Preferences To and Not To

Call it derivative. I prefer the term “speculative,” but you can speculate about anyone without relying on a source. Not only is Melvill true to a source, it offers its speculation as a source for novels and short stories that have been read, analyzed, taught, studied, and referenced for a century and a half and counting.

From Argentinian novelist Roderigo Fresan in 2022, Melvill was not translated into English until 2024 and is just now making the rounds of Herman Melville and Moby-Dick fan pages on social media.

The title character is not the writer we know, but his father Allan who went mad, was kept tied to bed, and died when Herman was just 12–and who spelled the family name without the final e, soon added by his widow either to improve the flourish of her signature (her reason) or to confuse her husband’s and now her creditors (circumstantial evidence).

That much we know. Speculation begins when Fresan puts an attentive young Herman bedside, listening to his father’s wild tales of his “Grand Tour” of European courts and markets dealing in silk and textiles with a mystical partner named Nico C. All this to establish the likely impressions left upon the imaginative boy.

And this is where Fresan ups the ante. Other derivative novels are narrated by other characters to tell: a parallel story, Ahab’s Wife (1999); a backstory, Finn (2008); the same story, James (2024); or an adapted story, this year’s Call Me Ishmaelle. Fresan’s Melvill suggests where the characters and plots of most of Herman Melville’s fiction and poetry originated.

Quite a trip to see how seamlessly and plausibly Moby-Dick, Confidence Man, Pierre, Israel Potter, and Billy Budd fit the narrative. Even Nico C. anticipates Herman’s friendship with Nat H. (“Nathaniel Hawthorne to all of you”), and the connection of the wary, cerebral older man’s “Wakefield” to the admiring, dynamic young man’s “Bartleby” is worth the effort.

Effort it is in the first of Melvill‘s three sections. The narrator is Herman at the end of his own life, posing as a 12-year-old son, recounting his father’s “Great White Delirium” with a constant barrage of parenthetical clarifications. If that’s not enough, the footnotes outnumber the pages with a parallel account of how his father’s raving echoed throughout his own life, his relationships with his suicidal sons, his writings, his reactions to critics.

Anyone who has read Moby-Dick with any honest attention will realize by page five or footnote four that the format parodies the book that intersperses a novel about a whaling voyage with a manual on the whaling industry while adding barrels of philosophical and historical seasoning. As the older narrator says in a footnote:

A new style for beginning to write things, yes. A style that I want to be mine for the things I end up writing. A style that no longer runs through what is written but through how it is written. The present of a style that might be the style of the future, knowing that all style is but the result of new language being added to an old expression. Or vice-versa.

Footnotes disappear in the second of the three sections, “Glaciology, or the Transparency of Ice.” In it we hear Allan Melvill in an uninterrupted rhapsody. May take some effort to keep reminding yourself that you are not listening to any of the narrators of Herman’s novels, especially Ishmael in his “Cetology” and “The Whiteness of the Whale.” And on the subject of human fascination with ghosts and vampires who:

…are not supernatural or impossible beings but, actually the most natural constructs of human fear… Oh, it’s touching: the invocations of all those instruction manuals for ways to destroy us that you all have invented in order to tolerate just sensing our presence and to convince yourselves that you can expel us at will from your parties… But I fear it’s not and won’t be like that, O fearful humans. Ours is the real party and you haven’t been invited.

That’s one of several passages that classify Melvill as a “Gothic novel,” and Fresan includes as many references to Melville’s Gothic parody, Pierre, that the critics took all to literally, as to Moby-Dick. The most references, however, are made to Bartleby’s mantra, “I would prefer not to,” which Fresan suggests is an answer to Hamlet’s existential question. If so, Bartleby was Melville’s response to those who condemned Pierre as vile, and called him mad.

For all that, I favor the claim–again having to remind myself that this is not the voice of Herman Melville, but of an actor so skilled that he is nailing the literary voice–that the form, if not the content, of Confidence Man was inspired by Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales:

…a stranger coming aboard, in Mississippi, on April Fool’s Day, to make everyone feel guilty for their capacity and need to be deceived, changing masks, again and again, but leaving the mystery of the true face beneath all of them unresolved and offering the warning that “after pouring over the best novels professing to portray human nature, the studious youth will still run the risk of being too often at fault upon actually entering the world.”

That’s from the third section after the father has died, and the son, nearing the end of his own life, assumes the narrative, connecting all kinds of dots between what he had heard and what he would write. At which point, I remind myself that some of what I’m reading really is Herman Melville.

Even the acknowledgements do not escape Melvillean treatment, as Fresan names every influence major and minor, from Coen Brothers’ films to Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, from a critical essay by John Updike to a song by Bob Dylan, “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)”–along with reappearing, lengthy footnotes such as the one quoting Dylan’s praise of Moby-Dick in his Nobel Prize lecture.*

A quote from Dylan’s “Key West” is among the extracts placed on the front pages of Melvill, a la the many placed before Moby-Dick:

That’s my story, but not where it ends.

Derivative? Yes, but Melvill creates much more than it derives from the lives of Allan Melvill and Herman Melville. And suggested possibilities seem endless: Did you ever consider, for instance, that Melville used the word “extract” rather than “epigraph” because it suggested the scents of spices and perfumes still be offloaded at all American ports in his time?

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*https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2016/dylan/lecture/

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/rodrigo-fresan/melvill/

‘Mom Fights the Bad Guys’

Impossible to know what is most shocking about Nobody’s Girl.

A father’s sexual contact with his pre-teen daughter? Sharing the girl with his drinking buddy? A knowing mother always with a beer can in hand but never a word of objection?

Those are just the opening chapters growing up in the boonies inland from Florida’s Gold Coast where she would find employment as a 17-year-old handing out towels at Mar-a-Lago’s spa. Before long she was spotted and recruited by an elegant, motherly woman with a British accent to work for a neighbor nearby. Mar-a-Lago’s owner gave her a reference, wished her well.

