Last December, we were all eyeing the calendar nervously, awaiting the 21st like a lot of people eye an upcoming high school reunion if they've never managed to leave their parents' basement and the best job they can manage is assistant manager at Sewage Control: with dread. I want to say that I was calm, cool, and dismissive of such madness, having lived through Y2K with nary a scratch. But there was a small part of me (the part that still gets spooked by old episodes of "Unsolved Mysteries") that thought "uh oh, what if this is the end?" So I made a list of things that I wanted to do in case the world didn't end, in the thought that, if it did, I wouldn't have to.
Stupid fuckin' Mayans...
One of the things I wanted to achieve (and I believe I wrote about it here before, so excuse the repetition) is to purchase and read Moby-Dick in its entirity. Thanks to the fact that the Mayans couldn't find their ass from a hole in the ground, I set out on December 22 for the nearest Books-A-Million to get a full-on, Penguin-edition-with-intro-from-Nathaniel-Philbrick copy of "The Mobes" (as I like to call it...no, not catching on? Okay) and start pounding away at all 625 pages of it.
Last weekend, not this past one but the one before, I finished the damn thing...and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
"Moby-Dick" of course is a story of boy meets whale, boy tries to kill whale, all but one crew member perish (hey, if you didn't know how the story ends, your cultural education is sorely lacking. It's like being shocked at the end of Titanic. "What do you mean, they hit the iceberg?"). It's also one of the best double-entendre titles in all of literature. And, as a Bachelor of the Arts in English, I have plenty to say about it. Read on, if you want to hear:
First things first, don't skimp on the el cheapo versions if you want to experience Herman Melville's story. Go for the ones that are big and thick (no pun intended). As someone who's been a lifelong reader, I love the feel of books, the way that you have a sense of accomplishment when you get past a certain point in page-count for the day or in terms of where you are in the story. I'm sure someday I might splurge for a Kindle or something, but so far I'm good with the old-fashioned version of books. You can't dog-ear a tablet.
Secondly, the story itself: sure, the ship sinks in the end, but the voyage it (and you) goes on is worth all the overlong examinations of just what whales are and what they mean. Ishmael, the main character, is probably one of the weirdest but most endearing narrators in all literature; he's just a guy in need of a job (with perhaps an unhealthy obsession with sperm whale anatomy) who signs up for the Good Ship Lollipop of possibly Satanic captains with their own unhealthy obsessions with sperm whales (and their own anatomy). He kinda disappears as a main character midway through, and even seems to be unusually aware of things that, if he were simply as he presents himself (a crewman on a whale boat), he would have no way of knowing about. But it's a novel, not a non-fiction story, and you can kinda do whatever the hell you want in a novel. As long as the reader is willing to follow along.
The language of the book can be daunting if you have no previous exposure to nineteenth-century literature (I honestly think that, if I didn't already have an appreciation for Jane Austen and one or two of the Bronte sisters, I would've been hopelessly lost). Melville has a lot to say (about six-hundred pages' worth), and sometimes I had to take a break from the book because I needed a rest (thus why it took me almost five months to finish). But it's one of those books that you can put down for a time and pick back up with very little lost in terms of finding your way back around. For such a thick book, the chapters themselves (when it's not Ishamel telling you more than you ever wanted to know about what's inside a sperm whale, for instance) are pretty short, almost alarmingly so; I'd start a chapter on one page, turn to find it concluding well before the end of the next page, and wonder what the hell happened. But you get used to it once you really get into it.
So my review (and thus, the reference to the Talking Heads song in the title of this essay): reading "Moby-Dick" can definitely disorient you by being possibly the most difficult book you'll ever read. But do try and pick it up at least once or twice, and stick with it if you can. I doubt I'll ever feel the urge to read any more Melville, but "Moby-Dick" does stand up as being a classic (and not just in the way that Mark Twain defined a "classic" as a book that everyone agreed deserved the title but no one bothered to actually read). Put aside some time for Ahab, he'll lead you to ruin but you can always come up for air. It really is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and you can impress friends at parties.
Assuming that the parties you go to are attended by fellow English majors...
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