James Thurber

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What do you think of Thurbers work, and where is a good place to start?

― ... (gareth), Sunday, 28 September 2003 20:36 (twenty-two years ago)

What I've read of it is pleasant enough. I have some sort of collection of essays with some drawings. None of it was dazzling and I don't really remember any of it. If I were Momus I'd give it a 4/10, maybe 5 for the drawings.

― Chris P (Chris P), Sunday, 28 September 2003 20:46 (twenty-two years ago)

"Has anyone noticed the sores on the tops of the horses in the agricultural barn?"

― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Sunday, 28 September 2003 20:56 (twenty-two years ago)

There are some decent collections of highlights. I think my favourite of his is his memoir of his New Yorker editor, The Years With Ross, but I like everything he wrote and drew, near enough.

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Sunday, 28 September 2003 21:18 (twenty-two years ago)

He must be one of the de facto patron saints of I Love Everything. He described himself as a writer "of light pieces running from a thousand to two thousand words.

"The notion that such persons are gay of heart and carefree is curiously untrue. They lead, as a matter of fact, an existence of jumpiness and apprehension. They sit on the edge of the chair of Literature. In the house of Life they have the feeling that they have never taken off their overcoats. Afraid of losing themselves in the larger flight of the two-volume novel, or even the one-volume novel, they stick to short accounts of their misadventures because they never get so deep into them but that they feel they can get out. This type of writing is not a joyous form of self-expression but the manifestation of a twitchiness both cosmic and mundane. Authors of such pieces have, nobody knows why, a genius for getting into minor difficulties: they walk into the wrong apartments, they drink furniture polish for stomach bitters, they drive their cars into prize tulip beds of haughty neighbors, they playfully slap gangsters, mistaking them for old school friends. To call such persons 'humorists,' a loose-fitting and ugly word, is to miss the nature of their dilemma and the dilemma of their nature. The little wheels of their invention are set in motion by the damp hand of melancholy.

"The 'time' of such a writer, then, is hardly worth reading about if the reader wishes to find out what was going on in the world while the writer in question was alive and at what might be laughingly called 'his best.' All that the reader is going to find out is what happened to the writer. The compensation, I suppose, must lie in the comforting feeling that one has had, after all, a pretty sensible and peaceful life, by comparison. It is unfortunate, however, that even a well-ordered life cannot lead one safely around the inevitable doom that waits in the skies. As F. Hopkinson Smith long ago pointed out, the claw of the sea-puss gets us all in the end."

― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Sunday, 28 September 2003 22:14 (twenty-two years ago)

I have to think more about how to explain his genius. It might be to do with his prickly relationship to everything (including himself), and how that somehow, miraculously, intersects with the generousity he shows to even his most unsympathetic characters.

― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Sunday, 28 September 2003 22:36 (twenty-two years ago)

"Has anyone noticed the sores on the tops of the horses in the agricultural barn?"

Surely "WHO has noticed . . . "?

I thought that was from his advice to budding writers on how to get the reader all interested in the story.

― felicity (felicity), Sunday, 28 September 2003 22:40 (twenty-two years ago)

Felicity is correct!! Also, "agricultural barn" ought to be "animal husbandry building," but that's a less-serious error. Felicity, when I was haranguing mark s with readings taken from random pages in Thurber Carnival he finally stopped me long enough to flip to that sentence. It's near the cartoon of a quiveringly furious botany professor.

― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Sunday, 28 September 2003 22:52 (twenty-two years ago)

I love Thurber Carnival. The dabchick? 'Tis the little grebe.

― felicity (felicity), Sunday, 28 September 2003 22:56 (twenty-two years ago)

i used to love james thurber, especially his cartoons. he drew dogs better than just about anyone.

― Justyn Dillingham (Justyn Dillingham), Monday, 29 September 2003 07:20 (twenty-two years ago)

Ivan Brunetti strips about Thurber:

http://www.highwaterbooks.com/ivan/ivan_012.html
http://www.highwaterbooks.com/ivan/ivan_018.html

― Chriddof (Chriddof), Monday, 29 September 2003 08:35 (twenty-two years ago)

fourteen years pass...

Always been curious to see the 1969-70 sitcom based on JT's work, My World... and Welcome to It, which won a couple major Emmys despite running one year. AFAIK it's never been available on home media.

The same creators made a related feature film in '72, The War Between Men and Women, starring Jack Lemmon as a misogynist cartoonist losing his sight. It's not very good, tho Barbara Harris is terrific as always.

― ice cream social justice (Dr Morbius), Saturday, 10 March 2018 16:33 (eight years ago)

Have found memories of that show. William Windom and Lisa Gerritsen!

― Whiney On The Moog (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, 10 March 2018 16:38 (eight years ago)

Lisa G is also in the Lemmon movie... good kid actor.

― ice cream social justice (Dr Morbius), Saturday, 10 March 2018 17:09 (eight years ago)

"Has anyone noticed the sores on the tops of the horses in the agricultural barn?"
― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Sunday, September 28, 2003 9:56 PM (fourteen years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol that i never spotted this before, this is one of my favourite thurber jokes

as a teenager i tried to write an opera based on THE WHITE DEER, it was bad not good

― mark s, Saturday, 10 March 2018 19:00 (eight years ago)

I Break Everything I Touch

― Whiney On The Moog (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, 10 March 2018 19:09 (eight years ago)

A Sort of Genius

― Whiney On The Moog (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, 10 March 2018 19:12 (eight years ago)

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