January 2021 – Biblioklept

The mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable | Moby-Dick reread, riff 17

January 31, 2021 BibliokleptLeave a comment

I. In this riff: Chapters 61-73 of Moby-Dick.

II. Ch. 61, “Stubb Kills a Whale.”

In this chapter, Stubb kills a whale.

III. Ch. 62, “The Dart.”

In this chapter, Ishmael argues that harpooneers should not have to row so that their throwing arms are not fatigued when the time comes to lance a whale.

IV. Ch. 63, “The Crotch.”

Ishmael begins this chapter by noting his propensity toward a discursive narrative style: “Out of the trunk, the branches grow; out of them, the twigs. So, in productive subjects, grow the chapters.”

He then suggests that “The crotch alluded to on a previous page deserves independent mention.”

I’m reminded of the time I made a list of smutty-sounding chapter titles in Moby-Dick.

V. Ch. 64, “Stubb’s Supper.”

Stubb eats some of that whale he killed a few chapters back.

VI. Ch. 65, “The Whale as a Dish.”

Ishmael riffs on eating whales—sperm whales in particular—and concedes that they are generally too unctuous for the palates of landlubbers. He’s all for eating the brains:

In the case of a small Sperm Whale the brains are accounted a fine dish. The casket of the skull is broken into with an axe, and the two plump, whitish lobes being withdrawn (precisely resembling two large puddings), they are then mixed with flour, and cooked into a most delectable mess, in flavor somewhat resembling calves’ head, which is quite a dish among some epicures…

VII. Ch. 66, “The Shark Massacre.”

Sharks eat at Stubb’s whale too, which has been tied to the side of The Pequod overnight. Queequeg kills some of the sharks, and hoists one on deck to take its skin. It almost bites his hand off.

VIII. Ch. 67, “Cutting In.”

Another one of Ishmael’s technically-oriented chapters, with little in the way of philosophy. He describes the process by which the crew strips the blubber from the whale.

IX. Ch. 68, “The Blanket.”

Another one of Ishmael’s philosophically-oriented chapters. Here, he ponders, “what and where is the skin of the whale?” Ishmael notes that over the whale’s blubber there is an “infinitely thin, transparent substance, somewhat resembling the thinnest shreds of isinglass.” He says that this “isinglass,” when dried, makes a good bookmark for his “whale-books”

It is transparent, as I said before; and being laid upon the printed page, I have sometimes pleased myself with fancying it exerted a magnifying influence. At any rate, it is pleasant to read about whales through their own spectacles, as you may say.

Ultimately though, this isinglass is but the “skin of the skin” and the whale’s blubber is his “blanket.”

It is telling that Ishmael reads whale books through a whale lens. Indeed, his whole mission is to read the whale, and in “The Blanket” he turns the whale’s body into a text beyond his ciphering, noting that the body of the sperm whale is “all over obliquely crossed and re-crossed with numberless straight marks in thick array.” He continues::

But these marks do not seem to be impressed upon the isinglass substance above mentioned, but seem to be seen through it, as if they were engraved upon the body itself. Nor is this all. In some instances, to the quick, observant eye, those linear marks, as in a veritable engraving, but afford the ground for far other delineations. These are hieroglyphical; that is, if you call those mysterious cyphers on the walls of pyramids hieroglyphics, then that is the proper word to use in the present connexion. By my retentive memory of the hieroglyphics upon one Sperm Whale in particular, I was much struck with a plate representing the old Indian characters chiselled on the famous hieroglyphic palisades on the banks of the Upper Mississippi. Like those mystic rocks, too, the mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable.

X. Ch. 69, “The Funeral.”

The whale’s corpse is cut loose to endure the mocking “funeral” of every scavenger of the sea and sky.

Thus, while in life the great whale’s body may have been a real terror to his foes, in his death his ghost becomes a powerless panic to a world.

Are you a believer in ghosts, my friend? There are other ghosts than the Cock-Lane one, and far deeper men than Doctor Johnson who believe in them.

The last two lines of the chapter—quoted above—again point to the idea that perhaps our Ish is himself a ghost.

XI. Ch. 70, “The Sphynx.”

The crew decapitated Stubb’s whale and kept it on deck. In another one of those How is Ishmael witnessing this wait is he like a ghost or something? scenes, Ish manages to overhear Captain Ahab’s batshit soliloquy to the dead head:

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 venerable head,” muttered Ahab, “which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world’s foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou hast been where bell or diver never went; hast slept by many a sailor’s side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou saw’st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw’st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed on unharmed—while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. O head! thou hast seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!”

XII. Ch. 71, “The Jeroboam’s Story.”

Ahab’s interrogation of the whale’s head is cut short when the call goes up that another ship—the aptly named Jeroboam—is in hailing distance. Our boy Ahab just has to get some news about his White Whale.

The crew of The Jeroboam elect to keep their distance from The Peqoud. Their Captain Mayhew suggests they have a plague of some kind on board, but it becomes evident that the plague might be a kind of madness. The crew of Mayhew’s ship are under the sway of a Shaker sailor who believes himself to be the Archangel Gabriel. Anyway, it turns out that The Jeroboam has encountered Moby Dick; in fact, Mayhew’s chief mate Macey died hunting the great beast—all while Gabriel chanted prophecies of doom. Symbolically underlining the foreshadowing in this episode, The Pequod carries aboard a letter for Macey from his wife, who does not yet know she is a widow. And in even more symbolic foreshadowing, when Starbuck attempts to pass the letter to Mayhew,

…as if by magic, the letter suddenly ranged along with Gabriel’s eager hand. He clutched it in an instant, seized the boat-knife, and impaling the letter on it, sent it thus loaded back into the ship. It fell at Ahab’s feet. Then Gabriel shrieked out to his comrades to give way with their oars, and in that manner the mutinous boat rapidly shot away from the Pequod.

