Posted on 08/11/2012 7:31:33 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Liza Klaussmann: 'I Reread Moby-Dick and Thought: Where Was Your Editor?'
Feh. It sprawls from Nantucket all the way out to the Pacific on a whaling ship, where it meets the white whale. OK, sure there's some scenery along the way, but this is not a "sprawling novel". Good grief.
And "touches of genius" is way off, too. Its genius is the unity and focus of its conception. BTW, I "reread" it at the beach in my 40's. My constant thought was, "How can they expect high school kids to read this stuff?"
2 words: Newspaper Serial. Back in the day, the main way for people to read well-known books was through newspapers serials. Most of Dickens’ books were read this way as was Moby Dick. And to sell more newspapers, Melville padded the novel to include all kinds of things that normally would have been left out of an unserialized book - for example the step-by-step instructions on how to cut up a whale.
Exactly. Channels of distribution matter for what is a consumer product.
And not just life at sea, a hotel putting strangers in the same bed? Oh my...
To the last I grapple with thee. From hell's heart I stab at thee. For hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee.
Moby Dick was an OK short story hidden in a rotten book.
Now that right there is good writin'
Khans Last Breath...Youtube
The hollow sound of a book hitting a head isn’t always the book.
lol
My constant thought was, “How can they expect high school kids to read this stuff?”
I’ve read it twice, planning on a third. Believe it or not it is an easy read, not a lot of “high dollar” words.
I would rather read MOBY DICK several times than that awful SILAS MARNER once.
What's the opposite of a plankton? Ans: a nekton . A whale is a nekton, that is a free swimmer, and in this sense it is a fish. It's just a matter of usage. Just a word. Similarly, among the plankton, which by definition are drifters, one finds many classes of organisms, including crustacean larvae.
***a hotel putting strangers in the same bed? Oh my...***
Especially a tatoo’d man who is trying to sell a head.
Well, the bench was real hard to sleep on!
Question: When AHAB was killed what was his artificial leg made of?
Moby Dick can be ponderous, but is still a masterpiece of the American novel. Other great works of literature can be similarly ponderous...Le Rouge et le Noir (the Red and the Black) by Stendhal, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables and any thing by Tolstoy for example. However, nothing IMHO is more ponderous than the novels of George Elliot. I could hardly get through reading Silas Marner.
The next Star Trek is apparently going to have Ahab, I mean Khan, facing off against Kirk again - with Benedict Cumberbatch (of Sherlock fame) playing Khan.
I never made that connection before! WOK was just on the other night. Certainly was Ricardo M’s defining role, more so than Fantasy Island, IMO.
Where do you get this? I never heard of it, and I don't see it on a quick check, which indicates it was introduced as a completed book.
I’ve always been amused at the way people who grew up attending modernist schools think historical people are “wrong” for calling a whale a fish. Whales are not Pisces, but “fish” was a term used for any sea creatures, historically.
The ancients and less-ancients were quite well aware that there were major biological differences between whales and Pisces; the name “dolphin” means “womb,” in Greek, for what the Greeks called them, translated into English, was “womb-fishes.” Also not Pisces are shellfish, crayfish, starfish, jellyfish, etc. Some eels are Pisces, some are not. And “Pisces,” as a phylogenic class has been discarded, anyway.
If sometime around the 1950s, elementary school teachers decided that they would only use “fish” to describe Pisces, that’s fine. But throughout the whole of English history up until that time, “fish” meant a category of creatures which included whales, polyphylitic as it was.
Will they someday call us wrong for calling both earthworms and pinworms “worms” even though they are not related?
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