Back in the boonies she found herself a complete misfit, and so she got in with other misfits. Drugs, alcohol, casual sex, petty theft, reform school. And yet, even at her worst, her best bursts forth:

At thirteen, I would walk a mile for a fistfight. I particularly liked confronting bullies, which is probably part of the reason I befriended a boy named Jose. He didn’t call himself gay, because that wasn’t a word we used then. But he liked boys “that way,” and he refused to hide it, so he was always getting picked on.

Any reader easily perceives how the world of Mar-a-Lago and Jeffery Epstein’s equally plush, gilded mansion would seem like paradise to a 17-year-old survivor of a sordid past. And the pay, in addition to all the material comforts it bought, was as good as Novocain.

That’s how Virginia Roberts Guiffre sets the table for Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice, published just last year. On the plates is medicine, no matter how hard to take. At the very least, victims of Epstein and his ever-present accompliss, Ghislaine Maxwell, and other sexual predators will know that they are not alone–that escape and a fruitful, if not entirely peaceful, life, are possible. And at best, the book will encourage others to come forward and join those seeking to bring Epstein’s “clients” and “associates” to account.

Guiffre weaves her married-with-children life after two years with Epstein throughout the book. Sent by Maxwell and Epstein to Thailand to study a technique of massage and to recruit down-and-out young girls she might find, she meets an Australian fellow who immediately falls for her. Robbie, as he is portrayed to the end of the book, is a beyond considerate dynamo who make her laugh, and so it all happens quickly. They marry while still in Thailand before he returns to and she, in effect, defects to the Land Down Under.

Before long, back in the Up and Over, police and journalists started getting tips about Epstein, often with references to “Jenna.” They tracked her down, and from what seemed such a protective distance, she went on the record. Epstein’s world began to unravel, albeit all-too-slowly thanks to bureaucrats all too willing to believe those who can afford never ending lawsuits over those who can’t, especially those “with a past.”

Epstein may be dead, but his chilling effect retains its grip. For example, King Charles visited America last week and gave a speech that progressives, liberals, and Democrats of all stripes applauded, especially his defense of NATO and call for environmental protection. However, he declined a request to meet with Epstein survivors. He did include a vague line about justice for victims of international trafficking, but no mention of the scandal that has forced the resignations of British (but not American) officials.

Nobody’s Girl tells us that Guiffre was interviewed by ABC when she decided to go public in 2015. Because she named Prince Andrew, ABC’s lawyers contacted the royal family for comment. There’s no record of what was said except for inside sources claiming not only that the family denied everything, but they threatened a lawsuit. One source claimed that ABC caved because it feared losing access to the high-flying celebrity couple of Prince William and Kate Middleton.

ABC killed the story, but the book sheds light on King Charles’ caution.

After so many details and names, times and dates, Guiffre draws toward her conclusion with a paragraph that begins with inspiration:

As I turned thirty-eight, I realized that I’d spent the second half of my life recovering from the first. I was nineteen when I met Robbie and set off to make a new life with him. I’d now lived almost precisely nineteen more years, and I was still fighting for justice.

And ends in heartbreak:

I’d come a long way, but had yet to feel anywhere near whole. I wondered if that feeling would ever come.

In her closing chapters, it sounded possible. Guiffre was among the survivors who testified in congressional hearings and spoke in rallies on the steps of the Capitol calling for a full release of the Epstein files. She was also happily assisting her daughter with making a manga demon slayer costume for Halloween and telling her sons that “Mom fights the bad guys.”

But she also admits lapses into severe depression, disorienting drugs, and two suicide attempts. There’s also a breakup with her husband mentioned only in the “Collaborator’s Note” that serves as the book’s preface/intro. Without any hint of it in Guiffre’s own narrative, a reader must wonder how much of that turmoil was her own imagination.

Still, all of what is in Guiffre’s own words is entirely credible. Tragically, her moments of doubt at the end of Nobody’s Girl, proved prophetic: Before it was in print, another suicide attempt, this time successful.

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Thick as a Brick & Mortar

When I heard very late one night that Martin Barre, Jethro Tull’s lead guitarist, had written a memoir, it took no more than that night’s sleep, a cup of coffee, and a short drive to the mainland before I was ordering a copy in Jabberwocky Bookshop.

This was this past November when A Trick of Memory was released in the United Kingdom where Tull first formed in 1967. Barre, son of a jazz musician in Birmingham, England’s second largest city, joined the group a year later and, after frontman/flautist Ian Anderson, was Tull’s only mainstay until it disbanded in 2014.

Reasons remain under wraps, which is why I, a veteran of about two dozen Tull concerts in seven states since 1970, am eager to see what Barre has to say, include it in a review, and post it on Jethro Tull fan pages on social media.

Paul, Jabberwocky’s mainstay clerk, put my order in, consulted a distributor’s website, and told me it was due to land in the USA at the end of January. They always call when a book arrives, but when the calendar turned to February, I went in to check. Some delay. A very small printing house. Later in the month, I was told. Since I’m at a coffeeshop right next door every Tuesday morning, I kept checking in.

By this time, I met Steve, another, newer clerk at Jabberwocky who recognized the name Martin Barre and lit up. A fellow Tull-Skull! He started tapping a laptop and was as disappointed as I that no news was to be had. But he did add one more copy to the order.

March came in like a lion but apparently left A Trick of Memory to a dodo bird who may yet need a few more months to touch down anywhere in North America. Friends started telling me I could get it within days if I clicked into eBay or Amazon, but I never renounced my citizenship in the United States of America for consumership in the Lazy States of Convenience. If it doesn’t come from brick and mortar, I don’t want it. If it’s available locally, from an independent business, I’ll always buy from people I can see and talk to.

A week into April, I wondered if I might learn something about the impasse on Martin Barre’s or Jethro Tull’s websites. Nothing. However, a cutesy notice for a Spanish distillery offering “Aqualung Scotch” and “Thick as a Brick Brandy” caught my attention. Yesterday morning, I was in Jabberwocky to tell Paul:

Their specialty is putting custom labels on bottles of vodka or gin or whatever you want. You could get ‘Paul’s Rum’ with your picture wearing an eye-patch and a parrot sitting on your shoulder!