To steal a line from Melville’s later short masterpiece Bartleby: “Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men?”

XIII. Ch. 72, “The Monkey-Rope.”

In this chapter—another chapter with a hyphenated title!—in this chapter, Ishmael goes back to some technical business of whaling, explaining that while hauling in Stubb’s whale, Queequeg had to insert the blubber hook into the whale—which means he had to be over the side of the boat, on the whale itself. In this process, Queequeg and Ishmael are connected by a “monkey-rope” — a rope tethering the two between belts.

“It was a humorously perilous business for both of us,” Ishmael notes, a line that again underscores Moby-Dick’s compounding — hyphenating — modes of comedy and terror. The chapter also again reminds us that Ish and Queeg are like a married couple: “for better or for worse, we two, for the time, were wedded.” As is often the case, Ishmael goes into a philosophical reverie:

So strongly and metaphysically did I conceive of my situation then, that while earnestly watching his motions, I seemed distinctly to perceive that my own individuality was now merged in a joint stock company of two; that my free will had received a mortal wound; and that another’s mistake or misfortune might plunge innocent me into unmerited disaster and death. …still further pondering, I say, I saw that this situation of mine was the precise situation of every mortal that breathes; only, in most cases, he, one way or other, has this Siamese connexion with a plurality of other mortals.

XIV. Ch. 73, “Stubb and Flask Kill a Right Whale; and Then Have a Talk over Him.”

In this chapter, Stubb and Flask kill a right whale and then have a talk over him.

Ann Quin’s Passages (Book acquired, 30 Jan. 2021)

January 30, 2021January 30, 2021 BibliokleptLeave a comment

A new edition of Ann Quin’s third novel Passages is out in a few days from indie juggernaut And Other Stories. The new edition (the first in nearly two decades) features a new introduction from Claire-Louise Bennett, whose book (novel?) Pond was a favorite of mine a few years back.

Ann Quin’s first novel Berg was one of the best books I read in 2019, and one of the best books I’ve read in years. In my review of the novel a few years back, I wrote,

Read the book. There’s nothing I can do in this review that approaches the feeling of reading Ann Quin’s Berg. I can make lame comparisons, saying that it reminds me of James Joyce’s Ulysses (in its evocations of loose consciousness), or David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (in its oedipal voyeuristic griminess), or Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel (for its surreal humor and dense claustrophobia). Or I can point out how ahead of her time Quin was, how Berg bridges modernism to postmodernism while simply not giving a fuck about silly terms like modernism and postmodernism.

I’m psyched to get into Passages.

Here’s And Other Stories’ blurb:

Ann Quin’s third novel Passages – an instant classic when published in 1969 – is perhaps her most harrowing investigation of the limits of identity and desire, as well as the possibilities of fiction. It is the story of a woman, accompanied by her lover, searching for her lost brother, who may have been a revolutionary, and who may have been tortured, imprisoned or killed. Roving a Mediterranean landscape, they live out their entangled existences, reluctant to give up, yet afraid of where their search will lead.

In ‘passages’ that alternate between the two protagonists’ perspectives, taking the form of diary excerpts, annotations and Burroughsian cut-ups, this fractured tale builds an intricate, musical system of theme and repetition. ‘All seasons passed through before the pattern formed, collected in parts.’

Erotic and terrifying by turns, Quin’s third novel allowed her writing freer rein than ever before, blazing a trail still being followed by such authors as Eimear McBride, Chris Kraus and Anna Burns. It stands as Quin’s most beguiling, poetic, and mysterious work.

Read an excerpt here.

“Whaler” — W.S. Merwin

January 29, 2021January 29, 2021 BibliokleptLeave a comment

Lemon Gatherers — Duncan Grant

January 29, 2021January 29, 2021 BibliokleptLeave a comment

Lemon Gatherers, 1910 by Duncan Grant (1885-1978)

All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks | Moby-Dick reread, riff 16

January 28, 2021 BibliokleptLeave a comment

I. In this riff: Chapters 58, 59, and 60 of Moby-Dick.

II. Ch. 58, “Brit.”

With all of Ishmael’s metaphysical flights into philosophy, as well as the intrigue of Ahab’s revenge quest, it can be easy to lose track of just where in the watery world the Pequod is. Ishmael gives us our bearings again in the opening of “Brit”:

Steering north-eastward from the Crozetts, we fell in with vast meadows of brit, the minute, yellow substance, upon which the Right Whale largely feeds. For leagues and leagues it undulated round us, so that we seemed to be sailing through boundless fields of ripe and golden wheat.

The image of “boundless fields of ripe and golden wheat” seems out of place in these antarctic climes. It ties the sea back to the land—ever a concern of Ishmael, who posits his reader as the “landsman” afloat with him in alien waters.

III. And yet Ishmael, despite his sympathies, occasionally condescends landlubbers. He suggest that “to landsmen in general, the native inhabitants of the seas have ever been regarded with emotions unspeakably unsocial and repelling,” which may be more or less true. Ish continues:

…we know the sea to be an everlasting terra incognita, so that Columbus sailed over numberless unknown worlds to discover his one superficial western one; though, by vast odds, the most terrific of all mortal disasters have immemorially and indiscriminately befallen tens and hundreds of thousands of those who have gone upon the waters; though but a moment’s consideration will teach, that however baby man may brag of his science and skill, and however much, in a flattering future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make; nevertheless, by the continual repetition of these very impressions, man has lost that sense of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it.

III. Ishmael then evokes the infinite apocalypse of the seventh chapter of Genesis:

Yea, foolish mortals, Noah’s flood is not yet subsided; two thirds of the fair world it yet covers.

