“Quite an original” (From Herman Melville’s novel The Confidence-Man)
“Quite an original:” A phrase, we fancy, rather oftener used by the young, or the unlearned, or the untraveled, than by the old, or the well-read, or the man who has made the grand tour. Certainly, the...
View Article“Merry Christmas” (Moby-Dick)
“Merry Christmas” from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick At length, towards noon, upon the final dismissal of the ship’s riggers, and after the Pequod had been hauled out from the wharf, and after the...
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Blog about some books acquired, 17 July 2019 (and some Poe and Whitman...
Despite having a pretty large TBR stack, I killed this afternoon’s spare hour at my favorite used bookstore. This particular bookstore is a maze of used books, labyrinthine walls of books, with...
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On Herman Melville’s novella Benito Cereno
Near the middle of Herman Melville’s 1855 novella Benito Cereno, our erstwhile protagonist Captain Amasa Delano encounters an old sailor tying a strange knot: For intricacy, such a knot he had never...
View ArticleSelections from One-Star Amazon Reviews of Melville’s Moby-Dick
[Ed. note: The following citations come from one-star Amazon reviews of Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick. To be very clear, I think Moby-Dick is fantastic—but I also enjoy seeing what people compelled...
View Article“Herman Melville”— Jorge Luis Borges
“Herman Melville” by Jorge Luis Borges He was always surrounded by the sea of his elders, The Saxons, who named the ocean The Whale-Road, thereby uniting The two immense things, the whale And the...
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Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest | Moby-Dick
Fathomless Sounding, 1932 by Gertrude Hermes (1901-1983) It was a black and hooded head; and hanging there in the midst of so intense a calm, it seemed the Sphynx’s in the desert. “Speak, thou vast and...
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Perseus, whaleman (Melville/Sienkiewicz)
From Bill Sienkiewicz’s adaptation of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. The Classics Illustrated edition (February 1990) is one of my favorite Moby-Dicks.
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Moby-Dick | A short riff on a long book
Green and White, Georgia O’Keeffe Prompted by Call Me Ishmael, Charles Olson’s marvelous study of Moby-Dick, I took a fifth trip through Melville’s massive opus this past month. Every time I read...
View ArticleList of smutty-sounding Moby-Dick chapters
The Spouter-Inn. A Bosom Friend. Nightgown. Wheelbarrow. The Mast-Head. Moby Dick. The First Lowering. The Spirit-Spout. The Gam. The Town-Ho’s Story. Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales. The Dart. The...
View ArticleNo writer has produced such inconsistent characters as nature herself has...
…it may be urged that there is nothing a writer of fiction should more carefully see to, as there is nothing a sensible reader will more carefully look for, than that, in the depiction of any...
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The problems of Bartleby
What are the problems of Herman Melville’s story “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street”? This question seems like a bad starting place. Let me share an anecdote instead. —I was in the tenth...
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The moral here is wonderfully fine | Melville annotates Hawthorne
Herman Melville’s markings and annotations on the last page of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “The Birth-mark.” From Melville’s Marginalia Online.
View Article“Bartleby” is the first great epic of modern Sloth (Thomas Pynchon)
By the time of “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street” (1853), acedia had lost the last of its religious reverberations and was now an offense against the economy. Right in the heart of...
View ArticleMoby-Dick (Alasdair Gray’s Lanark)
It is a relief to turn to the honest American book about the whale. A captain wants to kill it because the last time he tried to do that it bit off his leg while escaping. He embarks with a...
View Article“Herman Melville”— W.H. Auden
“Herman Melville” by W.H. Auden Towards the end he sailed into an extraordinary mildness, And anchored in his home and reached his wife And rode within the harbour of her hand, And went each morning to...
View ArticleEverything Bartleby says in Herman Melville’s “Bartleby”
Everything Bartleby says in Herman Melville’s “Bartleby”: “I would prefer not to.” “I would prefer not to.” “I would prefer not to,” said he. “What is wanted?” “I would prefer not to,” he said, and...
View ArticleFatal embrace! | A passage from Herman Melville’s novel Typee
I shall never forget the observation of one of our crew as we were passing slowly by the entrance of the bay in our way to Nukuheva. As we stood gazing over the side at the verdant headlands, Ned,...
View ArticleCivilized barbarity | A passage from Herman Melville’s novel Typee
The fiend-like skill we display in the invention of all manner of death-dealing engines, the vindictiveness with which we carry on our wars, and the misery and desolation that follow in their train,...
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