I don’t get the “difficulty” of Moby-Dick either. It is stragne, and perhaps something of a “botch” as Melville conceded, but it’s perfectly readable. Funnily I never thought to think of his childhood analytically, but you’re right- almost as though the fall was reinscribed on the life writ large in some subterranean way. That’s part of what I like about Melville, that sense of an almost integral wrongness which becomes in some of the late work almost a desire to get out of the world itself, as if he realized that the whaleboat wasn’t far enough out, but I recognize that’s a matter of taste, and I wouldn’t go to the whaleboats myself. You might like White-Jacket, it’s similar in style to Moby-Dick but funnier and less metaphysical.
Sorry for my delayed reply, but someone (not me!) should write a book on the decaying/dispossesed-aristocrat-to-radical pipeline, with Melville, Pynchon, Nabokov, and maybe Gore Vidal. I definitely want to read White Jacket!
I haven’t read much Vidal, but that seems right to me. It seems like it might be the most honest with him, because you know he’s partly unhappy that his class/cohort/type aren’t calling the shots anymore! I wouldn’t by any means call my own background “aristocratic” (closest thing might be that one of my great-grandfathers was less successfully engaged in the same profession as Fred Trump) but I *do* tend to gravitate to authors like that.
Yes, me too. It's more embarrassing in my case because the petit-bourgeois-to-faux-aristocratic-radical pipeline is a cliche, a sort of mall goth phenomenon.
The Scarlet Letter, which I loved on first read in my high school days, and loved on a second time, is more "difficult" in some ways, not just for the long sentences which are a glory inaccessible to those who can't fully read or accept their form, but for the habits you need to adjust to accept what the novel is doing, and how different it is from something like Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina (I haven't read those yet, but they seem more representatively novelistic as novels).
Moby-Dick is more 'readable' for all its literary heterogeneous variety, is more masculine, more propulsive in the dramatic parts. It's more "fun" in many ways.
Anna Karenina is the most readable of these books, maybe the most readable book of the 19th century (supposedly Tolstoy has the same preternatural clarity in Russian too). You can really disappear into it. Though there is almost as much about how to run a Russian farm in Anna K as there is about whaling in Moby-Dick. I find the harassingly over-detailed and resolutely ironical Madame Bovary the least readable of the four under discussion, but maybe I should re-read it.
Re: comic book adaptations, my first exposure to Moby-Dick was the lurid, nearly psychedelic Saddleback Illustrated Classics edition, which I got at the grocery store when I was about five. I still have some of its panels burned into my brain. I can’t find anything out now about the illustrator, since Google is practically useless now, and Internet Archive has been razed, alas.
Scratch that: it was a reprint of the Pendulum Press “Now Age Classics” comic, inked by regular Marvel, DC and Heavy Metal contributor Alex Niño. It was also reprinted for the Marvel Classics Comics line. It is a sight to behold.
Thanks, I'd never heard of those! I probably pored over some of Niño's psychedelic works myself in my youth since my father had all those Warren horror magazines he and a host of other Filipino artists were recruited to illustrate, as well as all the early Heavy Metals. I remember being mesmerized by the greater intricacy of those artists' work compared to most American comic creators.
I don’t get the “difficulty” of Moby-Dick either. It is stragne, and perhaps something of a “botch” as Melville conceded, but it’s perfectly readable. Funnily I never thought to think of his childhood analytically, but you’re right- almost as though the fall was reinscribed on the life writ large in some subterranean way. That’s part of what I like about Melville, that sense of an almost integral wrongness which becomes in some of the late work almost a desire to get out of the world itself, as if he realized that the whaleboat wasn’t far enough out, but I recognize that’s a matter of taste, and I wouldn’t go to the whaleboats myself. You might like White-Jacket, it’s similar in style to Moby-Dick but funnier and less metaphysical.
Sorry for my delayed reply, but someone (not me!) should write a book on the decaying/dispossesed-aristocrat-to-radical pipeline, with Melville, Pynchon, Nabokov, and maybe Gore Vidal. I definitely want to read White Jacket!
I haven’t read much Vidal, but that seems right to me. It seems like it might be the most honest with him, because you know he’s partly unhappy that his class/cohort/type aren’t calling the shots anymore! I wouldn’t by any means call my own background “aristocratic” (closest thing might be that one of my great-grandfathers was less successfully engaged in the same profession as Fred Trump) but I *do* tend to gravitate to authors like that.
Yes, me too. It's more embarrassing in my case because the petit-bourgeois-to-faux-aristocratic-radical pipeline is a cliche, a sort of mall goth phenomenon.
The Scarlet Letter, which I loved on first read in my high school days, and loved on a second time, is more "difficult" in some ways, not just for the long sentences which are a glory inaccessible to those who can't fully read or accept their form, but for the habits you need to adjust to accept what the novel is doing, and how different it is from something like Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina (I haven't read those yet, but they seem more representatively novelistic as novels).
Moby-Dick is more 'readable' for all its literary heterogeneous variety, is more masculine, more propulsive in the dramatic parts. It's more "fun" in many ways.
Anna Karenina is the most readable of these books, maybe the most readable book of the 19th century (supposedly Tolstoy has the same preternatural clarity in Russian too). You can really disappear into it. Though there is almost as much about how to run a Russian farm in Anna K as there is about whaling in Moby-Dick. I find the harassingly over-detailed and resolutely ironical Madame Bovary the least readable of the four under discussion, but maybe I should re-read it.
Re: comic book adaptations, my first exposure to Moby-Dick was the lurid, nearly psychedelic Saddleback Illustrated Classics edition, which I got at the grocery store when I was about five. I still have some of its panels burned into my brain. I can’t find anything out now about the illustrator, since Google is practically useless now, and Internet Archive has been razed, alas.
Scratch that: it was a reprint of the Pendulum Press “Now Age Classics” comic, inked by regular Marvel, DC and Heavy Metal contributor Alex Niño. It was also reprinted for the Marvel Classics Comics line. It is a sight to behold.
Thanks, I'd never heard of those! I probably pored over some of Niño's psychedelic works myself in my youth since my father had all those Warren horror magazines he and a host of other Filipino artists were recruited to illustrate, as well as all the early Heavy Metals. I remember being mesmerized by the greater intricacy of those artists' work compared to most American comic creators.
Listening to the lecture on my morning dog walks. You mentioned a graphic version of the book - would you give me the name of the writer?
Thanks! It's Bill Sienkiewicz's Classics Illustrated Moby-Dick from 1990.