Thurber Tonight -- special edition: At the 92nd Street Y Thurber "do," Keith O gives a virtuoso performance

"I am trying to use reason and intelligence," said the strange new mongoose.

"Reason is six-sevenths of treason," said one of his neighbors.

"Intelligence is what the enemy uses," said another.

-- from Thurber's "The Peacelike Mongoose"

by Ken

I'm just back from the "celebration" of Thurber I mentioned the other day, with Keith Olbermann and friends Rosemary Thurber, the author's daughter (who is extremely wary of public events, and hadn't been in New York in a lot of years before coming for this event); Bob Mankoff, the cartoonist and cartoon editor of The New Yorker; and longtime New Yorker reporter and humorist Calvin Trillin. The moderator, political comic Scott Blakeman, noted that with Keith's new version of Countdown going on the Current TV air a week from tomorrow, June 20, he was taking time out from what is probably the busiest week of his career -- and that on top of having to wheel himself out in a wheelchair as a result of breaking his foot.

It was actually, to my surprise, really nice. There was even a stretch -- when Keith read Thurber's The Last Flower (which either Thurber or E. B. White, I forget which, declared his favorite Thurber book) while the crucial drawings of this words-and-drawings book were projected. I couldn't imagine that this would work very well, The Last Flower being such a "booky" kind of book, but the projections of the drawings projected them surprisingly successfully, and in combination Keith read the text splendidly.


I'll probably have more to say about the event, but for tonight, I'm pushing back the scheduled "Perelman Tonight" in order to bring you the story that has become one of Keith's most important readings -- and, as we'll see, non-readings. It was the fable "The Peacelike Mongoose" that was the first Thurber text Keith read on Countdown, at the urging of his hospital-bound father, to whom he had been reading everything he could think of, including (much to his father's pleasure) Thurber, going through (he said) pretty much the whole of the big Library of America Thurber volume.

Keith launched the on-air Thurber reading with great trepidation, but immediately won some important supporters. It was how he discovered that both Rosemary Thurber and her daughter, Sara Thurber Sauers, were regular Countdown viewers, and had seen the reading, and were thrilled. Keith had worried about the copyright situation, and Rosemary solved that by granting him permission to read whatever of her father's works he wished.

What's more, the timing proved eerily fortuitous. It turned out that at that very moment Rosemary was negotiating with an English textbook publisher for the right to include "The Peacelike Mongoose" (from Thurber's second volume of fables, Further Fables for Our Time) in a textbook, something she hoped to be able to accomplish, because she likes the idea of students reading Thurber. However, the publisher was insisting on the right to edit the text, which is pretty silly in the case of a writer who writes as meticulously as JT (earlier, Keith had read a long-time favorite piece of his, "A Box to Hide In" from The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze, and noted that while it was written for the page rather than performance, it couldn't be more successful as a performance piece if it had been written for it -- the sentences, the cadences, the words all being calculated with astounding precision for maximum performance effect). The bottom-line sticking point was what most readers would describe as one of the piece's particular glories, the word mongoosexual. Once Keith had uttered the dreaded word on the air, it became a non-issue.

But that early on-ar reading of "Mongoose" was only half the reason for its significance to Keith. Because he had planned to read it again the night of his last MSNBC Countdown. Only he was asked by people at MSNBC not to read it. He left it to the audience to imagine what nerve the piece might have touched with his former employers.


WHAT SPOOKED THOSE MSNBC EXECS ABOUT
"THE PEACELIKE MONGOOSE"? CLICK HERE


TOMORROW IN PERELMAN TONIGHT: Part 1 of "How Sharper Than a Serpent's Tooth"


THURBER TONIGHT (including BENCHLEY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, BOB AND RAY, E. B. WHITE, JEAN SHEPHERD, and PERELMAN TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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