Welcome to week 4 of our Remedial Lit Summer Project, which features Moby Dick.
This is where you can discuss Moby Dick, or whatever much shorter, less whale-y book you are reading this week.
I began Moby Dick last week. It is definitely funnier than I'd anticipated. I am sure it is genius. I am sure I would seem like more of a genius if I said, "Wow! What genius." I am not sure there is enough caffeine in the world for me to finish all 700 pages of this book.
Have fun.
Monday, June 16, 2008
June 16 - Moby Dick
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14 comments:
My thoughts on The Great Gatsby are here. I finished Slaughterhouse-Five today after soccer and baseball. Now, the quixotic quest to harpoon the white whale ...
I finally finished it! I won't say the last 100 page make up for all the chapters on whale anatomy, phrenology, classification, etc etc etc, but they come close. Here is my official Remedial Lit Reading Project Haiku:
Melville and Ahab
Both obsessed with great sperm whales
In deathly detail
Diane, your haiku is perfect. And I am thrilled to hear about the last 100 pages!
My longer review of MD is in my blog here. (I hope the coding works for that link.)
Sorry, no illustrations for Wuthering Heights because of deadlines on other paying illustrations! :)
But I'll try to get a Moby Dick illo done for next week. The anatomy probably won't be correct, though, even after reading 100 chapters on whale anatomy. I just don't absorb that kind of description in written word. I have to see it for it to make sense. Maybe I'll just draw some spurting water, I mean steam, I mean maybe whales spurt water and steam... hmmm... since this seems to be the one thing about whales that Ishmael doesn't know, I don't know either.
Kristi, I have just finished chapters 74-80ish, all of which are about whale heads. I am liking this book more and more, but I'd be happy to substitute a visual from you for the details on the whale eye socket...
I've only just broke the surface, but again, I'm surprised by the humor. Ishmael is someone I could visit with!
(I'm just the kind of guy to enjoy the intricacies of whale taxonomy, too -- remember, Coach, I focused on evolutionary anthro, not that mushy cultural mumbo-jumbo.)
" ... and so the universal thump is passed around ..."
I'm having a whale of a flashback to college -- unfortunately the guy who taught all of the 19th century American lit courses was a Melville scholar. He thought reading Moby was too pedestrian and we should read/be tortured by "Billy Budd, Sailor" and "Pierre: or The Ambiguities" instead. (Don't get me started on Bartleby the Scrivener.)
I think the most important take-home message is that "Omoo" (A Narrative of the South Seas) is the one in all of the crossword puzzles...
Lizard, the entirety of my knowledge of the book Billy Budd is this:
1. it is in no way related to the fabulous kids' novel Bud, Not Buddy and
2. Lizard swore a lot while she was reading it. The memory is not as strong as the one of you beaten and moaning "Middlemarch!" but it's there.
Let's just say that if you don't finish Moby in the allotted week and you need a consequence, I've got a whopper for you, and will send it to Ann Arbor posthaste.
400+ pages of "...[the] author's most profound anxieties and obsessions, it stands as the strangely compelling creation of an intensely troubled, eternally questioning mind."
Did I mention that it's printed in a very small font?
Wow. Sounds, um, classic? But it's working as incentive: going to read now...
Belated (and pretty weak) thoughts on Slaughterhouse-Five here.
Thorp, you are a reading machine. Are you really starting Moby Dick now?!
I'm better than 100 page in ... not far, but it's a start!
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