His polite laughter did not hide his puzzlement: Why are you telling me this?

The homepage had a bright-colored notice across the top saying something like: Sales to the United States have been suspended due to the tariffs. We are working to negotiate lower prices.

Paul lit up: “That would explain what’s happening with this book.”

I asked if he noticed it with other books from Europe and the UK, and he said no, but also said that he wouldn’t notice it unless someone had an order in. Then I made the mistake of telling him something that he neither needed nor wanted to hear: “Meanwhile, copies of the book are being sold on eBay and by Amazon, undercutting you.”

His expression made me regret my lame attempt at sympathy as soon as it was out of my mouth: “That’s all Amazon does: Undercut small business.”

“And now they have help. Keep my order in! I won’t go to them.”

As I made my way home, the word “help” stuck in my mind like a key in an old lock. I turned it. All this time, I thought, as most others thought, that the tariffs were a tough-guy illusion to rile the base who could be counted on to somehow believe that the increased prices in American stores would be Biden’s fault.

Yes, it was that, but it was–and still is–more. The tariffs are help. From a corrupt autocrat to his billionaire donors to help their mega-corporations squeeze every dollar, every cent, every pound-of-flesh they can from the independent, local, neighborhood, and mom-and-pop small businesses we pretend to so proudly hail.

Call it a trick of democracy when run as big business here in the Lazy States of Convenience.

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To Make US Face Ourselves

Late one night after a weekend way out of town and not wanting to make dinner when I arrived home, I drove my voracious appetite into the 401 Tavern in Hampton, NH, and took a seat at the bar.

Happened to be the last of two seats on a corner, and so I sat next to a woman whose husband and another elderly couple were on the three stools perpendicular to us. They were all in their eighties, and very pleasantly welcomed me into their conversation.

Before long I was wolfing down a burger, and they resumed getting to know each other. When the man nearest me mentioned that he was a retired police chief, the other asked, “Portsmouth?”

“No. Burlington, Vermont.”

I swallowed and waited for a pause in the conversation: “Were you chief of police when Bernie Sanders was mayor?”

Under much darker-colored hair, the smile that immediately beamed back at me appears on page 456 of a new book, Bernie for Burlington, with an equally beaming Mayor Sanders and an in-character Crime Dog McGruff as they appeared in 1987.

It is one of many surprises of poet and English professor Dan Chaisson’s part-memoir, part-biography, part-history, and very-much-nostalgic ode to the city where he came of age during Sander’s eight years in city hall. It was the police union that put the socialist alternative to a corrupt Democratic incumbent and a weak rogue Democratic challenger in office. More specifically, it was the police union that did it with a unanimous vote.

Where were the Republicans, you ask? They were quite content to support the incumbent and make their efforts elsewhere in the state. And they dominated the state, including elections for the US congress throughout the 70s in which Sanders ran a distant, but improving third.

Before Chaisson gets to that, he gives us a look at Bernie’s childhood in the Bronx. Source for this is older brother Larry Sanders who describes a father who could have been the model for Willie Loman in Death of a Salesman. Mom was equally hard-luck, but the brothers made do without complaint. Instead, they explore, including free pamphlets in a store named Vermont in Manhattan aimed at drawing tourists to the Green Mountain State.

At least Larry makes no complaint. Chaisson deliberately did not interview Bernie for the book, though they are pictured together, arm in arm and smiling, at a family picnic in 2024. Bernie and his wife Jane were said to be “aware” of the project and “intrigued” by it. Sources are numerous without them, including campaign workers, political rivals, neighborhood activists, historians, business leaders, and political allies, most notably his successor as mayor, Peter Clavelle. If you subscribe to the theory that your legacy is measured by the person who replaces you, then all you need to know is that Clavelle and Sanders were the co-founders of Vermont’s Progressive Party.

Other notables include Howard Dean, sometimes ally sometimes opponent, and Peter Freyne, a court-jester columnist for The Vermont Vanguard Press who predicted Sander’s rise: “Don’t be surprised to see Ol’ Bernardo draw a lot of votes from folks who just want to flip the bird at the status quo in Montpelier.”

Freyne also had the scoop of “the notorious smear shop” of Paul Manafort and Roger Stone “to attack… Eagle Scout Patrick Leahy,” Vermont’s long-time US senator in a campaign for re-election–three decades before the two felons helped fix America’s 2016 election.

Following Sanders’ upbringing in Brooklyn and a couple of semesters in Chicago, Chaisson give us a history of the hippie movement into northern New England, college-aged kids dropping out and looking for abandoned farms they would turn into communes. Sanders was in but not of that wave, as inspired by the renowned Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich and A.S. Neil, he of Summerhill School fame, as any. To the contrary, he was impatient with the “tuning out” part, but he never gave up, and the grass roots grew. Unable to win a seat in the Vermont state legislature or in the US Congress, Bernie, as calculating as any natural politician, jumped at his chance in Burlington.

My Newburyport friends may do well to get Bernie for Burlington just to study the ins-and-outs of the waterfront issue, which beyond all else was what turned residents against the Democratic mayor. Writes Chaisson:

Sanders’ first Burlington apartment on Front Street was adjacent to Battery Park on the Old North End. Few physical settings in the United States present such a contrast between agonizing urban problems and almost unreal natural vistas. Bernie’s small, rented worker’s cottage, his first home in the city, sat on the seam between the two Burlingtons. His challenge was to make the city take its eyes off the sunsets and face itself.

Mission accomplished with the help of a cultural undercurrent the book captures in fine detail, such as new and trendy businesses downtown, some of which Chaisson worked at as a teenager. And around the state, such as Bread and Puppet Theater, Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream, Phish, and Goddard College:

Between fish farms in the mountains and cauldron of soup at the Fresh Ground Coffee House, a relay ran. Goddard and the Fresh Ground, sixty miles apart, were the transmitting stations for radical ideas about power and subjugation. Sanders, no fan of fish farms or gourmet coffee, and “ruthlessly sarcastic” about (anarchist-environmentalist Murray) Bookchin’s wild-eyed pronouncements, nevertheless participated in the busy traffic moving between the two points, one artery in the larger organism evolving into a new Vermont.

