  television, which doesn't say  very much for television.  >> Pekar: You know it's funny  because we went to a restaurant,  we're trying to give him a real  taste of Cleveland,  so we went to a Polish  restaurant that was set up  like a cafeteria.  And the first time I went with  Bourdain we went with this guy  named Toby Radloff.  I don't know if anybody  remembers Toby from the American  Splendor movie, but among other  things Toby is this tremendous  glutton.  (laughter)  So we got in line,  Toby was with us, and we got in  line, Toby had his tray and the  first two things that he put in  it were these two huge pieces of  cake. 

 He likes sweet stuff and  everything like that.  And it was like that caught  everybody's attention and they  were watching him and listening  to him throughout his stay in  this place called Ostrovsky's.  So I just happened to have  occasion to go there again for  the first time in a couple of  years with some other guys, and  I'm standing in line and some  guy, some big fat guy who works  there comes up to me and says  where's Toby, where's Toby?  (laughter)  Toby is always good  for some audience response.  >> Buhle: In the world  of software development,  which baffles me pretty much  but like all of us  we seem to enjoy the products,  the distance between comics that  have been created by software  and animating them has been  reduced continually over the  last few years and will continue  to be reduced, which means the  prospects for comics of our kind  being made into animation seems  to be getting closer and closer.  That's great for comic artists  who are under 30, it's tough for  comic artists who are over 60.  One of my favorite books I  edited for comics for years is  Spain Rodriguez's biography of  Che Guevara.  Everything is by hand.  There's nothing software.  They would be starting from  scratch.  And likewise, another of my  favorite, Sharon Rudahl, did a  graphic biography  of Emma Goldman. 

 Magnificent book, wonderful  book.  But animating it would be  extraordinarily difficult.  On the other end, not to go on  and on here, Sabrina Jones  worked with me to create a  graphic biography of Isadora  Duncan, the famous dancer, which  also is just an unbelievably  great work.  And that's ready to be animated.  Wouldn't be such a big deal, or  so I'm told.  Have we run out of questions?  No, not yet.  >> I wanted to go back to the  adaptation process.  In a lot of ways the book is --  so Studs Terkel would adapt,  heavily edit, you said,  the words of the people  he was speaking with.  The adaptation  in graphic form here.  Did you ever have any moments,  either of you, during this  process where you thought the  result was fundamentally  different than the original  story?  Were there concerns that the  adaptation changed things?  >> Pekar: You mean  like doing comics?  >> I'm talking about the book  Working, in particular, when the  artist came to you or during the  adaptation you looked at it and  said this is somehow  fundamentally different than  what the original person was  saying?  >> Pekar: I want to make it  as similar as possible. 

 That was my goal because I  didn't feel like that was my  property to mess with.  It was a classic work and I  didn't want to screw around with  it.  >> Buhle: I'm sorry, in a way,  speaking as an historian,  it's not so distant  from me asking myself as  I got page after page from Spain  Rodriguez, one of the great  figures of underground comics,  was this really Che Guevara's  life.  And naturally I was looking for  mistakes or some factual errors  or whatever I could catch.  But I felt I had to give the  artist and script writer a great  deal of latitude because, again,  it's a story, it's told as a  story and if it isn't accurate  as a story than the artist has  her or his own way of making  sense of that narrative for  himself.  And I don't think, just speaking  of the comics in Working done by  artists themselves, I don't  think any two artists would ever  adapt a script in the same way,  or a story upon which they based  a script in the same way.  It's an art thing.  And it has to be an art thing.  Let's see if somebody  hasn't asked a question.  You haven't. 

