Maggie's Farm

We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.

Our Recent Essays Behind the Front Page

Much Sorry with Delays
Birth, Death and All That Stuff in Between
How to Honor Labor Day, Every Day
My Yom Kippur Miracle (Repost from 2010)
Good intro to fly casting
Peach update, with pie
NYC update
Easy for you to say: To the elites on mass immigration
For NYC on 9/11, Sailors' Snug Harbor
Pickled Peaches
Water Shoes
Labor Costs in U.S.
Your "identity"
Good news about The Great Courses
Uses of Hot Pepper Jelly/Sauce, Chutneys, and Jams
A Saturday Drive to Litchfield County, CT
How to Pick a Kayak
Civilized: Fruit forks and knives
Loads of kayaking on Cape Cod
Psychology Experiments' Questionable Results

Categories


All categories

Quicksearch

Links

Blog Administration

Open login screen

RSS Readers

Add to Google

Subscribe with Bloglines

Monday, October 26. 2009

James Thurber

The other night I became distracted by reading the series on radio soap operas which James Thurber wrote for The New Yorker in 1948. "Soapland" is in Thurber's The Beast in Me and Other Animals.


I envy Thurber's clarity, simplicity, and directness of writing, whether he is doing humor or regular reporting. Liked him better than EB White, with whom Thurber collaborated in writing the spoof on self-help books, Is Sex Necessary?, in 1929.


If you have never read Thurber, you are missing a real delight. Start with The Thurber Carnival. I could not find any of his toons on line, but I didn't spend much time searching.


Here's a good summary of the history of the radio soaps. Thurber's piece on the topic is a masterpiece of straightforward New Yorker-style reportage; the kind that can make any random topic fascinating because it is so well-written.

Posted by Bird Dog in Our Essays, The Culture, "Culture," Pop Culture and Recreation at 15:51 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)

Trackbacks
Trackback specific URI for this entry

No Trackbacks

Comments
Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)

Thurber's soap summary is what I cite to describe today's news channels

"In many soap operas, a permanent question is either implied or actually posed every day by the serial narrators. These questions are usually expressed in terms of doubt, indecision, or inner struggle. Which is more important, a woman's heart or a mother's duty? Could a woman be happy with a man fifteen years older than herself? Should a mother tell her daughter that the father of the rich man she loves ruined the fortunes of the daughter's father? Should a mother tell her son that his father, long believed dead, is alive, well, and a criminal? Can a good, clean Iowa girl find happiness as the wife of New York's most famous matinee idol? Can a beautiful young stepmother, can a widow with two children, can a restless woman married to a preoccupied doctor, can a mountain girl in love with a millionaire, can a woman married to a hopeless cripple, can a girl who married an amnesia case - can they find soap-opera happiness and the good, soap-opera way of life? No, they can't - not, at least, in your time and mine. The characters in Soapland and their unsolvable preplexities will be marking time on the air long after you and I are gone, for we must grow old and die, whereas the people of Soapland have a magic immunity to age, like Peter Pan and the Katzenjammer Kids. When you and I are in Heaven with the angels, the troubled people of Ivorytown, Rinsoville, Anacinburg, and Crisco Corners, forever young or forever middle-aged, will still be up to their ears in inner struggle, soul searching, and everlasting frustration."

James Thurber ``II - Ivorytown, Rinsoville, Anacinburg, and Crisco Corners'' Soapland in The Beast in Me and Other Animals p.222

The news biz is aimed at soap opera women, which is a large (40% of women) enough audience to sustain the advertisers, and they come every day, news or no news, so long as there is a predictable soap narrative line.

It's that audience or nothing, for the business model.

They sell the women to advertisers.
#1 rhhardin (Link) on 2009-10-26 17:11 (Reply)
Thank you for the nudge -- I hadn't read any Thurber for quite some time (way too long).

And by the way, Thurber's cartoons are definitely available online; googling
Thurber cartoons
will return a boatload of hits, the first being Google images, over 30,000 of them (yes, of course there are duplicates).
#2 Jeannette Hawkins on 2009-10-26 21:04 (Reply)
I am a person who has to reread Thurber at least twice a year, as that fellow is one of the few, if not the only, humor writer of his time whose work really holds up well.
#3 SCOTTtheBADGER on 2009-10-26 22:22 (Reply)
And if you have never read E. B. White, you are missing a real delight. Try "One Man's Meat".

They don't make them like these two anymore.
#4 KBK on 2009-10-27 01:32 (Reply)

Add Comment
(Your e-mail will not show in your comment)

By commenting on this site you agree to the site rules listed here. Email
addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for email notifications.

Quick reference guide: [i] italics [/i], [b] bold [/b], [u] underline [/u],
[url] (web address) [/url]. More tips here.

Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (*word*), underscore are made via _word_.
E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications.

To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly.
CAPTCHA

BBCode format allowed
 
 
A Chris Southern Consulting website.