Coming Up for Some Air

Ah, it's been so long, I bet you thought you'd lost me. Truth to tell, I did take a couple of weeks off, distracted by other projects, but I'm back now, and actually in Ch. LXXIII.

Man, this guy is a great storyteller. By that I mean that he sure knows how to stuff a goose. Multiple chapters go by in which Melville abandons the plot to discuss rope, or water, or boots, or something, but I can perceive how it is all intregal to his purpose. Here are some of the chapter titles: Chowder, The Albatross, Squid, and The Line (all about rope). Sometimes these chapters are back-to-back, leaving the story idling while I learn all about hemp fibers, or harpoons, or sails. All very fascinating, but the Story, Man! I vacillate between thoroughly enjoying all the arcana, and wanting the story to go on.

Jack London gives details about ships, weather, sailors, all gleaned from his personal experience on the water himself. Did Melville ever put to sea? He sure knows a lot, and it's almost as if he's compelled to tell me about the all-encompassing world of whaling, down to the last tack. Not in a feverish way, like the narrator in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, but he's not going to let me go until he's unburdened himself.

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Okay, so after almost four hundred pages, they're still looking for MD. They have hauled in two whales, and the second one was just to set up a superstition: that a ship that hangs a sperm whale's head from one side, and a right whale's head from the other will never capsize. They've met a couple of other ships, and Ahab is always seeking information on the whereabouts of the white whale. There was a prophet character, an insane man, from another ship that warned Ahab would sink to the bottom of the sea, so we have that classic Illiad element. But it's slow, slow, slow, like the ponderous, deliberate movement of the whale himself.

Oh: them sailors are some superstitious guys, taken as a lot. Reminds me again of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Melville has been working hard to make MD a completely mythical character: larger than life, almost not part of this world, in a sense godlike, or as if MD were a metaphysical or psychological reality instead of a physical one. Building, building, bigger and bigger he becomes. By the time Ahab catches up to him, he'll be as big as a mountain in the reader's mind. He's thrown in the yeast, and now is letting the lump grow in our minds. Some sailors believe MD has magical powers, or that he's in more than one place at a time; the insane man, a self-proclaimed prophet, declared Moby-Dick to be his god. Oh, it'll be a Titanic struggle, it will, when at last we hear the cry, "There she blows!"

A Little Coffee with Your Milk?

How much foreshadowing can a writer indulge in? It's all over the place, but he doesn't seem to be embarrassed one bit. It ain't subtle, that's for sure. Maybe because I know the outcome I'm conscious of more than I would be otherwise, but tone it down, Man!

The Early Chapters

Okay, this is really good. I'm already two hundred pages in, and there's a lot going on. I should have stopped to blog before this, but I'm enjoying it more than I thought I would. I thought the blogging would be a kind of chronicle/journal to help me wade through, but so far I haven't needed much in the way of self-help.

All right, the thing that is the greatest surprise is his humor. My impression of him was that he was going to be unrelentingly morose and heavy, but that's not true at all. He's actually kind of funny, esp. when using Queequeg the barbarian to expose the hypocrises of 19th C. western civilization. Queequeg is the epitome of the direct, open, loving voyager through life, his pagan religious ideas aside for the moment. Melville is having some fun using him to poke at the mores of the "civilized" people around him. I never expected such humor. So points for you, Mr. Melville.

Not that Melville is ant-religion per se: Ishmael speaks of his own deep Presbyterian roots, and one takes that as rather auto-biographical and dearly-held; the character of Father Mapple is as humble and pious as Melville can make him without him becoming caricature, deeply conscious of his own sin and shortcoming, both as a man, and as Man, quaking in recognition of an Almighty God in the heavens. I think Father Mapple's life verse would be "What is Man, that You are mindful of him?" (Ps. 8:4). What seems to matter to Melville is one's earnestness rather than propositional truth. At least, he suggests that even Queegueg is a member of a Universal congregation of Man to which we all belong, when Capt. Bildad challenges Queequeg before allowing him to sign ship's articles.

