Summer of Dick

The first short chapter concerns itself with Ishmael awakening with Queequeg's arm flung over him, Ishmael awakening Queequeg, and finally Ishmael watching Queequeg dress, wash, and shave himself with his harpoon blade. Beyond the suggested homoeroticism of this chapter with the last, there is the matter of Ishmael recalling to himself a similar experience of waking up after a long sleep and believing that a hand was holding his own, only to find upon becoming fully awake that the hand was not there. While one could normally attribute such a sensation to the fact of being only half-awake, the experience seems to have stuck with Ishmael for his whole life. Also repeated in these chapters (the second of which details breakfast) are the racial aspects of how Ishmael (and everyone else) views Queequeg as a non-white "savage." I'm always tempted to consider Dan Carlin's dictum that racism "should be graded on a scale," i.e., that racial attitudes have evolv...

The chapter ends with Queequeg making his appearance. As I said earlier, we'd get to the racism in the novel soon enough, and with Queequeg's depiction, we get it in full. We also get the first hints of homosexuality in the novel, which will continue in several chapters as well. I'm reminded of an episode of The Sopranos  on HBO, in which Meadow -- at that time, an undergraduate at Columbia -- tells her mother Carmela that Billy Budd is a veiled story about homosexuality. Carmela takes great issue with this interpretation, but Meadow defends it well enough and, indeed, it is a standard interpretation today. With Moby Dick , the issue is both more direct but more veiled. On the one hand, Queequeg and Ishmael do not engage in gay sex in the chapter. On the other hand, the chapter does end with two men sharing a bed, with Ishmael noting, "I  turned in, and never slept better in my life" -- perhaps the sleep of a consummated relationship? At any rate, here's a...

This chapter begins in the Spouter Inn, where Ishmael meets the pub owner Jonah and rubs elbows with other whalers. The selection for today ends before Ishmael meets Queequeg, of whom more later. The key aspect of this chapter is the introduction, with Ishmael's viewing of the painting on the wall in the opening pages of the chapter, of the theme of radical subjectivity .\ Repeatedly over the course of the novel, we are reminded that personal perception informs much of how we understand the world and that no two people see the same thing exactly alike. Melville describes it (in part) thus: " Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through.—It’s the Black Sea in a midnight gale.—It’s the unnatural combat of the four primal elements.—It’s a blasted heath.—It’s a Hyperborean winter scene.—It’s the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time." In the end, it turns out it is a portrait of a whale, but this itself tells us something about other parts...

This is my third time around reading this novel in its entirety, but it's the first time I've read it and realized with full gravity that the first chapter takes place in Manhattan. In particular, Melville references too places on the island with which I was unfamiliar. Ishmael states, " Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see?" Corlears Hook is still there, apparently, on the Lower East side bordering the East River and the FDR Drive. Coenties Slip is gone but was close by, much closer to the southern tip of Manhattan. Whitehall, of course, is where the ferry to Staten Island arrives. What's curious is what a person unfamiliar with Manhattan might think, i.e., that this is a lot of distance to cover -- it isn't. It's rather a short walk along the southern end of the island. The second thing I hadn't paid much attention to before is the ...

If you've read this novel before, you know it begins not with the iconic quasi-opening line of "Call me Ishmael" but rather with several pages with the headings "Etymology" and "Extracts," the latter of which provides a number of quotations from literature over several centuries in which the word "whale" appears. A few things caught my interest that hadn't before. First, while I had thought the opening line of "Etymology," referencing an "Usher," was a direct quotation from Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," I was apparently mistaken. It is not. Second, regarding the "Extracts," while many readers know that the term commonly translated as "whale" from the Book of Jonah is actually literally "big fish" in Hebrew, it turns out the term thus translated in Genesis also doesn't mean "whale." The word in Hebrew -- tannin -- means something closer to "se...

It's a pretty straightforward idea. One novel ( Moby Dick , by Herman Melville), one summer (Memorial Day to Labor Day inclusive), around six pages per day, one blog post per day of roughly 100 words (perhaps more) on what I've read and observed. I meant to do this a few years ago and kinda pooped out. This year I'm going to try it again. Wish me luck.