This is my beloved copy, a hardback Signet Classic edition that’s the size of a mass market paperback.
I love this copy because it was the one that I read when I really read Moby-Dick (I also kinda sorta ‘klept it).
These abridged versions for young readers are the same, despite the cooler updated cover on the right, which I guess fooled my wife into buying another copy for me to read with my daughter. (She liked it the first time though, so….). Even the illustrations are the same:
More of a resource than a reading copy—although as Norton Critical Editions go, this one’s footnotes aren’t too obtrusive. Handy dictionary of nautical terms.
I am a huge fan of Bill Sienkiewicz. And Moby-Dick. I wish his Moby-Dick adaptation had no words though.
My dad’s childhood adaption, a Grosset & Dunlap from the early ’60s.
Sam Ita’s fantastic pop-up adaptation fails to mention Herman Melville’s name at all.
Despite the gross oversight, it’s given me hours of joy with my kids.
Moby-Dick was published on October 18th, 1851 in England.
The English printer Peter Bentley’s text contained numerous errors, including leaving out the epilogue, where we learn that Ishmael survives to bear witness to disaster.
Although the American printing in November of 1851 emended many of these errors, the early reviews of Moby-Dick were scathing, and Melville’s career and reputation deteriorated.
It wasn’t until the advent of literary modernism in the first decades of the twentieth century that the world caught up to Moby-Dick.
The final sequence of Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 film Children of Men offers an example of film-making at its finest. Theo Faron, played by Clive Owen, frantically guides refugee Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey) and her newborn through a hellish internment camp to an ostensible escape by sea. Kee, her name symbolically overdetermined, is the first person on earth to become pregnant after a generation of sterility.
Children of Men is set against the backdrop of militarized dystopia (Slavoj Žižek has suggested that this background is the essence of the film), a vile, clamorous police state that its hero Theo mutes with alcohol. Theo has yet to come to terms with the grief of losing his son, a plot conceit that mirrors the infinite loss figured in humanity’s sterility (and looming extinction). The film’s thrilling final third sees Theo convert his paralysis into radical action, as he ushers Kee and her newborn through the dystopic background, a violent blur the ideological details of which the audience is free to ignore.
Cuarón strips meaning down to raw, simple, archetypal impulses—Theo is a stand-in for any parent, Kee and her daughter emblematic of genetic futurity. The film sublimates its underlying existential discourse into a gripping narrative fueled by its audience’s own anxieties. The drama culminates in a final sequence in which Cuarón amplifies and extends the existential anxiety by refusing to cut his shots for minutes at a time. The audience finds a surrogate in both Theo and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who moves us physically through violence and disaster.
While directors like Chris Nolan and Michael Bay produce anxiety in their films through frenetic editing and rapid jump cuts, Cuarón’s long takes force the viewer to engage the drama directly. The payoff is that rare creature: A film with an ending stronger than its beginning—a film that goes, that moves, that grips its audience right up until the credits.
Cuarón’s newest film Gravity follows this same template. For ninety minutes, Cuarón—again working with cinematographer Lubezki—forces the audience into a propulsive and sustained anxiety trip. Gravity features astronauts as its heroes, but its technological milieu (space stations, shuttles, astronaut suits) belies its radical simplicity. This is a film about survival that questions why there is indeed a human impulse to survive.
Like Theo of Children of Men, the hero of Gravity Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) has also lost a child. She too has yet to come to terms with her grief. While Children of Men used a dystopic, politicized backdrop to highlight its character’s grief—and, significantly, the specter of infinite infanticide—Gravity offers up an existential void. The film’s near-perfection is that it refuses any other plot elements, giving us only Ryan’s literal attempt to save herself paired with the film’s overdetermined but singular metaphor: outer space as a beautiful, nihilistic abyss.
Gravity has been out for a few weeks now and has done gangbusters at the box office. I take this as a positive sign. This is the kind of blockbuster we need more of, a personal spectacle, a huge film in a minimalist mode. I could pick on a few things, maybe—the score is heavy-handed and obtrusive (and could probably be dispensed with entirely) and some of the dialogue falls clumsily—but I think that Cuarón has made the film he intended to, a sequel of sorts to Children of Men, and one worthy of that film’s climax.
I can’t end here though without addressing Richard Brody’s negative review of Gravity in The New Yorker. Brody is admittedly hard to take seriously after his opening claim that the film is simultaneously “viscerally thrilling and…deadly boring,” a statement that immediately highlights Brody’s biggest critical failure: He wants the film to be something that it is not trying to be.
Brody at length:
Cuarón has done a formidable job of piecing together a plausibly coherent material world of space, of conveying the appearance of that setting and the sensations of the characters who inhabit it. But he has created those sensations generically, with no difference between the subjectivity of his characters and the ostensible appearance to a camera of those phenomena. He offers point-of-view images that are imbued with no actual point of view. The movie, with its near-absolute absence of inner life, presents a material fantasy that flatters the studious humanism of critics who honor the attention to so-called reality—as an aesthetic endowed with a quasi-political virtue.
