Who Ain't A Speck?

 Ishmael would understand.

As would Pip and Ahab, though both would resist the obvious lessons.

And, who could blame them?

Mendocino paddling:

JP in the offing.

Ursula K. Le Guin: Telling It

“Interactivity in the sense of the viewer controlling the text is also nightmarish, when interpreted to mean that the viewer can rewrite the novel.  If you don’t like the end of Moby Dick you can change it.  You can make it happy.  Ahab kills the whale.  Ooowee.


“Readers can’t kill the whale.  They can only reread until they understand why Ahab collaborated with the whale to kill himself.  Readers don’t control the text: they genuinely interact with it.”

—from “The Question I Get Asked Most Often”



“Prose does not have meter.  Prose scrupulously avoids any noticeable regularity or pattern of stresses.  If prose acquires any noticeable meter for more than a sentence or so (just as if it rhymes noticeably), it stops being prose and becomes poetry.

“This is the only difference between prose and poetry that I have ever been certain of.”

—from “Stress-Rhythm in Poetry and Prose”



"Nobody who says, 'I told you so' has ever been, or will ever be, a hero."

--Ursula K. Le Guin,
from "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie"

Exam Prompt: Channeling Peter O'Toole

The late great actor Peter O’Toole expressed something I feel is worth remembering:

"I will not be a common man. I will stir the smooth sands of monotony.   I do not crave security. I wish to hazard my soul to opportunity."

How can we use this quotation to help us to understand the characters, the actions, and/or the outcomes in the books we’ve been reading? Connecting the quotation to Melville's Captain Ahab seems fairly easy, but what of Queequeg or, say, Ishmael? To Shakespeare's Prospero? To Kem Nunn's Ike or Preston or Hound? Would such connections be true ones or mere poses? Or . . . ?

Go deep into one long text, or use multiple texts in your response. Use clear references to explore O’Toole’s statement and its possible application to what we’ve read.


(Thanks to Jay Trinidad for leading me to the quotation; thanks to Peter O'Toole for the words and the life lived.)