"Leviathan is not the biggest fish;--I have heard of Krakens," or, To the boats!

{Photos by rocketlass.}

From Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville

What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?

A press of obligations has me feeling much more like a fast-fish than a loose-fish today, but I feel I should at least take the time to point you to my guest post on the blog of the recently launched online book site the Second Pass. Follow that link and you'll find me raving about an old favorite, Moby-Dick, and a new favorite, Dan Beachy-Quick's A Whaler's Dictionary; dig around the site some more and you'll find plenty of good stuff (including an excellent appreciation of Russell Hoban's doomsday novel, Riddley Walker).

But first, back to Melville. I hope that if I've established anything with this blog, it's the fact that one book always leads to another: my love of Moby-Dick led me to pick up A Whaler's Dictionary when I spotted it in St. Mark's back in January; reading it led me both back to Moby-Dick and, thanks to a recommendation from reader ctorre, forward to Paul Metcalf's unclassifiable novelish book Genoa: A Telling of Wonders (1965), which takes much of its material and inspiration from Melville.



You enter one book, but you may find that the only exit from that book opens right into another one; as Metcalf writes,

[S]inking in one ocean, I have risen to the surface of another--in a different hemisphere, or on the other side of the equator. The heart beats, the blood flows, the lungs inhale and discharge air--but all are radically altered.

I've been dipping into all three volumes here and there for months; the melting away of the lake ice and the halting approach of spring makes me think it's the right time to banish all other books from my shoulder bag and read only the tales of the whale for a while.

So I'll plunge in, and who knows what I might find at the confluence of the three books' waters? Perhaps I'll discover what Beachy-Quick describes in his entry for "Line":

Every book, unlike every whale hunt, ends in silence. The line runs out and becomes blank.

"Great poets / foretell their own deaths in a single line"; I, instead, use up several on trifles

{Photos by rocketlass.}

The morning's snow is but a memory, the clouds that brought it now on their way to New York, leaving us with a cold sliver of moon . . . and what's that it illuminates? Oh, no--it's that lazy columnist's friend and succor . . . the Notes Column! Like a Rod Blagojevich press conference, this post is unlikely to offer any coherent theme or defense of its existence, but it might quote some poetry!

It's been months since I've resorted to one of these; how about this time rather than a numbered list, I tart the blog up as if it were a gossip column?

ITEM! I ventured to Chicago's Harold Washington Library on Monday to pick up some supplementary volumes for a review that is due now. {Note the italics. They're to remind me of what I ought to be doing right now rather than assembling this list. They're not, you'll note, working.}

I easily found the books I was after, but when I laid them on the circulation desk I hit a snag: according to the librarian, one of the volumes I had handed him, The Selected Poems of Tomaž Šalamun (1988), didn't exist. Or at least it didn't exist in their system; despite what the computer asserted, the physical book did to all eyes appear to be right there in hand.

I'm familiar with the frustration of looking on a library shelf for a missing book that the system assures you is there, but this was my first experience with its opposite. Could this be some tendril of the Invisible Library infecting an actual library?

Oh, and I owed an $.80 fine. Ed, do we levy fines at the Invisible Library?

ITEM! Speaking of looking for books on shelves: anyone who has ever worked in a bookshop has experienced the dreadful moment when, as you search the shelves in vain for a book requested by a customer, you realize that the customer looming at your elbow is the author of the book in question, attempting in a decreasingly subtle way to determine whether his fears of irrelevance and disregard are quite justified. It is a singularly awkward situation, for which the only remedy is the white lie, a suddenly recovered memory of the satisfied customer who left the store mere moments ago, beaming with joy, day made because you'd sold her that very book. You're sure you'll have another copy in any day now, in anticipation of another such customer.

Well, reading Fanny Burney's journals has confirmed my suspicion that authors were always so--as, fortunately, were quick-witted booksellers:

We amused ourselves, while we waited there, at a Bookseller's shop, where Mrs Thrale enquired if they had got the Book she had recommended to them. "Yes, Ma'am," was the answer; "and it's always out--the Ladies like it vastly."

ITEM! Speaking of the Invisible Library: this blog has been remarkably free lately of writing about that master of invisible book creation, Roberto Bolaño. My mind, on the other hand, has not: nearly five months after I read it, 2666 still staggers around in my thoughts. If you're having the same problem, you might as well go read what I think might be the best review of the novel yet, Sam Sacks's at Open Letters Monthly. More than anyone else I've read, Stark assembles a coherent argument about the book's aims, starting with this proposition:

But it must be reemphasized that, with one significant exception that I’ll look into later, every character, every occurrence, and every development of this book is brought into existence for the purpose of being negated. Nothingness is the single connecting motif of the five disparate sections, and it doesn’t bind them so much as drape across them like a shroud.