Both those passages hint at more of the surprises this book has for those of us who supported Bernie Sanders in his 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. He never got high marks from environmentalists because of his full commitments to unions. He was at harsh odds with the University of Vermont because the state–that “status quo in Montpelier”–paid no Burlington taxes. And he rode in the cruiser with Chief Kevin Scully during the crackdown on UV students.

As Scully told me a few years ago at the 401 in Hampton, in paraphrase: Bernie was great to work with. We didn’t always agree, but he always listened, and I know had some influence. Just as he had over me. He always explained things, and was always very clear.

To make 520 pages well worth the time and effort, that last line is true of Chaisson’s book.

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https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/dan-chiasson/bernie-for-burlington/

History Pulled Taut

Among the first films I saw at the Screening Room where I now show them was 1984’s playfully pointed The Brother from Another Planet, one of the earliest written and directed by John Sayles, by then already acclaimed in art-house cinema circles for Return of the Secaucus Seven.

I had missed that 1979 gem, but when I got caught up in the Boomer hoopla of 1983’s The Big Chill, Screening Room faithful let me know in no uncertain terms that it was a sanitized version of Secaucus Seven. They were right.

Sayles would continue riding high in the world of independent film with film after film of compelling stories, irresistible characters, and dialogue at once natural and purposeful. The list is surprisingly long even to a Sayles fan, so many more than the best known: Matewan (1987), Eight Men Out (1988), The Secret of Roan Inish (1994), and Lone Star (1996).

There’s a reason why these and every other film of his are beyond entertaining and informative. As a projectionist I was able to see them several times. (Not only do I not pay to see films, I get paid to see them.) Every viewing was always just as satisfying, and on one busman’s holiday, it was doubly so. That was during a cross-country trip with my daughter, then 16. We stayed a night in Lawrence, Kansas, for dinner and a movie at the Free State Cinema & Brew Pub. If that combo wasn’t luck enough, Roan Inish was on the screen. Next day we were talking about it half way to Colorado.

Can’t just be us. In 1997, the West Newton Cinema, an art-house with six screens including one with perhaps 35 seats, played Men with Guns for at least six months. At the end of the run, their entry in the Boston Globe‘s schedule announced that it would be the final week. I had monitored that weekly page for 15 years and cannot recall any other film gaining such a notice.

Two years later, Limbo would nearly match it. Some irony here. Limbo ends not with a fade to black, but to white. As the one-word title suggests, there is no certain outcome. When viewers left the theater, they stopped at the base of the projection booth, asking if I knew what happened next. A former projectionist at Upstate Films in Rhinebeck, N.Y., now co-owner of the Screening Room, tells me that people left angry when it played there.

That may have turned the tide on Sayles’ films, although it’s far more likely that “market forces”–a euphemism for greed that seeks the lowest common denominator–caused funding for independent films, particularly those made by writers and directors committed to honest exposes of history, to shrink. A brief succession of films–Sunshine State (2002), Casa de los Babys (2003), and Silver City (2004)–continued to do well in art-house cinemas such as ours, but as Sayles recently said in a public appearance, at least on of his screenplays is still on the shelf.

All along, Sayles was also writing novels. He appeared at Newburyport’s Jabberwocky Bookshop last month to read from and talk about his latest of nine novels, Crucible. The event was billed as “a conversation” with local author, Andre Dubus III, who noted that, for all Sayles’ attention to people who have been slighted and wronged by the twists and turns of American history, he is “never didactic.” Quite a compliment for a novel that might pass as a fictionalized chapter of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.

As cinematic as his films, Crucible is an epic spanning nearly 500 pages, 16 years, a couple dozen characters, and six settings from Michigan to Brazil. To unify all of that is the Ford Motor Company, ads for which divide the novel’s seven sections while denoting the passage of time–from the Crash of 1929, through the last years of Prohibition, into the New Deal, up against one of the most consequential strikes of America’s Labor Movement, accompanied by race riots, past a mural by Diego Rivera, into labor unions, and headlong toward World War II, churning out tanks where once they made cars.

The characters are distinct and as recognizable as those we see today: a Polish family, a Jewish family, a Black family, an AFL, a CIO, members of the Detroit press, Henry Ford himself with his gun-happy henchman and his affable son Edsel, as ill-fated as the car that would bear his name. You can see the crowded neighborhoods, feel the humidity of the rainforest, hear the drills in the factory; touch the steering wheel of a Model T, smell the golabki in the kitchen.

There’s also a family named Rogan who would be dispatched from the pine forests on Michigan’s lily-white Upper Peninsula into the Amazon Jungle to grow rubber trees when the “Sage of Dearborn,” tired of paying Goodyear and Firestone for tires, thought he could make his own. In his talk, Sayles estimated that “Fordlandia” was about the size of Connecticut, but in the book he gives far more space to Kerry Rogan who we watch grow up in Brazil with her puppy-love, Flavio, each of them teaching the other their native language.

May sound like too much, but the pages may be three-fourths dialogue. The result is as fast-paced as Hemingway, though the casual, witty narrator, the jokes, the historical content, and the innovative format make Hemingway’s friend, John Dos Passos, a closer comparison. While Dos Passos employed a “Camera’s Eye” between chapters of Manhattan Transfer and his USA trilogy, Sayles’ narrator is a camera. Here’s an exchange between a young Jewish woman [Rosa] and a Polish couple [Kaz and Molly] who rescue her from a riot after her boyfriend shoved her into their car because he wanted to join the fight. Unable to drive safely into her neighborhood, they take her home for the night:

“Your father won’t be worried?” she asks.

“Not really,” says Rosa, amazed at how much cooler this house is compared to their apartment in Hastings. “I told him I’d be staying with Rick overnight.”

