OF A GOLDEN AGE

After I glimpsed Pekar at the book fair (see previous post), I stood at attention for the next hour and a half knowing he’d eventually be back. The coordinator came back to ask if I wanted to be rotated, but of course I was waiting to see Harvey Pekar again. She said, “Oh, come upstairs and meet him!”

Pekar and his editor, Paul Buhle, were in the hospitality room and we talked for a few minutes before they had to go downstairs for their panel discussion. I also met Bucky Halker, a Wisconsin-born singer-songwriter and labor academic who reminds me of Jeff Bridges circa Fearless (tall, thin, runaway hair, piercing blue eyes) and serves on the Woody Guthrie Foundation board.

At past Printers Rows, Studs Terkel presented his own program, but at this first one since his death in October they invited Pekar and Buhle to discuss their recent graphication of portions of Terkel’s most famous book, Working. Really, Pekar and Terkel are cut of the same cloth: both are magnetic personalities (though Pekar has great social anxiety) who spend their lives discussing the overlooked “ordinary” people who populate most of the world. By holding these people’s stories up to the light, we can give them the attention they deserve — not by romanticizing, or making them unhealthily famous (Cough . . . Susan Boyle?), but by acknowledging that everyone plays a part.

Because of the draw of Studs Terkel (especially in Chicago) and Pekar’s elevated profile since 2003′s great movie adaptation of American Splendor, CSPAN’s Book TV broadcast the panel live. In this context I felt more self conscious as the loudest laugher. Whoops.

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