IdleRich
IdleRich
Gore Vidal? I've read The Judgment of Paris and Julian and Myra Breckinridge and probably some others too.
Herman Melville
Benny Bunter
Well-known member
I'm about 100 pages in. I love Queequeg so much! And it's been a while since I laughed so much at a book. It's like with Don Quijote and Ulysses - they have these monumental reputations so you think they're gonna be really serious and difficult, but they're actually great big comic novels at heart.
jenks
thread death
I think it’s what you want it to be too. I re- read it recently and felt on one hand like it was a series of sermons where whaling constantly stands for some aspect of human behaviour. He sees parallels to whaling everywhere.
It’s a novel about obsession but just as much as it’s about Ahab’s obsession I think it’s also about Ishmael’s obsession with whales themselves.
The Olsen book on it is wonderfully idiosyncratic which is as it should be for such an enjoyably odd book.
Benny Bunter
Well-known member
Wow, Ahab's first big speech and the sunset soliloquy just after it are just about the best things I've ever read, as good as Shakespeare, or Milton's Satan, or Tennyson's Ulysses.
Benny Bunter
Well-known member
It's mad that Whitman and Melville were almost exact contemporaries - in the same city, both born in the same year and dying within a year of each other - but apparently never met or even mentioned each other at all.
Benny Bunter
Well-known member
.
Neither did I until today, read a thing where Harold Bloom points it out, they must have passed each other in the street hundreds of times.
I'm only 200 pages in but I'm happy to declare this the best book ever written.
Neither did I until today, read a thing where Harold Bloom points it out, they must have passed each other in the street hundreds of times.
I'm only 200 pages in but I'm happy to declare this the best book ever written.
Benny Bunter
Well-known member
I havent come across any boring bits so far.
luka
Well-known member
The good bits are good. The vigour and the artlessness are linked as they are in whitman. Thats a professional opinion
Carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God (
Carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God (
Benny Bunter
Well-known member
Bang on the nail with 'artlessness' - its astonishing how great that artless writing can be, it just flows out of him.
I suppose you mean the boring bits are the encyclopedic bits about the whales and the whaling ships, but I really enjoyed those and they're not all that long, it all adds to it. The chapter about the mast-head especially was brilliant.
Maybe there's more boring bits to come, or maybe you should read it again.
I suppose you mean the boring bits are the encyclopedic bits about the whales and the whaling ships, but I really enjoyed those and they're not all that long, it all adds to it. The chapter about the mast-head especially was brilliant.
Maybe there's more boring bits to come, or maybe you should read it again.
Benny Bunter
Well-known member
Ahab's sunset soliloquy after his first big speech is amazing.
sunset.
The cabin; by the stern windows; Ahab sitting alone, and gazing out.
I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where’er I sail. The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them; but first I pass.
Yonder, by the ever-brimming goblet’s rim, the warm waves blush like wine. The gold brow plumbs the blue. The diver sun—slow dived from noon,—goes down; my soul mounts up! she wearies with her endless hill. Is, then, the crown too heavy that I wear? this Iron Crown of Lombardy. Yet is it bright with many a gem; I the wearer, see not its far flashings; but darkly feel that I wear that, that dazzlingly confounds. ’Tis iron—that I know—not gold. ’Tis split, too—that I feel; the jagged edge galls me so, my brain seems to beat against the solid metal; aye, steel skull, mine; the sort that needs no helmet in the most brain-battering fight!
Dry heat upon my brow? Oh! time was, when as the sunrise nobly spurred me, so the sunset soothed. No more. This lovely light, it lights not me; all loveliness is anguish to me, since I can ne’er enjoy. Gifted with the high perception, I lack the low, enjoying power; damned, most subtly and most malignantly! damned in the midst of Paradise! Good night—good night! (waving his hand, he moves from the window.)
