Melville's birthday celebrations

if ((you have children) and  
    (you will be near New Bedford on July 31)) then {

you might be interested in "a fun-filled day celebrating Herman Melville's birthday"

} else {

celebrate our man's 192nd birthday, August 1, as you will

}

Hawthorne's Birthday!

Hawthorne statue, Salem, MA

Crimminy! Almost missed this...

Today is the 207th birthday of Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom Melville inscribed Moby-Dick.

Born in Salem, Massachusetts (at 27 Union Street, where there is no historical marker!). He grew up, went to college, married the girl next door (around the corner, really, at 105 Essex Street, where there is a marker), became a big-time writer, was appointed U.S. consul in Liverpool, and was buried in Concord.

Along the way, Melville latched onto him as a mentor. Hershel Parker, in his biography of Melville, 2nd volume, wrote, "By understanding Moby-Dick as a great truth-telling allegory, Hawthorne had proved himself the ideal audience of one."

Thanks and happy birthday, Mr. Hawthorne.

PS - If you're walking around Salem, stroll down Mall Street and look at #16. Years ago when I lived nearby, it had a sign stating that Hawthorne lived there while he was writing The Scarlet Letter.

Frank Stella interview

Artist Frank Stella turned 75 on May 12. This is a belated birthday post for him. The original intent was to make a road-trip to Malden, Massachusetts, where he was born and grew up, locate his birthplace, and post some photos, but I missed the hours of the Malden Historical Collection, and the Malden Public Library had nothing that specified his birthplace beyond "Malden, MA."

So, how is Stella relevant to us Melvillians?  In 1985, already an influential figure in American art, he "conceives of a Moby-Dick series after taking his sons to the aquarium [at Coney Island, Brooklyn]." (See Frank Stella's Moby-Dick; Words and Shapes; Robert K. Wallace; University of Michigan Press, 2000.) Stella is not the first or last American artist to be influenced by M-D. Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Richard Serra, and Jean-Michel Basquiat have all taken stabs at the beast. But Stella's may be the most ambitious. Between 1985 and 1997, Stella produced a series of 266 pieces—including large metal reliefs, prints, monumental sculptures, and a mural—with titles taken from Moby-Dick. In Unpainted to the Last, Elizabeth A. Schultz wrote, "Perhaps no one but Rockwell Kent and Gilbert Wilson has created as many images as Stella that look to Melville's novel." (Written before Matt Kish's herculean effort.)

In 1989, Stella told the New York Times:

The idea of the whale reminded me of Moby-Dick, so I decided to go back and read the novel, and the more I got into it, the more I thought it would be geat to use the chapter headings of the novel for the titles of the pieces.

Speaking in 1995, Stella said:

Moby-Dick and Melville are not something I'm trying to touch or follow along with. ... But I really don't want to be parallel to it, either. I guess what I'm tryting to find is ... a way to make some kind of equivalence.

Frank Stella was interviewed on May 25, on NPR's On Point. You can see some photos of his work and listen to the interview here. At 33:52 into the recording he talks about the problems involved in communicating "narrative content" via abstraction, and how an off-hand remark by his son drove him to develop the Moby-Dick series.

Some pieces from this series (along with the prices they fetched at a Christie's auction in 2007) can be seen here.

Happy Birthday, Frank Stella.

On Beckett's birthday

Samuel Beckett born April 13, 1906.

Was there one among them to put himself in my place, to feel how removed I was then from him I seemed to be, and in that remove what strain, as of hawsers about to snap? It's possible. Yes, I was straining towards those spurious deeps, their lying promise of gravity and peace, from all my old poisons I struggled towards them, safely bound.
- Molloy

I feel strained, half stranded, as ropes that tow dismasted frigates in a gale; and I may look so. But ere I break, ye'll hear me crack; and till ye hear that, know that Ahab's hawser tows his purpose yet.
- Chapter CXXXIV

Born today, 1807

Born 204 years ago today, the rock-star poet of 19th-century America, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
There is no mention, in Hershel Parker's biography of Melville, of Herman ever having met Henry. However, Mr. Parker reports that Longfellow and his second wife, Fanny, read Omoo aloud together. In a letter to her father, Fanny wrote, "...[we read] through Omoo which is very inferior to Typee..."
Longfellow died in 1882, so he certainly could have read M-D.
(If you're ever in Cambridge, MA, a tour of the Longfellow House, led by a well-informed National Park Service guide, is very worthwhile.)