Running 40 minutes behind schedule, the 30th Annual Moby-Dick Marathon dives past midnight into Sunday’s wee hours. So sorry if I’m keeping you up waiting for me to breach on the livestream.
Here at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, no one appears at all bothered by it. The twenty readers following me, all the way to 3:30, are all smiles when they take to the podium and when they leave. While up there, expressions change to capture Ishmael’s excitement, Ahab’s rage, Queequeg’s resolve, Starbuck’s meditation, Stubb’s flippancy, Flask’s complacence, Pipp’s innocence.
Yes, that’s all in the present tense, as I now have a seat outside the auditorium in a room just off the lobby where coffee is here for the taking. Only chowder cups remain from which to drink it, but caffeine is caffeine. There’s a large screen with the livestream a few feet from where I sit, and the sound, frankly, is louder and more clear than in the auditorium.
Only because I glanced at the screen do I realize that viewers may have noticed an odd bit of drama when I took my seat. Indeed, when I checked messages before starting this report, I learned that a friend had patiently waited those 40 minutes before writing: “I’m here. Where are you?” And then:
There you are… what? That guy just took your book and kept it? You are such a gentleman.
Don’t know about the “gentleman” part, but I need to describe the Marathon’s format to explain what happened:
On the auditorium stage are two podiums and one chair. The dual podiums work like a relay race to keep transitions up to speed. Each has a microphone, and so the reader on deck, so to speak, is ready to start as soon as the one reading is finished. Two monitors are seated in the front row facing us, and one will say “Thank You” at the end of a paragraph nearest our allotted time. The reader who is finished leaves the stage, and the reader waiting in the seat goes to the vacant podium. Since we wear numbers on lanyards around our necks, it is very easy to see when we should leave the audience and take that vacated chair.
So it was that when 128 finished, 129 started, and 130 went from chair to podium. At that moment, I, 131, took the chair. And then it happened. Stepping back toward me, in a whisper, 130 seemed in distress and said something. I thought he had lost his place and wanted me to point it out. Already following along, I held my book up and pointed to the paragraph that 129 was then reading.
130 took the book! I was surprised, but he soon brought it back, saying he was still lost. I’m quite familiar with those ten or so chapters (that’s why I always choose the “midnight watch”), so I was able to point to it. Again, he took it to the podium, and got ready to read from it.
This time I was stunned. How could he not have his own? And they have a stack right there from which anyone can borrow. One of the monitors, perceiving what happened, and knowing that I had to be following along as 130 read, gave me one of those books, open to the page.
As if to add insult to injury, 130 got “The Dart,” the chapter I hope to get every year. For one, it’s an op-ed column written 70 years before newspapers began carrying such things, and 120 years before the term was coined. Other chapters in Moby-Dick fit the description, but, just as the best op-eds end with “kickers,” this one ends with a metaphor showing that Melville had a lot more than whaling in mind.
And then my bad luck turned to gold. They cut the book thief before the last paragraph, which I know by heart, so I was able to look up into the audience and camera, and deliver it as the kicker it is:
To insure the greatest efficiency of the dart, the harpooneers of this world must start to their feet out of idleness, and not from out of toil.
Gave it two beats to sink in before buoyantly announcing “Chapter 63, The Crotch” and putting on my glasses. Grateful that no one snickered at the name of the fixture that holds harpoons in place on the boats that give chase, I then read the chapter’s delightfully calm, organic opening line:
Out of the trunk, the branches grow; out of them, the twigs. So, in productive subjects, grow the chapters.
The audience laughed, and for the first time, despite having read Moby-Dick five times, I heard Melville’s anticipation of critics who would complain that he attempted too much. As he writes in a later chapter, “I try all things; I achieve what I can.”
Not sure if it was that realization, or kicking of “The Dart” with point and purpose, or both that took my mind off the book thief and animated me like a child on a boogie board riding the waves of a playful surf through Ishmael’s provocative prose.
Yes, I’m sorry if I kept you waiting, but not at all for what you got while you waited. Nor would I apologize for any of the 25 hours these marathons average, with or without an extra 40 minutes this year.
-756-
No screenshots awaiting me this year, as those prone to send them sent them in previous years. This may be from two years ago, before the event was moved into the auditorium. I won’t know if my opening recitation had the desired effect until I see the video, which the museum usually posts about two weeks after the event. Judging from the message from Woonsocket, the affair of the book makes an impression. I’ll post it in a blog as soon as I can:
Really don’t mind if you sit this one out and take it for the purely academic exercise that it admittedly is. Written for my fellow Jethro Tull fans (“Tullskulls”) with my fellow Moby-Dick fans (“Dickheads”) also in mind, I thought I’d offer it for possible conversation or at least amusement as much for those who defy categories as for those in them.
Call me sophomore. That’s what I was in 1971 when I took a college elective titled “Hawthorne & Melville.” Moby-Dick had already been assigned me in high school, but I Cliff Noted it and wrote a paper more about the Gregory Peck movie. In college, I was ready for it, immediately identified with Ishmael, and was the first to answer the professor who wanted to know what we thought.
“Woody Allen should make this his next film,” I began. The prof laughed hard and out loud, no doubt because Allen at the time was in his early, wacky Bananas stage, but he still managed to nod his head. Other students were looking at each other, jaws dropped, wondering what to think. Such a moment that I can’t recall anything said afterward.
Less than two months later, I attended my first Jethro Tull concert at an old ocean-front casino, the Aqualung tour. A year or two later, I heard them play Thick as a Brick in the old, revered Boston Garden, and in another year, I was there for A Passion Play. Since then, I may have attended 30, mostly in five of New England’s six states, with two outliers in Minneapolis and at Kent State where I paid a scalper $20 for a front row seat. Yes, it was that long ago, just a few years after the shootings. Last heard them two years ago not long after the release of RökFlöte–back in the Hampton Beach Casino.
Minneapolis was as close as Tull came to South Dakota where I was in graduate school reading, among other things, everything Melville wrote that still survives, and all of the criticism of him I could find in those pre-internet days. How much time did I spend with the SDSU library’s microfilm readers? Back in my trailer on the edge of an alfalfa field, I read Confidence Man and Billy Budd to the tunes of Songs from the Wood and Heavy Horses.
Never gave any thought to any connection between the two. It was, after all, Led Zeppelin who titled a track “Moby-Dick.” No lyrics at all, mostly a 19-minute drum solo, perhaps intended as a soundtrack for the book’s final scene. And it was an American group called Mountain who gave us an album titled Nantucket Sleighride.
Might have made the connection in 2014 upon the release of Tull frontman/flautist Ian Anderson’s solo album Homo Erraticus (“The Wandering Man”) had Melville been on my mind. Since then I have joined the annual marathon reading of Moby-Dick at the New Bedford Whaling Museum–about 225 of us taking five- or ten-minute turns for 25 consecutive hours–and it was only a matter of time before I’d play that CD and feel that slow hunch of recognition take hold. I replayed it while reading the lyrics, and the hunch seemed obvious.