“And Rick is–?”

“The soldier you saw me have a fight with.”

“Ah.”

Rosa forgets, sometimes, that she is in the minority in many ways, social mores being one of them. Kaz looks amused, but Molly–

“Do you have a date set?”

“Ah—-? Oh, no marriage plans.”

Molly tucks a sheet under the sofa cushions, pulling it taut.

Crucible weaves the stories of these and over a dozen other characters into a final section that, without dictating just what their future holds, gives us the direction they are heading. Rosa will be rid of Rick. Kaz and Molly’s handicapped daughter, Sonia, will have a productive life. Mavis is far less fortunate at the morgue looking for her 14-year-old son. Flavio is a rare teenager who can speak fluent English in a third-world country. Norma wants to be a nurse whether she gets paid or not. And her daughter Kerry is on a flight back to Michigan to attend a teacher’s college:

“You are going home now?” asks the nice Brazilian lady beside her.

Kerry’s answer to that question would make a Ford owner’s manual worth slogging through. Thankfully, Sayles put it at the end of a novel rich with such moments. Much like his films.

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https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000626/

Call Her ‘What If’

Whether or not the very title, Call Me Ishmaelle, makes obvious the book’s premise, let’s start by saying that Xiaolu Guo’s re-imagination of Moby-Dick is based on historical record.

No telling how many young women successfully disguised themselves as young men for the sake of adventure and got themselves hired, mostly as cabin-boys, on merchant and whaling ships that crossed oceans in the 19th Century. Guo mentions four whose stories and memoirs have appeared in print.

Her acknowledgments also include Skip Finley’s Whaling Captains of Color: America’s First Meritocracy (2020). May not have been true in the early 19th Century when Herman Melville’s novel is set or even in 1851 when Moby-Dick was published, but Guo’s adaptation begins in 1860 by which time freed African-Americans rose through the ranks to become captains of ships.

Suffice to say that, while the critics label Ishmaelle “gender-flipped” or “a feminist re-telling,” they are not wrong. But the book is so much more, that they reduce it even as they think they praise it.

Moreover, Guo tells a very different story. While the characters are parallel, most of them play quite different roles. Unlike Ishmael who keeps his head down on the Pequod, Ishmaelle becomes very much a part of the plot. With the exception of a few musings at the end of chapters and at the end of the book, her narration stays focused on the Nimrod‘s pursuit of Moby-Dick, a far cry from Ishmael’s frenzied philosophical and historical tangents while telling us of the Pequod‘s voyage.

Captain Seneca is as close to Othello as to Ahab, with an added grievance or two that propel him. And his surprise addition to the crew, Muzi, a Taoist “monk” who advises him with the I Ching, is 180 degrees removed from Ahab’s Satanic Fedallah.

Advising Ishmaelle is Mr. Entwhistle, or “Woody” as he is inevitably known, who likes to remind her that, as he first puts it, “Everything is a task. Living is a task. There is only one thing that is not a task.” What follows is among the more revealing passages regarding her inner turmoil, the glaring difference between Guo’s narrator and Melville’s, and by implication between men and women:

‘And what is that, Woody?’

‘Death. Death is not a task.’

Well, I thought he was right. Death is not a task. But that was like saying that a carpenter is a carpenter, a fish is a fish, a boat is a boat. There was no need to interpret these things. But to be a whaler was different. A whaler had a mission to conquer, to kill. Life for a whaler was not about one task after another task. Life for them was a huge heroic mission involving killing or being killed. I was never sure if I was a real whaler. I did not have this desire to conquer or to kill. I did not have this unstoppable urge to chase. But I did have the desire to know about the world, and to discover. So I was neither a carpenter nor a whaler. I was not sure what I was. For the last several months, I had been a man called Ishmael, now I was a woman called Ishmaelle. Though to myself I was both.

While there’s no Father Mapple and no “Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appall” sermon, the Nimrod’s crew includes a surgeon, Mr. Hawthorne, who takes Ishmaelle under wing. By the end, we’ll learn that Hawthorne discerned the disguise early on. He soon becomes a father figure to the girl-boy when he learns of her knowledge of the medicinal properties of herbs. Guo is offering an inside joke with the name: Not only was Moby-Dick dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Melville’s friend, but herbal medicine played a leading role in The Scarlet Letter.

Captain Seneca also took note of Ishmaelle’s way with herbs. Because of it, he spared her any punishment when she was found out. Might add that he put her attacker in irons for three days, but that’s a slap on the wrist considering just what the attack entailed. When the third mate was lost overboard, he amazed the crew–and I dare say this reader–by promoting her to the position that includes leading one of the three boats that leave the ship for the chase.

Like so many secrets in Guo’s intrigue-rich tale, Seneca’s reason will be made as clear as it is logical. When Ishmaelle denies his claim that she has some secret power over “the white devil,” Seneca explodes:

You cannot lie to me and dissemble! You witch, you have been brought to me, brought onto this cursed bark. You are the path to the whale. You have beguiled that whale, you will ensure I prevail!

A black captain vs. a white whale. A woman in the role of a man. Eastern religion guiding a Christian boat. The backdrop of an imminent Civil War before the story sets sail. A cameo appearance of witchcraft as it dives toward conclusion.

Taken in full, Call Me Ishmaelle isn’t a “gender-flipping” of Moby-Dick, nor is it a backstory such as Sena Jeter Naslund’s page-turning Ahab’s Wife (1999), or the tale told from another point of view such as James (2024), Percival Everett’s uncompromising re-telling of Huckleberry Finn.

The only category into which Guo’s novel might fit, if it exists, is the category of “What if?” It’s a category, a question, a premise in which the imagination has no limit.

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https://www.kcl.ac.uk/events/book-talk-call-me-ishmaelle-xiaolu-guo

Death of a Verb

Put aside all the political and social damage that he continues to wreak (which is, of course, impossible), and he is still guilty of destroying one of the most useful, forceful, unambiguous verbs in the English language.