Another sign that Melville isn't taking himself too, too seriously is the chapter on cetology, where his taxonomy uses Folios, Octavos, and Duo-decimos (the three different sizes for manuscript pages) to categorize whales. But I'm not sure if his definition of a whale as "a spouting fish with a horizontal tail" is meant to be serious or evoke a smile in his contemporary readers. That's the problem reading 150yr-old tongue-in-cheek: we don't have a feel for the pulse of the audience, and much of this kind of humor relies on what is known to be true and what is known to be false in past eras. Methinks he teases, but I'm not sure. I do get the impression, at the very least, that he's poking fun at the naturalists and their contradictory, ever-changing classification schemes; and so it is today with the paleo-anthropologists: the purported "ascent of Man" by incremental links from bi-pedal ancestors is a shifting path, and yesterday's missing link today sits on the top of a trash heap of disproved previous links. Still, they toil. Still, they call every biped "hommo." Still, they create whole villages out of a jawbone or a single tooth, with the help of "artists' conceptions." If you strip away all but the actual evidence, there is very little to go on. But we dig, and arrange, and hypothesize.

Why I Went a-Whaling

"Call Me Ishmael."

Those three words resound down the corridors of American literature like the voice of the principal calling a student into his office to be confronted with an unpleasant truth. Like the whale itself, this tome is out there, under the surface, malignant, stealthy, and to be avoided if at all possible. After all, there's so much of the sea that is navigable: we don't have to go courting the behemoth, hurling our tiny intellectual harpoons at its leathery hide (unless you've bought paperback), all the while fearing in your heart that they will bounce off as so many toothpicks, and that it will swim on, primal, unassailable, indifferent to us.

Well, that's the way I've always felt. I wrote that I picked this up when I was twelve ("Quite a reader, that boy"), and I remember being interested the way a child is interested in an antique shop: curiosity keeps him going, the novelty of the experience sustains him for a while; but ultimately, there needs to be a car crash, er, pay-off somewhere, and this plot just doesn't do any paying off for about eight hundred pages: building suspense and developing character and grappling with our place in the Universe can't carry a kid's interest by themselves. So I bailed out on it, and returned to the comfort of Bradbury and Asimov: a different captain, a different ship, and a different whale.

I threw myself upon Moby-Dick, and he tore my leg off and spit me out. But I knew I'd be back someday to hunt him down.

That is how this book became one that I have always thought I should read, if I'm going to be a good disciple. It's on The List: in terms of American literature, arguably it heads The List, but there are so many other ShouldReads that can we can play with: Twain, and Poe, and Faulkner, and that's all 19th C., which is the ground we're treading here. I'm not even going back to Cooper and his ilk. It's so much easier to laconically float down Ole Miss on a raft wth Jim while someone on shore plays a banjo than it is to roam the Indian Ocean wth Queequeg, deck pitching, spray in your face: it's work, Man. Work, I tell you!

So that was my attitude when I cracked open the cover thrity-five years later. And I'm surprised.

Melville (oh! the dark clouds that appear on the horizon at the mere intoning of that name!) can be vague and oblique, but no more so than Poe, and I teach that to sixteen-year-olds. He's not impenetrable, just metaphysical at times, but that's the age he lives in, so I shan't fault him for that. And it's a sign of a high intellect, it is. I can't be afraid to stand in the penumbra of his radiance for fear of being blinded. I have to walk out into the full blaze of his Melville-ness, and if I am burned, I will have the comfort of knowing that the redness will soon suffuse into a smooth even tan.

You can praise all your Moderns and Post-Moderns, but how sturdy is the house built on a bad foundation? I'm down in the cellar, shoring up the foundaton.

Blogging Moby-Dick

Dived into this when I was 12, but only made it through 100 pages or so. It's been lurking out there since then, like the white whale himself, daring me to pursue. So call me Ishmael & here I go.