I’ve included the hyperlink in that last phrase to a confused essay in which Brody decries what he perceives as the failure of contemporary directors to address the imaginative capacity of their characters. For Brody, Gravity has to be a failure—by design, it is a thoroughly concrete transmission of events, a causal chain of consequences. Brody wants flashbacks, moments of introspection; he explicitly calls for the “moral forthrightness of a foregrounded speaker bearing witness.” In Gravity, Bullock’s Ryan is agent and surrogate for the audience, who process and bear witness to her choices and changes. The film’s minimalism strips her choices down to an extended but focused exploration of the problem Hamlet voiced centuries earlier: “To be or not to be.” And Cuarón has offered a moral forthrightness and a clear point of view, even if Brody is uncomfortable with the mechanisms through which Cuarón would have us access it: Gravity chooses To be.
“The Huldrefish” by Jonas Lie; Translated from Norwegian by Nisbet Bain (Illustration by Laurence Housman)
It was such an odd trout that Nona hauled in at the end of his fishing-line. Large and fat, red spotted and shiny, it sprawled and squirmed, with its dirty yellow belly above the water, to wriggle off the hook. And when he got it into the boat, and took it off the hook, he saw that it had only two small slits where the eyes should have been.
It must be a huldrefish, thought one of the boatmen, for rumour had it that that lake was one of those which had a double bottom.
But Nona didn’t trouble his head very much about what sort of a fish it was, so long as it was a big one. He was ravenously hungry, and bawled to them to row as rapidly as possible ashore so as to get it cooked.
He had been sitting the whole afternoon with empty lines out in the mountain lake there; but as for the trout, it was only an hour ago since it had been steering its way through the water with its rudder of a tail, and allowed itself to be fooled by a hook, and already it lay cooked red there on the dish.
But now Nona recollected about the strange eyes, and felt for them, and pricked away at its head with his fork. There was nothing but slits outside, and yet there was a sort of hard eyeball inside. The head was strangely shaped, and looked very peculiar in many respects.
He was vexed that he had not examined it more closely before it was cooked; it was not so easy now to make out what it really was. It had tasted first-rate, however, and that was something.
But at night there was, as it were, a gleam of bright water before his eyes, and he lay half asleep, thinking of the odd fish he had pulled up.
He was in his boat again, he thought, and it seemed to him as if his hands felt the fish wriggling and sprawling for its life, and shooting its snout backwards and forwards to get off the hook.
All at once it grew so heavy and strong that it drew the boat after it by the line.
It went along at a frightful speed, while the lake gradually diminished, as it were, and dried up.
There was an irresistible sucking of the water in the direction the fish went, which was towards a hole at the bottom of the lake like a funnel, and right into this hole went the boat.
It glided for a long time in a sort of twilight along a subterranean river, which dashed and splashed about him. The air that met him was, at first, chilly and cellar-like; gradually, however, it grew milder and milder, and warmer and warmer.
The stream now flowed along calmly and quietly, and broadened out continually till it fell into a large lake.
Beyond the borders of this lake, but only half visible in the gloom, stretched swamps and morasses, where he heard sounds as of huge beasts wading and trampling. Serpent like they rose and writhed with a crashing and splashing and snorting amidst the tepid mud and mire.
By the phosphorescent gleams he saw various fishes close to his boat, but all of them lacked eyes.
And he caught glimpses of the outlines of gigantic sea-serpents stretching far away into the darkness. He now understood that it was from down here that they pop up their heads off the coast in the dog days when the sea is warm.
The lindworm, with its flat head and duck’s beak, darted after fish, and crept up to the surface of the earth through the slimy ways of mire and marsh.
Through the warm and choking gloom there came, from time to time, a cooling chilling blast from the cold curves and winds of the slimy and slippery greenish lichworm, which bores its way through the earth and eats away the coffins that are rotting in the churchyards.
Horrible shapeless monsters, with streaming manes, such as are said to sometimes appear in mountain tarns, writhed and wallowed and seized their prey in the fens and marshes.
And he caught glimpses of all sorts of humanlike creatures, such as fishermen and sailors meet and marvel at on the sea, and landsmen see outside the elfin mounds.
And, besides, that there was a soft whizzing and an endless hovering and swarming of beings, whose shapes were nevertheless invisible to the eye of man.
Then the boat glided into miry pulpy water, where her course tended downwards, and where the earth-vault above darkened as it sank lower and lower.
All at once a blinding strip of light shot down from a bright blue slit high, high, above him.
A stuffy vapour stood round about him. The water was as yellow and turbid as that which comes out of steam boilers.
And he called to mind the peculiar tepid undrinkable water which bubbles up by the side of artesian wells. It was quite hot. Up there they were boring down to a world of warm watercourses and liquid strata beneath the earth’s crust.
Heat as from an oven rose up from the huge abysses and dizzying clefts, whilst mighty steaming waterfalls roared and shook the ground.
All at once he felt as if his body were breaking loose, freeing itself, and rising in the air. He had a feeling of infinite lightness, of a wondrous capability for floating in higher atmospheres and recovering equilibrium.
And, before he knew how it was, he found himself up on the earth again.
Biblioklept 