Reflections on Moby Dick Salon from Lizzie Harwood, Paris Salon Participant & Writer

Lizzie is a writer and Paris Salonista– she perfectly sums up the expereince of being in the belly of the Whale in last weekend’s lively study…check out her blog on writing, living and life’s interruptions: http://lizzieharwood.com/2013/03/29/readthewhale/
10 reasons to read Herman Melville’s The Whale (or M.D.)

March 29, 2013

Mby Dick

Last Saturday, I jumped onboard of another of Toby Brother’s awe-inspiring Literary Salons – (here in Paris) this time on Moby Dick or The Whale, by Herman Melville (published in 1851). It was 427 pages long. But in teeny-tiny font with itty-bitty footnotes. It was a book that required halogen reading light – so I dunno how the 19th Century folks read it. I only received the book on Tuesday – four days before the Salon, so I can’t say I read all of it because that would have been insane, but I read 3/4th of it, which was still fairly insane. Boy, the book blows your mind.

Here are my 10 Reasons Why We Should All Read Melville’s The Whale.

1) The cannibal is a really lovely guy. Who knew?

2) Captain Ahab is the possibly the loneliest character in literature. He’s also a jerk. It’s pretty compelling.

3) The Whales ROCK. They are described in detail, including their willies, which takes up Chapter 95, where we see a mincer wearing the skin of the Whale’s six-foot-long, one-foot diameter member. Way out there.

4) The language is totally sagacious!

5) Melville plays around with so many narrative forms, and gets so darned allegorical, that you don’t know what’s what anymore but you are on the boat with those guys and you totally understand why they regularly spend three years at a time at sea eating salted meat and ship’s biscuit. And blubber steaks.

6) Starbuck’s, the coffee empire, was named after the First Mate character, Starbuck. So now I can’t see Starbuck’s without thinking of this novel.

7) It’ll make you want to make and eat Clam Chowder. And possibly watered down Rum.

8) If you don’t take the side of Moby against Ahab then you know you are a jerk. The detail of how they strip a dead whale for its oil will make you cry.

9) It’s basically an adventure story. And a bit of a love story between Ishmael and Queequeg.

10) It explains why we are currently in a mess with the ecology, capitalism, the treatment of other cultures in a post-colonial world, and why man is basically a self-centered destroyer of our planet. Yet it was written over 150 years ago. Way before Greenpeace.

Thank you Toby and fellow Salonistas for taking on such a leviathan of a book.

Moby Dick

Herman Melville’s Moby Dick

 “Call me Ishmael. .  . .”

First published in 1851, Moby Dick ranks on almost any list as one of the greatest works in the English language. Its three famous opening words, and the image of the one-legged Ahab in mad pursuit of the great White Whale, have become cultural icons. This grand—and occasionally grandiose—adventure tale unites the many voices of Herman Melville in a mongrel mix of epic poetry, Shakespearean tragedy, encyclopedic cataloguing, biblical oratory—and not a small dose of comedy. With Moby Dick, Melville presents an insightful study of obsession, madness and charismatic leadership that anticipates many of our contemporary conversations of democracy, cosmopolitanism, capitalism and environmentalism.

“I am half way in the work . . . It will be a strange sort of book, tho’, I fear; blubber is blubber you know; tho’ you might get oil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree;—and to cool the thing up, one must needs throw in a little fancy, which from the nature of the thing, must be ungainly as the gambols of the whales themselves. Yet I mean to give the truth of the thing, spite of this.”

Herman Melville

A few years ago, artist Angela Cockayne and writer Philip Hoare convened and curated a unique whale symposium and exhibition at Peninsula Arts, the dedicated contemporary art space at Plymouth University. This grew into an extraordinary compilation of voices, the Moby Dick Big Read, (with Tilda Swinton, Stephen Fry and many more) and art to illuminate each chapter, inspiring and inspired by this vast book.From the site:

‘I have written a wicked book’, said Melville when his novel was first published in 1851, ‘and I feel as spotless as the lamb’. Deeply subversive, in almost every way imaginable, Moby-Dick is a virtual, alternative bible – and as such, ripe for reinterpretation in this new world of new media. Out of Dominion was born its bastard child – or perhaps its immaculate conception – the Moby-Dick Big Read: an online version of Melville’s magisterial tome: each of its 135 chapters read out aloud, by a mixture of the celebrated and the unknown, to be broadcast online in a sequence of 135 downloads, publicly and freely accessible.

SALON DETAILS

  • Eight meeting study
  • Recommended edition: Moby Dick (Norton Critical Edition, Third Edition), by Herman Melville, edited by Herschel Parker; W.W. Norton & Co.; ISBN-13: 978-0393285000
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