(What would a BLOG be without self-published bad poetry?)
How I crave
Asparagus
With hollandaise
And two poached eggs
Take me back
to California
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
I sent this to the book club email list on 5-Aug-2004. Now I reproduce it here. I'd like to add a little more Moby-Dick commentary in el Blog. It's a fantastic book.
After reading Chapter 8, 'The Sermon', I wanted to re-acquaint myself
with the story of Jonah. There are plenty of free bibles on the web,
here's one: http://ebible.org/bible/web/Jonah.htm
The translations vary, and everything on the web that I found seems
rather archaic, but hey, we are reading Moby Dick after all.
I think the sermon the pastor delivers does a fantastic job of
illustrating the first quarter of this book.
1:6 So the shipmaster came to him, and said to him, "What do you mean,
sleeper? Arise, call on your God! Maybe your God will notice us, so
that we won't perish."
I recall be told in (Catholic) elementary school that the idea of this
passage was that the boat was a pantheon of religions, with everyone
onboard praying to his own god. I think that's a cool idea which is
somewhat common in the old testament, that different peoples have
different gods, and as these people interace on earth their gods may
interact above. Discretionary polytheism, let's call it.
1:7 They all said to each other, "Come, let us cast lots, that we may
know for whose cause this evil is on us." So they cast lots, and the
lot fell on Jonah.
I also love the idea of throwing dice to determine who is at fault.
1:17 Yahweh prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah, and Jonah was in
the belly of the fish three days and three nights.
-Matt
So!
On Monday, I was driving home from work (en route to the gym before MCNULTY'S TWO FOR ONE BURGERS), when, ahead of me on the highway, I noticed a truck pulled over, boxes falling off of it, and a man darting through traffic. As I slowed and approached, I realized the box that had fallen off this truck into the highway had been filled with PLUSH STUFFED SEA TURTLES, and he was trying to rescue them from the roadway.
So I Sit / Sad, Brokenhearted / Sought to Shit / But Solely Farted