This is not at all to say that Melville’s novel inspired Anderson’s album. In fact, I’d be surprised if Anderson gave it any thought. The stories being told–a fatal whaling voyage and a condensed history of the British Empire–would never be classified together, much less compared. But the arc, the architecture of the two, as well as some minute details of style, are uncannily similar.
As I said, it’s all academic, perhaps esoteric, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth exploring. As Ishmael says: “I try all things; I achieve what I can.”
And as “Gerald Bostock,” the “lyricist” of Thick as a Brick, Brick 2, and Homo Erraticus, puts it: “Sorry–we’re coming in!”
Ishmael Erraticus
Moby-Dick opens with Ishmael (Biblically, “the outcast”) retreating from Manhattan to sign onto a whaling ship on the island of Nantucket. Anderson’s “wandering man” first appears crossing “Doggerland” from the continent to an island.
Ishmael, delayed for a day in New Bedford, lands himself in The Spouter Inn before meeting Queequeg. Horrified at first by the heavily tattooed Pacific Islander, he takes a liking to him and sings his praises. “Drown sorrow” and “sweet surrender” from the lyrics of “The Turnpike Inn” might describe that change of heart.
“Wild Child Coming” covers the arrival of Christianity in Britain circa 600 AD. In the New Bedford chapel, Father Mapple delivers a tumultuous sermon with a nevertheless hopeful message that offers “a new age dawning… to an old age plan.”
Religion is a recurring theme in both works, and it likely reminded Tull fans of Aqualung. Reminded me of a paper I wrote while in South Dakota based on a premise that most of us hear at a very early age: If the Bible is “God talking to man,” then Moby-Dick is man’s response.
Grandiose? Maybe, but how far is that from “After These Wars”:
When the Co-op gave us daily bread
And penicillin raised the dead
And combine harvesters kept us fed…
With Anderson’s characteristic touch of satire, “The Pax Britannica” both lyrically and musically waves the UK flag, celebrating an empire “generous in deed and promise.” Throughout Moby-Dick, Ishmael celebrates the whaling industry with boasts just as spirited–and seasoned to Melville’s satirical taste.
Celebrating the Industrial Revolution, “The Engineer” boasts of “Rain, Steam, Speed at Maidenhead--Turner’s vision wide.” The reference is to one of the best-known works of British painter J.M.W. Turner (1775-1849):
But Turner’s most frequent subject was the sea, especially ships wracked by storms which drew Melville’s attention. Biographers note that Melville went out of his way to view Turner’s work at exhibits, and collected over 30 or his miniature engravings. One tells us that Melville was impressed by “the air of uncertainty” Turner put over his work and wanted to replicate it in prose, starting with Moby-Dick.
Starting with the intro to Brick–“I may make you feel, but I can’t make you think”–that air has since been felt in Tull albums, right up to this year’s Curious Ruminant. Highlights include: “Baker Street Muse,” “Heavy Horses,” “Farm on the Freeway,” “Budapest,” “Sailor’s Song,” “Beside Myself,” and much of The Zealot Gene.
As a tribute, Ishmael describes a painting on the wall at the Spouter Inn. There’s neither title nor artist’s name, but, no matter how “thoroughly besmoked and in every way defaced” Ishmael finds it, he is clearly describing Turner’s Whalers:
Critics who complain that Moby-Dick is wrought with tangents are referring to chapters where Ishmael reaches back into history, philosophy, art, and literature to list names of people, places and events related to whaling. Erraticus does this with “Heavy Metals” and “Enter the Uninvited” with hints of it in other tracks.
Ahab nails a gold doubloon to the mast to motivate the Pequod’s crew; Erraticus “plays the winning card” and is “in for a pound.” Ahab is obsessed with vengeance; First Mate Starbuck pleads with him to “let us follow better things.”
That call proves futile in both works. Final chapter of Moby-Dick may be the coldest, deadest reckoning in all of literature, but it is followed by an epilogue, a single paragraph in which Ishmael tells us of how he clung to, of all things, a coffin, to stay afloat until another ship arrives.
Erraticus‘ “Cold, Dead Reckoning” ends with a brief but sweetly simple instrumental to suggest that after we are gone–with or without a lone survivor to tell the story–the trees and shrubs will eventually break through the ruins, just as you could see on the road to the top of Mount Saint Helens just eight years after it blew. The world will go on without us and be better off for it.
Call Me Gerald
Something else that can be said of all Tull and Anderson solo albums starting with Brick: Each has a consistent narrative voice. Some may be quite apart from the others. The voice of Crest of a Knave will never be mistaken for that of War Child, for example. And it may be hard to believe that the guy who wrote Dot Com was the same guy who wrote Minstrel in the Gallery.
All that matters here is that we are told in the liner notes that the same “Gerald Bostock” who wrote two Brick albums “adapted” the lyrics for Erraticus from the exhaustive work of some whacked out historian. It’s a satirical layer of authorship that echoes Moby-Dick‘s “Extracts” and “Sub-sub librarians” as an elaborate and somewhat zany preface to an identity layered with “Call me…”
Many English teachers and majors parrot the lazy view that Ishmael is an example of what they call “the unreliable narrator.” What is so unreliable about telling a story in full, issuing warnings that need making, revealing the history behind it, and the facade that often lurks beneath? Is it a bent toward entertainment that they do not trust? Is it the natural appeal? Is it human nature?
What they smugly call “unreliable” is the surprising originality and artistry with which a story is delivered by a story-teller who can range from flippant to sincere, objective to satirical, obsessive to cautious, provocative to reassuring, skittish to incisive, silly to reverential, whimsical to defiant–all with a narrative command that refuses to spell things out, but instead exposes them for our own verdict. Moby-Dick is not for cubby-holing critics.
Apply all of that to any Tull album starting with Aqualung, and you may have the reason why the group is not in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
More than anything, the similarity of narrative voice makes Homo Erraticus comparable to Moby-Dick. Admittedly, I remind you, this may be a mere figment of my hyper-imagination. Truth is, I’ve often explained my attraction to the novel by saying that, had I been born in the early-19th Century, you could call me Ishmael.
Now I realize that I’m just as close to this 21st Century version.
-737-
Ian Anderson on stage at Balboa Theatre on October 17, 2016 in San Diego, California. (Photo by Daniel Knighton/Getty Images)
When Santa Rosa called to wish me a Happy Bastille Day (also our daughter’s anniversary–what was she, daughter, trying to tell us?), she, mother, added something that took me completely by surprise: The two of them will be riding Amtrak coast to coast, west to east next month.
I answered that I had good news and bad news: Amtrack’s Cleveland station is a stone’s roll from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. A beetle could walk the freeway overpass in under two hours.
Unfortunately, the one and only Chicago-to-Boston-via-NYC train pulls into Cleveland just ten minutes before “Six O’Clock in the morning when it’s still too early to knock“, so you may be singing “So Tired, tired of waiting” before you can croon “Here Comes the Sun, Little Darling.” All of that, and you’ll still be waiting a few hours before the doors light your fire.
