Potluck Dinner Weds!

Emily has kindly offered to host a gathering--I propose Weds. early-ish [6 or 7] to allow subsequent young-folk activities [work or play]! If half of us bring dishes, we'll have plenty for all... so none fear culinary duties. I can also do it Thurs. or even Friday, but I fear too many of you will have flown the coop by then. I really would like to see everyone again in an even less formal setting!

here it is

I, the final arbiter

and ultimate enforcer

of such things (appointed by the king!), make official

and binding this: that the eyes shall be gouged out

and replaced by hot coals

in the head, the blockhead,

of each citizen who,

upon reaching his/her majority,

has yet to read

Moby-Dick, by Mr. Herman Melville (1819-1891), American

novelist

and poet.

a poem

I ran across this poem on NPR... "Eyes Scooped Out and Replaced by Hot Coals" by Thomas Lux.

I think Melville would appreciate this

A typographer designed a series of images based on Moby-Dick and the letter E. very intriguing, and pretty.


http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/typography/

Melville and Kafka

When I read Bartleby, I made connections to Kafka's The Hunger Artist, but didn't think much of it.

Now, reading Tartarus of Maids, I realize that it intensely resembles Kafka's In The Penal Colony!

Has anyone else who's read these noticed the parallels? There's probably no evidence that Kafka read Melville, but the parallels are far too striking to ignore.

The Simpsons - Season 4 - Last Exit to Springfield

I love the early seasons of The Simpsons. In a season 4 episode called "Last Exit to Springfield," Burns eliminates the dental plan from his workers' benefits, causing them to strike. In the climax point, Burns says, "Springfield, from hell’s heart I stab at thee" just before he turns out the power to the entire city.

On a random note, this episode is also considered one of the series' best. Click on the title to see a wikipedia blurb on it.

beer

"Call me Ishmael... Our honey-colored English-style pale ale is generously hopped with Goldings for a light fruity aroma, and brewed with boatloads of crystal malt for a sweet caramel finish. A white whale of a good time!" It isn't.

The Real Confidence Man

There was an actual confidence trickster, operating on the streets of New York during the 1840's. A newspaper coined the term "confidence man" in 1849.


http://chnm.gmu.edu/lostmuseum/lm/328/

How come we never knew this?

In 1975, the sperm whale was designated as Connecticut's state animal!

see more here:
http://www.ct.gov/ctportal/cwp/view.asp?a=885&q=246476

Trip Feedback - A+

Though Moby-Dick is more than a ship's log, I definitely found its ship lingo and nautical images pretty overwhelming at times. When I saw the comparable whale ship in Mystic, the Pequod's story became a lot more real and relatable. I felt like I could interact with the text more since I knew where on the ship the oil was prepared, where men like Ishmael slept, and where Ahab would have eaten dinner. Seeing everything up-close allowed me to become more than a clueless onlooker, and therefore made the book more interesting for me. In Moby-Dick, Melville provides the reader with "extracts" and other pieces of external testimony meant to corroborate the evidence of the story. These are snippets of information that are held "outside" the main text in order to validate the reader's experience. For me, seeing the ship was a necessary bit of outside "reading" that encouraged my experience with the "inside" reading.

Overall, I really enjoyed the trip! (+ the moussaka pizza - delicious)

Stein vs Melville

The self-professed genius Gertrude Stein wrote a poem in Tender Buttons that I think gets the gist of Moby Dick in a much more condensed language:

"A White Hunter"

A white hunter is nearly crazy.

The Whiteness of the Trail: Alta

Capitaine Achab

just out in France, I think

white (killer) whale spotted

Human Tofu!

http://www.strangenewproducts.com/2005/09/tofu-that-tastes-like-human-flesh.html

Came across this the other day and thought it was pretty funny. They recently took this product off the market, but the idea of cannibalism for vegetarians struck me and made me think of Typee. Unfortunately, the product's actual web site was taken off the internet.

Pizza and whales? Odd

Stretching a bit for this one. Maybe not, especially if we're going to mystic pizza (!! !!!!!). Whales and pizza sit just fine with me.

Shatner, the white whale

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJTi7KJPx_E

Star Trek 2: Wrath of Khan trailer.

Couldn't find a clip, but Imdb confirms that Khan speaks such lines as "To the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee."