Trump has trumped “trump.”

If we could imagine a deck of cards representing the 52 most glaring debasements of the English language over the past, say, twenty years, “trump” would be the highest trump in whatever game you choose.

Maybe I’m fortunate that the only card game I continue to play is cribbage, a game that has no trump, although getting skunked is reminiscent.

Other cards might come close. Those who answer cellphones in classrooms, in meetings, in theaters, and many other public places have turned “emergency” into the biggest one-word joke in the history of any language.

In Newburyport, another ace would be “accountability,” rendered absolutely meaningless in last year’s election as he who most often proclaimed it openly and successfully avoided it.

Ever taking tricks is one dating back at least to the early-80s when I first heard it o’er and o’er again in the halls of academe. That’s when we went from The Dawning of the Age of Aquarius to The Yawning of the Age of Appropriate.

Before long, “appropriate” clouded the language of business and politics as well, like an invasive species that kills off useful plants while having no use of its own other than to presume agreement. It’s the adult version of the adolescent “cool,” making conformity with our peers seem like discerning individuality.

Once upon an attention span, we readily described subjects as necessary, relevant, ethical, practical, effective, durable, flexible, reliable, useful, pleasing, timely, sufficient, and on and on. Now, we lazily rely on this all-purpose “appropriate.” Test it for yourself: Whenever you hear the word “appropriate,” stop the speaker and ask what it means. Chances are the speaker will need just a moment to give you a clear, precise, honest word.

Be prepared, however, for the question to draw a blank, suggesting that speakers are either inflating the language or do not know what they are talking about. I’m not saying that there is anything necessarily nefarious here, just that “appropriate” is dead from overuse, and has been for 40 years.

As American economist Thomas Sowell told us, “If it means everything, it means nothing.”

Just last year, we heard the debasement of a word that has always seemed harmless, at least as far as this Truman baby can recall. In fact, the man with the most undeserved name claimed to have invented it: “grocery.” Can’t recall the Truman years, but I can tell you that, in the Eisenhower years, supermarkets were still on the horizon of what we called “grocery stores.”

He also boasted that he would “make America affordable again” in his 2024 campaign, although he now calls “affordability” a made-up word, a Democratic hoax. But that’s nothing compared to his 2016 campaign when his stump speeches included pro-longed ridicule of the word “emoluments.” He also called that a hoax, having heard it repeatedly invoked during his two impeachments.

Apparently he never saw it in print. That includes the US Constitution where “emoluments” appears several times because the founders were determined to prevent future presidents from accepting riches that might influence them. The emphasis they put on emoluments is so great that, to say you read the Constitution and then not recognize it, is akin to claiming you’ve been to Yellowstone but can’t recall any geyser.

Those passages drew loud laughter from the MAGA crowds, as Trump trumped the founders with a series of weird and exaggerated pronunciations made with twisting facial expressions–“eeee-MULL-ew-mints,” “eh-mole-U-mince.” All those folks who for years dared that we liberals “Read the Constitution!” themselves do not recognize it.

It’s as if the novel 1984 has been taken and employed as a blueprint rather than as a cautionary tale. George Orwell’s “Newspeak” serves as a precursor for today’s debased English, not just in the limited vocabulary of “Doubleplusgoodspeak,” but in naming and renaming of anything in sight. “Victory Cigarettes” and “Victory Chocolate” may very well be the models for “Big Beautiful Bill” and “Gulf of America.” The brand name, “Trump,” now being stamped on public buildings follows the lead of the ubiquitous posters of Big Brother in Orwell’s “Oceania.”

Orwell’s most quoted line sums it up: “(I)f thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” We need heed the line that follows:

A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.

And so it is that Americans left and right, educated or not, have allowed our language to be debased. How bad is it? Walmart now claims to be “investing in American jobs” on signs that it places directly above self-checkout counters manufactured in China, and few notice. The fewer who object are dismissed as malcontents.

Could say that we were trumped before Trump hit the scene. But that does not mean that the game is lost. We still have the language and the ability to use it with honesty, precision, and clarity. In effect, we still have cards. And we have turns to bid.

Those turns are called elections where the highest bid calls trump. Might call it “the art of the deal” if only that phrase were not already debased.

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https://sva.design/projects/11458/1984-principles-of-newspeak/

https://www.fox5ny.com/news/trump-selling-99-virtual-trading-cards

Forever in Our Ears

Finally rejoined the No Kings rallies after eight weekends in a Renaissance faire, two in witch-trial re-enactments, and one to celebrate my grandson’s 11th birthday.

Put another way, after two months in 1510, two weeks in 1692, and two days recalling 2014, I’m back in 1968 trying to prevent Project 2025 from destroying any more than it already has.

If that’s not enough, I always spend the first weekend after New Year’s taking a turn in the Midnight Watch of a marathon reading of Moby-Dick, which puts me in 1851.

Some people are all over the map, but I’m all over the millennium, and my estimates are admittedly liberal. I’m a throwback to the Pied Piper of Hamelin (1284), but most of the tunes I play at the renfaire, Celtic and Baroque, were first heard in the early 1700s. As if to balance that, all my banter about Chaucer (1343-1400) and Gutenberg (1393?-1468) make the renfaire’s 1510 a reasonable compromise. The same music pre-dates Salem’s trials, but it was still played, and I found it easy to add colonial hits such as “Gathering Peascods” and “Virgin Pullets” to my rotation. As long as I refrain from playing “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” and the theme from The Godfather, the artistic director is pleased.

Yesterday, I went armed with a small, high-pitched pipe hoping for a drum-circle in Newburyport. Instead, an amplifier or two belted out classic rock. Given the low temps and the vigorous wind-chill, I was quite content to keep my hands in my pockets though I quietly wished I had trekked to Ipswich where my chances would have been better.

Just before the much larger, nationally held, and heavily attended No Kings rally on Oct. 18, a woman in Newburyport sent me an email saying I had been spotted playing with a drum circle this past summer. She wanted me to know that Newburyport would have one at No Kings, and would I join them?