I actually did that in 2008 on a return trip from Chicago, taking a long walk to find breakfast and enjoy the architecture downtown, followed by the newly, gorgeously landscaped Erie waterfront. If I were still that young, I’d intercept them to do it again.
Today, I’d approach the Rock Hall with a bit of history I just stumbled upon. Someone put a hint on social media, but it was barely half the story. Back in 1961 when I was but 10 years old, a rock and roller I do not recall released a song I never heard of:
In 1965, shortly before I turned 14, The Beatles’ “I Feel Fine” was #1 on the American chart:
That same year, the Yardbirds had a song I don’t recall, perhaps a track on an album I never heard, called “I’m Not Talking”:
Turns out to be a cover of a Mose Allison track on a 1964 album that replaces Allison’s piano styling with Parker-turned-Harrison:
In 1969, Yardbirds 2.0 took another whack with it for an instrumental intriguingly named “Moby Dick” on an album titled Led Zeppelin II, mostly a drum solo to re-create the final scene of the novel I guess:
Three years later, the Allman Brothers returned to the original riff set to the lyrics of an early Sixties composition by Elmore James and Sonny Boy Williamson II titled “One Way Out”:
And lastly (as far as I know), Deep Purple chipped in with “Rat Bat Blue” in 1973, a tune that turns into something that sounds like Bach-Goes-to-Coney-Island before slamming the door with “C’mon Baby, Douse My Fire” and returning to “Watch &/or Feel My Fine Step”:
All these years I have heard and talked of “the folk process,” how regional and ethnic tunes are picked up, re-imagined, adapted, styled, and re-created as something new. Reaching further back, I was always impressed by the classical composers readiness to redo the melodies of others with “variations on a theme,” and the willingness of the original composers to have it happen. Plagiarism? They considered it a compliment.
Czech composer Anton Dvorak with his New World Symphony and the USA’s own Aaron Copeland with Appalachian Spring both turned quaint American folk tunes into international favorites on the classical scene, giving many other songs like them more currency on every musical scene.
Perhaps that’s how it was in rock until 1976 when The Chiffons won a suit against George Harrison for “consciously” plagiarizing their early-60s hit “He’s So Fine” with “My Sweet Lord.”
A friend laughs: If Bach, Handel, Telemann, and Vivaldi lived like that, they’d have spent all their time in court. I guess we are just lucky that the disease of litigation didn’t spread until the glory days of rock and roll had passed. An account would have been Biblical: Blind Faith sueth Jethro Tull; Jethro Tull sueth The Eagles; The Eagles sueth America; America sueth Grand Funk Railroad…
And Grand Funk Railroad screeches into Cleveland where you can hear it all if you are patient.
-726-
Everyone knows of the glass pyramid where most everything is on six or seven floors, but the entire building is in the shape of t]a guitar with the neck stretching over Lake Erie. Inside that neck are the plaques of all inductees while the rest is mostly museum displays with a gift shop, a Sirius radio station, and a cafeteria on an upper floor surrounded by a tall wall with characters and objects from Pink Floyd’s album among the odds and ends. A creation of the renowned architect I.M. Pei, it would be worth a tour if it was empty. https://www.fmsp.com/projects/rock-roll-hall-of-fame-and-museum/
When I first saw it in the gift-shop of the New Bedford Whaling Museum, I knew I’d get a lot of mileage out of it. As a bonus, deep red is a nice addition to my endless collection of black, blue, and ash T-shirts.
My black “Newburyport Stands with Ukraine” T still draws more comments, especially at the now weekly “No Kings” rallies I attend. But these are simply expressions of agreement–while also satisfying my ulterior motive of not wanting to hold a sign or wave a flag.
“Call me” compels people to ask: “Call you what?”
Seriously, I’ve walked down State Street, and people in parked cars roll (or buzz) down windows to ask that question. Patrons walking into the Screening Room ask it so often that I now wash the shirt in my kitchen sink in between trips to the laundromat so I can wear it there twice a week.
At times, I simply turn around and show them this:
Not that I expect anyone to call me by the name of that Biblical outcast taken by the flippantly philosophical and skittishly obsessive narrator of Moby-Dick, but I wouldn’t mind if they did. Had I been born around 1800, I would be he. Most who ask recognize the name, but even for those who do not, what usually happens is that I tell them of the annual marathon reading of the book on the first weekend after New Year’s.
Depending on the scene, I’ll save that plug for later, and see how much banter I can generate:
“Call you what?”
“Charming, handsome, witty, erudite, bold, courageous, imaginative, inspiring, inspired…” and on and on until I’m interrupted:
“I meant your name!”
“Oh, I thought you wanted my preferred adjectives.”
And on it goes before I show or describe the back and pitch the marathon, emphasizing the words “free of charge.”
Yes, I add my first name which can, at times, be confusing, but I’m just starting to realize that this shirt may be the right fit for an end to that confusion. Baptized “John” into a family flush with Johns–yes, the name is fluid with puns–I became “Jackie” in my childhood, and “ja-KEE” as my mother voiced it until just short of my 50th birthday.
In college, 25 miles south of everyone who knew me, professors began classes by reading roll calls with our formal names. Shy as I’ve always been, I never corrected anyone, and so in the fall of 1968, I became John or Jack depending on which end of Massachusetts Route 114 I was matriculating. When I went west, the same thing happened at South Dakota State University except that 1,700 miles was too long for weekend visits, so it was hit the road, Jack, and make yourself comfortable, John.
And so it is that friends from Salem and from anywhere west of the Mississippi know me as John, while family in the Merrimack Valley and friends from my native Lawrence call me Jack. When I returned from the west and started writing for a newspaper in Newburyport, it was out of deference to family that the byline would be Jack. Had I landed in Salem and started writing columns for the Salem Evening News, it would have been John.
In other words, or with both names, I was never fussy. In fact, I usually invite anyone who asks to call me by any four-letter word that starts with J. What a joke! All my life, many people have called me “Jerk” without the invitation.
To be honest, I’d prefer that people address me by the name they first used. That includes a few from both Salem and Lawrence who call me by my last name–something common in the Sixties. But I don’t mind when Salemites or westerners attempt “Jack.” As I say, I’m not picky, and I’m too shy to correct anyone.
The exception is when friends say both: “Jack-John” or “John-Jack.” Not only is it grating on the ear, but it gives me a vague feeling of playing an undefined role in my own life rather than being my own person. Confidence is everything that holds one together, and without it we are helpless. That double name when I hear it–or read it in an email–is like a bucket of uncertainty poured on top of me. Sensation is physical, and I shake, as if trying to get it off.
Considering that we had a president of the USA back in the Sixties who used both names interchangeably, it’s hard to figure why anyone would struggle with this now. Joking about it doesn’t seem to help. When I’ve told people it depends on whether they want me in a bathroom or in the trunk of a car, their faces turn from confused to horrified.
