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.

Not as Obvious as It Ought to Be

Teach the book on its merits, not on its laurels.

(And by book, I mean anything.  I mean specific books first, of course, the ones by Homer and Melville and Austen and Shakespeare and whomever is popular in the moment, but I certainly mean anything also.)

Fictional Identikit

There's a game going about to identify one's self via three or four literary characters.

Here's my submission from the four quarters of my soul, or some such:

Jim Hawkins, from Stevenson's Treasure Island;
Ishmael, from Melville's Moby Dick;
Frank Bascombe, from Ford's The Sportswriter;
and
Robert Walton, from Shelley's Frankenstein.

Eye, Aye: A Medley

A Whale of a Tale

Moby: sculpture mix, unglazed.

Thanks also to the artist of the Penguin Books Deluxe Edition of Melville's Moby Dick, foreword by Nathaniel Philbrick.  Book and book cover used here with respect.

(I can't find any reference to the actual artist of the cover, so I will need to conduct an image search in the near future.)

TGIF: Two Views

North Berkeley pit-stop.

A little albacore on the grill.

Queequeg: "As Cool As An Icicle"

But as for Queequeg -- why, Queequeg sat there among them -- at the head of the table, too, it so chanced; as cool as an icicle.  To be sure I cannot say much for his breeding.  His greatest admirer could not have cordially justified his bringing his harpoon into breakfast with him, and using it there without ceremony; reaching over the table with it, to the imminent jeopardy of many heads, and grappling the beefsteaks towards him.  But that was certainly very coolly done by him, and every one knows that in most people's estimation, to do anything coolly is to do it genteelly.

--Melville's Ishmael on his new friend

from "Chapter 5: Breakfast"
of Moby Dick

The White Whale, Swimming

Moby, Ubiquitous

Another Moby: 
sculpture mix, unglazed.

Moby Dick!

Sperm Whale: sculpture mix; unglazed.

Hail Herman Melville and your great American epic!

Melville's Queequeg: "George Washington Cannibalistically Developed"

Herman Melville's Moby Dick is a novel full of great lines, sentences and even paragraphs that resonate either wittily, sensibly, or sentimentally (in the best and worst ways) long after the reading is done. Here's a simple sentence that I keep close at hand:

“You cannot hide the soul.”

Here’s the full passage from Chapter 10 -- "A Bosum Friend":

“With much interest I sat watching him. Savage though he was, and hideously marred about the face—at least to my taste—his countenance yet had something in it which was by no means disagreeable. You cannot hide the soul. Through all his unearthly tattooings, I thought I saw the traces of a simple honest heart; and in his large, deep eyes, fiery black and bold, there seemed tokens of a spirit that would dare a thousand devils. And besides all this, there was a certain lofty bearing about the Pagan, which even his uncouthness could not altogether maim. He looked like a man who had never cringed and never had had a creditor. Whether it was, too, that his head being shaved, his forehead was drawn out in freer and brighter relief, and looked more expansive than it otherwise would, this I will not venture to decide; but certain it was his head was phrenologically an excellent one. It may seem ridiculous, but it reminded me of General Washington’s head, as seen in the popular busts of him. It had the same long regularly graded retreating slope from above the brows, which were likewise very projecting, like tow long promontories thickly wooded on top. Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.”

And from the next page, signaling Ishmael's shift from the opening pages "hypos," those feelings of violence and despair:

“I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world. This soothing savage had redeemed it.”

"The Carpet-Bag": Sentence #1

"I stuffed a shirt or two into my old carpet-bag, tucked it under my arm, and started for Cape Horn and the Pacific."

--Melville's Ishmael.

Classic chapter opener; such an easy, sweeping sentence.

Melville does this again and again, but in a big book like Moby Dick, you've got to stop and just look, every so often, sentence by sentence, to feel the poise and power.

"The Two Orchard Thieves"

Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single penny that I ever heard of. On the contrary, passengers themselves must pay. And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But being paid, --what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man received money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition.

--Melville's Ismael, Moby Dick: Chapter 1 Loomings.

Adam and Eve?

The hair on the figure to the right made that connection for me.

That's my Mateo on the left, waiting for the next round in the kiln.