Two Years Before the Mast is one of the books I’ve been dipping in and out of, since I find these sea journals really lend themselves to that. Richard Henry Dana was a student at Harvard who took time off school to go on a merchant voyage around Cape Horn in 1834. He returned [...]
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I was going to post more about “Bartleby” today, but I would prefer not to. Ha! (If only my jokes were as good as Melville’s.) Also, I had not one but two flat tires last night. And thus the blog is neglected. We’ll remain on shore for a while with “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” It’s strange to be ashore with Melville, not a sailor in sight, but it turns out we’re in good hands. “Bartleby”‘s exposition is sheer delight. The narrator is a wonderfully self-deprecating lawyer (“All who know me, consider me an eminently safe man.”), and [...] I don’t think I will have time to post about In Hazard until next week, but I will tease you a little. John Crowley quotes Ford Madox Ford in his introduction to the NYRB Classics edition; apparently he told Richard Hughes: I have seen one or two notices that quite miss all the points [...] After Fletcher Christian and his fellow mutineers subvert the ship in the starkest way possible, they decide to settle on an island, a chronotope I haven’t really explored. The island is a place to remake civilization, start from scratch with a new society, and really, with a whole new world. The sailors are as [...] So captain and faithful crew make it home eventually, and what happens to the mutineers? Famously, some started a colony on the uninhabited Pitcairn’s Island. Save them for later. Because the rest decide to stay in Tahiti, where they’re sure to be caught, and after a while they are. Fletcher Christian, the ringleader of [...] Sometimes I think we hardly need fiction. It’s not just that truth is stranger—it’s also just as dramatic and just as fascinating. I’m very fond in general of reading fiction presented in the form of some other document—diary entries, letters, statements, legal records of all sorts, fiction within fiction, etc.—and when I read nonfiction [...] I guess Chicago is not the only place that’s been having unseasonably warm weather, but it’s really acting like winter is over here. There’s no snow on the ground for the first time in months and frankly I’m a little disappointed. On the other hand it meant the consumption partner and I were up [...] All of the personal narratives I’ve been reading of time at sea, including those by Richard Henry Dana, William Bligh, the crew of the Essex, Amasa Delano, spend considerable time discussing the flora and fauna they encounter on their travels. Not a huge surprise, of course—they were all traveling to quite exotic places, with [...] In the past week or so, Wuthering Expectations and Novel Readings have both discussed gaps in their reading. The gaps weigh on me, but at the same time the subliminal burden of them probably pushes me even more toward the unnecessaries. My perennial question is whether it is better to focus on a single [...] |
My Personal Canon (ongoing project) |
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