Thankfully, this doesn’t happen more than twice or thrice a month. Prompted, no doubt, by the “John” on my email account. If it were more than that, say twice a week, I might wash this shirt every night to wear every day:
“Call you what?”
“Call me what you’ve always called me.”
If it’s someone I don’t know, I give them “Jack,” the more recent, local name, adding something to help them remember it: “If you need a lift, call me.”
Such a trick of memory for “John” would be at best unpleasant, and possibly lewd.
When anyone asks why I’d make a 200-mile round-trip in the dead of winter to read for ten minutes in the Moby-Dick marathon, I throw a punch-line:
I’ve been plagiarizing Herman Melville for 45 years. It’s the least I can do.
Almost always gets a good laugh, although it surprises me how nervous some people are with their own laughter. I wonder if it may be due to how suddenly aware people are of AI and the possibility of being fooled by it. Anything I write–indeed, anything anyone writes–is now suspect.
There are some who just don’t get the joke. A newspaper reporter assigned to preview the event this year went silent over the phone at my answer to the question. Finally, as if slowly coming out of hiding: “You mean you quote without giving attribution?”
While setting him straight, I could sense a memory surface after years out of mind. Over fifty years ago, it may well have been clouded over as soon as it happened in a room filled with the smoke of marijuana. Now that the statute of limitations is well past, and now that I can find no trace of the two college friends who took part in this crime, it is time to confess.
No, not a civil or criminal case that might call for a courtroom trial, much less time in jail, but an academic crime. The kind we hear of every few years that might knock a candidate out of, say, presidential primaries, as it did a young Delaware senator named Joe Biden in 1988.
The stakes for Rick, Kitty, and me were far less. A failing grade in a class, or maybe suspension from Salem State College (now University) back in 1970 or ’71, maybe ’72, whichever came first.
Time was a blur back then. The anti-war movement was at its height on college classes, and those of us in it barely cared that we were delaying our degrees a year or two. I went in as Class of ’72, finished my last class in December ’73, and graduated with the Class of ’74.
But we attempted to complete what we could of our requirements at the end of each semester. And it was within weeks of one when I found myself with Rick and Kitty seated in the corner of a room adjacent a large kitchen where a dozen of us had been planning a demonstration on campus. Planning done, it was time to “alter our consciousness” as we said back then.
Rick, a quintessential history buff, or a “nerd” decades before the word was coined, worried over a paper he had to write for a psychology class. One of those liberal arts requirements he had no feel for.
Kitty, a child psychology major, lit up: “Wish that was my assignment. I loved that class!” She took a hit and slumped back in the chair, “I have to write a book report. Charles Dickens! Hard Times! I can’t even look at it!”
A huge fan of Dickens at the time, I lit up: “I read that during spring break. That’s a damn good read. So relevant to now!” I took a hit, “Mine is a history essay. I have to cough up something about the role of Thomas Paine in American independence.”
Rick lit up, “I could write that paper right now.” He took a hit and raised his eyebrows.
It all unfolded like a round of bidding at a card game. Though not one of us was a math major, all three of us immediately did the math. And all three of us took hits getting higher and higher on the pact we made.
Rick proved he wasn’t kidding when he handed me his, or rather my paper on Paine the very next day, footnotes and all. That prompted me to compile what I had already written of what may be Dickens’ most focused novel and turn it into essay form. Delivered to Kitty that night, it may have pushed her into dusting off a paper she had already handed in and re-writing it with different examples before handing it to Rick for his psychology class just two days after our illicit academic and high-as-kites tryst.
Three students terrified of a looming deadline, we all handed in papers a week ahead of time. And we all received As for our, or rather each other’s efforts. Kitty admitted that she toned some of my vocabulary down, such as changing “famished” to “very hungry” to “make it sound more like me.”
“And a good way to increase the word count!” I added. Rick, however, was so put off by the whole subject, that he merely checked the spelling of his name on the title page and handed it in. Read it? He didn’t even scan it.
For my part, I streamlined some of Rick’s phrasing. But only after a careful and fascinated read. That paper taught me as much about American history as any single class or chapter in a history text that I’ve ever seen.
Maybe that helped me rationalize my one slip into plagiarism over fifty years ago. That and the fact that it wasn’t as if I did nothing. I did write a paper, and it did get an A.
Or I could just chalk it up to all those hits of marijuana.
I roll my eyes at people who complain about spending time in waiting rooms.
Whether at a doctor’s office or an auto shop, awaiting a late train or waiting out unexpected rain, I’m always grateful for the chance to be still, to look out a window, to read a book or magazine, one of which I’m always sure to bring, anything to escape the never-ending demands of my own commitments, if not the necessities of my very existence.
So it was last week when I went for an annual check-up with a specialist who tends to things I’d rather not mention. As my old college pal, Fort Myers, says, “At our age, it’s all about the plumbing!”
So early was it, that I had only coffee before getting dressed and grabbing the still-unopened February issue of Harper’s to take with. Breakfast could wait, I figured.
Dr. Small is a friendly fellow probably half my age who, like me, is a fan of Herman Melville, or at least of the hyper-thinking, kaleidoscopically-talking, bumptious narrator of Moby-Dick. He has attended the marathon reading in Provincetown much like the ones in New Bedford where I read. I wore my new “Call Me Ishmael” t-shirt to give him a laugh.
Dr. Small agreed that breakfast could wait. So, too, could my employment that afternoon and the next day if not also a third day. The word “procedure” was in the air. When I asked if that could wait a couple days, Ismael walked the plank and I was face-to-face with Ahab: “This is serious!”
And I knew it. My check-up had been scheduled for March, but I was noticing a change in color by mid-January. Darker and darker. Maybe that’s why I wore the t-shirt. Ishmael is full of double-entendres. A burgundy shirt might help hide what was about to happen.
About 90 minutes later, I’m in the waiting room of the hospital’s ER. Feeling beat up, though relieved I’d been cleaned out, I was content to sit for hours with my magazine. Guess my appetite had also been vacuumed, but I needed to call an employer expecting me to show up in just three hours, and there are times when cellphones ring out disengagement rather than the usual busy signal. I couldn’t leave a message. After a dozen tries, I called the folks expecting me the next day, and asked them to get through. They agreed, but I had no way of knowing if they were successful.
Two hours or maybe a third of Harper’s later, I was on a gurney up and down the hall for a CAT scan. On the way back, rolling toward ER, I spotted people in the overflow seats out in the corridor. They had been empty when I left, so I was grateful for the early appointment until I remembered skipping breakfast. And I hear a woman’s voice calling my name, “There’s Jack! There’s Jack!” She was in the nearest seat and had a cellphone to her ear while waving frantically.
My arms weren’t doing frantic, nor was my voice doing loud, and the nurse, who knows me as “John” not “Jack,” turned the gurney through the doors closed to the public. I still do not know who the woman was, if she was looking for me or was there for her own problem.
