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.

According to this web sheet, that new Moby Dick movie being shot in Canada and Malta has a budget of 25.5 million dollars and will feature Ethan Hawke and William Hurt. And it will be written by Nigel Williams who wrote Elizabeth I for HBO.

Ethan Hawke will play Starbuck and William Hurt will play Ahab.

Ethan Hawke will play Starbuck

William Hurt will play Ahab

Honestly, I’m sort of feeling Ethan Hawke as Starbuck, but I’m not sold on Hurt as Ahab.

On a side note, several years back, this guy I know was looking for a restaurant called Veritas in NYC and he was sort of drunk so he thought it would be funny to ask this couple that was sucking face sort of off in an alley if they knew where it was - and it was Ethan Hawke and Angelina Jolie. He claims it’s true. Me, however, I can only claim that I heard it claimed by a drunk guy. Therefore, probably not true.

And this other time I sat next to him and Uma at this Mexican restaurant over on the West side and one of their kids was sort of annoying. That’s true, as long as you trust my definition of annoying.

William Hurt…I got nothing.

According to their Web Sheet:

Moby-Dick is the second show in a trilogy of Wattis Institute exhibitions that are based on canonical American novels. The first, The Wizard of Oz, was presented in fall 2008; the third will be The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in fall 2010. All three stories have major themes related to exploration and (self-)discovery, and the corresponding exhibitions function as metaphorical journeys through which the audience experiences various notions of America’s reality, both contemporary and historic. Established and emerging contemporary artists from around the world are invited to address the key themes of the books and the historical moments in which they were written. Many of the artists create new commissions specifically for the shows.

This investigation of America and its realities through the lens of literature by means of artworks, artifacts, and historical documents is unique to the Wattis Institute. Moby-Dick will encompass a wide range of works, including sculpture, film, video, drawing, and photography.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:

Kenneth Anger, Matthew Benedict, Mark Bradford, Marcel Broodthaers, Angela Bulloch, Tom Burr, Tacita Dean, Marcel Dzama, Ellen Gallagher and Edgar Cleijne, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Rodney Graham, John Gutmann, Susan Hiller, Evan Holloway, Peter Hutton, Colter Jacobsen, Brian Jungen, Buster Keaton, Rockwell Kent, Mateo Lopez, Jorge Macchi, Kris Martin, Henrik Olesen, Paulina Olowska, Damián Ortega, Jean Painlevé, Kirsten Pieroth, Richard Serra, Andreas Slominski, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Adrián Villar Rojas, Orson Welles

I think I’ve heard of Orson Welles! (I mean, he’s no Bill Shatner, but…)

Sounds pretty cool. If I’m out that way, I’ll check it out. Runs 9/22 - 12/12.