Wrote back to thank her, but also to say I’d be at Renaissance festival that day, literally playing for a king.

Had that in mind when I turned north instead of south on US 1A after leaving Plum Island. These weekly rallies may not receive much media attention, but the No Kings rallies on Oct. 18 were all over the news with estimates of over seven million protesters nation wide–over 2,000 in a city as small as Newburyport, and approaching 300 in the small town of Ipswich. Each week? I’d say Ipswich drew between 100 and 150 in the dozen weeks I attended, and I’m told that Newburyport averages 200.

Windchill kept this weekend’s numbers down. At least 50 of the 75 or so protesters in Newburyport this weekend could have been with me in DC in 1968, more likely for Mayday in 1971. Same was true of all the “stand-outs” I attended before Labor Day, including one in Peterborough, N.H. In Ipswich, not only have I joined Salem State classmates, but also one of our profs who greeted us by yelling, “I can’t believe we’re doing this same shit!”

L2R: Retired Salem State English Prof. Pat Gozemba and two of her students who shall go unnamed to avoid the attention of their respective parole officers. Photo taken in Ipswich, July or August by either Karen Kahn or Marilyn Humphries.

No classmates or profs this weekend, but one fellow who knew I was looking for a drum circle greeted me by asking: “Are you going to play?”

Though touched by his mere interest, I called as much attention to the windchill as to the lack of drums to decline. Apparently one of the organizers, he offered me a bullhorn. I laughed, “That’s just for voice-“

“Do you sing?”

That deserved a laugh, but it conjured up a memory: “About 20 years ago, I learned three songs just for the sake of a break from piping. Tried them first in Salem so I wouldn’t embarrass myself here on the home court. It did not go well. So, no, I do not sing.”

“What were the songs?”

“Two by Stan Rogers.” He nodded, which I took to mean he recognized the late-Canadian folk-singer’s name. I launched into ‘White Collar Holler’:

And it’s ho, boys, can you code it, program it right
Nothing ever happens in the life of mine
I’m calling up the data on the Xerox line“

He smiled as if to say not bad, but I told him I couldn’t sustain more than a verse. I then named the other two: “Roger’s ‘The Idiot’ and Stephen Foster’s ‘Hard Times’:

His reaction took me by surprise: “Weren’t Stephen Foster’s songs racist?”

Maybe renfaire and witch-trial credentials make it easy for me to place myself in the shoes of 1854 when, as I answered: “Foster was staying in Cincinnati, in lodgings overlooking the Ohio River where he could see the random small craft of the Underground Railroad unload people escaping the South. That’s why he wrote this song. I guess I recall Uncle Tom stereotypes and words like ‘darkie’ in other songs, including ‘Old Kentucky Home,’ but for me, ‘Hard Times’ eclipses all of that. And anyway, I’m not going to pass that kind of judgment on an artist from a time so far removed from me–in a Zeitgeist I myself never had to endure.”

My new friend appeared satisfied, so I offered an upbeat sequel:

“About 20 years ago I visited a friend in Louisville who took me to Bardstown where the ‘Old Kentucky Home’ is now a tourist attraction. As soon as I saw the loudspeakers on poles around the parking lot, I quipped before we got out of the car, ‘You can bet they won’t be playing ‘Hard Times’. As soon as we stepped out, we heard:

Let us pause in life’s pleasures and count its many tears
While we all sup sorrow with the poor
There’s a song that will linger forever in our ears
Oh hard times come again no more”

We soon turned our attention to the rally at hand, perhaps to prevent me from torturing anyone’s sense of hearing any more than I already had. Driving home, I realized that I had made the same assumption of the Foster museum that my friend had made of Foster.

Might seem like a cute little story except for its parallel that has been a ubiquitous landmine in the American culture war that has raged for time out of mind. Many now appalled by the banning of books treating racial, gender, and environmental issues today are the same folks who called for the banishment of Huckleberry Finn at least once a decade before this decade of our malcontent.

As with Foster, objections all aim at Mark Twain’s use of words, mostly in dialogue, common to the 19th Century and stereotypes held today only by the willfully ignorant and hopelessly shut-in. No matter that the whole point of the book is delivered when young Huck is tormented by his “Christian” belief that he must turn Jim in. No matter that a 14-year-old white boy tells us he’d rather “go to hell” than surrender Jim back into enslavement–that he chose the freedom of a Black Man over the grace of a White God.

Heavy stuff for 1884. And heavy stuff now, which may be the real reason it’s condemned by both left and right.

And maybe why I keep looking for answers in the past.

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https://genius.com/Stan-rogers-white-collar-holler-lyrics

https://genius.com/Stan-rogers-the-idiot-lyrics

https://genius.com/Stephen-foster-hard-times-lyrics

From a video (below) taken in Ipswich, Aug 23. by Marilyn Humphries.

American Friction

Rummaging through past writings looking for something I never found, I found this instead: A draft of a commentary on James, Percival Everett’s 2024 re-telling of Huckleberry Finn in the voice of Jim, the runaway who joins Huck on the raft to escape enslavement.

Yes, I said “commentary.” For a review, please see the website in the photo caption below. Also, if you do not recognize the name Everett, it may help to know he’s the author of the 2001 novel Erasure that was adapted for the Oscar-nominated film American Fiction in 2023.

Not that it matters now, but I laughed when I saw the mid-July date on the draft. That’s when my Lenovo went kaput, and I went a full week without a laptop while I was also unwilling to sit for any length of time in a library. Meanwhile, other matters claimed my attention, and I just forgot it was there.

Be that as it may, for those of you who spend many winter nights with books, as well as those maybe looking for holiday gift suggestions, I now hasten it onto screen:

Checked James out of the library after recommendations from a couple who both thought it preposterous–“literary revisionism”–and two other friends, unknown to each other, who found it incisive and enlightening. Though busy the rest of the day, I thought I’d give the book a look before falling asleep. The need for sleep did not reclaim me until 30 pages later.