‘Twas not so hard a task. I thought to find one stubborn, at the least; but my one cogged circle fits into all their various wheels, and they revolve. Or, if you will, like so many ant-hills of powder, they all stand before me; and I their match. Oh, hard! that to fire others, the match itself must needs be wasting! What I’ve dared, I’ve willed; and what I’ve willed, I’ll do! They think me mad—Starbuck does; but I’m demoniac, I am madness maddened! That wild madness that’s only calm to comprehend itself! The prophecy was that I should be dismembered; and—Aye! I lost this leg. I now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer. Now, then, be the prophet and the fulfiller one. That’s more than ye, ye great gods, ever were. I laugh and hoot at ye, ye cricket-players, ye pugilists, ye deaf Burkes and blinded Bendigoes! I will not say as schoolboys do to bullies,—Take some one of your own size; don’t pommel me! No, ye’ve knocked me down, and I am up again; but ye have run and hidden. Come forth from behind your cotton bags! I have no long gun to reach ye. Come, Ahab’s compliments to ye; come and see if ye can swerve me. Swerve me? ye cannot swerve me, else ye swerve yourselves! man has ye there. Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!
sunset.
The cabin; by the stern windows; Ahab sitting alone, and gazing out.
I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where’er I sail. The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them; but first I pass.
Yonder, by the ever-brimming goblet’s rim, the warm waves blush like wine. The gold brow plumbs the blue. The diver sun—slow dived from noon,—goes down; my soul mounts up! she wearies with her endless hill. Is, then, the crown too heavy that I wear? this Iron Crown of Lombardy. Yet is it bright with many a gem; I the wearer, see not its far flashings; but darkly feel that I wear that, that dazzlingly confounds. ’Tis iron—that I know—not gold. ’Tis split, too—that I feel; the jagged edge galls me so, my brain seems to beat against the solid metal; aye, steel skull, mine; the sort that needs no helmet in the most brain-battering fight!
Dry heat upon my brow? Oh! time was, when as the sunrise nobly spurred me, so the sunset soothed. No more. This lovely light, it lights not me; all loveliness is anguish to me, since I can ne’er enjoy. Gifted with the high perception, I lack the low, enjoying power; damned, most subtly and most malignantly! damned in the midst of Paradise! Good night—good night! (waving his hand, he moves from the window.)
‘Twas not so hard a task. I thought to find one stubborn, at the least; but my one cogged circle fits into all their various wheels, and they revolve. Or, if you will, like so many ant-hills of powder, they all stand before me; and I their match. Oh, hard! that to fire others, the match itself must needs be wasting! What I’ve dared, I’ve willed; and what I’ve willed, I’ll do! They think me mad—Starbuck does; but I’m demoniac, I am madness maddened! That wild madness that’s only calm to comprehend itself! The prophecy was that I should be dismembered; and—Aye! I lost this leg. I now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer. Now, then, be the prophet and the fulfiller one. That’s more than ye, ye great gods, ever were. I laugh and hoot at ye, ye cricket-players, ye pugilists, ye deaf Burkes and blinded Bendigoes! I will not say as schoolboys do to bullies,—Take some one of your own size; don’t pommel me! No, ye’ve knocked me down, and I am up again; but ye have run and hidden. Come forth from behind your cotton bags! I have no long gun to reach ye. Come, Ahab’s compliments to ye; come and see if ye can swerve me. Swerve me? ye cannot swerve me, else ye swerve yourselves! man has ye there. Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!
Benny Bunter
Well-known member
Outrageously good, only Iago or Satan or Ulysses compares.
Benny Bunter
Well-known member
Omfg the steelkilt chapter in this is brilliant, what does he hiss to the captain that stops him from whipping him to death? Is it literally the fear of God?
Don't answer if it spoils the plot.
Don't answer if it spoils the plot.
sus
Moderator
What do you guys mean by artless? I kind of know but I'll learn more if I play fully naif
luka
Well-known member
A Pact
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Ezra Pound
1885 –
1972
I make truce with you, Walt Whitman—
I have detested you long enough.
I come to you as a grown child
Who has had a pig-headed father;
I am old enough now to make friends.
It was you that broke the new wood,
Now is a time for carving.
We have one sap and one root—
Let there be commerce between us.