mobydick

Interview: Dan Beachy-Quick

Daryl L. L. Houston4 Comments

I recently wrote a brief appreciation of Dan Beachy-Quick’s Moby-Dick-inspired book, A Whaler’s Dictionary. Dan’s not only a Moby-Dick enthusiast but is also a widely-published poet whose work has appeared in magazines (e.g. Poetry and The Paris Review) that many talented poets would sell limbs and family secrets to appear in. He’s published four full-length collections of poetry, two chapbooks, and the aforementioned collection of essays about Melville’s classic novel. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he now teaches English at the University of Colorado. He has graciously put up with my nagging him off and on for the last few months and has been kind enough to return thoughtful answers to a few questions I sent his way.

Infinite Zombies: You mention having spent a decade reading Moby-Dick. At what point did you begin to realize that you were going to write a book of your own? How did the idea germinate and blossom? Did you read the book straight through a bunch of times or did you find yourself spending more time on certain chapters?

Dan Beachy-Quick: I first read Moby-Dick after graduating with my BA, feeling cast out of the comfort of the classroom, and more poignantly, feeling that I’d learned enough only to gain some sense of how vast was my ignorance. It was in recognition of how uneducated I felt that I picked up Moby-Dick, feeling I had no right to consider myself a student of American Literature without having read it. I worked at a little café unsupervised by any manager, and drank coffee and read for hours. Moby-Dick became for me the first reading experience in which my only resource for thinking about the book was what I could think myself—there was no class conversation, no teacher as guide, no test to prove to myself I’d understood what I was supposed to understand. It was my first experience of reading as a form of Self-Reliance.

I think it is exactly in that sense of needing to find what work I must do in order to be close to that book, to put myself within its issues more than to understand it, that I first gained the sense of wanting to write about it. That next leap occurred in graduate school, during my MFA, where I began reading M-D again, privately, and quite privately, began writing poems located within the characters and crises of the novel. That book is titled Spell, and it is, in my mind, in the light of how I felt it failed, that I began the work that became A Whaler’s Dictionary. Some six years passed between those projects, maybe more. Writing poems about Moby-Dick took me away—or so it felt—from the questions that I most wanted to address. The poems in the end had to pay heed to their own formal life, to turn toward themselves and away from their original intent. I had hoped that A Whaler’s Dictionary might act as a remedy to the way in which my initial attention swerved.

The idea for the latter came from teaching a graduate seminar at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago on M-D. My effort in the class mimicked my own effort of reading-writing: to find a way for us to put ourselves within the squall of possible meaning, and so within the realm of doubt and inquiry and necessity, rather than to find any objective grounds to form a so-called judgment of the book.

I’ve both read the book through many times—I don’t know how many, as well as returned to certain chapters whose nature particularly compels me. My tendency, though, is to read whole, and to respond in writing as a kind of immediacy to the direct experience of thinking within the work I’m reading. I prefer thinking to having thought, thinking to having had a thought, and want the essays to record the strangeness and difficulty of how thinking undermines certainty even as it tries, valiantly if futilely, to create it.

IZ: Can you say a little bit about how you conducted in-depth reading and annotation of Moby-Dick? Do you dog-ear your books and scrawl in the margins, or do you keep tidy notebooks? Any quirks or peculiarities in (or madness to) your method?

DB-Q: I am not tidy—in part, because I’m not a scholar. I’m a poet, and my copy of Moby-Dick bears the traces of my enthusiasm, a kind of archeology of enthusiasm, marked in creased pages and marginalia in a vast spectrum of ink. Put my copy on its spine, and it will open to certain chapters all of its own—a kind of charmed insistence. The cover is half off, repaired poorly with tape. I make notes in the book as I read, and then go back through the chapters to create a set of notes to put myself more firmly within thinking before teaching. The writing emerges to some degree from both of these processes, but is also a process that drives itself. It is all a very unanchored process, more a devotion than a discipline, and so records a different sort of rigor than more academically oriented work. My method is a kind of madness. Or, as Ishmael has it, “There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.”