Sperm whale attack

A video of what a real sperm whale attack might have been like.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHIBwl-rSaI

Nathan Swain

Nathan Swain is mentioned twice (as far as I can remember), the first time being on p. 27, when Ishmael describes the interior of the Spouter-Inn, decorated with a "heathenish array of monstrous clubs and spears" that make "you shudder as you gaze, and wonder what monstrous cannibal could ever have gone a death-harvesting with such a hacking, horrifying implement." Also hanging on the wall alongside the "storied weapons" of heroic whalers like Nathan Swain, who "fifty years ago did kill fifteen whales between a sunrise and sunset."

The second mention of "young Nat Swain" is on p. 85-6 when Peleg stops Bildad from preaching scripture to Queequeg, afraid of his "spoiling our harpooneer": "Pious harpooners never make good voyagers--it takes the shark out of em'; no harpooner is worth a straw who aint pretty sharkish. There was young Nat Swain, once the bravest boat-header out of all Nantucket and the Vineyard; he joined the meeting, and never came to good. He got so frightened about his plaguy soul, that he shrinked and sheered away from whales, for fear of after-claps, in case he got stove and went to Davy Jones."

I did a google search for Nathaniel Swain and found some genealogical records for the Swain family, who apparently were among the founding families involved in the settlement of Nantucket, forced to move from Puritan New England to the island for sympathizing with Quakers. It appears that there was a Nathaniel Swain alive during the 18th century. Several records claim that Nathaniel's father Benjamin was "killed by a whale." Whether Melville knew of a historical Nathan Swain or was just using a typical Nantucket surname to create a fictional whaler-hero, there is still the dusting of a pretty sweet (and relevant) storyline here: Quaker son takes to the sea to avenge his father's death and becomes a whale-killing legend.

The Melville Scholar at Microsoft

To add to Professor Baraw's suspicions, Microsoft Word suggests "tattoo" for "Tashtego."

There are not wanting some points of curious similitude

Today's Onion

http://www.theonion.com/content/news_briefs/whale_expert_measures

today

today when a stranger asked me what I writing and reading about, I told him Moby Dick. he then asked what I thought Ahab held onto while he was riding the whale.

has anyone else had people (outside of classmates) talk to them about reading "the whale"?

Quietude

When I type "Queequeg" in Word, it wants to correct it as "Quietude."

ironic, when we think of "savagery" vs. "quietude"

McSweeney's List

McSweeney's Internet Tendency has a feature of lists submitted by readers that is sometimes funny and sometimes falls completely flat. Actually they are mostly absurdly dorky and obscure but I found one that was ok: "Chapter Titles in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick that Misleadingly Suggest Racy Content". Its funnier probably because I'm pretty sure that the titles are not misleading, but in fact Melville's intention. So despite the smugness of the author, it is actually perhaps a helpful list if you want to keep track of Melville's dirty sense of humor. Man, "A Squeeze of the Hand" is insane.

Rock CD based on Moby Dick

Hardcore rock band Mastodon released a CD called Leviathan based on the story of Moby Dick. Follow the link to the amazon.com page.

There was a passage that struck me a while back.

In "The Mast-Head," chapter 35 (p. 133), Ishmael observes:

"In one of those southern whalemen, on a long three or four years' voyage, as often happens, the sum of the various hours you spend at the mast-head would amount to several entire months. And it is much to be deplored that the place to which you devote so considerable a portion of the whole term of your natural life, should be so sadly destitute of anything approaching a cosy inhabitiveness, or adapted to breed a comfortable localness of feeling, such as pertains to a bed, a hammock, a hearse, a sentry box, a pulpit, a coach, or any other of those small and snug contrivances in which men temporarily isolate themselves."

Things to look at:

- Melville wedges his reference to "hearse" in the middle of his litany of "small and snug contrivances," making the "hearse" seem simultaneously commonplace and strange. We imagine Ishmael gaining morbid comfort in the quietude of recent death, riding with the corpse in the hearse, gaining closure on the person's demise. When I first read the selected sentences, I thought that Ishmael was referring to a man's own death and his eventual hearse ride. I then realized that death would not lend itself to a place of "temporary isolation." Ishmael presents the hearse not as a vehicle of one's own death, but for access to feelings of calm and solitude.

-Ishmael's mention of "pulpit" invokes instant religious imagery. Apparently, he recognizes that a preacher can find a "localness of feeling" in his work, even though it involves metaphysics (far from "local"). The preacher shares his fervor with a crowd, thereby creating a very public experience, but his own immersion in his message is remarkable - the absorption akin to a "comfortable localness of feeling" (through

Spongebob?!

