Summer of Melville in the Berkshires!

A slate of Melville-themed events is coming to Pittsfield, MA this summer. From the Call Me Melville site:

This summer (from Memorial Day weekend to Columbus Day weekend 2012) we’re celebrating Melville’s life and writings, and bringing them vividly to life for a new generation of readers as well as for all those whose first acquaintance with this vibrant writer left something to be desired.

Keep an eye out for an exhibit and talk by Bill Pettit (of The Moby Dick Collection), to be presented at Arrowhead.

If you're not fortunate enough to live in Pittsfield (declared "Best place for single retirees" by US News & World Report!), you can participate in Moby Dick Daily. Billed as "a chapter-a-day online community read-along," this is some kind of networked group-read of M-D for the Facebook-&-Twitter generation. (Yes, I'm considering the recommendation of USN&WP.)

Latest News from the Feejees - 6

The second episode of the second series of BBC mysteries, Sherlock  (The Hounds of Baskerville), aired in the US tonight. It opens with Holmes bursting into his flat (at 221B, of course), blood-spattered and carrying a fine, toggle-headed harpoon(!).

Watson: You went on the tube like that?
Holmes: None of the cabs would take me!

So, what's the deal with the harpoon? Did I miss something?

Maurice Sendak on Melville

As a tribute to Maurice Sendak, Fresh Air yesterday broadcast portions of several past interviews. Melvillians will know Mr. Sendak's cover art for both volume one and volume two of Hershel Parker's essential biography. (Mr. Parker has posted a collection of personal photos of Maurice Sendak on his blog.)

Mr. Sendak expressed a warm appreciation for interviewer Terry Gross, and it is a joy and a sorrow to listen to the entire 45-minute broadcast. For Melville-centric us, there is a nugget at 26:25.

Melville is the one that should keep novelists up at night

A segment in last Friday's broadcast of On the Media (20 Apr 12) caught my ear. In it, writer Tom Bissell recounts how "random events can rule the destinies of the greatest works of art."

The works of Franz Kafka, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and our Herman might have been forgotten, even lost, but for something as arbitrary as a particular person wandering into a used book store.

Melville is the one that I think should keep novelists up at night.

Bissell tells how Moby-Dick was "a resounding un-success" when first published, selling "three thousand copies over its thrity-six years in print." (Does that count sales in England?) By the turn of the 20th Century it was unpublished and unread. Sometime in the early 1900's, "according to the legend," critic Carl Van Doren found a copy of M-D in a used book store, recognized it as a masterwork, and wrote about it. A Melville renaissance followed — his books were brought back into print and have stayed in print since.

The essay that started it all was gathered into Van Doren's study, The American Novel, published in 1921, with a second edition in 1940. Copyright on the 1921 edition has expired; you can find it online.

If you're interested in the current state of the publishing business as it confronts e-readers, copyright extensions, Amazon's under-pricing, and knock-off books (such as "I Am the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," not by Stieg Larsson), listen to the entire program.

In Appreciation of Karen Allen

I was surprised not to see Karen Allen, past Event Director of the Whaling Museum, at January's MDM. She was at all my previous Marathons, in "friendly housemother" mode, making sure the sleepover party that is the MDM didn't get out of control. (No food on the balcony while the exhibits are open!) She's moved on, but the museum staff I spoke with didn't know where.

At my first MDM, when I was ignorant of the sign-up list for those who intended to stay for the entire reading, Ms. Allen noticed me bleary-eyed on Sunday morning and made sure that I got the recognition gift, and Peter Whittemore handshake, accorded to folks who completed the voyage. I would like to have seen her work this year's record crowds.

She has a sound bite in this promotional video. As The Great Durante would say, Good night Ms. Allen, wherever you are.

Beckett's 106th

Samuel Beckett, born on this day, in 1906.

At the age of 26 he read Moby-Dick, and wrote to his close friend Tom MacGreevy, "That's more like the real stuff. White whales and natural piety." (Damned to Fame, James Knowlson, 1996.)

And a slightly-relevant quote from Molloy:

There are people the sea doesn't suit, who prefer the mountains or the plain. Personally I feel no worse there than anywhere else. ... And I too once went forth on it, in a sort of oarless skiff, but I paddled with an old bit of drifwood. And I sometimes wonder if I ever came back, from that voyage. For if I see myself putting to sea, and the long hours without landfall, I do not see the return, the tossing on the breakers, and I do not hear the frail keel grating on the shore.