Into a room I went where another nurse told me that things looked good, but I’d have to stay the night for the sake of seeing if they still look good in the morning. They also needed results of tests, the scan, I guess. I responded with one word: “food.” She laughed, handed me a menu, and showed me how to use the phone for room service.
Let me put the menu aside to tell you that all the tests came back in my favor. But they were still taking samples of my O-neg to be sure, and by mid-afternoon, Newburyport was hit by a serious ice storm. Dr. Small’s associate bounced into and around the room like a tennis ball while telling me I could be released, and feeling here and there asking, “Does this hurt?” “How about here?” And “Here?” No, no, and no.
But, he said bouncing back up and away, the storm would be too much for me in my weakened condition. Fine by me. I knew that PBS was airing a documentary on Wilmington, North Carolina, 1898 that night. You know, the kind of history that Republicans are erasing from public education. Might as well see it there. My only regret was taking another dubious chance with the dinner menu.
The menu, ah the menu, oh the goddamned menu!
Knowing that hospital food does not have a great reputation, on that first night I ordered meatloaf, figuring I was playing it safe. They can’t screw that up. Well, the side of green beans was good, but the rest of it was just heavy filler. The lemon meringue dessert was light filler, but the coffee was excellent.
Next morning, a ham-cheddar omelet was pretty good, while lunchtime’s grilled cheese seemed to disappear before it reached my taste buds. But the chocolate cookie dessert offered consolation, and the coffee as good as home. Dinner was so bland, I can’t recall what it was, but the green beans were good, and the chocolate cookie seemed a reward for finishing it.
Waking up after the ice storm, I decided to play safe with the same omelet. Good move! And only then did I notice on the menu that breakfast is served for all three meals. If I’m sent there again, I’ll have it for every meal because of what happened next.
A delay in paperwork they told me, but yes you will be going home. I looked at the sign on the wall: “Our goal is to always release you before 12 noon.” What was left in Harper’s wouldn’t get me past 9:30. Unless I wanted to re-read one environmental horror story after another. And I can never watch TV with any daylight in the windows. A psychological thing, I guess, very depressing.
After noon passed, I was resigned to another hospital lunch. Several nurses were at a loss to tell me the reason for the delay. Maybe Dr. Tennis Ball had bounced over the fence, down the hill, and into the Merrimack. Whatever, lunch was still their serve. Oh, why did I not backhand another omelet? Or volley ten sides of green beans?
For no reason I can recall, imagine, invent, or at this point even believe, I thought a chicken quesadilla would be a good idea. Maybe because the word itself appeared so exotic on an otherwise Father-Knows-Best, white-picket-fence menu. Neither of my parents nor any aunts and uncles would have recognized the word quesadilla, nor would I until a college spring-break took me to Tuscon.
Now I wonder if it’s the hospital’s idea of a joke. For me to ever order it again should be ruled attempted suicide. The stench of it should have been warning enough. How do any health workers let it get past them on the rolling tray from the cafeteria to any room? I held my nose, but the burned, metallic taste was worse than the barf. Where were the green beans when I needed them? I noted the sour cream and salsa on the tray and thought I could smother the taste with either. Neither worked, and after three horrific, self-punishing, self-torturing, death-defying swallows, I pushed it aside, tore open the chocolate chip cookie, shoved it in my mouth and sucked hard and long before chewing.
Coffee helped, but I was shaken in a way that was beyond a bad taste. How can anything that horrible exist? On a menu? On a hospital menu? To take my mind off it, I picked up the magazine only to find that I had read the entire issue. My mind went full-tilt-boogie into free association: Chicken quesadilla in a magazine? Yet more pages of toxic waste? Or just a lettuce to the editor? As an ad? In an app? On a map? In a halftime rap? From a barroom tap? In a maple’s sap? Caught in a trap? Cut the crap! For an opening zap:
Call me Chicken Quesadilla. Meals ago, never mind how many, with little or no salsa in my purse or sour cream in my pocket, I set out to see the culinary part of the coop, leaving behind all mundane cares of green beans and concerns of chocolate cookies…
Couple hours later, about when I befriended a harpooneer named Omelet, I was finally told to get dressed and ready to go home. I looked at the clock. It was just over 25 hours since Dr. Tennis Ball said I could leave if not for a white whale smashing the Pequod outside. That’s just about the time required for the Moby-Dick marathon–which is to say, for the Pequod to sink. To the parking lot Nurse Starbuck rolled me in a wheelchair named The Rachel from where I made my way to my tugboat and am now snug at home.
Call me anything you want. Next time, I’ll bring a novel.
-662-
Bartleby? Confidence Man? Pierre or the Ambiguities? Billy Budd? Benito Cereno? Yes!Frontispiece..Verso.
Imagine picking up a book of American history and finding one of our presidents and all that happened during his term omitted.
Pick your omit: No Jefferson and Louisiana Purchase. No Polk and Mexican War. No FDR and New Deal.
Or pick up a dictionary and imagine all words beginning with one of the 26 letters left out. Cancel L. Suppress S. X X. Bleep U.
How about a map of North America with no Great Lakes? Just five oddly shaped, unexplained blank spots.
Imagine one of those and you might approximate the sensation that shook me in the Newbury Public Library when the young woman at the desk responded to my inquiry by turning to her laptop:
“Let me see if this library carries books by that author.”*
Had I been hit by a bullet I could not have been more stunned. She looked up in alarm when I voiced a spontaneous reaction:
“This is an American public library! ‘That author‘ is Herman Melville. Herman Melville! Unless he has suddenly become very popular and is flying off the shelves, how can he not be here, not a single book?”
She turned back to her laptop and hurriedly repeated the same answer. Verbatim.
Something made me take a few backward steps, and I waved a hand back toward her: “No, no, forget it, I’m sorry.” And I quickly reeled out the door.
That something, in retrospect, had to be the realization that we now have people graduating from American colleges with degrees in Library Science who do not recognize the names of writers whose books helped shape American ideals and values.
Yes, I have already noticed and written of “weeding” in public libraries. Columns in the local paper last summer and the summer before both drew considerable responses from library patrons who had also noticed the trend. One told me it had happened in the periodical section where scholarly magazines are also giving way to fan ‘zines and pop culture. Another informs me of the weeding of classical music from the CD collection at the Jones Public Library in Amherst, Mass.
In the past year, I’ve visited eight public libraries I drive by in the course of a week and taken counts in the shelves. The number of volumes for classic authors such as Melville, Willa Cather, Sinclair Lewis, and even John Steinbeck have hovered in the two to six range. East and west of Steinbeck, those of Danielle Steel and Jacqueline Susann range from the sixties well into the eighties every time.
All the while, I have swallowed hard and held my tongue at endless kudos posted on social media for many public libraries that display and encourage the circulation of books, mostly contemporary, being banned in schools in Florida and other parts of the country. Glad they do it, but isn’t weeding just as much a dumbing down?