Sorry, I couldn't alter the video or find a clip of the scene I wanted to show you. I happened upon this over the weekend. Hilarious. But also interesting because an underlying theme that continues to crop up at the most unusual times is money. Fortune and fame that comes with capturing Moby Dick almost forgotten when Ahab's spell is cast on the crew.

Let the piece load, then scroll the round green button down to 3:54 to begin the clip. Thanks for watching!

Gay Head - aka Aquinnah

Cannibalism

"Moby Dick - Rehearsed" by Orson Welles

Though Orson Welles got less and less funding as his career went on, he never stopped working, supporting his own independent work with miscellaneous acting jobs. So on youtube I found both his turn as Father Mapple in John Huston's Moby Dick, and rough bits of his own adaptation, which he filmed at home, I think, between other projects - probably waiting for funding.

Inspired By?

Found a review of a graphic novel with a sort of Ahabian protagonist...

BTW Does anybody know how to get this blog on my igoogle homepage? I did it with the travel class, but can't repeat...argh.

Inspired By

As Samantha mentioned, Moby Dick seems to inspire infinite other works of art in all different media. The first that comes to mind is a thesis film that a Wesleyan graduate, Benh Zeitlin, made back in 2005. Some of you may have seen this, but Egg is his fantastic stop-motion animation about a miniature Ahabian captain afloat in the ocean of an egg white in search of the ever-elusive "great yellow yolk."

Check it out: Egg by Benh Zeitlin

Also check his other stuff, and fellow Wes grad Ray Tintori's work at Court 13.

risking the obvious

Uhm, whiteness anybody... a good day to pull lines on that famous subject... Thanks, Maria for starting us off on this snow day. cb

"Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian" (36).

"Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air" (45).

"This elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of whiteness, when divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any object terrible in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds" (160).

"Nor smile so, while I write that this little black was brilliant, for even blackness has its brilliancy ..." (319). (I feel like this line is a moment when Melville interjects himself into the text and speaks directly to the reader.)

some recent favorite lines

"Now then, thought I, unconsciously rolling up the sleeves of my frock, here goes for a cool, collected dive at death and destruction, and the devil fetch the hindmost." (189)

"Now to any one not fully acquainted with the ways of the leviathans, it might seem an absurdly hopeless task thus to seek out one solitary creature in the unhooped oceans of this planet. But not so did it seem to Ahab, who knew the sets of all tides and currents; and thereby calculating the driftings of the sperm whale's food; and, also calling to mind the regular, ascertained seasons for hunting him in particular latitudes; could arrive at reasonable surmises, almost approaching to certainties, concerning the timeliest day to be upon this or that ground in search of his prey." (167)

"But there are other instances where this whiteness loses all that accessory and strange glory which invests it in the White Steed and Albatross. What is it that in the Albino man so peculiarly repels and often shocks the eye...It is that whiteness which invests him...this mere aspect of all-pervading whiteness makes him more strangely hideous than the ugliest abortion. Why should this be so?" (161)

"Oh, boys, don't be sentimental; it's bad for the digestion! Take a tonic, follow me!" (146)

"Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant unconscious reveries is that this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thought, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless sooul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some indiscernible form, seems to him, the embodiment of those elusive thought that only people the soul by continually flitting through it." (136)

My Favorite Lines: Moby Dick

"Now then, thought I, unconsciously rolling up the sleeves of my frock, here goes for a cool, collected dive at death and destruction, and the devil fetch the hindmost"(189). 

"....unconsumed, we were burning; immortal in these jaws of death!"(187).

"He knew, for example, that however magnetic his ascendency did not cover the complete spiritual man any more than mere corporeal superiority involves intellectual mastership; for to the purely spiritual, the intellectual but stands in a sort of corporeal relation"(177).

"....but without an object to color, and therefor a blankness in itself, God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates"(170).

"How it was that they so aboundingly responded to the old man's ire-- by what evil magic their souls were possessed, that at times his hate seemed almost theirs; the White Whale as much their insufferable foe as his; how all this came to be-- what the White Whale was to them, of how to their unconscious understandings, also, in some dim, unsuspected way, he might have seemed the gliding great demon of the seas of life, -- all this to explain, would be to dive deeper than Ishmael can go"(158).

