Another mailing of mine to the Book Club:
Hi!
Only 8 days left until our first Moby-Dick meeting, which will be on
Wednesday August 25th. Expect an email from Dawn soon with logistical
details.
I hope you've at least had the chance to crack the cover on Moby-Dick.
Even if not, you've still got a week to do some reading, and if you
haven't even bought a copy yet you can always just go to:
http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/etext01/moby10b.txt and get most of the
experience.
...
My method of 'opening the book to the center' to determine the midway
point determined Chapter 61 to be halfway. I'm only to Chapter 38 at
this point, but I think I can catch up to 61 if I stop going to the
video store. If you're not very far in the book yet, take heart! the
chapters can be very short, some barely a page long.
...
I'm going to quote below one of my favorite passages so far from this
book, from Chapgter 36. We're more than a quarter of the way into this
giant book, the narrator has barely gotten out to sea yet, Ahab has
barely put his head above deck, and (if not for 1,000,000 pop culture
references) we don't even know who the title character is yet. Ahab
pulls all hands to an assembly, tells them that he's basically insane
and his only reason to live is to hunt Moby-Dick, and explains just
how much he hates the whale:
"How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the
wall?
"To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I
think there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps
me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice
sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be
the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak
that hate upon him."
I love that quote, and the chapter. It's the first dramatic relief of
tension in a long time. It really drove home, for me, the total
insanity of being on this boat with some-hundred other people for
three years.
...
Here is a very interesting link describing life in the British navy in
Nelson's time, mostly the early 1800s. So, it's the wrong country and
50 years too early, but it gives a very good summary of what naval
life was like then:
http://www.nelsonsnavy.co.uk/index.html
Here is a very interesting link describing life in the British navy in
Nelson's time, mostly th
If anyone has seen or read MASTER AND COMMANDER, this is the time and
place as Patrick O'Brian's world.
...
Finally! At dinner last night someone asked how shrunken heads, as
sold by Queequeg at the beginning of the novel, were produced.
Basically, as far as I can tell, a particular group of South American
Indians would kill their enemies, decapitate them, remove the skull,
boil the head, and then put some hot rocks in it to melt the fat off
the inner skin. Then sew it up, etc. The whole process is described
here:
http://www.head-hunter.com/prep.html>http://www.head-hunter.com/prep.html
Quite possibly not for the faint of heart.
I can't wait to hear your impressions of this book,
-Matt