Filed under: Book review, Moby-Monday, new media | Tags: Moby-Dick, Sky Mall Kitties, SkyMall, SkyMaul
It’s SkyMall’s moment. On the heels of Nina Katchadourian’s infectious "Sky Mall Kitties," a tribute in song, comes new attention to the 2006 parody book SkyMaul: Happy Crap You Can Buy From a Plane. Among the book’s pages of “Reality-Cancelling Headphones” and “Adultery Detectors” you’ll find the "Moby-Dick Hamster Coffin, a “hand-carved mini-coffin” designed to give your fluffy friend the burial-at-sea he deserves—or the life-buoy he so desperately needs.
Margaret Guroff is the editor and publisher of Power Moby-Dick.
Filed under: Moby-Monday, new media | Tags: Matthew Wasteland, Moby-Dick, Penny Arcade, Split Reason, video games
This thing (a mock cover for Moby-Dick, “the literary classic that inspired the epic video game”) reminds me of this thing (a T-shirt featuring a mock screen from an “Ahab vs Dick” video game) and this thing (a mock announcement of a Wii Moby-Dick game) and, sadly, this thing (an essay about why there may never actually be a Moby-Dick video game.) Sigh.
Margaret Guroff is the editor and publisher of Power Moby-Dick.
Filed under: maritime, Moby-Monday, new media, social media, storytelling | Tags: Emoji-Dick, Fred Benenson, Meg Guroff, Moby-Dick
Emoticons are fine as far as they go, but they do not express the whole range of human experience—our hopes, our dreams, our heartbreaks; our recycling, our maple leaves, our bananas. For that, you need emoji, which are Japanese emoticons for people with a lot of stuff to express (and maybe a lot of time on their hands).
In fact, emoji are now used by Japanese texters as a form of written language. This gave Fred Benenson an idea. The product manager at Creative Commons decided to have a book translated entirely into emoji, using the micro-contracting site Mechanical Turk for labor and the micro-funding site Kickstarter for scratch. But for a translation subject, he went decidedly macro: with enough backing, Benenson plans to produce a translation of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, the English language’s premier text on recycling, maple leaves, and bananas.
Benenson estimates the cost of translating Melville’s 1851 novel at $3,500 and is currently seeking pledges of $5 to $200. If enough backers sign on by October 19, their donations will be accepted and work will proceed. In the end, supporters will receive benefits based on their investments. Five-dollar backers will get a PDF file of the final product, while $200 backers will receive a color, hardcover limited edition Emoji-Dick book, numbered and signed “by the author.” Wonder how Benenson is going to swing that one?
Margaret Guroff is the editor and publisher of Power Moby-Dick.
Filed under: Moby-Monday, new media, storytelling | Tags: CGI, Ethan Hawke, Jason Statham, Kate Hudson, Moby-Dick, movies, Shia LaBeouf, steampunk, The Rock, William Hurt
I’ve envisioned William Hurt as Ahab ever since I saw him in Kiss of the Spider Woman. And now that vision is realized: German production company TMG just announced that its upcoming Moby-Dick miniseries stars Hurt as Ahab and Ethan Hawke as Starbuck. Filming begins shortly in Nova Scotia—where one boatbuilder got the contract for six replica whaleboats—and Malta, where a tall ship has been cast to play the Pequod.
So far, that production sounds fairly faithful to the text; if you’re looking for “Moby Dick as Frankenstein” and whalers who can fly, you’ll have to wait for the planned Moby-Dick action film by Wanted director Timur Bekmambetov.
Then again, if you’re really patient and you really want a break from that tired old storyline, check out this hilarious script for the trailer for Moby-Dick: Ahab’s Revenge, by a blogger called tpalumbi. The film—which, strangely, has not yet been optioned—is envisioned to star Shia LaBeouf as Ishmael, Kate Hudson as his love interest, The Rock as Queequeg, and Jason Statham (known for starring in Guy Ritchie films) as as an Ahab with four steam-powered legs. Well, you know, if you can’t get William Hurt …
Margaret Guroff is the editor and publisher of Power Moby-Dick.
Photo via MSN Movies.
Filed under: maritime, Moby-Monday, new media | Tags: iPhone, Meg Guroff, Moby-Dick, video games
Speaking of iPhone apps, what would your Moby-Dick application look like? The iTunes store offers a few downloadable versions of the text (though, sadly, no annotated version yet) as well as audiobooks, musical recordings, a schweet study guide by Shmoop, and the whole 1956 film starring Gregory Peck … but no app that really brings the book to life in a new, iPhone-specific way.