 >> I had a stem cell transplant  several years ago.  I'm interested in Harvey's  perspective on post-chemo.  How do you view your life?  >> Pekar: Well, I guess  just about everything's --  and I guess one thing  that proves it is this  book "Our Cancer Year" that my  wife and I wrote together.  And I've talked about my  physical illness on a couple of  other occasions.  My wife now wants to write a  book called "Harvey and Joyce's  Big Book of Marriage."  And she's got this contract to  do it.  But we both have to sign it.  (laughter)  And I want the money,  that's how I make my living  these days doing  these graphic novels.  And they're getting harder and  harder to sell as the economy  goes down the tubes.  So naturally I want to get it  over with.  I want her to stop holding it  over my head and sign it and  have me sign it, but on the  other hand, I know that whatever  direction I push, she'll push  the other way. 

 (laughter)  So I'm just doing,  right now my policy  is watchful waiting.  (laughter)  >> Buhle: More candor, yes?  >> Maybe it will just be Joyce's  Book of Marriage.  >> Pekar: Well, the thing is,  it would have been  a lot simpler that way.  I'm not bragging when I tell you  this is true, they wanted my  name on the book.  All the money I make, it goes  into an account and Joyce has as  much access to it as I do.  And I'm hoping, I hope I'm not  mistaken, that if Joyce gets  some good money she'll make it  available.  (laughter)  I spend a lot less  money than she does anyway.  >> The question about adapting  things to the medium, what did  you think of the film American  Splendor?  >> Pekar: I thought  it was really good.  I didn't really think it was  like, I didn't write the script.  I thought it was really good  though, but I didn't think it  was maybe that close  to American Splendor. 

 They came up with a lot of  interesting devices that  couldn't be used in comics like  using me and the character who  plays me simultaneously in the  movie.  >> Buhle: And the animation,  all three.  Never been done before, I think.  >> Pekar: They tried,  they pulled out all the stops.  >> Buhle: You were pleased  with it?  >> Pekar: Yeah, I was amazed.  >> Buhle: You got a free trip  to Cannes.  >> Pekar: Yeah, it was  at Cannes, it was at Sundance,  it won an award at Cannes.  It probably wouldn't have if I  would have been in charge of  making the thing.  These people just, it's like  they were like film students and  they hadn't really gotten  anything really that heavy to do  since then.  So they got this and it was like  they had this accumulation of  ideas or something and they just  all blossomed. 

 I was really pleased.  I was glad just to get paid.  But to have a really good movie,  because a lot of movies that are  based on other things aren't too  good.  >> I was looking forward to  Toby's revenge.  >> Pekar: Toby does these movies  for local guys.  He made one called Killer Nerd,  and another one The Revenge of  Killer Nerd or something like  that.  (laughter)  There's one called Townies.  These are really, as you might  think, low budget productions,  and Toby doesn't get paid  anything for them.  And, as a matter of fact, I  think he might get ripped off.  He spends a lot of his own money  on this stuff. 

 And I don't know if that's  really necessary.  But the stuff exists and he's  got a following.  There are people that collect  his stuff.  >> Buhle: Let's see, somebody  who hasn't asked a question.  >> Harvey, earlier you were  talking about territorialism and  that type of thing in writing,  switching it into a different  background would you say you  still root for CC?  >> Pekar: Do I still, I'm sorry?  >> Do you still root for CC?  >> Pekar: Sabathia?  My interest in baseball has been  waning since 1954 when...  >> Buhle: The Indians lost the  series in four games to the  Giants.  >> Pekar: It wasn't,  it was more than that.  The Indians who had been  finishing second to the Yankees  or third year after year after  year and who had actually won  the series in '48 with this  miracle team that included  Satchel Paige, the great negro  league star, and Larry Doby, the  first black player in the  American league, and Gene  Bearden, this wounded war hero  that came out and won 20 and  lost only seven and stuff like  that.  >> Buhle: Early Wynn?  >> Pekar: No, he wasn't on  a team yet,  he was with Washington.  And that was like  a miracle year. 

