No Bulwer-Lytton Prize for you this year, Melville!

One of the problems with attempting to comment on VDH's meditations is that there usually isn't anything much one can add which isn't trite. So, I have nothing intelligent at all to say (may just be a function of me, of course:)).... but, will just mention that the UC Press facsimile of the Arion Press edition of Moby Dick is a Good Thing. Buy one for the Fallout Shelter.

erk.. I mean GvdL of course... I can't even get my Vast Right Wing Conspirators names straight!

Travel the soil of this country from ocean to ocean, as I have done a dozen times and just recently, and you see that there's enough energy to light up the world - or burn itself to the bedrock.

The cool manipulating fool in the White House and his snarling congressional bangers are fair set to enrage their citizens into mutiny. They seem not to notice or care that we are the close descendents of the craftiest pioneers, most resolute seafarers and bravest warriors ever to live.

Those who seek to leverage elected leadership into soft despotism are deluding themselves that most Americans have softened irretrievably into pablum-fed charity addicts. An hour at a flyover high school football game or any truck stop in this fine and vulgar country could disabuse them of this conceit.

Gerard is obviously in the grip of the muse. I pity his keyboard, and his tummy, for the poundings they must have been taking.

Thank you. Today I will buy a copy of Moby Dick (my school copy long lost) and read it again.

Ah - finally the tattoo piece. Masterful exposition Mr. V. I'm off to the library.

On point book to read: Heart of the Sea. The true story of the whaleship Essex, and the privations suffered by the survivors of a malicious attack by 80 ft. whale.

With Obie and Ahab, we see what happens when the charisma of an intriguing persona meets the demands of near-impossible tasks and the resistance of dissenters. It's no help.

Egoism surfaces.

The "good of the whole" is revealed as a salespitch that hid pure ego and mad ambitions.

No more persuasive talk. Just coercion.

"The time for debating is over."

Really?

WE'LL tell you when it's over, Your Madness.

I wonder who will be The Rachel?

"It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search
after her missing children, only found another orphan."

You've accomplished something I believed impossible, Gerard - now I actually want to read Moby Dick. And with a little grace, perhaps at this point in my life it'll even be accessible to me.

Thank you.

"Like all great works, Moby Dick repays re-reading at different stages of life."

Life's lessons learned. I had a rather classical primary education - that's the way it was in the 50s. My bete noire was "Silas Marner" by George Elliott. The second time through I looked forward to the next hour when I faced a quiz on conjugating irregular Latin verbs. The third time? Sheer bliss. Takes a while sometimes.

Couple of very old, very bad jokes to lighten the mood a bit.

Zen student refuses novacaine for a root canal. "I'm trying to transcend dental medication".

'Twarnt till I got to kollege fore I found out Moby Dick wasn't a venereal disease.

Oh yes, Julie!

I'm on your donkey, Western Chauvinist.

(Gerard. Wow.)

Many of us know who the White Whale was according to Melville. Who is the White Whale now?

Nice essay.

I remember one night leaving the Livingston Channel heading into Lake Erie on course for the Detroit River Light. It was rough, squally, and I could not see the bow clearly, so I steered according to the plan position indicator of the radar. Keeping the boat centered between the lines of blips that were the spar bouys, gazing on the light of the radar screen and not the blackness which I couldn't see through.

I had never navigated blind like that before, compass and radar alone - we may as well been at the backside of the moon as western Lake Erie.

Bravo, bravo. As I quietly re-read this marvelous essay, I wonder whither Zion in the extended metaphor. Differently represented to different readers, no doubt. That it's there however is beyond question.

For those who don't know, the wonderful drawings that Mr. Vanderleun included are by Rockwell Kent, who copiously illustrated a justly famous edition of Moby Dick.

Bob sykes - try to get ahold of a Modern Library copy with illustrations by Rockwell Kent. Cheers -

Moby Dick "our greatest American novel to date"? Sorry, I can't agree. I think Moby Dick is a hack work by a hack writer -- long, unfocused, excessively verbose, excessively full of itself, tangled in its syntax, pathetic in its factual inaccuracies, and a torturous chore to read.

I do, however, agree that "Long sea voyages have strange effects on writers.." Long sea voyages have strange effects on anyone with a fertile imagination.

"Like all great works, Moby Dick repays re-reading at different stages of life."

So true. As a callow schoolboy, one reads Fyodor Dostoyevsky and ranks him with all the other dead authors of dead prose. But in one's forties, one reads or re-reads Karamazov and feels the urge to hurry to his grave at the Nevsky Monastery, dig him up, and kiss the bones of his hand.

