Moby-Dick and stuff….

I know whale tales aren’t for everyone.

If you’re still with me, you might be interested to know that Herman Melville’s iconic whale story was published 172 years ago in London, and then, a month later, in New York.

The original title is Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. Melville actually went to sea in the crew of a whaling vessel, and based his novel in part on a real sperm whale named Mocha Dick, known to South Pacific sailors in the 1840s.

During his lifetime Melville was briefly well-known for some of his South Pacific stories, such as Typee, but he was obscure during the last 30 years of his life. He earned only $1,200 or so from the sale of about 3,200 copies of Moby-Dick, which was out of print when he died in 1891.

A high quality first edition of the book can easily be secured now if you have about $60,000 to spare.

Melville wrote in a variety of genres—again, not for all tastes. I’m a big fan of Moby-Dick, and I’m also an advocate for Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street. Nothing of the South Pacific here. The circumstances of this desiccated short story are curious, even eccentric, incredulous. The withered and aloof Bartleby is presented, examined, and disdained, until his very dispirited isolation makes him the object of the narrator’s genuine but increasingly troubled caretaking.

Don’t overlook Billy Budd, Sailor. It’s a searing morality play.

You may be surprised to know that Melville also wrote poetry. One critic has somewhat ponderously suggested that Moby-Dick is filled with Melville’s incipient poetry. I certainly believe that a story can contain a poem, in any defensible sense of those two words. I’m not ready to think of Ahab and Ishmael and the whale as characters in a longish poem.

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Old Friends (book review)

Tracy Kidder tells truth about old age…

click here

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As with another eye: Poems of exactitude with 55 free verse and haiku poems,

and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)

and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”

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Moby-Dick and stuff