"HERMAN MELVILLE CRAZY"
I'm reading Moby-Dick for the first time (having successfully evaded it in high school).
I am now about 35% through the novel.
This is far and away the weirdest book I have ever read.
posted by VMM at 12:48 AM
4 Comments:
Sometimes a harpoon is just...a harpoon...
Oddly, never assigned in high school, but I've read it 2 or three times. Not only a supreme novel and great sea story (still less, in the book's own phrase, a blasted metaphor), but, keeping always in mind, Melville and Twain more or less invented American Literature; if nothing else, here is a novel with absolutely nothing to do with noblemen.
In grad school, I did a painting based on the the whale oil smoke covered painting in "The Spouter Inn," which is essentially an apt description of abstract painting and its mysteries that compared to nothing at that time except JMW Turner.
"So ignorant are most landsman of some of the plainest and most palpable wonders of the world, that without some hints touching the plain facts, historical or otherwise, of the fishery, they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory." - Chapter 45: An Affidavit
If I remember, he goes on at some length about this.
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