IZ: If you had to pick a handful of A Whaler’s Dictionary entries you find the most vital, or that you’re the most proud of, or that address things in Melville’s book that really speak to you, which ones would you name?

DB-Q: I don’t have the book in front of me, but the entries that I tend to think the most of are centered in strange ways around the work of writing, feeling, generation, thinking: Wound, Tattoo, Child, Writing, and Silence.

IZ: In the front-matter of your book, you mention a book of Charles Olson’s. I hadn’t known until I began doing my own research for this group read that Olson had been a Melville scholar early in his life. I’ve always known him as a poet. As a widely published poet and a writer with a demonstrable obsession with Moby-Dick yourself, do you have any thoughts about that leap from obsessive Melville scholar to obsessive composer of poetry? Is there a kinship at play here? Do you know of other poets who share the obsession? (Stanley Kunitz comes to mind as a potential candidate.)

DB-Q: Charles Olson has been, and is, a poet very much on my mind—both in terms of his own work on Moby-Dick, Call Me Ishmael, which I have read and taught many times, as well as his Maximus Poems, and the large project of unearthing the mythology and cosmology of a given locality. My process has been somewhat the reverse of Olson’s, concentrating on poetry, and from poetry, turning to the work of writing essays on Moby-Dick. As to what to make of the leap you mention, I do think there is an element in Melville’s novel that encourages—even if in an underground, mostly unconscious way—this risk of radical approach. The novel itself is cobbled together in a dizzying variety of vocal registers and literary approaches, a kaleidoscopic quality that also suggests no one voice is able to bear the weight of the whole project. It is a novel that always seeks to trespass into itself. In some sense, the relation of poetry to scholarship is also involved in such trespass, refusing a descriptive approach in favor of an approach that enacts the issues it describes. I’d love to claim a kinship, but perhaps that is a young poet’s wishful thinking. Olson’s work is work that has imprinted me. There are other poets doing interesting work in and of and around M-D: Deborah Meadows comes immediately to mind, as does the critic K.L. Evans.

IZ: After the miserable reception of Moby-Dick, Melville faded into obscurity, writing just a few more unsuccessful books and resorting at last to poetry, largely unpublished. Do you make anything of this?

DB-Q: I don’t have any unique take on this, save the glib observation of how failure seeks out a respite in poetry—or, that poetry has a more accommodating relationship to failure than does the grandeur of the novel of genius. There is in the story for me—well, the history, really—a kind of Icarus-like parallel. Melville in Moby-Dick, as Olson so vividly points out, is driven not by Daedalus’s inventive heights, but by Shakespeare’s heights and depths, brightnesses and darknesses, and in seeking for himself the same audacious genius, and in accomplishing it, suffered a kind of fall. Here the source isn’t the sun’s heat, but the opposite, the crowd’s freezing indifference, which suffices just as well for the crash. Melville, it feels to me, was writing not only in his time, still so close to the large industry of whaling, but was also writing before and beyond his time, breaking through the cultural confines of his contemporaries in ways either unrecognizable or frankly bewildering to the reading public. But it seems to me that genius works this way—always forcing one to the outside of whatever one is in, be that oneself or one’s time. Genius is a peripheral art, or says the center is elsewhere. Perhaps that center ends up in poetry, that art of the margins.

IZ: I began indoctrinating my children into the church of Moby-Dick from as early in their lives (in the case of my daughter) as the womb. Although it’s a bit bloody, I’ve brought both of mine up on Allan Drummond’s short illustrated adaptation of Moby-Dick. How has the book figured in the reading life of your daughter? (Stated another way: Please tell me I’m not a weirdo.)

DB-Q: Well, you are probably a weirdo, but so am I—and, I suspect the same of pretty much everyone obsessed with this book. My daughter, now 5, has an amazing pop-up version of Moby-Dick that we often read at night. She knows of  my love for the book, which instills in her a kind of love. My wife and I are soon expecting a new baby, and Hana makes joke after joke of naming her Ahab, Ahabetta, Ishmaela, and Queeqega. Then she laughs and laughs. I think I’ll wait a little longer to read the whole novel to her—or maybe, I can’t decide, let her discover it for herself, and see if it can be for her what has been for me, the book the showed me the way to the necessity of learning to think for myself.