Librarians at two stops tell me weeding is a national trend. Friends around the state in Lowell, Northampton (where it is called “deaccessioning”), and Wareham have noticed it, as have others as far away as Santa Rosa and Seattle on the west coast. Last summer, in Harper’s August issue, Joyce Carol Oates described weeding without using the word in “The Return,” a short story set in New Jersey.
According to one librarian, computer programs now tell librarians how much a book circulates each month. Those that gather dust and once were dusted are now tossed with no regard for who wrote them, much less than for any obscure places they might have in American history.
“Obscure places”? Melville’s Moby-Dick may retain prominence, especially with a recent US president so eerily comparable to a captain bent on revenge and willing to take his ship down with him.
But how many Americans know that his previous book, White-Jacket, was an expose of the US Navy that led to many reforms, including a ban on the practice of flogging?
Or that Redburn, the one before that, offers a first hand look at waves of immigrants boarding a ship in Liverpool and making the trans-Atlantic passage to America?
More to the point, how many might find such books? All of them—by Cather, Lewis, Steinbeck, and the rest—reveal people and places that may be historically obscure but which are endlessly relevant.
That’s why we call it literature.
Today, the logic, both practical and legal, of Melville’s comprehensive analysis of flogging could strengthen any case made for the regulation of automatic weapons.
Likewise, his account of desperate immigrants hoping for a new life may help nail a convincing, pro-active plank into the platform offered by the Democratic National Convention this summer.
I can say it “may” because I sent a summary to a delegate from my district who says she has forwarded it to the rest of the Massachusetts delegation.
Good to know, as there’s little chance of finding it on the shelves of what’s left of America’s public libraries.
-601-
*When I related this story to a friend over pints of Guinness, he stopped me here and insisted, “That is a canned response!” I realized right away that it was the identical Let-me-see-if… line that we always hear from customer service reps in person, on the phone, and on those on-line chats that utility and other companies have on their websites. Just fill in the blanks: this library and that author. I also knew what she said next, and told him so: “And I’m about to prove you right!”
First reason always given for weeding is that more shelf space is needed. This pic was taken about a year ago at the Newburyport Public Library, a year after my first newspaper column on the subject. But it could just as easily have been taken in Newbury, Rowley, Topsfield, Methuen and elsewhere, including Ipswich where entire rows were empty last fall. Still could, although since then, many of those blank spaces now contain a book on display, propped up on a small stand, facing out and angled to eye-level. These are the books shown by algorithms to be most popular. As one approving librarian puts it: “Less is more.” Photo by Ann O’Nimmis.
A woman I do not know waltzes into the Screening Room, merrily announces it’s her birthday (mid-50s? I’d never ask), and sings of delight to find me there.
“Why’s that?”
“Because I’ve been wanting to tell you that my son is reading Moby-Dick.”
Occurs to me that, after 50 years of plagiarizing Herman Melville, maybe some people think I am Herman Melville. With a hint of offering advice she might pass on, I mention that students who read it as an assignment are too in awe of the book’s reputation to allow for–or get–the jokes that run throughout.
“Oh, no! He’s 33, an avid reader. I gave him your column about it.”
“Which one?” I quip, but as if to prove that I’m no Ishmael, I’m at a loss for words to say much more, and other customers begin to arrive. Two hours later, however, when the film is done, she’s among the last people to leave, and I flag her down:
“At Renaissance faires, when we find out that patrons are having a birthday, a group of us will surround and serenade them with our own renfaire song.”
“You’re going to sing to me!”
“Well, I’m never included in these. And since none of the others are here, you’re about to find out why” (to the tune of “Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay”):
This is your birthday song
It isn’t very long–
Abruptly as I can, I then turn to the popcorn machine to make a new batch as if she is no longer there. “Thank you! Thank you!” she laughs over her shoulder as she dances out the door, a bit more bubbly than when she bounced in.
Next day, a Newburyport friend sends a Bizarro take on my favorite novel, clipped from the Boston Globe a week back. Bizarro is a long time favorite comic strip of mine, mostly due its many puns, as is the one I pull out of the envelope:
Had it arrived a day earlier, I’d have passed it on with a “Happy Birthday” to the dancing woman with the suggestion that her son use it as a bookmark. But she did say he was on page 450 of a book that is about 550 in most editions, so he may be floating on Queequeg’s coffin by the time she sees him again.
Instead, I’ll keep it in my wallet to show anyone else who approaches me to volunteer any news of Melville and Ishmael’s 500-plus page rhapsody in deep blue. I’ll tell them it’s a sequel I’ve just published and offer to send them signed copies for just fifteen dollars or two pints of Guinness in the nearest pub.
Next day, I’ll send them Once Upon an Attention Span, brand new and signed, containing just enough quotes from and references to Melville that they might not notice the difference.
Photo by Michael Boer: https://onewe.wordpress.com/ The model for the cover of Attention Span (shown above), this is a replica at Alki Beach in West Seattle where immigrants arrived from the other direction. The photo as is, but B&W, has a two-page spread in the book’s opening with an inscription by, who else?, Herman Melville describing a wave of immigrants in Liverpool boarding an American ship bound for New York. From Redburn, 1849:
There is something in the contemplation of the mode in which America has been settled, that, in a noble breast, should forever extinguish the prejudices of national dislikes… Settled by the people of all nations, all nations may claim her for their own. You cannot spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole world… We are not a narrow tribe of men… whose blood has been debased in the attempt to ennoble it by maintaining an exclusive succession among ourselves. No: our blood is as the flood of the Amazon, made up of a thousand noble currents all pouring into one. We are not a nation so much as a world…
First weekend after New Year’s is the Moby-Dick Marathon Reading in New Bedford, as close as I come to a religious observance these past five years.
This year, Recuperation Monday was most unusual. For starters, I finished breakfast at 3 p.m.
Also, because it fell on the 8th, I was acutely aware of my cousin John Hyzuk, a longtime Plum Islander far more popular than I realized judging from the condolences sent my way.
Would have been his 73rd birthday as well as my mother’s 99th. She might have stayed up for the livestream of my reading at 1:30 a.m. Sunday, despite tuning in early for my scheduled time at 1 a.m.
John would have laughed at the thought. In fact, in 2020 and each year since, he did exactly that. But he always pressed me to answer a question he found irresistible when I first told him of it.
He had quite a taste for the unusual, the eccentric, the bold. Pretty sure his favorite song was Warren Zevon’s “Lawyers, Guns, and Money,” which tells us something.
When I called Ishmael the ultimate “Excitable Boy,” John’s interest piqued. So, upon return from a pilgrimage to Herman Melville’s grave in the Bronx a few years ago, I was eager to tell him of the blank scroll on the tombstone. He immediately asked why?
“It’s a debate that has never been resolved.”
“Debate?”
“Some think it was Melville’s white flag to a hard, cruel world. Others think it was his middle finger.”
John’s reaction left no question as to which side he preferred.