IV. Ch. 59, “Squid.”

Ishmael again situates us geographically. The Pequod is now near Java. There, they behold “The great live squid, which, they say, few whale-ships ever beheld, and returned to their ports to tell of it.” At first though, the crew believes that the “great white mass” is Moby Dick. Starbuck mutters that he would have preferred to meet and battle the White Whale than glimpse the giant squid, which is an ill omen to him.

Ishmael retreats from superstition and heads instead into scientific speculation:

Whatever superstitions the sperm whalemen in general have connected with the sight of this object, certain it is, that a glimpse of it being so very unusual, that circumstance has gone far to invest it with portentousness. So rarely is it beheld, that though one and all of them declare it to be the largest animated thing in the ocean, yet very few of them have any but the most vague ideas concerning its true nature and form; notwithstanding, they believe it to furnish to the sperm whale his only food. For though other species of whales find their food above water, and may be seen by man in the act of feeding, the spermaceti whale obtains his whole food in unknown zones below the surface; and only by inference is it that any one can tell of what, precisely, that food consists. At times, when closely pursued, he will disgorge what are supposed to be the detached arms of the squid; some of them thus exhibited exceeding twenty and thirty feet in length. They fancy that the monster to which these arms belonged ordinarily clings by them to the bed of the ocean; and that the sperm whale, unlike other species, is supplied with teeth in order to attack and tear it.

V. Ch. 60, “The Line.”

“The Line might be a good example of what turns many readers off in Moby-Dick. Ishmael riffs for a few pages on rope. Like, the qualities, textures, durability of different types of rope.

At the end though, our Ishmael turns the rope into a metaphor:

All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.

AnnumMMXX Phase V — John Jacobsmeyer

January 28, 2021 BibliokleptLeave a comment

AnnumMMXX Phase V, 2020 by John Jacobsmeyer (b. 1964)

The great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last | Moby-Dick reread, riff 15

January 27, 2021January 27, 2021 Biblioklept2 Comments

I. In this riff: Ch. 55, 56, and 57 of Moby-Dick.

Each of these chapters concerns graphic—artistic and scientific—depictions of whales. Ishmael dwells mostly upon the failure of artists to truthfully represent the whale, but also concedes that the task is near impossible. Nevertheless, Ish attests that he “shall ere long paint to you as well as one can without canvas, something like the true form of the whale as he actually appears to the eye of the whaleman…”

II. Ch. 55, “Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales.”

Ishmael avers that erroneous depictions of whales are likely based in antiquity: “It may be that the primal source of all those pictorial delusions will be found among the oldest Hindoo, Egyptian, and Grecian sculptures.” He goes on,

Now, by all odds, the most ancient extant portrait anyways purporting to be the whale’s, is to be found in the famous cavern-pagoda of Elephanta, in India. …The Hindoo whale referred to, occurs in a separate department of the wall, depicting the incarnation of Vishnu in the form of leviathan, learnedly known as the Matse Avatar. But though this sculpture is half man and half whale, so as only to give the tail of the latter, yet that small section of him is all wrong. It looks more like the tapering tail of an anaconda, than the broad palms of the true whale’s majestic flukes.

I couldn’t locate an image of Ish’s Elaphanta icon, but here’s an unsigned depiction of Vishnu in this form from an 1816 portfolio of “deities, mendicants and ritual scenes such as a wedding and cremation.”

III. (Barry Moser, who illustrated the edition of Moby-Dick I’m rereading, wisely stayed away from most of these “picture” episodes.)

IV. Let us continue:

It is Guido’s picture of Perseus rescuing Andromeda from the sea-monster or whale. Where did Guido get the model of such a strange creature as that?

–and–

Nor does Hogarth, in painting the same scene in his own “Perseus Descending,” make out one whit better.

–and–

Then, there are the Prodromus whales of old Scotch Sibbald

–and—

Jonah’s whale, as depicted in the prints of old Bibles and the cuts of old primers.

Jonah, 1585 by Antonius Wierix

–and–

In old Harris’s collection of voyages there are some plates of whales extracted from a Dutch book of voyages, A.D. 1671, entitled “A Whaling Voyage to Spitzbergen in the ship Jonas in the Whale, Peter Peterson of Friesland, master.” In one of those plates the whales, like great rafts of logs, are represented lying among ice-isles, with white bears running over their living backs. In another plate, the prodigious blunder is made of representing the whale with perpendicular flukes.

–and–

Then again, there is an imposing quarto, written by one Captain Colnett, a Post Captain in the English navy, entitled “A Voyage round Cape Horn into the South Seas, for the purpose of extending the Spermaceti Whale Fisheries.” In this book is an outline purporting to be a “Picture of a Physeter or Spermaceti whale, drawn by scale from one killed on the coast of Mexico, August, 1793, and hoisted on deck.”

–and–

Look at that popular work “Goldsmith’s Animated Nature.” In the abridged London edition of 1807, there are plates of an alleged “whale” and a “narwhale.” I do not wish to seem inelegant, but this unsightly whale looks much like an amputated sow; and, as for the narwhale, one glimpse at it is enough to amaze one, that in this nineteenth century such a hippogriff could be palmed for genuine upon any intelligent public of schoolboys.

–and–

Then, again, in 1825, Bernard Germain, Count de Lacépède, a great naturalist, published a scientific systemized whale book, wherein are several pictures of the different species of the Leviathan.

–and–

But the placing of the cap-sheaf to all this blundering business was reserved for the scientific Frederick Cuvier, brother to the famous Baron. In 1836, he published a Natural History of Whales, in which he gives what he calls a picture of the Sperm Whale. Before showing that picture to any Nantucketer, you had best provide for your summary retreat from Nantucket. In a word, Frederick Cuvier’s Sperm Whale is not a Sperm Whale, but a squash.

