Stan Dubinsky sends out an interesting-looking article about whaling (someday I’ve got to get ME a gig that allows me time to read all the cool stuff that Stan sends links to… I couldn’t even do it while unemployed… but then I’m a freakishly slow, deliberate reader), and it reminds me:
Remember back when I was talking about how cool Moby Dick was, because I had finally started reading it (40 years after I had gotten an A+ on the final essay test in my advanced English class despite not having read ANY of it, based purely on my talent for BS and listening in class)?
Well… I didn’t finish it. Again.
The thing is, while the opening chapters are pretty engrossing, after Ishmael and Queequeg actually ship out, once the Pequod is underway… it begins to drag.
I just totally lost interest, long before the Great White Whale shows up. Maybe it’s because I was getting to the draggy bits at about the time I got laid off, or something. I don’t know.
Mind you, I could have gone the rest of my life still giving the impression I had read it, and discussing the characters and themes with great insight and fluency upon demand, the way I always have…
But I just had to level with y’all.
Maybe I’ll take it up again; just not right now. Right now I’m making my way through Flags of Our Fathers by James Bradley. On a related note, I almost bought myself a copy of Robert Leckie‘s Helmet for My Pillow over the weekend — but it turned out that I only had less than a dollar left on the Barnes & Noble giftcard that I thought I hadn’t used. So no dice.
Speaking of which, Burl: I’m still going to write more about “The Pacific,” once I’ve finished watching it for the second time, as you recommended.
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A book I read once by a psychotherapist of some stripe suggested reading 19th century novels as a way to develop perspective and resilience. I dutifully read *The Mill on the Floss*, and found out she was right. Thomas Hardy novels are also good for this.
… which tells you why Burl was in the SMART English class, while I wasn’t.
Actually, I was in A smart class — it was called English 6, I believe — just not THE smartest class, English 7.
This happened a lot in my career as a military brat. I would be in all the top, advanced classes, then my Dad would get transferred again, and the new school wouldn’t let me into the top classes because I hadn’t been in THEIR system. And I’d spend the whole year fighting that, and eventually get transferred up.
When I arrived at Radford and they put me in level 6, and I learned there was a level 7 (which had nothing to do with which grade you were in; there were even a couple of juniors in 7, and quite a few in 6), I immediately started bucking for an upgrade. But my teacher, Mrs. Burchard, insisted that I start writing in a more structured, expository style before she’d send me up.
Well, I could see what she wanted, but I resisted cooperating on general principles (even then, I didn’t like being told HOW to write), and then… well, I guess I sort of developed a crush on Mrs. Burchard. And aside from that, I really enjoyed the class. I had Cecilia Toole (who was REALLY cute) sitting in front of me (she tied up her long brown hair with a leather thing held together with a wooden pin stuck through it, and periodically I’d pull the pin to watch it fall), and Gayla Gould over across the way, and Libby Custer and Steve Clark and several other friends, and we had a lot of fun together. While Mrs. Burchard did asign us some material (Wuthering Heights and Ibsen, for instance), she mostly let us decide what we’d study. So we picked Catch-22, and Cat’s Cradle, and Stranger in a Strange Land. It was a blast.
And in the end, I was happy not to be in the “smart” class. Which was uncharacteristic of me.
I took 2 triews for me to get thru Moby Dick. But the second time, I didn’t feel pushed, and I throroughly enjoyed it. I think you have to be in the right mood. Now I’ve never been able to do Crime and Punishment.
“Well, I could see what she wanted, but I resisted cooperating on general principles..”
Isn’t that what just happened to Tandy Carter? Maybe now you get it…
Crime and Punishment is AWESOME. That’s one of those few books I actually read at the time it was assigned. It was my sophomore year of college, at Memphis State.
I read a good chunk of it in my sack in the dorm when I was running a high fever from some virus. Might have been flu. Anyway, my own fever and the feverish state Raskolnikov was in after his crime sort of ran together in my head, heightening the sense of identification. Mind you, (thanks to Mrs. Burchard) I had been deeply impressed by Ibsen’s “Enemy of the People,” so I could see how Raskolnikov would have developed his notion that some men were destined for greater things than others — an assumption that caused him to do something monstrous, so it was probably a good thing for me to read. It helped with moral maturation. Therefore I did NOT, in my fevered student years, whack anybody with an ax.
For a time, I would cite it as my favorite novel, even outstripping The Sun Also Rises. Now, I couldn’t tell you what my favorite novel is…
Uh, Kathryn, I was 17. Actually, 16 at the start of the year. A bit in love with my own brilliance, if you know the type. You would not have wanted me to be your police chief in 1970.
I don’t know–you don’t have to worry about conflicts of interest with most 16/17 year olds I know–they are models of integrity….social (employment) politics, not so much…
I started watching “Modern” Hamlet that featured Captain Picard and the Tenth Doctor. I just couldn’t get involved in it and deleted it from Tivo after about 20 minutes or so.
But if you want a lesson in wading through an intrically constructed and lavishly worded plot, don’t miss Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. As Moby Dick is the prototype of novels about obsession, The Turn of the Screw is the prototype tale of a horror that creeps up on you until it’s too late to run away.
You MET the “Ghost Who Walks?” He SPOKE with you? I am in awe. Did you have to recite incantations to summon him? I never actually saw him, so the sobriquet you applied to him had meaning to me.
And when you saw Mrs. Burchard, did she mention me (he said, pathetically)?
Mrs. Burchard was so cool. I had made a huge mistake in signing up for first-year German there in my senior year, and I had a real personality conflict with the teacher (I suspect that not ALL the ex-Nazis ran off to Argentina). I took to cutting the class and begging Mrs. Burchard to write me an excuse. She did, a couple of times, but then swore she wouldn’t do it again.
Rather than letting me run around loose those periods, she had me sit in her English 4 class and grade papers. I learned that there really WAS a difference between 4 and 6.
… or maybe it was English 3. I forget…
As a child on a very isolated Air Force base in a foreign country, I discovered the base library and dove in. The “adult” books weren’t separate from the “kid” books. The very first book I ever read was “Treasure Island” in third grade. And so, along with the usual Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew and Tarzan advantures, I read “Moby Dick” at a very young age, and remember it fondly still.
Ah, Moby Dick… I did a book report on it in the eighth grade. I read maybe the first 20% and the last 10%… still got an A, though, and without resorting to Cliff’s Notes. That really says something, although precisely WHAT it says and whether it’s about me or the book, I couldn’t tell you.
During high school, I worked a couple of days a week at an art gallery, and at one of the openings, ran into the lovely Mrs. Burchard. The cool thing? She was totally, totally stoned. It was so cute the way she was embarrassed.
One of the annoying things about the way Radford’s classes were structured is that they’d bump you into the next level if you did well. The effect, however, was that they’d elevate you until you were average, which meant that you’d score Cs on tests, while students your age in less-academic classes scored As, getting excellent GPAs. It was the academic Peter Principle. I was in top-level classes, but an average student.
I was so ornery a student that the principal threatened to fail me my senior year for “political” reasons. I told him that meant I’d be back next year and somehow, I passed.
“War and Peace” and “Gone With the Wind” are two books I didn’t pick up until adulthood, and then couldn’t put down. But the big one after high school was “Gravity’s Rainbow.”
Yes, Steve, I remember liking the Turn of the Screw even in high school–it’s very accessible as Henry James goes, and not very long. Check it out, y’all.