Next morning, as always, I made a pot of coffee and returned to bed before breakfast. Before the need for breakfast claimed me, I was on page 95. My watch said high noon. After an omelet and with another pot of coffee, I set up outside under a shade tree and read the book right to the end, page 304. I don’t recall ever getting out of the chair.

To say I found it fascinating would be a gross understatement. No doubt, the amount of dialogue and first-person narrative gave it quick pace. And no doubt my just having finished Willa Cather’s Sapphira & the Slave Girl–a 1940 novel that would be condemned by both right and left if a high school teacher put it on a syllabus today—prepared me for the duality of enslaved life.

From a literary viewpoint, this book atones for the ridiculous ending Twain slap-stuck onto an otherwise brilliant novel. Even those who call Huckleberry Finn America’s greatest novel condemn the final chapters. But more than anything I admired the relevance to today, especially the white insistence on stereotypes. After the King & Dauphin boast of how easy it is to con people out of their money, James tells us:

After being cruel, the most notable white trait was gullibility.

And the scenes. Con-artists were common enough on the Mississippi that Melville wrote a novel about them called The Confidence Man years before Twain started writing short stories for magazines. Steamboat explosions were rather common when they were overloaded. Rapes were matter-of-fact. How much of those three 19th Century American realities is ever mentioned in the history and literature taught in schools or presented anywhere today?

For all that, James is as hilarious as it is horrifying. A great read, and a valuable addition to American letters, you can bet it will be banned from many public schools and libraries by many cruel state legislatures that thrive on public gullibility.

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James also reminded me of a review of an art exhibit I wrote four years ago:

Go Tell It on the Canvas

https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/6335/book-review-james-by-percival-everett

Ear Candy for All Ages

If we look at the bright side of life here in Soviet America, we might find encouragement in the resurgence of literary parables and satires of authoritarian rule.

Launched like a rocket in 2017 when Mar-an-Ego’s first spokesliar, Jelly-Ban Wrongway, called Ego’s version of inaugural events “alternative facts” despite all photographic evidence to the contrary.

Days later there were reports from coast to coast of George Orwell’s 1984 flying off bookstore shelves. Within a week, a new edition of the 72-year-old novel was printed.

Soon after, Republicans ramped up their attack on Roe v. Wade in anticipation of an Ego appointment to the Supreme Court. Feminists responded by drawing comparisons to The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood’s 1958 dystopian novel, igniting another stampede into America’s bookstores.

From the beginning, Ego drew many comparisons to Captain Ahab who sank his ship in pursuit of the whale that tore off his leg, all for the sake of revenge. And that was four years before Ego coined the name “Revenge Tour” for his campaign.

Eventually, classic titles gaining re-circulation in conversation, in the news, in classrooms and libraries were enough to fill the syllabus of a graduate seminar: Brave New World, Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451, The Road, The Hunger Games, stories from Vonnegut’s Welcome to the Monkey House, and more.

Another that I surely would have promoted is James Thurber’s The Wonderful O (1957) which might qualify as a cross between Orwell and J.R.R. Tolkien, though the closest comparisons may be The Emperor’s New Clothes and The Wizard of Oz.

A children’s story with no end of loopy language and word play, Wonderful O bites with political satire sure to amuse any parent or grandparent reading aloud. Never heard of it until I unwrapped a birthday gift two weeks ago.

While the premise is simple, the result is as textured and colorful as a Disney animation. And the pace of the narrative gives it a magical ride. As a likely nod to 1984, Thurber begins the tale with a familiar, yet often ominous sound:

Somewhere a ponderous tower clock slowly dropped a dozen strokes into the gloom. Storm clouds rode low along the horizon, and no moon showed.

The rhythmic and rhyming O sounds hint at the book’s premise: An attempt by power hungry leaders to stunt thought and dialogue among the people by debasing language. In 1984, this was called “Newspeak,” achieved by dumbing down vocabulary. Thurber takes the next step with characters, Littlejack and Black, who attempt to ban one letter from all speech and writing:

And so, language and the spoken word diminished as people were forced to speak without the use of O in any word. No longer could the people say Heigh-Ho, Yoohoo, Yo-ho-ho, or even plain Hello…

“We can’t tell shot from shoot, or hot from hoot,” the blacksmith said, in secret meeting with his fellows.

“We can’t tell rot from root, or owed from wed,” the banker said.

From scene to scene, we see and hear the result of this purge applied to various endeavors: gardening, music, farming, science, games, law, and more. Thurber sustains the rhyme and rhythm with a mesmerizing pace right to the end, as when Andreus and Andrea (the good guys) thwart Littlejack and Black by invoking heroes and heroines of legend and lore who begin…

… streaming out of song and story, each phantom flaunting like a flag his own special glory: Lancelot and Ivanhoe, Athos, Porthos, Cyrano, Roland, Rob Roy, Romeo; Donalbane of Burnham Wood, Robinson Crusoe and Robin Hood; the moody Doones of ‘Lorna Doone,’ Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone; out of near and ancient tomes, Banquo’s ghost and Sherlock Holmes; Lochinvar, Lothario, Horatius, and Horatio; and there were other figures too, darker, coming from the blue, Shakespeare’s Shylock, Billy Bones, Quasimodo, Conrad’s Jones, Ichabod and Captain Hook–names enough to fill a book.

Add an ending as all-to-real as surprising, and it’s as easy to see as to hear why Harper’s called it the “loveliest and liveliest of parables.” As Ransom Riggs, author of the endearing Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, offers in her introduction to a 2017 re-issue, it’s…

… a commentary on world affairs a half century ago, but which feels absolutely (and sadly) relevant today. While balancing all that… it accomplishes feat after feat of linguistic acrobatics–not quite poetry, not quite prose, O is ear candy.

Yes, re-issued in 2017, same year that 1984 was the “Newspeak” of the nation. And given me the very week that Mar-an-Ego’s Littlejacks and Blacks banned 294 words from federal government websites.

Life in Soviet America is so full of coincidence!

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