V. Ishmael then forgives these artists’ failures:

But these manifold mistakes in depicting the whale are not so very surprising after all. Consider! Most of the scientific drawings have been taken from the stranded fish; and these are about as correct as a drawing of a wrecked ship, with broken back, would correctly represent the noble animal itself in all its undashed pride of hull and spars. …The living whale, in his full majesty and significance, is only to be seen at sea in unfathomable waters; and afloat the vast bulk of him is out of sight…

VI. Ishmael then reminds us that the whale is a sort of metaphysical thing: “For it is one of the more curious things about this Leviathan, that his skeleton gives very little idea of his general shape,” unlike, say, Jeremy Bentham.

VII. Ishmael’s first pictorial chapter ends his chapter with a warning of sorts:

For all these reasons, then, any way you may look at it, you must needs conclude that the great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last. True, one portrait may hit the mark much nearer than another, but none can hit it with any very considerable degree of exactness. So there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what the whale really looks like. And the only mode in which you can derive even a tolerable idea of his living contour, is by going a whaling yourself; but by so doing, you run no small risk of being eternally stove and sunk by him. Wherefore, it seems to me you had best not be too fastidious in your curiosity touching this Leviathan.

Ishmael’s warning points—again—to The Pequod’s impending doom.

VIII. Ch. 56, “Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales, and the True Pictures of Whaling Scenes.”

Ishmael:

I know of only four published outlines of the great Sperm Whale; Colnett’s, Huggins’s, Frederick Cuvier’s, and Beale’s. In the previous chapter Colnett and Cuvier have been referred to. Huggins’s is far better than theirs; but, by great odds, Beale’s is the best.

Here is a detail from W.J. Huggin’s South Sea Whale Fishery (1825):

–and from Beale’s volume—

Ishmael then mentions William Scoresby, whose disastrous depictions also likely helped inform the imagery at the climax of Moby-Dick:

Ishmael is also very fond of two engravings from Ambroise Lous Garneray, the second of which he describes thus—

In the second engraving, the boat is in the act of drawing alongside the barnacled flank of a large running Right Whale, that rolls his black weedy bulk in the sea like some mossy rock-slide from the Patagonian cliffs. His jets are erect, full, and black like soot; so that from so abounding a smoke in the chimney, you would think there must be a brave supper cooking in the great bowels below. Sea fowls are pecking at the small crabs, shell-fish, and other sea candies and maccaroni, which the Right Whale sometimes carries on his pestilent back. And all the while the thick-lipped leviathan is rushing through the deep, leaving tons of tumultuous white curds in his wake, and causing the slight boat to rock in the swells like a skiff caught nigh the paddle-wheels of an ocean steamer. Thus, the foreground is all raging commotion; but behind, in admirable artistic contrast, is the glassy level of a sea becalmed, the drooping unstarched sails of the powerless ship, and the inert mass of a dead whale, a conquered fortress, with the flag of capture lazily hanging from the whale-pole inserted into his spout-hole.

I think it must be this–

IX. Ch. 57, “Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone; in Mountains; in Stars.”

I wrote above that Barry Moser pretty much stays out of these pictorial chapters, but he does include this lovely little illustration in Ch. 57:

On scrimshaw:

Throughout the Pacific, and also in Nantucket, and New Bedford, and Sag Harbor, you will come across lively sketches of whales and whaling-scenes, graven by the fishermen themselves on Sperm Whale-teeth, or ladies’ busks wrought out of the Right Whale-bone, and other like skrimshander articles, as the whalemen call the numerous little ingenious contrivances they elaborately carve out of the rough material, in their hours of ocean leisure.

(So I just spent the last half hour looking for this tiny little scrimshaw pocket knife I bought when I was ten years old in Honolulu — it was the winter of 1989 and we were going home-not-really-home to Florida for Christmas from Dunedin, New Zealand. We got to spend a few days in Honolulu and I bought a “scrimshaw” knife in the market. “Like Moby-Dick,” my father said, or something like that. I know the knife is here somewhere, in some box or crate, squirreled away, more beautiful in my mind’s eye than an iPhone pic could capture.)

X. These three chapters end with Ishmael’s reaffirmation to go a’whaliln’ — to see for himself, and not through, to quote Walt Whitman, “take things at second or third hand, not look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books.”

Our boy Ish ends the chapter horny for life:

With a frigate’s anchors for my bridle-bitts and fasces of harpoons for spurs, would I could mount that whale and leap the topmost skies, to see whether the fabled heavens with all their countless tents really lie encamped beyond my mortal sight!

Two Lovely Le Guins (Books acquired, 22 Jan. 2021)

January 26, 2021 Biblioklept4 Comments

I found two first-edition hardback Ursula K. Le Guin novels—my favorite Le Guins at that!—for next to nothing last week at my favorite local used bookstore.

The simple, elegant cover for Le Guin’s 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness was designed by Lena Fong Lueg. It employs an illustration by Jack Gaughan.

The jacket for 1974’s The Dispossessed was designed by Fred Winkowski.

In 2015, I undertook the project of reading (or in some cases rereading) Le Guin’s so-called Hainish novels. I wrote about those novels in a long post in January of 2016. Of the (maybe) eight novels in the Hainish cycle, The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed are easily the strongest (although I really loved the one-two punch of Planet of Exile (1966) and City of Illusions (1967)).

Here is what I wrote about The Left Hand of Darkness:

The Left Hand of Darkness is amazing. Perfect in its strange imperfections and crammed with fables and myths and misunderstandings, it is the apotheosis of Le Guin’s synthesis of adventure with philosophy. Darkness is about shadows and weight. About pulling weight—literally, figuratively. It’s also the story of an ice planet. (A stranger comes to the ice planet!). It’s a political thriller. It’s a sexual thriller. But the impression that lingers strongest: The Left Hand of Darkness is one of the better literary evocations of friendship (its precarious awful strange wonderful tenuous strength) that I’ve ever read.