His overall assessment is a more harsh than mine, but it is forceful and convincing, one of the few writings on 2666 that I'm confident will stay with me and inform my eventual rereading of the novel.

Bolaño fans should also check out the appreciative review of his collection of poetry, The Romantic Dogs, that Ed Pavlic (author of the exceptionally good prose poem collection Winners Have Yet to Be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway) wrote for Verse. Pavlic opens with a quotation from the fragments of Empedocles that reads like an uncanny anticipation of Bolaño's fictions:

I shall tell thee a twofold tale. At one time it grew to be one only out of many; at another, it divided up to be many instead of one. There is a double becoming of perishable things and a double passing away. The coming together of all things brings one generation into being and destroys it; the other grows up and is scattered as things become divided. And these things never cease continually changing places, at one time all uniting in one through Love, at another each borne in different directions by the repulsion of Strife.

The Romantic Dogs has mostly been drowned out by the hubbub surrounding 2666, but Pavlic makes a good case for why it's worth taking a look at.

ITEM! Way back in June when I read The Savage Detectives, I unexpectedly found myself comparing the young, horny, violent infrerealists of Bolaño's Mexico City to Giacomo Casanova. Casanova's wonderfully amoral twelve-volume History of My Life frequently finds him reciting poetry, but always in an instrumental fashion: poetry is a marker of his refinement and sensibility, one of many tools that he uses in his neverending quest to get into women's pants. There is never a sense, as Casanova is recounting his recitation of a poem, of a poem truly affecting him; the reader--or at least the contemporary reader--gets the sense that he would have used whatever was to hand, that if knowing obscure facts about CC Sabathia or Dungeons and Dragons would have pitter-patted the hearts of the ladies, he would have been just as happy to deploy those.

The infrarealists, on the other hand, while they certainly do use poetry as an aphrodisiac (part of the overly masculine atmosphere of the early part of the novel that would have turned me off were Bolaño's prose not so captivating). At the same time, however, Bolaño makes us believe that poetry also is a crucial part of their self-definition, and even their way of understanding the world. Of all the poses to adopt, they've chosen a relatively marginalized one, and the enthusiasm and vigor with which they enact it--especially late in the novel when the youngest of them, Garcia Madero, reveals an encylopedic knowledge of poetic form--is bracing. Poetry is an instrument for these young men, but it's not solely or merely an instrument; its roots and its effects run far deeper.

ITEM! Which reminds me: I promised you some poetry, didn't I? How about this, which Melville includes in the "Extracts" assembled by a "poor," "hopeless, sallow" sub-sub-librarian with which he opens Moby-Dick--and which thus, almost Ouroborically, brings us back to where we started, with libraries:

Leviathan maketh a path to shine after him;
One would think the deep to be hoary.

It's from Job, which I believe Blagojevich has yet to quote--but fear not, Rod! There's still time to work it in!

See Also:

{Photos by rocketlass.}

From A Whaler's Dictionary (2008), by Dan Beachy-Quick

A book is a depth that presents itself as a surface. A first page sits upon the future. A last page sits beneath its own history, a text that is a depth above it. The present tense of the open page is a surface floating between opposing depths--anticipation and memory.

Though I am not generally one for making resolutions--my life tending to continue more or less the same, unresolved but pleasant, from year to year--at the request of Scott Esposito, editor of the Quarterly Conversation, I recently assembled a small list of reading resolutions for 2009. Given that my reading is generally governed only by a butterfly haphazardness, I enjoyed setting out some possibilities, directions I might head on those rare afternoons when, between books, my shelves stymie me. You can find my resolutions here.

Now we find ourselves three weeks into the year . . . and the resolutions remain just notions, thus far defeated by the new reading ideas that seem to pop up every day. Like picking up Ross Macdonald's The Barbarous Coast (1956) at St. Mark's to read on the subway while I was in New York last week, which led to my picking up his The Way Some People Die (1952) at the Mysterious Bookshop to read on the plane on the way home. Father confessor Lew Archer, rueful and weary, seems the right companion for these wan winter afternoons, and I can already tell that these won't be the last Macdonalds I read this year.

And then there's Dan Beachy-Quick's extraordinary A Whaler's Dictionary, which, Beachy-Quick assures the reader in the Introduction (and user's guide),

does not finish Ishmael's failed cetological endeavor--it simply repeats the failure in a different guise.

Spied at St. Mark's when I bought the Macdonald, bought on a return trip made specially for that purpose, it almost fits one of my resolutions: Beachy-Quick is by trade a poet, and I have resolved to read more poetry this year. But A Whaler's Dictionary is not poetry but cracked reference, a meditation both on that old favorite Moby-Dick and on books and obsessions in general--which seems appropriate since on some days Moby-Dick in its capacious madness seems like it might just contain all books and obsessions itself (and what it doesn't contain surely "Bartleby the Scrivener" does). And I can already tell from brief acquaintance that this book is going to force me to re-read Moby-Dick itself . . .