Anna Leach of the blog Shiny Shiny proposes one such app: a simple whale-locator service that would identify any nearby whales and take you to their blogs (or, we’d add, their Twitter feeds).
Some friends and I had a different idea: a Moby-Dick video game. Blogger Matthew Wasteland has previously laid out the inherent problem with such a product. If you allow for alternate endings to Ahab’s quest, have you leached out of your game all the greatness of the novel?
That’s what makes our Moby-Dick game app idea so brilliant (if we do say so ourselves). It’s mainly just a view of the sea—sometimes calm, sometimes stormy, throw in a little St. Elmo’s fire now and again—and you only ever see the white whale after you’ve been playing nonstop for … what, hours? months? It’s theoretically possible to harpoon the sucker, but by the time you get a chance to do it, you’ll be begging for Ahab’s (virtual) fate.
Anyway, that’s our concept. If you have a better one, let’s hear it in the comments.
Margaret Guroff is the editor and publisher of Power Moby-Dick.
Filed under: maritime, Moby-Monday, new media, social media, storytelling | Tags: Ishmael, Meg Guroff, Moby-Dick, Nathaniel Philbrick, Thomas Watson, Twitter
First came Moby-Dick as a Twitter feed. Then came a newspaper piece that reimagined the novel as a series of tweets from its narrator, Ishmael: “We’re all having a ‘whale of a time’ here! (That’s right, I WENT THERE. Sue me!)”
Last week, Thomas Watson of New Orleans went all 2.0 on the concept with TweetMeIshmael, a Twitter feed in Ishmael’s 19th-century voice. Not only does this Ishmael note his key observations as tweets, but he responds in character to Twitter users who @reply to him (by typing “@TweetMeIshmael” at the beginning of a post). Here’s a convo about Chapter 16:
TweetMeIshmael Yojo, Q’s little black god, has tasked me with finding a whaleship. Three suitable ships in harbor: Devil-Dam, Tit-Bit, and Pequod.
jmsullivan @TweetMeIshmael Go with Tit-Bit! Tit-Bit! Come on, how can that not be a fun ship?
TweetMeIshmael Laughing aloud! RT @jmsullivan “Go with Tit-Bit! Tit-Bit! Come on, how can that not be a fun ship?”
TweetMeIshmael Learned a/b Pequod: owners (Peleg, Bildad); captain (pegleg Ahab)
jmsullivan @TweetMeIshmael Pretty sure those are names of Assyrian demons. Would be _very_ wary of this ship. Sounds ominous. What was wrong w Tit Bit?
TweetMeIshmael @jmsullivan Then Yojo shall have some company. re Tit-Bit: Its seaworthiness concerned me. What chance has a tit-bit against a spermaceti?
Watson, who is reading the book on his Blackberry, first thought of the feed as a way to take notes on author Herman Melville’s turns of phrase. Surprisingly, this will be his first time through the book—if he makes it through. Watson read part of the long, dense narrative during one summer vacation and always intended to finish, but it wasn’t until he picked up Nathaniel Philbrick’s nonfiction masterpiece In the Heart of the Sea recently that he felt ready. Philbrick’s gloss on the lives of Nantucket whalers “filled in a lot of the gaps I’d had,” Watson writes. “If I were a teacher, I’d make In the Heart of the Sea required reading before Moby-Dick.”
At press time, 30 Twitter users were following TweetMeIshmael. Watson plans to post at least one tweet for each of the book’s 135 chapters, though he may post more as time and inspiration allow. “If this little project helps me finish Moby-Dick, I’ll consider it a success,” he writes. “If a few dozen people enjoy Ishmael’s missives in their Twitter feed, so much the better!”
Margaret Guroff is editor and publisher of Power Moby-Dick. She tweets about artistic responses to Moby-Dick at twitter.com/powermobydick.
Filed under: maritime, Moby-Monday, new media | Tags: Call Me Ishmael, Dickmas, Meg Guroff, Patrick Shea
While you were doing whatever the heck you’ve been doing the past 10 months—working? watching pug videos on YouTube? who can remember?—Brooklyn sixth-grade teacher Patrick Shea has been cranking out whaling tunes. Specifically, he has been writing one song per week, each based on a chapter of Moby-Dick.
Shea—who is also the frontman for the pop band The New Fantastics—posts these songs to his blog, Call Me Ishmael. Last week he announced that the first 19 of them were available as a digital download. For just $5, you get the close vocal harmonies of “The Specksynder”; the counterintuitively danceable “The Lee Shore”; “The Counterpane” waltz; and many more. The perfect(ly affordable) gift for the music fan on your Dickmas* list!
Shea says he came up with the idea for the blog last summer, when his two vacation goals of reading Moby-Dick and writing one song per day eventually combined. He has posted 39 songs so far, which means that he ought to be done with the book’s 135 chapters (plus epilogue) in another couple of years. About the same amount of time, total, as your average 19th-century whaling expedition.
*August 1, Herman Melville’s birthday
Margaret Guroff is editor and publisher of Power Moby-Dick.
Filed under: maritime, Moby-Monday, new media, photography, social media, storytelling | Tags: LOLCats, LOLWhales, Margaret Guroff, Moby-Dick
Fans of LOLCats—the barely literate, photo-caption-writing felines of I Can Has Cheezburger—will enjoy a new edition of Moby-Dick compiled by blogger Debra at She Who Seeks. Using other people’s LOLCats images, Debra presents a clever four-panel version of the story. One quibble: the condensation omits the book’s cetology material completely. (Or maybe that’s a good thing?)
The Internet is surprisingly light on LOLWhales, but they do exist. Here’s one of a whale defying gravity—and apologizing for it. The spelling is particularly atrocious … but then, it’s not a sperm whale, so what do you expect?
Visitors to the Cheezburger site can upload images and write their own captions for free. Just an FYI, in case you have an LOLMobyDick inside you, dying to come out.
•••
Good work, Team Whale. After trailing Black Beauty during much of the 45-day polling period, Moby Dick surged ahead to win the Guardian (UK) online vote for “best performance by an animal” in a work of classic literature.
The final score was 35.2% for Moby Dick to 33.3% for Black Beauty, with Buck from The Call of the Wild, the bear from A Winter’s Tale, and Jip from David Copperfield trailing far behind. Victory is sweet!
Margaret Guroff is the editor and publisher of Power Moby-Dick.
You may think you don’t know anyone who needs a Moby Dick hat. But have you seen this Moby Dick hat? Hand crocheted by a teen crafter who sells her wares under the name WhatsEatinYou, the cap comes pre-harpooned for the wearer’s safety and convenience. I found it on Etsy.com, the online handcrafts superstore, a location packed with potential for Dickmas—the traditional Herman Melville’s birthday celebration on August 1—in case you aren’t yet finished with your shopping for this year.
Sadly, someone snapped up this cruelty-free “feltidermy” Moby Dick trophy head almost as soon as it was posted on Etsy by crafter girlsavage last week. But there are lots of other options. Who could resist a Moby-Dick GYOTAKU, a fish printed onto a page of everyone’s favorite metaphysical novel by artist Barry Singer? Or a stunning map of the voyage of the Pequod by printmaker Kathleen Piercefield—whose own website, by the way, offers a slew of other Moby Dick prints, including the haunting Pip: Alone. Have a look around; you might find the perfect item for your own Dickmas list.
Some commentators rue how commercialized Herman Melville’s birthday has become, but I personally prefer the gift exchange to earlier forms of observance, including the ritual donning of the cassock.
Happy shopping!
•••••
There are only four more days of voting left in the Guardian (UK) poll that pits Moby Dick (an asskicking sea monster) against Black Beauty (a talking horse). While the whale did pull ahead last month after we first mentioned the poll on Sea-Fever, he is currently once again losing to the horse by a hair—and whales don’t even have hair.
If you didn’t vote before, won’t you take a minute to put our boy over the top in this thing? Hint: your friends can vote, too.
Margaret Guroff is the editor and publisher of Power Moby-Dick.
Filed under: maritime, Moby-Monday, new media, storytelling | Tags: haiku, Moby-Dick
You might think nothing could be more antithetical to Herman Melville’s sprawling Moby-Dick than haiku, the compressed Japanese form that was the salvation of every “write a poem” assignment in school: five syllables, seven syllables, five syllables, and time for lunch. But where there’s an idea, there’s a haiku about it on the Internet.
In the case of the white whale, online haiku abound. Here’s one by Dan Higgins, a reader of the Albany (NY) Times Union newspaper:
Call me Ishmael
Then we will go whale hunting
‘Til the thing kills us.
A darker version showed up on muruch.com last week:
Call me Ishmael.
Ahab’s white whale heart of Hell.
Obsessed depths of death.
The king of Moby-Dick haiku, though, is Moby-Dick in Haiku, a hilarious 15-part retelling by the genius behind MadHaiku.com. Here’s chapter one:
Call me Ishmael
a white boy from Manhatto
I’m not really gay!
Noticing a pattern? There are other Moby-Dick haiku out there … and they all seem to start the same way. Do you think Melville wrote that famous first line in five syllables on purpose?
Margaret Guroff is editor and publisher of Power Moby-Dick.
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