'Conviction (1)'
There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."
In his writing books John Gardner talks a lot about the shear majesty of Mellville's prose.
Personally, I am love the fact that Mellville made his living with risque islande-exotique potboilers. Also that he lived in Manhattan.
Also, I love that Nabokov wished he could have seen the night that Melville visited Hawthorne and arrived in the middle of a thunderstorm looking wild, wet and biblical and scaring the hell out of Mrs. Hawthorne.
Moby Dick is up there with Ulysses in the category of "Books Required for College Classes that I Suffered Through." But, they are both trumped by Fielding's Tom Jones, which is the only one in the category of "Books I Dropped the Class Rather Than Read."
I've tried all 3. Couldn't finish Ulysses. "Finished" Moby Dick, if you can call skimming-the-last-600-pages-in-a-day reading. Loved Tom Jones the second time around, once I got some grounding in English of the pre-20th century variety -- it's actually pretty racy once you let your imagination fill in the gaps left by Fielding.
I'm not laughing at *you,* Jim. Just the question. Because answering it seems to get me in all kinds of trouble.
Heh. I had the same reaction.
It's on my list of things to pick up, and the comments I'm reading here are actually making that more likely than not. So, um, go y'all.
I really liked Moby Dick. I read it for my American Lit class in college, which was focused on captivity narratives. Strangely enough, my favorite parts were probably the long digressions, because, as Hec points out, they deepen the metaphors. "The Whiteness of the Whale" is fucking brilliant.
I have not read the whale book. I should. I've read other Melville.
I liked Billy Budd. I might have to revisit MD, just to give it a read outside of the classroom requirement.
I have not read the whale book. I should. I've read other Melville.
Having lost many hours of my life that I can never get back to the quintessential boredom of Billy Budd and Bartleby the Scrivener, I can't imagine this encouraging you to read more rather than conditioning you against it.
I've read "Bartleby the Scrivener" and "My Kinsman Major Molineux." I always meant to get to Typee and haven't; I think it's in the queue right after the rest of Joseph Conrad.
I saw the 1960s movie of Billy Budd, and am reliably informed that the book version can't possibly compete with Terence Stamp's girlish loveliness.
I saw the 1960s movie of Billy Budd, and am reliably informed that the book version can't possibly compete with Terence Stamp's girlish loveliness.
Sadly, this is true.
I've read a good chunk of Melville, and Billy Budd is the one thing I really disliked. Typee and the other Polynesian novels are fun, but nothing like Moby Dick, which is why his audience was more than a little miffed by Moby Dick. They were expecting more fun with native girls and got a grand, overwhelming, psychedelic mass of words carried on a sea of whale blubber.
("My Kinsman, Major Molineux" is by Melville's very good friend, Nathanial Hawthorne. They'd both be flattered by the confusion.)