Led Zeppelin Song Titled Moby Dick

According to Wikipedia, the tune is named "Moby Dick" because John Bonham's son asked him to play "the long song". When John asked why, the boy replied, "It's big like Moby." If you click on the title you can see a live version of the song.

From "The Whiteness of the Whale"

[no offense intended to any Vermonters]

"Tell me, why this strong young colt, foaled in some peaceful valley of Vermont, far removed from all beasts of prey--why is it that upon the sunniest day, if you but shake a fresh buffalo robe behind him, so that he cannot even see it, but only smells its wild animal muskiness--why will he start, snort, and with bursting eyes paw the ground in phrensies of affright?... for what knows he, this New England colt, of the black bison of distant Oregon?

No: but here thou beholdest even in a dumb brute, the instinct of the knowledge of the demonism in the world." (164)

The "Burden" of Secondary Sources

I'm interested in what some people said the other day about feeling "burdened" by the expectations that come with reading a long-celebrated and analyzed text like Moby-Dick. Somehow, a huge number of secondary sources and different interpretations can be more intimidating than helpful to the reader - especially to someone like me. Ideally, I'd like to read Moby-Dick as an adventure-philosophical-character-study, but as if the novel had just come out, its interpretations left solely to me.

Unfortunately, reading criticism before you finish the book not only gives away the ending (more often than not), but offers strange interpretations that color the reading experience, whether negatively or not. Therefore, reading too many secondary sources seems to cloud the "innocent" process of reading a book for the first time.

I began to think a lot about "innocent" reading, and whether it is possible nowadays to read classic literature without expecting too much or too little, since there is always the temptation to consult secondary sources before finishing the book.

I randomly found a good quote on "innocent" reading and secondary sources in a biography on Kafka (and a look at his work):

"The scene of scholars stepping all over one another to reach the 'crest' of meaning might seem comic today, but all this intellectual endeavor continues to affect our reading of the novel: every approach, even one deeply flawed, shapes its object." (Reiner Stach)

So, despite our enthusiasm for a great text or our attentiveness to its meaning, we often experience the novel mostly from the outside - either in aggrement with or in opposition to certain strands of criticism. I don't expect to enjoy a perfectly "pure" reading experience, which is impossible, but do wish that secondary sources played slightly less of a role in the "proper way" to understand a book.

why is moby-dick such an art-inspiring text?

**The title of this post is the link to the website**
The link is to a blog post about artist Justin Quinn's project of creating drawings and prints composed entirely of the letter 'e'. In this case the number of 'e's corresponds to the letters and words in a single chapter of Moby-Dick (Chapter 55 is used for this particular image)

I enjoyed the way Quinn writes about his interpretation of the reading-seeing relationship and his deconstruction of language. I am also fascinated by the fact that of all written texts to grasp at for a sense of structure to this series in his greater project, he went for Moby-Dick. I am getting the sense that Moby-Dick is America's (intellectual?) book in a much bigger way that I originally thought.

Here is what Quinn had to say about his project (from the website):

"The distance between reading and seeing has been an ongoing interest for me. Since 1998 I have been exploring this space through the use of letterforms, and have used the letter E as my primary starting point for the last two years. Since E is often found at the top of vision charts, I questioned what I saw as a familiar hierarchy. Was this letter more important than other letters? E is, after all, the most commonly used letter in the English language, it denotes a natural number (2.71828), and has a visual presence that interests me greatly. In my research E has become a surrogate for all letters in the alphabet. It now replaces the other letters and becomes a universal letter (or Letter), and a string of Es now becomes a generic language (or Language). This substitution denies written words their use as legible signifiers, allowing language to become a vacant parallel Language— a basis for visual manufacture.

After months of compiling Es into abstract compositions through various systemic arrangements, I started recognizing my studio time as a quasi-monastic experience. There was something sublime about both the compositions that I was making and the solitude in which they were made. It was as if I were translating some great text like a subliterate medieval scribe would have years ago—with no direct understanding of the source material. The next logical step was to find a source. Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick, a story rich in theology, philosophy, and psychosis provides me with a roadmap for my work, but also with a series of underlying narratives. My drawings, prints, and collages continue to speak of language and the transferal of information, but now as a conduit to Melville’s sublime narratives."

Elijah Blogs First

"I know how to draw Moby Dick: draw a line in his shape and leave the middle blank, because he is white. Let's use a black pencil"