"’All is vanity’. ALL,"

So, true. All is vanity. King Solomon is so right.

In a not too distant past, my hated rival had become my boss. Or more specifically, the person who despised me became my boss. For the eight years of his reign, he and his crony's gave me a variety of humiliations and torments on a continual basis. But for reasons I will not say at this time, I chose to stay as I had a dream I wanted to attain and that meant that I endure the unending harrassment.

Miserable I was. Tormented too. For Years.

One day... near the end, I ... realized ... that I could choose to be miserable or choose not to be miserable - from all the abuse.

I had a choice in how I met the truth that was my troubles.

...and then he was fired.

The saying 'The beatings will continue until moral improves' got a whole new meaning after that. :)

I always wondered how the story would read without the influence of Hawthorne. How I hated reading his books! With the heavy introspection and pulpit pounding fallen away, the Pequod would likely rest forgotten along with many of its contemporaries. Who today would know of Moby Dick if Melville had not framed the story with Calvinist oak? Has anyone else never heard of Mocha Dick?

Ahab pursued Moby Dick as the embodiment of the Devil on Earth, a flesh and blood evil. A killer.

And in his monomaniacal pursuit of the demon whale, Ahab himself became corrupted, as did all the men of the Pequod. Starbuck tried to sway him with logic and a recall to true Christian virtue, but even the pagan Quequay (?) knew they were damned and doomed.

The Leftist Progressives are damning us all by the pursuit of their various social devils, and just as the Transcendentalists may or may not have had some minor influence on the occurrance of that greatest American Tragedy, the Civil War, so to will today's Progressives lead us down into something terrible, in the vain belief and the Satanic pursuit of "heaven on earth". God will judge us harshly and mete out a proper rebuke.

And Ishmael alone survived. In times of danger and despair, find a coffin to float on.

From another time and clime, take heart and calloused fist, from Longfellow --
"Sail on, O Ship of State! Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!"

And as Churchill assured us and his Briton brethren (2-9-1941, after quoting the lines above,
"We shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire. Neither the sudden shock of battle, nor the long-drawn trials of vigilance and exertion will wear us down ... and we will finish the job."

So choose -- to win or lose!

Another fine essay, that somehow I managed to miss (well, it has gone up to 11....)

This time around it's attracted le Spam, I see. Whatever the linked gibberish means, I feel comfortable in proclaiming it Marxist, because French.

I shall root out le spam!

the cart and / or Lillie together with their our heirloom social gathering, employed to be floored with could not see it future. dude and / or Lillie of cracker barrel or clip, only that we could not. i had no clue this was feasible. food string is not around for get together of Thursdays and consequently Fridays as they is otherwise engaged in spending budget. he can quiz sales team the things they already have designed on that day to improve the individual suffer from. it makes a huge perception and helps to create memories to express throughout the business something a publication or piece aren't able to total,should your amount typically the Jayson Blair relationship as an example of well built and moreover reputable help and advice? How about the rhode island Times' scandalous write-up up jake McCain's "Mistress, assuredly, mother takes note of any kind of time after boston environment, no question hiring assiduously a bunch of their certainty investigation but also "integrity" values, in a hurry to create on its certainly front page, paintings of american troops "Raping" Iraqi gals which usually right after are already proved to be bogus. entire world happening is an illustration of classified publishers, by virtue of their ineradicable remains side prejudice, establishing an account whilst serious for the reason that fervently expected so that it is which means. where as were being being Saunders appreciated journalistic "principles" during periods? turned out to be people data for sale ads distributing true additionally highly regarded help and advice,

Out with le Spam, replaced with venerated and most honorable Spam...

Whack a mole is easier.

The unintelligible text reminds me of the cut-up techniques Burroughs and Gysin, except they made something out of it.
This spam drivel is maybe computer generated, select a target language and let 'er rip.
Sorry you're being bothered Gerard, it is like a plague of locusts. Have you tried smearing some lamb's blood on your lintel?

Agreed. The Kent etchings are just dandy, and stead me well as I wandered amongst the latter-day Queequeg's in the old town. I was reading it every five years or so, and kind of soured on Melville after detecting a certain curious theme in many of the writings. I suppose that's why it's held in such high regard with academia. Superior behaviorists as Phillipe and Jorge liked to say.

Great piece. FWIW, Tashtego was a Wampanoag Indian from Gay Head on Martha's Vineyard, not Nantucket. Gay Head is now called Aquinah.