Apologies to Conrad

Teaching writing is hard. And I hate reading papers, esp. demand writing, because I always become frustrated at the low skill level of students. The flights of logic I can understand, the grappling with meaning I have sympathy for; but their refusal to absorb the correct usage of the English language is frustrating.

I go over and over this stuff, but their patterns are stuck in their heads, and they fall back on them time and time again. Lack of agreement, no attempts at subordination, and the ubiquitous "they" when speaking of individuals. I want to scream, so I come here.

Our language use is not like our math use. The one is personal and part of our self-identities, the other is not. Even if we don't get our sums right, we all agree that there is a right answer, that we've made a mistake somewhere, and that it will never do to just keep going on adding together one and two and getting five. But language is not the same: the patterns of usage, our own idiolect, is so deeply ingrained in us that it is difficult to wholly and completely accept that how we use English is wrong and needs to be corrected before it is right. We think we're not so bad.

I have to re-design my content and come back to basic writing skills more and more often; I have to emphasize that the way they use language is not merely a matter of style, but that there is a matter of correctness that has nothing to do with style. It can by a stylistic feature to depart from standard usage, but the writer/speaker must know he's doing it in order to control it. And they don't know. Their non-standard usage is so ingrained in them that they will try to correct my standard English with their bastardized version, that they think is right. The irony, the horror.

Job security, I guess. Sigh…

Mack the Knife is Back in Town

Wow, where does the time go? Almost seven months since my last confession. Forgive me, blog-father, for I have sinned…

Okay, my room issue was resolved at the semester. The AP came through, peach of a gal that she is. Good sign: she's going to be our principal next year.

But that doesn't mean that the overall situation wil be 100% resolved, and I reserve the right to be curmudgeonly about it. Call me Don Quixote, and it will be my windmill; call me Ahab (not Ishmael) and it will be my white whale; call me Nemo, and it will be my underwater utopia, where men do not wage war against each other or the surface of the planet they inhabit (fooled you with that one, didn't I?)

So someone asked my yesteday, "Jeff, when you retire, who will you teach?"

I replied, "Whom."

she said, "That's what I mean."

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Tonight is Open House, which I find disappointing in high school. In middle school, we usually had a good turnout; high school parents are less involved. good in a my-kid-must-grow-up developmental way. Bad in a I-decorated-my-room-for-30-parents? way. I've lost some heart. Before, it was s slideshow of kids at football games and in class on the LCD projector, jazz music, coffee for everyone, and work crowding the walls. Tonight? Yeah, I'm here for the prescribed time period. I'll still enjoy talking to parents, but without a good crowd that provides a critical mass, it just ain't the same, I tell 'ya.

I fell behind in my grading from being sick for six weeks earlier this semester, and I'm still behind the 8-ball. I don't mean in-bed sick: I mean drag myself to work and back, lie exhausted on the couch until bedtime, wake in the morning after 9 hours in the arms of Morpheus dead tired, pull on clothes and do it another day sick. Crazy that it lasted that long, but it did. So the stack of grading greweth. For progress reports, I just notified the Your Kid Is In Danger Of Failing parents, and left it at that.

About 20 regular class meetings before finals week, and I have to get my sophomores through 200pgs of To Kill a Mockingbird. So I'm trimming two pages here and five pages there, giving them the essentials of the story. I don't feel entirely cheap, because I'm only cutting out the ancestry-and-breeding sections at this point. The story does not suffer if they don't know who Simon Finch is or where his trading post was in the 1800s. I hope I don't have to cut much else, because it would begin to compromise some of the overarching themes of this wonderful story, and I respect the novel too much to do that. I may have to resort to assigning a couple of chapters as homework reading and tell them that material will be included on the next reading quiz. Fair enough. And the movie is good (both because it follows the novel faithfully, and succeeds in providing the small southern town vibe that modern teenage suburbanites don't pull sucessfuly from the pages, so I'd hate to have to sacrifice that. I'll work it out.

I hate long blog posts, so I'll cut this off before it gets too tedious.