Some Helpful Links

Daryl L. L. HoustonLeave a comment

So, you’re reading Moby-Dick for the first time but are intimidated because it’s a stodgy old tome with archaisms or simply because it’s fairly long and there are only so many hours in the day. I’m here to help. Actually, others are here to help; I’m here to point in their direction.

First up, I recommend doing a skim of the annotations at powermobydick.com with each chunk of reading. This is particularly useful if you’re not the type to flip back to what are often asinine end notes in various print editions of the text. Do your day’s reading, make a quick note of the chapter name or number that you found yourself missing a reference or some vocabulary for, and then glance quickly at this site. A quick skim down the page will let you see and read in depth any annotations you’re interested in (often with links out to more information) and skip effortlessly over anything you already knew. Don’t know what a monkey jacket is in chapter 3? Boom. Quick glance down the annotations column of the text at powermobydick.com and you’ve got your answer. It really is a near-frictionless way to get at some of the information you’re — honestly — probably just sort of glossing over as you read. The powermobydick twitter feed also has lots of fun nuggets.

Second up, how about a free audio version of the book? Librivox hosts what I can only assume must be hundreds or thousands of audio versions of texts in the public domain, read by volunteer readers. I’ve jogged to Thoreau, done crunches to Whitman, and may just supplement my actual reading of Moby-Dick with a hearing of it as well (will it be my efforts on the elliptical machine or the blood-thumping chase of a ferocious whale quickening my pulse?)

Next, maybe your purse is $1250 heavier than you really want it to be, and you want, by the way, to eat in real Melvillean style. The Moby-Dick dishware set may be just what you need.

Or maybe you’re not so enthralled by the book that you feel compelled to introduce it to your dinner table, but you are something of a completist and want to read some of the material on which Melville based the taxonomic parts of his book. Be sure to check out the Beale and Scoresby texts.

Want to get your bearings aboard the whaling ship (once we finally set foot on one in earnest, which may not happen until week two)? Try this diagram.

These and a few other things appear in the sidebar (or will for the duration of this group read) and can be found in (probable) perpetuity, with occasional additions, here.

Front Matter and End Matter

Daryl L. L. Houston10 Comments

For both Infinite Jest and 2666, I wrote posts about front matter. I’ll do the same for Moby-Dick. At the beginning of the book, you’ll find a list of extracts from other works of literature that treat of whales. What a curious thing this seems upon a first read. Is it an extended set of epigraphs? Is it something that you really need to read at all? Should it be front matter or should it be an appendix (if it should even be there)?

The London publishers seem to have had similar questions, for they placed the extracts at the end of the book. At the time of the book’s publication, there were issues with getting a copyright in England on previously published work. To skirt these issues, it was apparently the habit of American authors to publish their books first in London and then, a week or a few weeks later, in America. So Melville sent his book off to the care of his London publisher, who proceeded to have the book corrected. The corrections weren’t limited to adding that wacky extra “u” to words like “color,” though. The book was downright bowdlerized, with a number of diction changes and with certain scenes removed or edited so as not to offend the religious (and other) sensibilities of the British reader. One chapter was removed wholesale because it was considered less than flattering to the crown. Perhaps most shockingly, the epilogue was removed, and with it any satisfying closure. (Oh, there was closure alright, but it wasn’t satisfying, and plenty of London critics latched onto this false ending in their criticism of the book.)

There’s speculation that moving the extracts to the end of the book may actually be responsible for the lost epilogue, the single sheet lost amid the many pages of extracts as they were moved. The move seems to have been something close to catastrophic for the reception of what must have seemed to that audience like an unfinished book.

But the shifting of the extracts seems all wrong to me for another reason as well. Placed at the beginning of the book, the extracts set a sort of tone. They establish the book almost as a compendium or encyclopedia or reference work, which in fact to some degree it is. They make something of a grand statement about what’s to come. A book that has epigraphs (of a sort) from so many important prior works must itself be very grand indeed. And they say something about the obsessive cataloging of whales and whaling in the book. A work that foregrounds such extracts is the work, perhaps, of an obsessed mind, or at least a thorough one. To understand the world may not be possible, but to catalog it is to some degree possible and perhaps represents a way of understanding the world.

Moving the extracts to the end relegates that sheaf of pages to the status of appendix. Here they become simply extra information, an optional chunk of text for the aficionado rather than a sort of invocation. In fact, maybe Melville’s extracts serve a similar purpose to that of the invocations of the great epics, suggesting that the extracts represent in a way what he’ll be writing about, but with a subtext that he’s improving, or at least expanding, on them. What better muse to invoke than the greats who have written of whales in the past?

To move the extracts, then, was to remove a vital structural, tonal, formal element that sets up expectations for what is to come.

Also worth noting, in terms of setting up expectations, is the form in which the book was bound and published. It was the habit of the period in England to publish romances (different meaning than at present) in three volumes. Moby-Dick was so published, though it was by no means your typical romance. Accordingly, purchasers may have expected one sort of book and gotten another sort altogether.

So, then. Are the extracts required reading? I have to admit that I found them a bit tiring when I first encountered them. I might have skimmed. Maybe they’re not entirely necessary, or maybe it’s not necessary to read them intensely. Still, it’s worth considering why they’re there and how they set up the text. It’s worth trying to imagine how one might receive the work differently without the extracts. How thoroughly will you read them, if at all?

Some Reviews

Daryl L. L. Houston5 Comments

Something of a fanatic about Moby-Dick, I’ve read a number of books peripheral to Melville’s work. Some I read years ago, and some I’ve picked up more recently for the first time or to reread. Brief impressions of a few of them appear below.

A Whaler’s Dictionary
Dan Beachy-Quick’s A Whaler’s Dictionary was the first secondary source I purchased once I began to consider leading a group read of Moby-Dick. The book contains a set of what I think are best called meditations on various ideas and items that appear in Moby-Dick. Beachy-Quick says in the introductory matter that the book arose out of a decade of reading Melville’s book, and indeed it does read like the musings of a person obsessed with the text. It’s even cross-referenced. Beachy-Quick suggests in the introduction that the best way to read his book is to thumb through it until you find something interesting and then to hop around from there; the cross-references help with this. In an apology at the beginning, he fesses up that it’s not responsible or well-researched, and this may be true, but the little essays are often lyrical and always thoughtful and full of neat connections. In a way, his project seems similar to the project that these group reads have become, but much more ambitious and far far better-wrought. It’s a necessary text for the Moby-Dick completist and a great addition to the collection for even a dabbler (if a serious dabbler) like me.

The Whale
A good friend gave me Philip Hoare’s The Whale for my birthday this year. I had been wringing my hands a little over whether or not to try a group read of Moby-Dick, and he happened to see a review of Hoare’s book in a national magazine. It’s a great read, full of information about whales and whaling. I learned, for example, that whaling not only extended into the 20th century but peaked in the 20th century: “In 1951 alone — one hundred years after Melville’s book appeared — more whales were killed worldwide than New Bedford’s whale-ships took in a century and a half of whaling.” Consider for a moment how big a sperm whale is (think roughly school-bus sized), and then consider that in 1965, some 72,000 were killed. Even if you’re not of a “save the whales” temperament, the sheer mass of such a killing season is mind-boggling. Hoare writes about a number of beached whales and tells the stories of the preservation of several whales in museums. He provides background information on Melville and always has Moby-Dick as a subtext. In addition to disbursing a trove of facts about whales and the history of whaling, Hoare invites us to take a more personal peek at his infatuation with whales — which after all many of us who love Moby-Dick share with him — beginning with his nearly-submersive (as in on a submarine) birth and culminating in a dive during which he was able to swim with a sperm whale. What a chance! Hoare shares with his reader the tragedy and the majesty of the sperm whale. It’s a fantastic read for anyone interested in either whales or Moby-Dick. I’ll let Hoare have the last word: “[T]he sperm whale also bears the legacy of our sins; an animal whose life came to be written only because it was taken; a whale so wreathed in superlatives and impossibilities that if no one had ever seen it, we would hardly believe that it existed — and even then, we might not be too sure. Only such a creature could lend Melville’s book its power.”