The 16th New Bedford Moby-Dick Marathon -- Scholar "Chats"

photo: Metro Library and Archive

For the second year in a row, the Marathon offered "Chat with a Melville Scholar." The scholars were available in a side-gallery, for two hours Saturday afternoon and one hour Sunday morning. I imagined this as sort of a visit to the library's reference desk — you ask your question, get your answer, and move on — but it turned out to be much more.

On Saturday I walked in on scholars Wyn Kelley (M.I.T.) and Timothy Marr (UNC), engaged in a free-form discussion with a small knot of marathoners. Ms. Kelley called me over to join the group. Other marathoners, as well as scholars Mary K. Bercaw Edwards (U. of Conn.) and Chris Sten (George Washington U.), wandered in until the circle swelled to over twenty.

There followed a sort of Master Class on "Moby-Dick and other matters arising," with insights voiced from all quarters. Among the "audience" were several students of literature, and a number of amateurs who clearly had given M-D a lot of thought. (Marathoners are fascinating people.)

Scribbling notes as fast as I could, I walked away with "leads" that could occupy this Melville dilettante for months:

• The Art of Fielding; fiction, somehow relevant
• seek out Lisa Norling's history of whalers' wives
• something about the 1919 centennial of Herman's birth, biographer Raymond Weaver, and his connection to Maria Melville (HM's mother)
• Eleanor Melville Metcalf (HM's granddaughter) shared Herman's papers with biographers to fuel the "Melville Revival" of the 1920s. (Wyn Kelley has a paper about this, available online.)
• M-D could be read as a poem; Melville's poem Clarel is significant
• something about Hassidic texts' "holy life point" in all creatures
• an interesting digression concerning Irish authors
• something about Irish writer Walter Macken (sp?) and his poem "The Great Pyramid"
• relevant: Whitman's poem Crossing Brooklyn Ferry
• In Chapter 24, The Advocate, Ishmael's voice changes from that of greenhand to shipwreck survivor
• M-D as "The Book of Ishmael," scripture of the final religion
• When was Ishmael recounting his story (M-D)? Where? In Lima?
• see "the Ibis trilogy" by Gaosh
• Freud's writings similar in some ways to M-D
• Freudian analysis of Ahab; in Chaper 119, The Candles, Ahab asks the Almighty, "what did you do with my mother?"
• Ahab as the hero, as he "rages against mortality," going up against something "epically monstrous"

The scholars displayed their pedagogic talents, too, drawing each of us into the discussion, and considering all comments with respect. Those "rock stars" of Melville scholarship treated us as colleagues, or at least coreligionists.

I made sure to join the group again on Sunday. Although many in the group were enervated from all-night marathoning, this session was even meatier. There was a long (and long-overdue) discussion of what we might charitably call the racially insensitive passages in M-D. (From the looks on people's faces, it seemed several of us would have liked to consider this topic further.)

Then came a bomb.

Someone asked, "What did Steelkilt say to the captain?" (in Chapter 54, The Town-Ho's Story).

Ms. Berkaw-Edwards told us that there were stories of a woman in the days of sail who disguised herself as a man and joined a crew in the forecastle. "He" was reportedly the toughest seaman (sea-person?) on the ship. The disguise was only discovered when "he" was about to be flogged for some infraction. (Lemuel might have more to post about this.)

A scholarly marathoner added to this shocker, positing that Gabriel of Chapter 71, The Jeroboam's Story, was Steelkilt after "he" had left the Town-Ho. Gabriel's coat is described so as long-skirted, and it was the crew of the Town-Ho that told the tale of Gabriel to the Pequod's crew.

My head was spinning as we returned to the reading in the atrium. Melvillians, both professional and amateur, know that M-D contains worlds within worlds. It was clear then that within those worlds every word matters.

Update, 12/10/13: Re-reading Chapter 54, Steelkilt is described as having "a flowing golden beard like the tassled housings of your last viceroy's snorting charger." So it's unlikely "he" was a "she." Steelkilt does whisper something upsetting to the captain and Radney—did he have some dirt on those two?