Unknown Melville manuscript found?

Roger Stritmatter, humanities professor at Coppin State University (Baltimore), believes he may have found the manuscript of "a satiric mock-newspaper" penned by Herman Melville.

Read all about it in the Baltimore Sun.

Hat-tip @MelvilleQuotes.

Latest News from the Feejees - 10

50,000,000 Shades of Grey fans can't be wrong...

Edited 10/23/2018 to add final votes.

MDM regulars will recognize Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, making the case for Moby-Dick as the "best-loved book" in The Great American Read on PBS. An experienced sailor, Melville scholar, and a pillar of MDMs at the Whaling Museum and Mystic Seaport, Ms. Bercaw Edwards knows whereof she speaks.

The 2-hour broadcast can be streamed on the program's home page. Skip to time 56:00 to hear why M-D is that fabled "great American novel."

It would be petty to gripe that this whole "list & vote" thing is a meaningless popularity contest skewed by the whims of ill-informed adolescents and political/religious zealots, so let's ignore that. No "Top x" list can satisfy everyone. (Where the dickens is Joyce's Ulysses?) Still, taken for what it is, this list might point you to a good read, and might point some wanderer to Moby-Dick.

10/23/18 - This just in: Moby-Dick ranked as #46 (higher than I would have predicted).
To Kill a Mockingbird was voted #1.

L'Homme-Confiance?

Noted on Hershel Parker's blog: The French Ministry of Education has added The Confidence-Man to the agrégation examination for English; specifically the Norton Critical Edition, 2nd edition, Hershel Parker and Mark Niemeyer, eds.

This Wikipedia entry explains the agrégation (I think).

Read these three posts for what this might mean to the world of Melville studies. Years ago, I read somewhere that the reason we study Prufrock is that it's what our profs were required to study. Could it be that in five years, The Confidence-Man will be more familiar to French readers than to (North) American readers?

Melville Scholars Workshop, June 7!

In case you missed the notice, it's not too late to register for an afternoon/evening full of Melville at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. This workshop looks to be a great event—a mini-MDM, without all that reading.

The Melville Society Cultural Project will lead the workshop, followed by themed museum tours, and a lecture (with reception) on Tuesday, June 7, beginning at 1 PM.

We can expect to see most of the panelists from the MDM's "Stump the Scholars" and "Chat with a Melville Scholar." Looking forward to it!

Gift idea! (even if it's for yourself)

Released this year: Melville Biography,
An Inside Narrative

For the Melvillian on your list is this unclassifiable tome by Hershel Parker: Melville Biography, An Inside Narrative.

"Unclassifiable" because it is part autobiography, part rebuttal of his critics, part explication of his approach to biography, part continuation of his monumental Melville biography.

More than that I hesitate to say—because I've only just started reading it, and because my ignorance in these matters is vast. For a real review, see this one by Carl Rollyson, himself an accomplished biographer. (You may need a Wall St. Journal account to load the review. I was able to view it once; no longer. If you have access to back issues, it's in the 3/29/2013 WSJ.) A slightly condensed version of Rollyson's review is here, about halfway down the page.

I can tell you that it is interesting reading. (Be sure to read the Notes in the back, too.) 

Events to Note @ Arrowhead

If you can make it to Arrowhead this summer, here are two events to catch (part of the Call Me Melville celebrations).

On July 29, at 11 A.M., Dr. Wyn Kelley (noted Melvillian and M.I.T. professor) will read and discuss The Piazza Tales, on the "piazza" of the title. (Bring bug spray.) Dr. Kelley is sure to deepen your appreciation of these stories.

On August 25, Bill Petit (of The Moby Dick Collection) will be at Arrowhead to discuss and paint(!). At 10 A.M. he'll be painting scenes around the property. At 2 P.M. he will be in the barn to talk about his impressive collection, 200 volumes and growing.

Addendum, 7/18/12: If you have a couple of days to spare, make your stop at Arrowhead part of a Melville tour. This 1986 article in the NY Times highlights some nearby points of interest.

Charles Olson's 101st

Charles Olson

Today is the 101st birthday of Charles Olson. Fans of experimental, tantalizing, abstruse, marvel-filled, American poetry might know him from his magnum opus, The Maximus Poems.

His first book, however, was Call Me Ishmael (1947). It is the culmination of his research on Melville, begun while working on his Master's degree (thesis: The Growth of Herman Melville, Prose Writer and Poetic Thinker), and continued at Harvard (where his paper Lear and Moby-Dick helped earn him his first of two Guggenheim fellowships).

Olson was one of the first scholars to consider the importance of Melville's reading and marginalia. Part of his work involved hunting down books from Melville's library that had since been passed to family members and collectors. When Olson located a book, he made detailed notes of his interviews with family members, and meticulous transcriptions of Melville's marginalia — all on 5x7 index cards. After the publication of Call Me Ishmael, Olson stored those cards in a trunk in a friend's cellar. Over the years, the cards were damaged by water and mildew.

Olson died in 1970 and is buried in Beechbrook Cemetery, Gloucester, Massachusetts. (His Colonial-style slate headstone is proving problematic.)

In 1973, the University of Connecticut purchased Olson's papers. In 2000, a project to conserve his note cards was initiated. The current state of the project (card images and transcriptions) is viewable at the site: Charles Olson's Melville Project.

But back to Call Me Ishmael. It's definitely worth a read, although you may find it "unusual" in its presentation. It is literary criticism as written by a nascent poet — freewheeling and condensed. For example:

To MAGNIFY is the mark of Moby-Dick. As with workers, castaways, so with the scope and space of the sea, the prose, the Whale, the Ship and, OVER ALL, the Captain. It is the technical act compelled by the American fact. Cubits of tragic stature. Put it this way. Three forces operated to bring about the dimensions of Moby-Dick: Melville, a man of MYTH, antemosaic; an experience of SPACE, its power and price, America; and ancient magnitudes of TRAGEDY, Shakespeare. 

A "Maximus-style" feature film about Olson's connection to Gloucester is viewable on the Web:

Parts 2 - 6 are viewable at FerriniProductions.com.

Ipse Dixit: Hershel Parker Has a Blog

Hershel "Mr. Melville" Parker has a blog, begun last month, in which he discusses Melville scholarship, critical reactions to his own work, 19th-century American lit, academic feuds, and related topics.  It's already jam-packed with challenging material.

Don't dawdle here when you could be there: he is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear.