This is a poster that we found a few week’s ago during a trip to the Mattapoisett Historical Society’s Museum and Carriage House. It reminded me that Herman Melville’s whaleship, the Acushnet was built in our backyard where 150 years ago six shipyards stood . Melville once referred to the Acushnet as “my Yale College and my Harvard.” Somethings never change; sailing a tall ship is still a valuable education.
Filed under: maritime art, maritime heritage, Moby-Monday | Tags: Jeremy Wood, maritime art, Moby-Monday, PowerMobyDick.com
Jeremy Wood is a multidiscipline artist and map maker whose diverse work offers people and places a playground of space and time. In October 2000 he began to explore GPS satellite technology as a tool for digital mark making on water, over land, and in the air. He makes drawings and maps of his movements by recording all his daily journeys with GPS to create a personal cartography. (from the artist’s website)
One of Wood’s projects included a walk though London along the quote: “It is not down in any map; true places never are.” Herman Melville, Moby Dick.
Also from the artist’s website.
The text was written over a period of three months from January 2005. The length of the line recorded on foot for the drawing was 44.2 miles, and the total distance traveled to make the drawing was 458.6 miles. I had two bicycle punctures with reinforced puncture resistant tires, the first of which happened 20 miles into a journey looking for locations that ended in having to push the bike home for 9 miles. After closing the body of the last letter, I headed as far north as the land allowed to a small pier on which the Greenwich Meridian is marked, and finished the drawing by circling around on the footpath at the edge of the River Thames for a full stop.
Via PowerMobyDick where you can find lots of other interesting Moby-Dick digital ephemera.
After nearly 60 always interesting and entertaining posts, Meg Guroff, the creator and curator of the amazing Power MobyDick, is taking some well deserved shore-leave from Sea-Fever’s Moby-Monday.
Meg’s got some exciting, new adventures underway, so she can’t be here every week. But she has agreed to be a relief captain from time to time and we look forward to welcoming her back aboard as often as she can manage.
A new skipper will be taking over Moby-Monday and I’ll have an update on that soon. And from time to time we’ll have some guest posts like Vassar senior english and art history major and New Bedford Whaling Museum intern, Evander Price’s great post today titled “Of Whales in Mountains…”
But today, I want to give a whale of a thank you to Meg for the incredible job that she’s done over the past year for Sea-Fever readers (including me)! Here’s something that Charlotte Cheshire created for one of her teachers which is cool and appropriate for Meg too!
This week’s guest Moby-Monday is by Evander Price, Senior English & Art History Major at Vassar College and former New Bedford Whaling Museum intern, along with a strong pull of the oar by Jeffrey Walker, Professor of Earth Science at Vassar College.*
In bony, ribby regions of the earth, where at the base of high broken cliffs masses of rock lie strewn in fantastic groupings upon the plain, you will often discover images as of the petrified forms of the Leviathan partly merged in grass, which of a windy day breaks against them in a surf of green surges.
Moby-Dick, Chapter 57, “Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet; in Stone; in Mountains; in Stars”
High up in the Catskills, though not too high, and not too far off from the historic Mountain House, lie the petrified remains of perhaps the oldest beached whale on our planet. He is composed of 350-million-year-old sandstone of the Catskill delta, and is surrounded by hemlocks. No doubt he remembers the time when the Hudson River Valley was almost entirely hemlock, before the demands of the Industrial Revolution deforested the old growth trees. While his mossy bulk has no doubt morphed considerably with the erosion of time, his toothy lower jaw corroborates his classification as an odontocete, and the prominence of his jaw further suggests that he is of some close relation to the physter macrocephalus, or the sperm whale.
It is discoveries like this that remind us readers of Melville that what might be taken for exaggeration or imaginative literary flourish is often pure fact.
*Credit to Jeffrey Walker, Professor of Earth Science at Vassar College for all geological information, and for leading the hike to the petrified whale. (more…)
Like this:
Filed under: Moby-Monday | Tags: Floating Cloud, Jean-Marie Massaud, Moby-Dick
French designer Jean-Marie Massaud has proposed a helium "manned cloud"—a floating 20-room hotel—that bears an uncanny resemblance to a certain white sperm whale.
Cruising for days at 100 miles per hour “permits man to explore the world without a trace,” Massaud’s website states: “to experience spectacular and exotic places without being intrusive or exploitative.” So, pretty much what Ahab was going for—except for that last bit.
Margaret Guroff is editor and publisher of Power Moby-Dick.
“It’s irresistible to make the analogy between the relentless hunt for whale oil in Melville’s day and for petroleum in ours,” scholar Andrew Delbanco recently told the New York Times. Moby-Dick is “a story about self-destruction visited upon the destroyer—and the apocalyptic vision at the end seems eerily pertinent to today.”
Margaret Guroff is editor and publisher of Power Moby-Dick.
Filed under: maritime, Moby-Monday | Tags: Moby-Dick, Samuel Enderby, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, Zach Weiner
Comic strip artist Zach Weiner has done it again. In a 10-panel Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal strip, Weiner imagines Ahab getting an unwelcome answer to his standard greeting, “Hast seen the white whale?”
“Yes! Killed him!” replies a jolly fellow captain—turning a timeless, dramatic quest for vengeance into more of a shaggy-dog story.
In an earlier strip, Weiner spares the whale, but allows a de-armed captain (possibly that of the Samuel Enderby) to offer Ahab a little perspective. “Oh, it ate your leg,” he says calmly. “That’s pretty bad. Of course, it ate my arm.”
“Well, a leg’s pretty bad,” Ahab responds. “Actually, a leg’s worse.”
“Not really,” the first captain says. But hey, he adds—if you feel some crazy need to avenge the loss of your leg, “Go for it!”
Margaret Guroff is editor and publisher of Power Moby-Dick.
Filed under: Book review, maritime, Moby-Monday | Tags: John Barrymore, Moby-Dick, S.R. Buchman
My friend, I give you perhaps the world’s first movie tie-in: a 1925 edition of Moby-Dick illustrated with stills from the John Barrymore silent-movie version, The Sea Beast. Slight problem—the film takes dazzling liberties with Herman Melville’s novel, giving young Ahab an evil half-brother, Derek, who pushes him into the jaws of the white whale that shears off his leg. Ahab also gets a love interest, Esther, but after said shearing, Derek convinces Ahab that she could never truly love a one-legged man. (One photo bears the caption, “Sensitive of his crippled condition, Ahab interprets her love as pity and self-sacrifice.”) Ahab ends things with Esther, sets off in search of the whale he blames for ruining his life … and kills it.
“In story, the screen version of Moby-Dick exceeds the book,” writes S.R. Buchman in an “Appreciation” that precedes Melville’s Derek- and Esther-free text. “The discrepancy between the two must not be considered as a profanely wanton alteration. The episode of the book has not been misused; it has been enlarged and clarified.” And Melville’s ending provides an “unreasonably cruel fate” for Ahab, Buchman complains. “In all justice, Ahab had suffered enough to be granted expiation and its rewards, but Melville killed him.” What a blunder! “It is a relief and satisfaction that the picture version allows Ahab to live,” Buchman concludes. I can think of at least one whale who might take issue with that.
Margaret Guroff is editor and publisher of Power Moby-Dick.
Filed under: maritime, Moby-Monday | Tags: Bluegrass Brewing Company, Cisco Brewers, Moby-Dick, North Coast Brewing Company, Ramses Bier
Dutch brewer Ramses Bier makes a wheat beer named after Moby Dick. According to a handy Babelfish translation, it’s “a zest Munich” style beer with “notige an aftertaste.” Proost!
Closer to home, Bluegrass Brewing Company of Louisville, Kentucky recently concocted a “white” (actually reddish-gold) porter called Melby Dick, named after Herman Melville’s novel and a brewing-company marketing staffer. One reviewer deemed it “terrific,” but unfortunately the brew was made only in a limited edition.
So if you’re in the mood for a frosty whale-related beverage (and there’s no flip on hand), consider Cisco Brewers’ Whale’s Tale Pale Ale or North Coast Brewery’s tasty Scrimshaw pilsener. Then all you’ll need will be an abominable tumbler etched with measuring lines, to be sure you’re getting the full Cape Horn portion.
Margaret Guroff is editor and publisher of Power Moby-Dick.
An eight-page pamphlet that sold for one (British) penny in the 1820s is for sale on eBay at $999.99. Its subject: the 1820 wreck of the whaleship Essex, upon which Moby-Dick is partly based.
Author Herman Melville read the horrific story of castaways and cannibalism in a memoir by Essex first mate Owen Chase, who was rescued after three months spent floating in a whaleboat in the Pacific Ocean. This booklet comes at the story from a different angle: that of the three crewmen who chose to stay behind on desolate Henderson Island and were later rescued.
If this pamphlet isn’t expensive enough for you, there’s another copy online priced at $1,950.
Margaret Guroff is editor and publisher of Power Moby-Dick.