 Like one of these, because they  only won a World Series once  before in their history.  So they go back and they've got  good players but the Yankees  beat them all the time.  So then '54 comes along and they  must have put something in the  water in Cleveland because the  American League record for wins  in a season, 154 game season,  which is what they played then,  was 110, and it was set by this  great New York Yankees team that  had Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig and  all those guys on it and  Cleveland wins 111 games.  So this has got to be a great  team, right?  So we're all going into the  series with real high  expectations.  So I think it was around the 7th  inning and the score is tied,  and Cleveland has two runners on  and this is being played in the  polo grounds in New York, this  old field that was 505 feet to  dead center.  In other words, almost  impossible to hit a home run to  dead center.  The Indians, there was this guy  named Vic Wertz, who was a real  good hitter, came up and he hits  this shot to dead center, 460  feet.  Mays whirls...  >> Buhle: Willie Mays  races back, instinctively.  >> Pekar: And catches it over  his head, whirls and throws  the ball back to the infield. 

 The rally is broken.  The Indians go on to lose that  game with some guy hitting a  200, the polo grounds also had  real short left and right field  things so some guy hit a  262-foot home run down the right  field line and they went on to  lose three more games and I've  never...  >> Buhle: Dusty Rhodes.  >> Pekar: Yeah, dusty Rhodes  was his name.  Oh, God.  So ever since then it's just  been gradually slipping away  from me.  (laughter)  >> Buhle: Yes, yes, yes.  Anyway, let's get somebody who  hasn't asked a question.  You.  >> Yeah, this is for Harvey, I  was wondering what are some of  the joys... 

 (inaudible)  And how does that  change because of your fame?  >> Pekar: Well, I'm not unique  in what I enjoy.  I mean, I enjoy getting a lot of  money, for example.  (laughter)  Or I enjoy somebody  complimenting me effusively.  (laughter)  Something like that.  Or getting revenge on somebody.  (laughter)  The standard stuff.  (laughter)  And what annoys me,  one thing that annoys me is that  I have to still hustle so hard  to sell a comic book story and  stuff like that.  I don't know, mostly I'm an  obsessive compulsive person, and  I got paranoid tendencies and I  bring a lot of grief down on my  own head.  And I know that and I've been  knowing that for years.  And I just can't seem to do  nothing about it. 

 >> Buhle: He has mellowed.  >> (inaudible)  >> Pekar: Pardon?  >> (inaudible)  >> Pekar: Yeah,  I was always messed up.  (laughter)  >> Buhle: Let's see, I guess you  a second time.  >> With how Terkel would shape  his stories.  (inaudible)  In some way where  he's not, there's an emotion but  he's not going to cross over.  (inaudible)  >> Buhle: You know, I had  students 10 years doing field  work in oral history, the best  way to get a student off campus  is have him do oral history with  perfectly normal people, mostly  working people or, in my case,  aged peaceniks or radical nuns,  etc., those types.  And the only terrible interviews  were with professors.  Those would be the worst.  (laughter)  Because they've been  thinking about their  autobiographies all their life.  (laughter)  Polishing it up in  hopes of making it sound better  than it is, more interesting  than it is. 

 And likewise, musicians are  almost impossible to interview  effectively, in my experience.  And anybody who's been famous  and thinks a lot of themselves.  But other people, ordinary  people, it's amazing that a high  percentage of interviews are  incredibly dramatic, emphatic  and great simply because they're  life story interviews and  because these people who haven't  been asked to tell their life  stories before wish to lay it  out to interviewers.  And are honored to have some  college student come and ask  them about their life.  And tears aren't infrequent.  With crises in teenage years.  Bad stuff happens.  They begin straightening things  out, and if it's about a social  movement, as my students often  did and I often did, then 10  years go by after the -- has  collapsed, and suddenly it's  historical and ironic instead of  being epic.  Or it was epic and it became  ironic.  In other words, people construct  the story of their life and if  they don't over construct it by  being too intellectualized then  those things are there. 