And here is what I wrote about The Dispossessed:

The Dispossessed feels closer to Le Guin’s non-Hainish 1971 novel The Lathe of Heaven in some ways than it does to its so-called Hainish kin. Both novels formally (and spiritually) evoke yin and yang, opposition, conflict, stress, and, ultimately, synthesis. The Dispossessed is a riff on anarchy and stability, allegiance to one’s community and family weighed against personal vision and ecumenical dreams.

I also claimed that The Dispossessed is the best starting place for those new to Le Guin, but I think The Left Hand of Darkness is equally good, as are her Earthsea novels.

The Sleeping Water — Leonor Fini

January 25, 2021 Biblioklept1 Comment

The Sleeping Water, 1962 by Leonor Fini (1908–1996)

A certain wondrous, inverted visitation of one of those so called judgments of God which at times are said to overtake some men | Moby-Dick reread, riff 14

January 24, 2021 BibliokleptLeave a comment

I. In this riff: Ch. 54 of Moby-Dick, “The Town Ho’s Story.”

II. “The Town Ho’s Story” comes not-exactly halfway through Moby-Dick.

At almost 8,000 words, it’s the longest chapter in the novel. For a sense of comparison, Melville’s novella Bartleby is about 14,000 words long. Indeed, “The Town Ho’s Story” reads like a long short story at times, but one without the conceptual scope of a novella.

III. Or maybe “without the conceptual scope of a novella” is incorrect. The plot of “The Town-Ho’s Story” anticipates Melville’s great late novella Billy Budd. Its handsome hero Steelkilt anticipates Baby Budd, and its villain Radney prefigures uglyassed Claggart. However, Ch. 54 ultimately fits into the strange shape of Moby-Dick, offering an alternate version of the novel’s catastrophic climax.

IV. Ch. 54 culminates with an attack on Moby Dick! But it’s the Town-Ho’s attack, not the Pequod’s! Which brings me to—

V. (Actually, before I get there, let me just address it: Yes, “The Town-Ho’s Story” is a salacious title to our modern ears. It is but one of many smutty sounding chapter titles in Moby-Dick.)

VI. So like well–which brings me to the narratological framing of “The Town-Ho’s Story”:

The Pequod meets The Town-Ho, a whale ship “manned almost wholly by Polynesians.”

There is a reason for this majority crew.

Ishmael informs us that the true Town-Ho’s story is “the private property of three confederate white seamen of that ship,” and that “one of whom, it seems, communicated it to Tashtego with Romish injunctions of secrecy.” Our harpooneer might have been sworn to secrecy—“injunctions of secrecy” and that hedging expression “it seems” points to Moby-Dick’s central acentered ambiguity—-

—–but Ishmael, ever the witness, notes that “the following night Tashtego rambled in his sleep, and revealed so much of it in that way, that when he was wakened he could not well withhold the rest.” The Pequod’s crew keeps the story from Ahab and his mates. Labor vs. management:

To some the general interest in the White Whale was now wildly heightened by a circumstance of the Town-Ho’s story, which seemed obscurely to involve with the whale a certain wondrous, inverted visitation of one of those so called judgments of God which at times are said to overtake some men. This latter circumstance, with its own particular accompaniments, forming what may be called the secret part of the tragedy about to be narrated, never reached the ears of Captain Ahab or his mates.

But, above—the reason for a majority Polynesian crew? Well, the Town-Ho fell on disastrous times.

VII. But again, the framing is what most intrigues me here. This story is told by three whites on the Town-Ho to the Native American harpooneer Tashtego, who reveals much of it in his sleep–to Ishmael? Or, rather, that is what Ishmael tells us. But Ishmael also tells us that

For my humor’s sake, I shall preserve the style in which I once narrated it at Lima, to a lounging circle of my Spanish friends, one saint’s eve, smoking upon the thick-gilt tiled piazza of the Golden Inn.

We have a story inside a story inside a dream inside a story inside an epic encyclopedic novel that may or may not be told from the perspective of a ghost.

VIII. (But—if Ishmael tells this story to living auditors, is he actually a ghost, or a proper survivor of the wreck of the Pequod? Or are his auditors in turn spirits as well, taking the measure of storytelling at their leisure?)

IX. There is but one Barry Moser illustration for this chapter in the edition I am reading. It depicts some dudes at the pumps—

X. The pumps are one of the major conflicts in “The Town-Ho’s Story.” The ship springs a leak and has to be pumped (more phallic language in this oh-so-phallic novel); the pumping accelerates the conflict between Radney and Steelkit, which eventually explodes into mutiny and suppression—and all that egotism is overwhelmed by a sighting of that great whale Moby Dick! They chase the monster and lose:

…Radney was tossed over into the sea, on the other flank of the whale. He struck out through the spray, and, for an instant, was dimly seen through that veil, wildly seeking to remove himself from the eye of Moby Dick. But the whale rushed round in a sudden maelstrom; seized the swimmer between his jaws; and rearing high up with him, plunged headlong again, and went down.

There’s no amount of pumping that will revive the drowned sailor.

But he lives on in Ishmael’s storytelling.

Éric Chevillard’s The Posthumous Works of Thomas Pilaster (Book acquired, 8 Jan. 2021)

January 23, 2021January 23, 2021 BibliokleptLeave a comment

I have no idea what the fuck is going on over there at that Sublunary Editions indie press.

Their forthcoming title is The Posthumous Works of Thomas Pilaster by Éric Chevillard (translated from the French by Chris Clarke), and it looks really good, like in the Borgesian vein good. I read the section “So Many Seahorses” a few minutes ago and it made me laugh aloud.

If I ever finish Moby-Dick I’ll let you know more.

