quote: Well, so far it looks like I'm the only one who has read it and...meh. I didn't hate it, but...meh. [emphasis added]
I was confused about this, because no single book has been mentioned in this thread that has not been read by at least a couple of posters here.
Posts: 13680 | Registered: Mar 2002
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posted
Ah. I should have put "only one in this thread who has read it who has thought 'meh' rather than loving it."
The worst casualty of this misunderstanding is the Simpsons quote. You know how jokes aren't funny when you have to explain them? Yeah.
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quote: And, doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this:
quote:
Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States
Whaling Voyage by one Ishmeal.
Bloody Battle in Affghanistan.
Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces
Moby Dick Chapter 1.
Seemed appropriate for today.
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Yeah, this is a shameless bump. I started rereading the book though, so maybe I'll do a daily bit.
One thing I just noticed on the first page: Ishmael says going to sea is like his version of suicide (pistol and ball, or throwing himself on his sword). I never thought of it before, but it sure is ironic that the guy who thinks of a whaling voyage as a suicide winds up being the only one alive at the end of the story.
Also, does anyone know when Ramadan is this year? (Yes it's related)
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I also did my HS senior paper of Moby Dick. It was actually what inspired me to join this forum (see my name?) but then I came to this Engineering School where literature is...not.
I did my paper on how Ahab's character is holy, unholy, divine, and demonic. What a great guy.
I also love how Melville wrote to Nathanial Hawthorne right after he had Moby Dick published that he thought it was (paraphrasing) 'an evil book.'
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quote: For be a man's intellectual superiority what it will, it can never assume the practical, available supremacy over other men, without the aid of some sort of external arts and entrenchments, always, in themselves, more or less paltry and base. This it is, that for ever keeps God's true princes of the Empire from the world's hustings; and leaves the highest honors that this air can give, to those men who become famous more through their infinite inferiority to the choice hidden handful of the Divine Inert, than through their undoubted superiority over the dead level of the mass. Such large virtue lurks in these small things when extreme political superstitions invest them, that in some royal instances even to idiot imbecility they have imparted potency.
Man! Forget Notradamus! Melville was a prophet!
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