Whales and Wiener Dogs

The Voyage Of The Pequod

…if you’re planning to do exactly what I’m doing while you’re there:

1. Arrive in time to see some people read some Moby Dick, then
2. Check out the New Bedford Whaling Museum
3. Visit the Seamen’s Bethel
4. Late lunch/early dinner at Antonio’s
5. Pre-reading libations and perhaps some playoff tackle football (somewhere near the whaling museum…there’s this place we went last year, but I can’t recall what it’s called).
6. Read at the Moby Dick-A-Thon (830PM)
7. Dinner at No Problemo
8. Watch the Capital Radio rock show at No Problemo (around 11PM).
9. Mohegan Sun

Right down there is where the Moby Dick-a-thon will take place

The 14th annual Moby Dick Marathon - a 25 hour non-stop reading of Melville’s novel by over 150 people - gets started at noon this Saturday at the New Bedford Whaling Museum.

Robert “Bo” William (frequent WAWD reader and commenter) and myself will be reading at 8:30 PM and 8:40 PM Saturday evening. By our best estimates, we should be jumping in somewhere around “The Whiteness of the Whale.”

If you’re planning a trip to New Bedford, please read the WAWD New Bedford Travelog. (I hope the parking is still free on the weekends).

The private library of some gentleman named William E. Self (“Important English And American Literature”) was recently auctioned off at Christie’s.

The highlights were items from Self’s (nearly positive we’re not talking about the basketball coach here) Poe (cue Troy McClure “One of our greatest writers.”) collection: $362,500 for an autographed manuscript of two poems, $662,500 for Tamerlane and Other Poems (”FIRST EDITION OF POE’S LEGENDARY FIRST BOOK: THE MOST CELEBRATED RARITY IN AMERICAN LITERATURE. ONE OF ONLY TWELVE COPIES KNOWN, AND ONLY ONE OF TWO IN PRIVATE HANDS.”), and $830,500 for Autograph manuscript verses, the first 8 stanzas (of 16) of “For Annie (”Thank Heaven: the crisis — the danger is past….”)

But I’m sure you’re like me, and you’re probably thinking. “Poe was a drunk. What about my man Herman Melville.” Funny you should ask.

A first edition copy of the English edition, published a month before the American version, and 35 passages smaller, fetched $43,750.

First Edition English copy of Moby Dick by Herman Melville

A first edition American copy was auctioned for $32,500

First Edition American copy of Moby Dick by Herman Melville

It Was Now Clear Sunrise by Matt Kish

The above drawing is for page 97. Check out all the “One Drawing For Every Page of Moby Dick” art here.

Hofstra University prof, Dr. John Bryant, has received a $175,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to launch the Melville Electronic Library (MEL) - a virtual place where “scholars, critics, students, and general readers, will have unprecedented access to a searchable collection of interlinked versions of Melville’s manuscripts, print texts, sources, art works, and other research and secondary materials.”

The entire project will supposedly take FIFTEEN YEARS. Seriously, though, in 15 years I hope we’ve got something like a million times better than the current internet. I wanna be hunting virtual f’ing whales with virtual Herman Melville and landing in Tahiti with Bligh and Spencer Christian (NOT to steal breadfruit trees).

Anyways, Dr. Bryant “is one of the world’s foremost experts on Herman Melville.” He’s also a proponent of something he calls “fluid texts” - “which will enable users to compare varying manuscript stages and published versions of Melville’s writings.” E-technology will best make this dream a reality.

Within two years, though, Moby Dick, Billy Budd, and Battle-Pieces will be available via MEL.

Sorry, “performed” by Burt Reynolds.

Moby Dick read by Burt Reynolds.

Yes, Burt f’in Reynolds

Burt F'in Reynolds

Burt Reynolds!

New York City’s Fred Benenson has recently launched/announced the Emoji Dick project on Kick Starter.

All 6,438 sentences of Moby Dick will be translated to Japanese Emoji.

According to Benenson, here’s how it’s gonna work:

Each of Moby Dick’s 6,438 sentences will be translated 3 times by different Amazon Mechanical Turk workers. Those results will then be voted on by another set of workers, and the most popular version of each sentence will be selected for inclusion in the book.

At the Emoji Dick web sheet, you can make donations to help get the project done (as of right now, he’s got $681 of the $3,500 needed). 5 bucks gets you the raw assets and a PDF. $200 gets you a signed, limited-edition hard cover. And there are many options in between.

Here’s a couple examples of what the work will/might look like:

For more info, check out the web sheet that features a video about the project.

Looks like a cool project. WAWD will be making a contribution.

Mex!

Back in the day, reading Moby Dick was probably the last thing Keith Hernandez would have done with a woman, but according to this long-ish, sort of boring feature on Keith in Newsday, Keith Hernandez would now read Moby Dick with a woman. According to the story:

Hernandez removed the copy of Moby-Dick from his collection and announced one of his offseason plans: Joining Kai in reading the book.

Aloud.

Whale by Tristan Lowe

Available for your view pleasure through “the summer” at the Philadelphia Fabric Workshop And Museum. 52 feet of felt covered inflatable whale.

The whale is called Mocha Dick after the supposedly-real whale that inspired Moby Dick.

And the version he has, has 552 pages in it. I’m no arithmetician, but that’s 552 original drawings. He’s up to about page 25. We’ll see…but so far, so good.

Page 1: Call Me Ishmael

From the first blog post, Matt says: “Because I honestly consider Moby-Dick to be the greatest novel ever written, I am now going to create one illustration for every single one of the 552 pages in the Signet Classic paperback edition. I’l try to do one a day, but we’ll see.”

Good luck. I can’t think of a more worthwhile endeavor.