Another local plumber recognized me as soon as I arrived at the Whaling Museum. Was sure to be in the audience for his turn, and like most of the 200-plus readers, he brought the text to life. No matter that he listed the categories of whales, his voice caught the smart-assed mix of whimsy and indignation, humor and reverence we call Ishmael.
When I was in grad school, I wrote a paper on a bold premise: If the Bible is “God talking to man,” then Moby-Dick is man’s response. This fascinated a few English profs at South Dakota State, at least when I laid it out over a few pitchers of Grain Belt at a downtown bar.
Admittedly, pure academic speculation with a few quotes leaning my way. Any great work of art will be open to several interpretations, some inevitably contradictory.
D.H. Lawrence and Somerset Maugham agreed that it was “written by a man in love,” as one called it. According to biographer Michael Shelden, that was a reference to Melville’s affair with Sarah Anne Morewood, a neighbor whose elderly husband’s devotion to business kept him in NYC most of the time that the novel was written at Melville’s Arrowhead Farm in the Berkshires. On the other hand, male relationships in the book, particularly that of Ishmael and Queequeg, have led others to call Moby-Dick a gay tract.
Moby-Dick has also been interpreted as an atheistic, even nihilistic treatise—a far crow’s nest cry from the accepted categorization of adventure story mixed with industrial manual. Also, “proto-Darwinian,” eight years ahead of Origin of the Species, with Ishmael cast as a “blue environmentalist” and “climate refugee.”
Most relevant today is C.L.R. James’ Mariners, Renegades and Castaways (1952) calling it a forerunner of the totalitarianism genre long before Brave New World and 1984. James himself is now a forerunner of numerous pundits comparing Trump’s boast of retribution to Ahab’s bent on revenge.
Whether Melville was responding to God or not hardly matters. As his friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne worried, “He can neither believe nor be comfortable in his disbelief.” What does matter is that he was and still is speaking to US.America didn’t listen then, and 10 years later sank into Civil War.
Save a few hundred Dick Heads who think that New Bedford offers a great weekend getaway in January, nearly half of America is just as deaf now – while many more pay little or no attention.
That would be more than enough cause for a white flag on a tombstone, but I prefer my cousin’s verdict set to the white whale roar of Warren Zevon.
May sound too aggressive for a church, but that’s why this excitable boy is a congregant. And why I call it prayer.
-30-
New Bedford, Jan. 2023.Jan. 2024
Every year I also attend the Old South Presbyteruan church on the Friday night closest to Dec. 10, the birthday of William Lloyd Garrison to hear a talk in his honor right around the corner from the home where he was born. Uncomfortable in my disbelief, I bring questions. Photo by Richard K. Lodge, my former editor at the local paper and one of the organizers of of the annual Garrison lecture.
First weekend after New Year’s is as close as I come to a religious observance these past five years, which makes Recuperation Monday most unusual.
For starters, I finished breakfast and began writing about it at 3:00 in the afternoon.
This year, because the day after the Moby-Dick Marathon Reading fell on the 8th, I was acutely aware of Cousin John who passed away just four weeks short of what would have been his 73rd birthday. Also my mother’s 99th, the combination of which made for memorable family gatherings years ago.
My mother might have stayed up for the livestream of my reading at 1:30 am Sunday, despite tuning in early for my scheduled time at 1:00. My cousin would have laughed at the thought; in fact, in 2020 and each year since, he did exactly that. But he would once again press me to answer a question he found irresistable when I told him of it.
John had quite a taste for the unusual, the eccentric, the bold. Pretty sure his favorite song was Warren Zevon’s “Lawyers, Guns, and Money,” which tells us something. When I told him that Ishmael fits the decription of Zevon’s “Excitable Boy,” he demanded details. So when I returned from a pilgrimage to Herman Melville’s grave in the Bronx a few years ago, I was eager to tell him of the blank scroll on the tombstone. He immediately asked why?
“It’s a debate that has never been resolved.”
“Debate?”
“Some think it was Melville throwing up a white flag to a hard, cruel world. Others think it was his middle finger.”
Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx, NYC. Photo by Michael Boer.
His reaction left no question as to which side he preferred.
Yes, I made it back from the New Bedford Whaling Museum, 100 miles away, before what little daylight we had gave way to night. The bulk of the storm stayed west of Boston’s Beltway well away from the coast, so I was able to navigate my compact Pequod north through Boston at a steady 35-40 MPH on well-plowed and sanded roads.
Bigger challenge was that I had gone 28 hours without sleep before leaving New Bedford relying on the rush of conversations about Melville, the sound of Moby-Dick as interpreted by all kinds of readers, and a full tank of caffeine.
New Bedford was hit only with rain, and so I drove 15 miles north before reaching the storm, and pulled into a highway plaza. Forecast was that it would clear by late afternoon, and so the longer I took, the better off I’d be.
Wanting nothing up north to concern me while in my church, so to speak, I stayed incommunicado while in NB, and so set up in the plaza with yet more coffee and my laptop to see what awaited me. Not much, but quite reassuring: A Plum Island friend posted photos of her street labeled, “Where’s the snow?” My landord assured me the driveway–a rather steep, if short, uphill–would be salted, and if I hadn’t “stocked up” on food, knock on their door.
Outside the plaza, the snow appeared to be tapering off, so I was back on 24 in less than half an hour. If I started feeling groggy, I knew that right on my path was caffeine in Braintree and Saugus, pit stops on my previous returns. Since both are Starbuck’s, I consider them part of my religious observance. Benediction on my way off Herman Melville’s dock.
Feeling fine, I passed Braintree and went smoothly through Boston and maybe another 15 miles up US 1. Never saw so few cars on that stretch. But I was I getting groggy, and in Saugus I was running into an actual storm. Bad luck, but nice timing. I holed up with coffee figuring I had about four hours to arrive home before dark.
My friend on Plum Island had made another post, likely about when I left the plaza. Photos were quite different, accompanied by her admission: ”I spoke too soon.” I sat by a window where, before long, I was watching a full-blown, howling blizzard that quickly covered my Pequod’s windshield and hood.
To take my mind off the storm, I returned to New Bedford by writing a few random prayers.
First was of gratitude for the Portuguese “Mini-Marathon.” Popped in thinking I’d just absorb the sound for a couple minutes. Half an hour later, I was still mesmerized, amazed to find that it sounds more like Polish & Russian than Spanish & Italian. A lot of CH and K sounds and deep, prolonged U‘s and O‘s. Didn’t understand a word, but figured out that baleia branca is “white whale.”
Left only because my stomach was screaming for something. One block away I sat down at Freestone’s where the clam chowder was memorable last year. Easily fell into conversation with Dick-Heads from Concord, trading reasons why Melville has proved so prophetic of America today.
Another prayer for the foremost draw of this event. No matter who they are or where from, conversation with anyone is already started. No one minds if you overhear a conversation and call in a comment from a distance, or if you join them. Quite unlike the tendency of the “real world,” as you may call it by contrast, those of us who congregate every January in the year 1851 are not content being told what we already think, and hearing from those we already know. Call us all Ishmael who will “try all things [and] achieve what [we] can.”