 And I guess Studs' enormous  talent was to hone it down and  bring the points up more  clearly.  But I listen to the interviews.  I think about these interviews  with -- Yiddish speakers in  1981, and I still get the lump  in the throat because they want  to tell their life stories and  they're pretty darn frank about  it.  Yes, our media personality.  >> The adaptation came out about  a year after Studs died,  what was the status  of the project when he died?  What consultation was there with  him?  And what rights of approval did  he or his estate have over the  finished work?  >> Buhle: The biggest problem  was that we were really hoping  and planning he would live  a few more years.  Really.  He very much liked the idea of  it, the work, the art was still  underway when he died.  And his heirs or the Terkel  estate, etc.,  they sort of turned over  everything except money for film  adaptation to the New Press.  The Terkel legacy keeps the New  Press alive in my candid  opinion.  >> Pekar: Incidentally, Studs  is on record as saying that  the book, as much of it  as he saw, he really liked it. 

 >> Buhle: And that's probably  all we can say.  It would have been great to have  him go over it.  But he also had a sort of artist  integrity or artist autonomy  thing where if he lived several  more years, and mostly was  sleeping a lot during the last  years because of the medication,  if he lived several more years I  strongly suspect he would say  this is an art form and I'm not  going to say if this is done  wrongly or differently than I  would have done it.  It wouldn't be like Studs to  take that view.  >> When you got the rights, they  didn't retain any approval of  the finished product?  >> Buhle: Only on film  adaptations, purportedly.  The first stage of film  adaptation is in the process of  being negotiated.  Will this ever come to anything?  I doubt it seriously.  But if it does than the estate  gets 50%.  And I think Harvey will be able  to buy a pizza with what we get,  if there's anything at all.  But maybe it will be an  expensive pizza,  a Madison pizza. 

 Yes?  >> Do you refer to your working  in musical at any point?  (inaudible)  >> Buhle: No.  No, I never saw it.  I'm allergic to musicals, I'm  afraid.  As I say, I was a humanist, a  human for this little tiny stage  adaptation at an earlier stage  and that's my only connection.  Yes, again.  >> (inaudible)  >> Buhle: You mean in  terms of comics?  >> No.  (inaudible)  >> Buhle: It's so broad.  It's easy for me to say that Ken  Burns is awful.  And everything that corporate  America wants to tell about  America, despite having great  researchers and great footage  with his brother and others, and  that Michael Moore's  documentaries are, in a way,  implicitly a savage attack on  Ken Burn's mode and mentality.  But interviews are so much a  part of documentary film making  that it's so much bigger than  what field workers like me used  to do. 

 And it's hard to say, everything  that it is, what's really great  and so forth and so forth.  Michael Moore is the greatest  filmmaker I know of right now,  or his films have a huge impact  on me.  So I'm prejudiced along those  lines.  And the field is so broad I  would be to loathe to say, oh,  there's like seven other things  that I think are really great  because maybe I don't see so  many of them.  >> (inaudible)  >> Buhle: What do I  think about StoryCorps?  Well, the StoryCorps guy blurbs  the book so it doesn't behoove  me to say even one negative  thing about it.  However, I will say my friends  at Brown who use this stuff or  work with the stuff, they have  only one criticism, that the  people who appear on StoryCorps  most all seem to be the same  social stratum, listeners to  National Public Radio.  Is that a fair criticism?  It's not entirely fair.  But is it accurate?  I suspect it's accurate.  And I don't have the answer for  how it should be different.  That's just an observation. 