In other words, despite my resolutions, my reading thus far continues as it always has, one book suggesting another suggesting another, a chain unimaginable until its links are formed, but unforgettable thereafter. Now that I think about it, if one is likely to fail to follow through on one's resolutions, A Whaler's Dictionary just might be the perfect book with which to do so, for at the end of each of its alphabetical entries lie cross-references, arresting in themselves, as this one from the entry I quoted to open this post, "Reading (Water)," attests:

See also
Aleph
Inspiration
Lightning
Ocean
Writing

Thus the web begins to be woven, and soon another year will have passed, defined by books as yet unglimpsed. Resolutions or no, it's a good life.

The unknown

{Photo by Secret Agent Martens.}

I know I rashly wrote yesterday that I was wrapping up my series of posts on ghosts and spirits, but it turns out that just like Jason Voorhees, I'm not quite finished yet. Hallowe'en's still a ways away; who knows how many times I'll lurch back into view with more scares?

From Moby-Dick (1851), by Herman Melville

Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.

Note how Melville moves from the potential, the seeming, to the definite: what we can see we cannot know, but what we cannot see we know deep in our bones. Good tellers of ghost stories have always known that; as Michel Tournier explains in The Mirror of Ideas (1994),

There is such a thing as an atavistic fear, digging its roots down to an ancestral past sleeping in our hearts; eternal humanity trembles with us in the presence of mystery. . . . It is the darkness itself that frightens--not the monsters hiding in it.

The merest hints of horror catch in the soul; the less a storyteller describes, the less he provides for our rational minds to attack and reject. As M. R. James wrote in "Ghosts--Treat Them Gently,"

On the whole, then, I say you must have horror and also malevolence. Not less necessary, however, is reticence.

Limn lightly the horror--give us, as Peter Ackroyd puts it,

the sudden stillness in a wood, or the sound of footsteps in an empty street

--and we will supply the rest. Even Stephen King, not someone usually associated with reticence, demonstrates that he knows the power of the undescribed when he uses it to create the most chilling moment in 'Salem's Lot. At midnight, a man at the gate of a graveyard raises his voice in prayer to his dark lord, then:

There was no sound but that brought on the breeze. The figure stood silent and thoughtful for a time. Then it stooped and stood with the figure of a child in his arms.

"I bring you this."

It became unspeakable.

By claiming to have come up against the limits of what language will even tolerate, King frees our imaginations to run on the darkest of paths, which of course they will do. For despite what we tell ourselves when encouraged by daylight, as the night steals in we remember that fear is built into the very structure of the universe. All that awaits us is the greater unknown of death. And while we feverishly distract ourselves from its approach, death for its part can afford to be patient.

From The Zurau Aphorisms (2004), by Franz Kafka, translated by Michael Hoffman

The dogs are still playing in the yard, but the quarry will not escape them, never mind how fast it is running through the forest already.

Is it any wonder that we take pleasure, however perverse, in telling ghost stories?

On the idea of the usefulness of literature in general, and Moby-Dick in particular

One of the problems I have with the instrumental view of literature, the idea that there is something to “get” from literature, is that it tends, especially at the high school level, to lead to attempts to explain complex stories through their symbolism. Moby-Dick is nature, Ahab is man attempting to overcome it. Or the whale is death. Or progress. Or some such thing. It’s an approach that, in the hands of a dedicated teacher working with engaged students, as part of an overall attempt to understand how and why Melville wrote the book, and why we might want to read it, could be productive. But as presented by an indifferent teacher to distracted students as a way to answer questions four through seven of the quiz that came with the study guide, it’s reductive, tedious, and as likely as not to turn students another step away from literature. In that case, I'd rather a teacher hand out some Stephen King or John Grisham or something—anything to get students to see that reading can be engrossing and surprising.

Moby-Dick should probably not be taught in high school. It seems like a book that a person should come to on his or her own terms, later. But if it is to be taught in high school, I think a teacher at my old high school, Mr. Harrison, who retired the year before I would have been in his class, had the right idea of how to do so. Several times in the fall of 1989, I walked by his classroom and heard him reading Moby-Dick aloud. That, it seemed, was a large part of his method of teaching it. He’d read aloud. But he didn’t read Moby-Dick so much as declaim it, preach it, shout it, chant it. It was captivating.

And that’s how I usually think about Moby-Dick. Jim from my office says he thinks it’s a book about work, about these guys trapped on a whale ship for a three-year cruise, and all the things they have to do and put up with, and about how Melville knew that work, whatever we may wish to pretend, is what we all do with most of our time. He’s got a point, and a fairly convincing one. But I think it’s really a book about Melville and some thing he has to say to you.