Like water running downhill, conversations veer into various paths, and another prayer of gratitude goes to the fellow with the Detroit t-shirt who took my card, thinking he could find what I needed: The name of an artist whose colorful murals of street-musicians were lost in the rubble of a building’s demolition in 2007.
There’s a lesson in that. I myself was wearing a hat that says “Newburyport Melville Society” when a couple stopped me for advice. They have reason to believe they own Melville’s bed–his deathbed–from NYC where he lived his last two decades and asked how they might track that down. Hoping that their bed lives up to their expectations better than I, I suggested the Berkshire Historical Society in Western Mass as their best bet to learn what became of his furniture. When I mentioned that his farm, Arrowhead, is nearby, they liked the idea of a weekend trip, and thanked me for it.
Another couple asked what connection Melville had to Newburyport. ”None that I know of. But he was on a lecture circuit, and I know he spoke in Lawrence.” They lit up. Unaware that Melville toured, they told me they’d look into the possibility in Springfield and nearby.
One fellow didn’t need my hat to recognize me. He subscribes to the Newburyport Daily News which runs a thumbnail photo with my column, one of which, he said, “inspired” him to join the reading. (“A toast for all holidays,” Dec. 14, 2022.)* Made it a point to be in the audience when his turn came, and I could tell he was a Melville fan long before that column. Like most of the 230 or so readers, he brought the text to life. No matter that he read the categorization of whales, his voice caught the smart-assed mix of whimsy and reverence, humor and indignation we call Ishmael.
Button-pressing, envelope-pushing, cage-rattling, drum-beating, boat-rocking, wave-making, assumption-challenging, conventional-wisdom-questioning, anything-to-wake-anyone-up Ishmael, as I like to say. Each year I pick a time so late because I try to get “The Dart,” a chapter written as an op-ed column decades before the term was coined. Got it last year, but too late–in the other sense of the word–this year. Still, here’s another prayer of thanks for “The Whale as a Dish” and “The Shark Massacre,” the first of which, like others I heard, I now hear as op-ed.
Yet, another prayer of thanks for having arrived at the Whaling Museum just as people were crossing the street and filling the Bethel Church, the historic setting of a few of the book’s early chapters–the only ones delivered by two readers, one as narrator Ishmael, the other as Father Mapple who climbs into a bow of a ship facing the pews. In the book he climbs a rope ladder that he pulls up behind him to be secure in “his own Little Quebec,” but the modern, perhaps more insurance-friendly props fill the bill.
Fr. Mapple’s sermon, as you might guess, is based on the story of Noah, fraught with God’s admonitions to the fugitive whale-rider:
Woe to him whom this world charms from Gospel duty! Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God has brewed them into a gale! Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appal! Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness! Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonor!
The main news that I did not want from up north was about the column I just filed before leaving with the Newburyport Daily News, a grenade at City Hall. Would the editor balk at something so explosive? Even I felt uneasy hitting “send.” But there’s Mapple, there’s Melville, there’s God thundering from the way-up pulpit: Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appal!
Never have I been so reassured.**
What makes the Marathon compelling for Melvillians, no matter how many times we have read the book, are the variety of interpretations gained by hearing the text in different voices. Like seeing your favorite natural scene, on the plains or on the coast, a mountain or a river, at different times of day or in different seasons. No matter how many times you visit, you keep seeing new things.
And you are struck by a fresh view of the present, no matter that Ishmael’s lens is 173 years in the past. Those of us who heard “The Quadrant” at 10:30 am were blessed to have a young fellow who channelled a raging Ahab to a degree that might have dropped the chiseled jaw of Gregory Peck.
Just two hours remained of the 25, but that show-stopper seemed the right time for breakfast across the street at Tia Maria’s. A couple who flew in from Santa Barbara apparently thought the same, and before our Portuguese omelets arrived, our conversation morphed from praise for the entertainment to alarm at the inescapable parallels to today.
Many chapters throughout the book, most notably “The Quadrant” and “The Dubloon” near the end, paint a picture of Ahab hauntingly close to Trump; of Fedallah and his phantom cadre to the MAGA Republicans; and of a gullible and sheepish crew to the US public–no matter how outwardly tough either think themselves.
In an election year when one party appears ready to nominate a man whose candidacy can be summed up in his own single word, retribution, and who himself called his campaign last year a “Revenge Tour,” how can we dismiss a book that, more than anything else, warns against vengeance?
Sorry to land this part of the account in the political mire of 2024, but this is Moby-Dick‘s claim to its place in American history and consciousness: Relevance so incisive you could call it truth ahead of time. For me to omit it from this report would be akin to a southern governor censoring Black History from school curricula. Or to a newspaper editor looking to comfort the already comfortable by ignoring the afflicted.
Doubt that? Then answer this: What would a Bible be if Satan were removed to spare you, or your children, any discomfort?
When I was in grad school, I wrote a paper on a bold premise: If the Bible is, as we often hear, “God talking to man,” Moby-Dick is man’s response.
A few English profs at South Dakota State were fascinated, at least when I laid it out over a table and a few pitchers of Grain Belt at Jim’s Tap in downtown Brookings. But my paper was pure academic speculation with a few quotes leaning my way. Any great work of art will be open to several interpretations, some inevitably contradictory. Moby-Dick has also been interpreted as an atheistic, even nihilistic treatise–a far crow’s nest cry from the accepted categorization of adventure story mixed with an industrial manual.
In Ahab’s Rolling Sea: A Natural History of Moby-Dick (2019), Richard J. King finds the book to be “proto-Darwinian,” a forerunner of Origin of the Species, published in 1859. He connects it to Rachel Carson’s 1962 classic, Silent Spring in a final chapter titled, “Ishmael: Blue Environmentalist and Climate Refugee.”
Most relevant today is C.L.R. James’ Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (1952). James, a Trinidadian immigrant who wrote it while detained for six months on Ellis Island, makes a compelling case that Melville was the first critic of global capitalism, and that Moby-Dick is a forerunner of the totalitarianism genre that appeared nearly a century later with the publication of Brave New World and 1984.
Whether he was responding to God or not hardly matters. As Melville’s friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne worried, “He could neither believe nor be comfortable in his disbelief.” What does matter is that he was and still is speaking to US. America didn’t listen then, and ten years later sank into Civil War. Except for a few hundred Dick Heads who think that New Bedford, Mass. is a great place for a weekend getaway in January, nearly half of America is just as deaf now–while many more are paying no attention.
That would be more than enough cause for a white flag on a tombstone, but I rather favor my cousin’s verdict set to the chorus of “Lawyers, Guns, and Money.” May sound too aggressive for a church, but that’s why this excitable boy is a congregant. And why I call it prayer.
-30-
* The enhanced blog version of the Daily News column:
Mouth of the River 