 Have we reached the end?  There, yes, again.  >> (inaudible)  >> Buhle: It's where  it all starts.  In a way, the first sustained  oral history in the US were the  slave narratives.  Some of the people who were  interviewing people who had been  slaves, obviously as children,  were the decedents of plantation  owners or other respectable  white people and the former  slaves didn't hardly give them  candid stories of the horrors  and so forth.  But nevertheless, despite all  the limitations, they got over  thousands of pages of slaves  narratives which finally were  published, edited by a friend of  mine George --, and published in  the early 1970s, and then oral  history was nothing until it was  started at Columbia University,  and they only interviewed people  who were really important, all  white men who didn't write  memoirs.  That was the first idea about  oral history, the first archive  that was ever funded.  And then 10 years later they  were doing all kinds of other  work.  And that's, in a way, the best  oral history project in the  country or the flagship.  The other thing was presidential  papers.  The Truman papers were the first  presidential papers of oral  history and they were very, very  carefully bedded. 

 All tapes were erased because  nobody wanted anything of the  dirt of the Truman  administration, and there was  plenty of it, to be available in  the public record.  And I presume it so with other  presidential papers, the oral  history aspects.  It's a way for oral historians  to make money so I don't want to  say too much negative about it.  But oral history then sort of  like moved to a higher niche and  got broader and broader and did  a lot more great stuff.  So it's a process which really  begins with those slave  narratives and then becomes more  and more a community history.  And everything that oral history  is today, if you happen to go to  an oral history academic  convention,  eventually there'll probably be  one in Madison, you see the  lowest percentage of PhDs at any  academic convention you will  ever go to.  You'll probably see the highest  percentage of women, also,  because it's an occupation that  doesn't pay hardly anything at  all, has very little prestige,  and there aren't very many  university poisitions.  But if you happen to go to this  convention, you'll hear a lot of  great work being done through  love, and not so much for money.  Yes, again.  >> (inaudible)  >> Buhle: I think  the answer was,  we were satisfied with Studs'  adaptation, so we didn't see any  need to go further than that. 

 Wouldn't want to correct Studs,  gosh.  That would be horrible, yes?  >> Sorry, since you brought up  the theme again of oral history,  I was wondering whether you'd  like to comment on Steven  Spielberg's effort, I think --  southern California.  >> Buhle: This is the Holocaust  interviews.  Yeah, yeah.  >> (inaudible)  >> Buhle: I think it's  admirable, and it's not a  subject which hasn't been done  very considerably in many  places, but the thoroughness  with which he provided the means  to take it on, is in some ways a  model of a huge behemoth of an  oral history project.  And that's good, and there's  been a lot of discussion within  the field of oral history, about  how people remember things,  about how Holocaust survivors  remember things, it's very  interesting because it isn't at  all what you'd expect.  It's very, very complex, and you  know, I'm hoping other areas of  human history get as documented  in oral history as the Holocaust  experience has been documented.  That would be my response.  Yes, again.  >> Do you want to keep doing  stuff until the end?  (laughter)  >> Pekar: If I could picture  myself hanging out and  listening to jazz, yeah, you  know, I'd like to end it like  that. 

 But I don't see any, see...  I had this job at the federal  government as a file clerk for  the VA hospital.  And it was my dream job, because  it was the lowest level job they  had, but I made enough to get  by, and the work was so simple,  it was just beyond boring, it  was like, I didn't even have to  think about it, I just went  around like in a dream or  something and did my work and  talked to people.  I got a lot of stories out of  work.  And you know, then...  Let me think.  It just, I don't know.  I just...  You know, I used to get  awards for doing outstanding  work when I didn't hardly do any  work.  I used to carry around a box of  recrods, LPs with me, to sell  while I went about my duties. 

 So this was really a wonderful,  for me, job at the time, but  what I didn't realize was that  your pension is based on how  much money you make during your  career.  And I never even asked for a  promotion, and I'd known people  who worked for the federal  government for a long time and  had gotten pensions, but these  were people that went up in the  hierarchy.  Whereas I stayed in the same  place for 37 years.  So when I got my pension I was  like, what?  (laughter)  How can these other people live?  And then my wife  explained it to me.  (laughter)  >> Buhle: On that note,  and because we need to go  out in the hallway and sign some  books I hope, thank you very  much.  (applause)