Sublunary’s blurb:

The literary world owes a great debt of gratitude to the executors who, charged with burning the remaining papers of their authorial charges, refuse, instead publishing them for the fanatic and meddlesome among us. Collected here are the remaining unpublished works—diaries and drafts, aphorisms and ephemera—of the late Thomas Pilaster, compiled by Marc-Antoine Marson, a longtime friend and fellow writer with whom Pilaster maintained a healthy rivalry. With rough edges and glints of genius present in equal measure, scholars and lay-readers alike will treasure these curious texts—So Many Seahorses, The Vander Sons Company, and Three Attempts at the Reintroduction of the Man-Eating Tiger Into Our Countryside, to name a few—for generations to come.

Don’t Lose Your Lover — Celeste Dupuy-Spencer

January 22, 2021 Biblioklept1 Comment

Don’t Lose Your Lover, 2018 by Celeste Dupuy-Spencer (b. 1979)

The Last Cavalier — Albert Birkle

January 22, 2021 BibliokleptLeave a comment

The Last Cavalier, 1925 by Albert Birkle (1900-1986 )

Certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life | Moby-Dick reread, riff 13

January 21, 2021 Biblioklept1 Comment

I. In this riff, Ch. 49-53 of Moby-Dick.

II. Ch. 49, “The Hyena,” begins with this wonderful paragraph, which I will share in full:

There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life whIIen a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own. However, nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth while disputing. He bolts down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions, all hard things visible and invisible, never mind how knobby; as an ostrich of potent digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints. And as for small difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him only sly, good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen and unaccountable old joker. That odd sort of wayward mood I am speaking of, comes over a man only in some time of extreme tribulation; it comes in the very midst of his earnestness, so that what just before might have seemed to him a thing most momentous, now seems but a part of the general joke. There is nothing like the perils of whaling to breed this free and easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy; and with it I now regarded this whole voyage of the Pequod, and the great White Whale its object.

“The Hyena” is a fitting name for this chapter. Ishmael is recovered from near-drowning, his boat–Starbuck’s, Queequeg’s boat too—was left for dead by The Pequod.

Ishamael’s hyena-wail here points toward modernist literature’s realization that comedy and terror amount to absurdity.

III. At the end of the chapter, Ishmael again underlines Moby-Dick’s themes of death and resurrection:

Besides, all the days I should now live would be as good as the days that Lazarus lived after his resurrection; a supplementary clean gain of so many months or weeks as the case might be. I survived myself; my death and burial were locked up in my chest. I looked round me tranquilly and contentedly, like a quiet ghost with a clean conscience sitting inside the bars of a snug family vault.

A quiet ghost, our narrator.

IV. Ch. 50, “Ahab’s Boat and Crew. Fedallah.”

Ishmael’s largeheartedness extends not to Fedallah and the rest of his Filipino crew. They are the outsiders among a crew of outsiders, sanctified stowaways charged with Ahab’s secret mission before the crew of The Pequod proper. Ishmael firsts sees them as “phantoms” and extends his unfortunate exoticism in this episode, which culminates in his racist suggestion that “the Oriental isles to the east of the continent” are descended from devils mating with humans: “according to Genesis, the angels indeed consorted with the daughters of men, the devils also, add the uncanonical Rabbins, indulged in mundane amours.”

V. Ch. 51, “The Spirit-Spout.”

I should’ve started a tally of hyphenated chapter titles in Moby-Dick.

Another chapter where our “quiet ghost” narrator Ishmael is able to inhabit the private thoughts of others—here, glimmers and glimpses of Ahab’s mind, but also full access to Starbuck’s consciousness: “Terrible old man! thought Starbuck with a shudder, sleeping in this gale, still thou steadfastly eyest thy purpose.”

VI. Ch. 52, “The Albatross.”

The Pequod meets The Goney, a ship named for the enormous white bird, the albatross. Ahab bellows out to ask if they’d encountered the white whale Moby Dick, but The Goney, speeds away from The Pequod “at the first mere mention of the White Whale’s name.”

Insulted Ahab bellows again, this time telling his crew to send The Pequod “off round the world!”

Ishmael worries in a final paragraph that again foreshadows the novel’s disastrous climax:

Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could for ever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage. But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented chase of that demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed.

VII. Ch. 53, “The Gam.”

Here, Ishmael lays out how strange it is that The Goney refused to hail The Pequod: the whaling tradition of the gam. Ishmael claims that the word is not defined in dictionaries: “Dr. Johnson never attained to that erudition; Noah Webster’s ark does not hold it.” So, our chronicler does his best:

GAM. NOUN—A social meeting of two (or more) Whaleships, generally on a cruising-ground; when, after exchanging hails, they exchange visits by boats’ crews: the two captains remaining, for the time, on board of one ship, and the two chief mates on the other.

The Oxford English Dictionary currently gives seven entries for gam as a noun or verb (and one for -gam the suffix).

They date from

-1508

n. In plural. Teeth, esp. large, misshapen, or irregular teeth (also gam teeth). Formerly also (occasionally): †jaws (obsolete).

-1785

n. slang. A person’s leg. Frequently in plural.

-1827

n. Amongst tribes in northern India: a headman, a chief.

-1831

n. colloquial. Originally: a social meeting among whalers at sea. Later more generally: a social gathering, a ‘get-together’; a chat, a gossip. Chiefly U.S. regional (New England) in the extended sense.

This definition cites Moby-Dick:

What does the whaler do when she meets another whaler in any sort of decent weather? She has a ‘Gam’.

And then Mark Twain’s 1866 “Letter from Hawaii”—but also refers to a 1831 citation from something called Sailor’s Mag.

-1849 gives us gam as a verb, both transitive and intransitive:

Nautical colloquial

(What is the nautical colloquial fashion look, and where can I get it?)