Ahab’s Wife
I was eager to read this book when it came out years ago. I wanted it to be good. I started reading it with an open mind. But it became clear fairly early on that Sena Naslund had an agenda that lay pretty far afield of dramatizing anything with any real relevance to Melville’s great work. She wanted to write a strong female character in Ahab’s young wife. I applaud writing strong female characters. But to distort reality and insist upon anachronisms in order to do so is to patronize, and the book began very early to do just these things. I can think of no other book that I’ve ever put down partway through with no intention of ever going back to it again. In preparation for this group read, I thought I might give Naslund’s book another chance (readers mature, after all, and maybe I simply hadn’t given it a fair shake) and checked it out of the library. I got a page or two in before I decided I simply couldn’t go on. I’d rather stab myself in the eye than try again; my resulting eyepatch would more closely resemble something authentic and nautical and Melvillean than Naslund’s long long book.

Moby Dick
Allan Drummond’s take on Moby-Dick is a little hard to swallow. Although it has the external appearance of a children’s book, it’s awfully bloody, and when my children were younger, I found myself wanting to avoid the bloody pages. Of course, it’s probably hard to adapt the book and cut out all the bloody violence without watering it down too much. It’s the sort of book that’s interesting for an adult to read to himself but that is annoying to read to a child, since it has speech bubbles in addition to primary text. Maybe it’s a strange preference, but I tend to prefer one or the other. I may be unique in this, and if so, then Drummond’s book can hardly be faulted. About the art I can say nothing terribly useful. The drawings seem a bit off-hand, neither realistic nor especially cartoonish. It’s a matter of style and not of aptitude (that is, it’s an intentional off-handedness), and it happens to be a style that doesn’t float my particular boat, but I imagine many find it appealing. Drummond does a fine job of condensing Melville’s book into a minuscule amount of text, and he certainly portrays a brooding Ahab. On the whole, I like having the book because it is a way of sharing a version of Melville’s story with my children, but I’d love to see another interpretation.

In the Heart of the Sea
It’s been many years since I read Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea, but parts of it remain with me vividly still. He tells the fascinating story of the whaleship Essex, which set out with its young captain and first mate and was sunk by the battering-ram head of what by all accounts was a vindictive whale. Philbrick details the horrors of being afloat in a small boat for months with limited food and water. The men resort at last to the last taboo of cannibalism, supping at first upon those who died naturally and finally drawing lots and killing a shipmate for food — and this after having chosen their ill-fated course rather than a nearer course to the Pacific for fear of the cannibals they feared they’d find there. It’s a riveting tale told with immediacy, and it’s a must-read for anybody with even a glimmer of an interest in texts peripheral to Moby-Dick. Philbrick appears also to have adapted the text for a younger audience in the form of a book entitled The Revenge of the Whale. If it’s half as deftly-done as In the Heart of the Sea, it’s sure to be a treat for youngsters.

Melville: His World and Work
Andrew Delbanco appeared in the recent PBS documentary, Into the Deep. Having read precious little about the life and work of Melville, I decided to try Delbanco’s rendering of Melville’s life. It arrived just yesterday, and I’m only 35 pages in, but it has so far been outstanding. It not only holds a wealth of information, but is also eloquently written. The introductory material rang so many bells for me that I spent more time underlining and making notes and pestering my wife by repeating enthusiastically what I had just read (e.g. Hardy’s career as a fiction writer turned poet mimics Melville’s) than I spent reading. If the rest of the book lives up to the promise of what I’ve read so far, it will have been a valuable purchase indeed.

