Thurber Tonight: "Sex ex Machina" from "Let Your Mind Alone!"

Happily mated rabbit terrified by motor-car

"Still other [writers] attribute the whole menace of the machine to sex, and so confuse the average reader that he cannot always be certain whether he has been knocked down by an automobile or is merely in love."

-- from "Sex ex Machina," the last
of our Let Your Mind Alone! offerings

by Ken

As noted previously, this as far as we're going with the Let Your Mind Alone! series (two installments away from the end). I still haven't figured out what we'll do next week for our final week of late-night more-or-less-comic writing. (We might fill in some of the missed episodes of Thurber's My Life and Hard Times . . . .)

I still haven't turned up my lovely replacement copy for my previous lost copy of Thurber and E. B. White's Is Sex Necessary? (for that matter, I still haven't turned up my at-large copy of the Library of America Thurber volume; it's just a matter of time . . . probably), in order to present White's version of how he engineered the use of Thurber drawings -- at a time when practically nobody outside the small office they shared at The New Yorker, which was apparently littered with the damned things, had seen a Thurber drawing -- as illustrations for the book, to the consternation of their editor at Harper's, who assumed, when first confronted with the drawings (with Thurber's dashed-off pencil strokes laboriously and painstakingly inked over by White), that they must be rough sketches for artwork the authors wished to have produced.

There's a lot of other stuff I never got to, but there's one project in particular I've had in mind for ages: to see whether there isn't a manageably extractable chunk from Thurber's memoir The Years With Ross concerning The New Yorker's publication of Wolcott Gibbs's famous November 1936 profile of Time, Inc. editor-magnate Henry Luce (there were all manner of permutations and complications and ramifications), which would be presented in tandem with the piece itself, "TIME . . . FORTUNE . . . LIFE . . . LUCE." That still feels like a lot of work, though. (Why do you think I never did it?)

In the meantime . . . .

YOU KNOW YOU WANT IT! FOR
"SEX EX MACHINA," CLICK HERE

Our coverage of the Let Your Mind Alone! series:

1. "Pythagoras and the Ladder"
2. "Destructive Forces in Life"
3. "The Case for the Daydreamer"
4, "A Dozen Disciplines"
5. "How to Adjust Yourself to Your Work"
6. "Anodynes for Anxieties"
7. "The Conscious vs. The Unconscious"
8. "Sex ex Machina" (tonight)

ONE LAST TIME, ANY REQUESTS?

As noted above, I still don't have this last week planned, so if you have any thoughts, there's at least a chance I may be able to do them, or something like them, or something distantly related to them. As I said the other day, it might be worth a shot.


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

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