-1910

v. transitive. To perform oral sex on (a person, originally esp. a man).

This definition cites Moby-Dick’s later brother, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow:

1973 T. Pynchon Gravity’s Rainbow i. 35 Knowing Bloat, perhaps that’s what it is, young lady gamming well-set-up young man.

-1971

n. British slang. An act of fellatio.

VIII.

Teeth

Leg

Chief

Meet

Head.

Hip, Hip, Hoorah! — Karel Appel

January 20, 2021 BibliokleptLeave a comment

Hip, Hip, Hoorah!, 1949 by Karel Appel (1921-2006)

And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt? | Moby-Dick reread, riff 12

January 19, 2021 BibliokleptLeave a comment

I. In this riff: Ch. 37-48.

II. Oof. Twelve chapters. Not sure how up to covering them I am, but let’s go—

III. Ch. 37, “Sunset.”

Ahab has just revealed that The Pequod’s true mission is vengeance on Moby Dick. “Sunset” is a short chapter and continues the Shakespearian mode initiated in Ch. 36, “The Quarter-Deck.” (It begins with the stage direction, “By the Mainmast; Starbuck leaning against it.”) We enter poor Starbuck’s inner monologue: “My soul is more than matched; she’s overmanned; and by a madman! Insufferable sting, that sanity should ground arms on such a field!”

This rhetorical conceit—a play on a stage with players—playfully plays out over the next few chapters, culminating in Ch. 40, “Midnight, Forecastle,” which reads like a playwright’s script. Ishmael is subsumed into this dramatic grammar, a bit player. Or perhaps he is the orchestrator of events. Or maybe just the recording witness. In any case, he arrives back to himself in—

IV. Ch. 41, “Moby Dick”—

Which begins,

I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest; my oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted, and more did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul. A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab’s quenchless feud seemed mine.

Ahab’s quenchless feud seemed mine: Ishmael’s first-person I returns, but he assumes a kind of vacant post—he’s been absorbed into the unity of the crew, a unity in turn subsumed into Ahab’s monomania. In “Moby Dick” Ishmael provides a working background summary of Moby Dick’s history, including his encounter with Ahab. At the same time, it seems Ishmael’s consciousness has somehow absorbed portions of Ahab’s:

But, as in his narrow-flowing monomania, not one jot of Ahab’s broad madness had been left behind; so in that broad madness, not one jot of his great natural intellect had perished. That before living agent, now became the living instrument. If such a furious trope may stand, his special lunacy stormed his general sanity, and carried it, and turned all its concentred cannon upon its own mad mark; so that far from having lost his strength, Ahab, to that one end, did now possess a thousand fold more potency than ever he had sanely brought to bear upon any one reasonable object.

But I skipped a few chapters. Where were we?

V. Ch. 39, “First Night-Watch.”

Another very short chapter, another interior monologue—this time, “(Stubb solus, and mending a brace.)” We mostly get a bit of character-building: “Well, Stubb, wise Stubb—that’s my title—well, Stubb, what of it, Stubb? Here’s a carcase. I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing.”

Go to it laughing: Moby-Dick is a tragedy, but it’s also a grand comedy.

VI. Ch. 40, “Midnight, Forecastle.”

The crew of The Pequod turns into a chorus. Chorus is not the right word: our boys are not on the same page (except that they literally are). A bit drunk from Ahab’s spirits, they indulge in songs. Melville marks most sailors not by name, but by origin: Dutch Sailor, China Sailor, Lascar Sailor, and so on. The final lines go to the cabin boy Pip though:

PIP (shrinking under the windlass). Jollies? Lord help such jollies! Crish, crash! there goes the jib-stay! Blang-whang! God! Duck lower, Pip, here comes the royal yard! It’s worse than being in the whirled woods, the last day of the year! Who’d go climbing after chestnuts now? But there they go, all cursing, and here I don’t. Fine prospects to ’em; they’re on the road to heaven. Hold on hard! Jimmini, what a squall! But those chaps there are worse yet—they are your white squalls, they. White squalls? white whale, shirr! shirr! Here have I heard all their chat just now, and the white whale—shirr! shirr!—but spoken of once! and only this evening—it makes me jingle all over like my tambourine—that anaconda of an old man swore ’em in to hunt him! Oh, thou big white God aloft there somewhere in yon darkness, have mercy on this small black boy down here; preserve him from all men that have no bowels to feel fear!

Poor Pip is already half mad on the road to ruin, his language jangled and his psyche scarred. It’ll get worse.

VII. Ch. 42, “The Whiteness of the Whale.”

Like maybe just read this one.

(That’s lazy on my part, right?

Okay, so—

“The Whiteness of the Whale” is one of the better chapters of Moby-Dick.

“What the white whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times, he was to me, as yet remains unsaid,” starts Ishmael, and then precedes to say, say, say—-and yet he tiptoes around the calamity at the book’s climax. (This ghost will foreshadow but not spoil.)