Into the Deep

Daryl L. L. Houston5 Comments

A friend who is going to try to grit his teeth and endure Moby-Dick along with us discovered that PBS will be airing a documentary entitled Into the Deep tonight at 9 Eastern. It purports to provide a history of whaling in America interwoven with the story of the whaleship Essex, whose sinking by a whale would certainly have informed Melville’s classic book. Check your local schedule for the broadcast of the American Experience program, under whose banner this two-hour thrill-ride will appear.

Audacity and Ambition

Daryl L. L. Houston2 Comments

When I was a junior in college, I decided that I had been born into the wrong century and country. I had by this time read the highlights of the Romantic and Victorian poets and had developed a fondness for the likes of Dickens and (especially) Hardy. I imagined that even in the current times, people in England were smarter than Americans and that they went about in their paperboy hats and tweeds speaking sentences that began “I should like to think that” and that ended with insightful pronouncements on literature and philosophy. These were things I was interested in that I figured there weren’t many people in America cultivated enough to be interested in. I’m a little surprised I didn’t begin to affect a British accent.

I had read precious little American literature. There were the standard Poe and Dickinson selections from high school along with some Hawthorne and good old vengeful Jack Edwards, and there were some of the modernist poets (the really major ones expatriates anyway), but that was about it. I don’t know what compelled me to take a course on the American novel. It was no doubt an odious requirement I had to knock off to get my degree. The American university I attended wanted me to have read something significant by an American before letting me out with an English degree, I suppose.

We read The Blithedale Romance, The Damnation of Thereon Ware (the title character of which in retrospect I sometimes feel as if I must then and more recently often have resembled in many ways), something whose title eludes me about a bilocutionist (an old-timey word for a ventriloquist), and I forget what else. Oh yeah — there was also this little book called Moby-Dick. I remember well the circumstances under which I first began to read the book, so surprisingly engaging and delightful was its beginning. It was a spring day, and I had some time to kill before a meeting with an advisor. I made my way to the outside of the building on the university’s main quad and settled myself among the roots of a 200-year-old tree. We had a bunch of these trees shooting their roots out like long knotted fingers of the arthritic, and I was in the habit — there was probably something of the Wordsworthian influence coming out here — of reading or scribbling beneath one or the other of them. I opened the book and read that iconic first sentence and then continued on to find that its speaker was somebody I sort of liked. As I continued to read, I was surprised to find that Melville wrote not in the stodgy, heavy prose that I expected of such a tome, but wrote instead with humor and tenderness and real human feeling. Here was a generous author.

I was hooked, and this was before I got to the high drama, the great beauty of the more poetic prose, the adventure on the merciless ocean and on the very back of the whale.

Stop and imagine that for a moment. Think about the audacity of striking out in a little boat to attach yourself by rope to a beast that might fling you fifty yards with a swipe of its tail, that might snap you up in its awful socketed jaws, that might drag your boat down as it sounds and leave you dog-paddling out in the great lonely deep. It boggles my mind, it’s so ballsy, and the dramatization of such audacity is a big part of the book’s appeal to me.

But it’s also an encyclopedia of sorts. The casual reader (or the reader uninterested in whales as fascinating creatures) may tend to find taxonomic and descriptive parts of the book — and there are many — tedious, but to me, reading the book has always been something like watching something on the Discovery Channel. Think about that for a moment too. I started watching a few weeks ago the latest set of documentaries by the group that brought us the dazzling series The Planet Earth. Oprah narrates the newer ones, and they’re inferior to the prior series in scope and majesty. They’re also badly written, every scene shifting to another with a tidy transition or counterpoint, somehow too simple and yet struggling to maintain a sort of coherence or unity of story across the various scenes of creatures in the wild. And they never have enough information; I find myself always always wanting more. However visually engaging the series is, it suffers a sort of poverty of information and style.

Moby-Dick treats us to the opposite dilemma, one in which we must furnish the images ourselves but are afforded detail after detail about whales and whaling by a man who saw it first-hand. As dilemmas go, it’s one I’m happy to deal with. (A person’s mud puddle is a pig’s delight.)

And on top of it all, Melville gives us philosophy and enlightenment and fellow-feeling and, most notably for the reader new to Melville, humor. Moby-Dick is surely not a book free of problems, but it really is a fantastic, ambitious book, one of my absolute favorites, and one I’m really excited to read and write about here.

