In Which Is Discussed the Annual Moby-Dick Marathon of the New Bedford Whaling Museum
The New Bedford Whaling Museum's Moby-Dick Marathon is an annual non-stop reading of Herman Melville's literary masterpiece. The multi-day program of entertaining activities and events is presented every January. Admission to the Marathon is free.
He's "revising the 1967 Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick." (I assume/hope this will be a third edition from Norton. The first two editions are both essential.)
He's about to give his personal "Melville Collection" to Lamar University, his undergrad alma mater.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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 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.)
Samuel Beckett born April 13, 1906.
Born 204 years ago today, the rock-star poet of 19th-century America, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 