I imagine that he sits down next to you at the bar—where you were only planning to have a quick one on your way home—and starts telling you a story. He's interesting, funny, even charming. And he’s telling you about things you know nothing about, so you buy him a drink and stick around a little longer, but—and here’s the part you don’t remember very clearly—then there are a lot of empty glasses in front of you both, and he’s leaning very close to you and has your shoulder in a grip a little too tight to be comfortable. One minute, he’s whispering conspiratorially, and then he SHOUTS in your ear, then he's mumbling more or less to himself. You aren't sure you have any idea what he’s talking about now, but you’ve definitely missed your last train home, so you might as well stick around and see if you can find out.

Some Melville for your weekend

From Herman Melville: His World and Work, by Andrew Delbanco (2005)

When [the Reverend J. M.] Mathews came to the Melvill[e] house on Pearl street in August 1819 to baptize the new baby, he asked both parents to acknowledge the hard truth that "children are . . . born in sin, and therefore are subject to all miseries, yea to condemnation itself," and to promise that they would instruct their child "to the utmost of your power" in the shame of its sinfulness.

From Moby-Dick (1851)

Now and then such unaccountable odds and ends of strange nations come up from the unknown nooks and ash-holes of the earth to man these floating outlaws of whalers; and the ships themselves often pick up such queer castaway creatures found tossing about the open sea on planks, bits of wreck, oars, whaleboats, canoes, blown-off Japanese junks, and what not; that Beelzebub himself might climb up the side and step down into the cabin to chat with the captain, and it would not create any unsubduable excitement in the forecastle.

From The Confidence Man: His Masquerade (1857)

With some minds, truth is, in effect, not so cruel a thing after all, seeing that, likea loaded pistol found by poor devils of savages, it raises more wonder than terror—its peculiar virtue being unguessed, unless, indeed, by indiscreet handling, it should happen to go off of itself.

From "The Lightning-Rod Man," collected in The Piazza Tales (1856)

"And now, since our being dumb will not help us," said I, resuming my place, "let me hear your precautions in traveling during thunder-storms."
"Wait till this one is passed."
"Nay, proceed with the precautions. You stand in the safest possible place according to your own account. Go on."
"Briefly then. I avoid pine-trees, high houses, lonely barns, upland pastures, running water, flocks of cattle and sheep, a crowd of men. If I travel on foot,—as to-day—I do not walk fast; if in my buggy, I touch not its back or sides; if on horseback, I dismount and lead the horse. But of all things, I avoid tall men."
"Do I dream? Man avoid man? And in danger-time too?"
"Tall men in a thunder-storm I avoid. Are you so grossly ignorant as not to know, that the height of a six-footer is sufficient to discharge an electric cloud upon him? Are not lonely Kentuckians, ploughing, smit in the unfinished furrow?"

From Moby-Dick (1851)

It may seem strange that of all men sailors should be tinkering at their last wills and testaments, but there are no people in the world more fond of that diversion. This was the fourth time in my nautical life that I had done the same thing. After the ceremony was concluded upon the present occasion, I felt all the easier; a stone was rolled away from my heart. Besides, all the days I should now live would be as good as the days that Lazarus lived after his resurrection; a supplementary clean gain of so many months or weeks as the case may be. I survived myself; my death and burial were locked up in my chest. I looked round me tranquilly and contentedly, like a quiet ghost with a clean conscience sitting inside the bars of a snug family vault.
Now then, thought I, unconsciously rolling up the sleeves of my frock, here goes for a cool, collected dive at death and destruction, and the devil fetch the hindmost.

From Amazon.com, on Moby-Dick

Far from being either enjoyable or enlightening, Melville's novel was tolerated as just another unpleasant aspect of high school life, like being hassled by the upperclassmen or the macaroni and cheese in the lunchroom or acne.

I HATE this book. Why? It's BORING!

This book is HORRIBLE! Classic, my eye! I would love to know what's so great about this book. I have seen better writing in a Hallmark card! Boring! Give me a good ole copy of Elvis and Me! A true story that really tugs at your heart strings! I sleep with that one under my pillow! Keep Moby Dick away from my bed!

"Moby Dick" has such an iconic place in American literature that anyone with a serious interest in the subject will want to read it. Please do so unprejudiced by the conventional view that this is a masterpiece. Ask yourself honestly; is it really any good?

I won't pretend it's not an absolute mess of a book. And I'm unlikely to recommend it to someone without knowing their tastes pretty well. And it boggles my mind that it is sometimes assigned in high school. I won't even pretend that a lot of what these people say isn't true.

Regardless, it's a favorite, and I overlook its faults as if it's a weird friend, and I'll be reading it again and again my whole life.