Moby-Dick Schedule

Daryl L. L. Houston6 Comments

We are just two short weeks and two short days away from the beginning of the Moby-Dick group read. Actually, that’s when the first milestone lands, which means that people who want to follow our calendar should read a bit in advance so that the first batch of chapters is all wrapped up in time for discussion beginning on May 24. I’ve decided for now to stick with a six-week reading schedule; we’ll see how we feel about this after the first couple of weeks and can expand a bit then if there’s an outcry, but I think six weeks will be about right. Moby-Dick is conveniently divided into numbered, titled chapters, so it doesn’t matter a whole lot what edition you’re using. Just stick to the chapter divisions and you should be good to go.

In parceling the chapters out across the several weeks, I tried to find a good balance between keeping a roughly equal number of pages per week and finding reasonable breaks within the content itself. I extended the first week’s reading by a chapter more than I had originally planned, for example, because I thought it would be a shame to break two linked chapters up.

Please note that there’s some front-matter (about which more in a later post) that makes the first week’s reading a bit longer than the other weeks’ readings. I don’t think it’ll be too onerous to complete it all, but I thought I’d mention it in case you’re counting numbered pages (the front-matter most likely falls outside the Arabic-numbered pages) to arrive at a pages-per-day count.

See the sidebar for the official schedule.

For any who want to track their reading semi-publicly on Facebook, I’ve added an entry for Moby-Dick to the InfiniteSummer Facebook app. Since there are so many different editions of the book, I just set the page count to 600, so this will be very much an approximation. When you update your page count in the app, it adds a little blurb to your Facebook profile that includes a picture of the book, your page count and approximate percentage complete, and links back to here. This is totally optional and isn’t something I derive any benefit from. If you want to show people your progress, add it; if not, that’s fine too.

Moby Dick

Daryl L. L. Houston12 Comments
Moby Dick group read prep

Well, there was pretty good response to my query about whether or not people were interested in a group read of Moby Dick. I’ve mentioned it a couple of times on twitter and Facebook as well and gotten a few encouraging responses. I had been waffling on whether or not to try to lead this thing, since I’ve been at this group read thing for nearly a year now, and it’s darned time-consuming for me. But I finally decided to go ahead and do the thing. And now I’m so excited I’m just about shaking in my skin about it. I’ve downloaded an audio version for potential listening to in the car and on the old elliptical machine. I’ve bought the authoritative text for this read and am poking into the end-matter as I have time. I’ve begun reading (and in some cases rereading) books about whaling and whales and Melville’s books. I’ve lined up a couple of neato bloggers who for the moment will remain nameless but whose participation I’m really excited about (not to diminish the efforts my siblings-in-arms already blogging here). And I’ve set a schedule.

Mark your calendar for May 24. That’s a couple of weeks after the 2666 read wraps up. We’re going to go pretty fast. I think that the longer a read goes along, the more fatigued people become. I know it’s been the case with 2666 (made worse by that big oppressive fourth section), and there are certainly parts of Moby Dick that some will find fatiguing or boring (though I find them fascinating). So this is going to be a 6-week whirlwind read. In the edition I cut my teeth on (the Penguin edition pictured front left above), that’s about 115 pages a week, or 16 pages a day. It seems like a lot, I guess, but the prose itself isn’t hard. If you were able to pull off 70 pages a week of Infinite Jest, this will be an absolute cinch. (And if people come at me with pitchforks and torches in the comments, I’ll consider stretching it out to an 8-week read instead.)

So there you have it. Bone up on your nautical lingo and get ready to chase the white whale. I’ll write a few more posts in preparation for the read in the mean time, but look for my post on the first few chapters on May 24.

If you’re already blogging for IZ and would like to be considered an official blogger for the Moby Dick read, please let me know one way or another so that I can add you to the about page when I make one. If you’re not a blogger for IZ but would like to be, please make your case in the comments (or if you’re too shy to make a case in the comments, at least leave a comment expressing your interest, and I’ll email you).