The third paragraph of this chapter goes on for almost five hundred words. Here it is (skip it if you like):

Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles, japonicas, and pearls; and though various nations have in some way recognised a certain royal preeminence in this hue; even the barbaric, grand old kings of Pegu placing the title “Lord of the White Elephants” above all their other magniloquent ascriptions of dominion; and the modern kings of Siam unfurling the same snow-white quadruped in the royal standard; and the Hanoverian flag bearing the one figure of a snow-white charger; and the great Austrian Empire, Cæsarian, heir to overlording Rome, having for the imperial colour the same imperial hue; and though this pre-eminence in it applies to the human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe; and though, besides, all this, whiteness has been even made significant of gladness, for among the Romans a white stone marked a joyful day; and though in other mortal sympathies and symbolizings, this same hue is made the emblem of many touching, noble things—the innocence of brides, the benignity of age; though among the Red Men of America the giving of the white belt of wampum was the deepest pledge of honor; though in many climes, whiteness typifies the majesty of Justice in the ermine of the Judge, and contributes to the daily state of kings and queens drawn by milk-white steeds; though even in the higher mysteries of the most august religions it has been made the symbol of the divine spotlessness and power; by the Persian fire worshippers, the white forked flame being held the holiest on the altar; and in the Greek mythologies, Great Jove himself being made incarnate in a snow-white bull; and though to the noble Iroquois, the midwinter sacrifice of the sacred White Dog was by far the holiest festival of their theology, that spotless, faithful creature being held the purest envoy they could send to the Great Spirit with the annual tidings of their own fidelity; and though directly from the Latin word for white, all Christian priests derive the name of one part of their sacred vesture, the alb or tunic, worn beneath the cassock; and though among the holy pomps of the Romish faith, white is specially employed in the celebration of the Passion of our Lord; though in the Vision of St. John, white robes are given to the redeemed, and the four-and-twenty elders stand clothed in white before the great white throne, and the Holy One that sitteth there white like wool; yet for all these accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and honorable, and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood.

(There are also a few really long footnotes in “The Whiteness of the Whale.”)

VIII. The last two sentences of “The Whiteness of the Whale” might serve as a tidy summary of Moby-Dick’s tropes and themes:

And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?

And so they hunt the object of their ideal, as if that would give life meaning and order.

IX. Ch. 43, “Hark!”

A short chapter composed almost entirely in dialogue, but without the markers of a drama. Instead, Melville puts his character’s lines in quotation marks and lets them go back and forth. The chapter basically is more foreshadowing for the eventual revelation of Fedallah and his hidden crew.

X. Ch. 44, “The Chart.”

More on Ahab’s mad questing. We learn his plans to intercept the white whale. As always, Ishmael is permitted into psychic environs that seem as if they should be verboten. He is somehow present in Ahab’s slumbering and waking:

Ah, God! what trances of torments does that man endure who is consumed with one unachieved revengeful desire. He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody nails in his palms.

A self-crucifying-Christ?

XI. Ch. 45, “The Affidavit.”

Ishmael seeks to validate the veracity of his tale with us, his readers. He invokes several “factual” (non-fiction!) texts, including an account from a man he claims as an uncle.

A key idea:

So ignorant are most landsmen of some of the plainest and most palpable wonders of the world, that without some hints touching the plain facts, historical and otherwise, of the fishery, they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory.

Ishmael tells us this is no allegory, perhaps signalling this is definitely an allegory—but a failed allegory, an ambiguous attempt at allegory, an allegory where object, symbol, and lesson will refuse to align neatly.

XII. Ch. 46, “Surmises.”

Moby-Dick is a novel of masters and commanders, and body and soul, themes I haven’t touched too much upon:

To accomplish his object Ahab must use tools; and of all tools used in the shadow of the moon, men are most apt to get out of order. He knew, for example, that however magnetic his ascendency in some respects was over Starbuck, yet that ascendency did not cover the complete spiritual man any more than mere corporeal superiority involves intellectual mastership; for to the purely spiritual, the intellectual but stand in a sort of corporeal relation.

XIII. Ch. 47, “The Mat-Maker.”

Does Melville love hyphens or what? Like so many of the chapters of Moby-Dick are hyphenated—and the title is hyphenated, even if the whale isn’t. Anyway. “The Mat-Maker” is a bit of stage business to remind us that Ish and Queeg are, like, working on a whale ship and are part of noble Starbuck’s crew. And then Tashtego calls out a whale. And then they lower boats.

XIV. Ch. 48, “The First Lowering.”

For all it’s philosophizin’, Moby-Dick is still an adventure story, and “The First Lowering” glows with vibrant action.

We are introduced to the secret phantoms that were stowed away beneath decks—Fedallah and his crew, Ahab’s secret assassins. While Ishmael is generally magnanimous and unbounded by prejudice, the novel gives way here to ugly racism:

The figure that now stood by its bows was tall and swart, with one white tooth evilly protruding from its steel-like lips. A rumpled Chinese jacket of black cotton funereally invested him, with wide black trowsers of the same dark stuff. But strangely crowning this ebonness was a glistening white plaited turban, the living hair braided and coiled round and round upon his head. Less swart in aspect, the companions of this figure were of that vivid, tiger-yellow complexion peculiar to some of the aboriginal natives of the Manillas;—a race notorious for a certain diabolism of subtilty, and by some honest white mariners supposed to be the paid spies and secret confidential agents on the water of the devil, their lord, whose counting-room they suppose to be elsewhere.

At an aesthetic level, Melville’s Ishmael is perhaps trying to work through an allegory of whiteness, using yellowness here in unkind and unwise methods—but I don’t think so. It’s just ugly.

XV. “The First Lowering” prefigures the disaster at the end of Moby-Dick. It’s a rough dress rehearsal for the outcome of Ahab’s mad quest, and it ends with Ish, Queeg, and Starbuck imperiled, “Wet, drenched through, and shivering cold, despairing of ship or boat”:

Floating on the waves we saw the abandoned boat, as for one instant it tossed and gaped beneath the ship’s bows like a chip at the base of a cataract; and then the vast hull rolled over it, and it was seen no more till it came up weltering astern. Again we swam for it, were dashed against it by the seas, and were at last taken up and safely landed on board. Ere the squall came close to, the other boats had cut loose from their fish and returned to the ship in good time. The ship had given us up, but was still cruising, if haply it might light upon some token of our perishing,—an oar or a lance pole.

XVI. Will Ish and Queeg survive? Has the ship given them up? Tune in next time, for Ch. 49 — “The Hyena”!