Just one more thing...

I had to share with all of you an article that appeared in the New York Times Book Review last Sunday, September 8:

Goodness: Altruism and the Literary Imagination

by none other than Toni Morrison.  It's a lecture she gave at Harvard at 2012 which has a remarkable degree of bearing on this year's Big Book Challenge.  She lays out a connection between The Bluest Eye and Moby Dick that hadn't occurred to me.  More food for thought!

Notes from Final Discussions

I can see why this book wasn't a great seller - he's a brilliant writer, witty, and perceptive, but... -I'm surprised that this is the great American novel

It's a volume that's representative of all types of literature - in an era when you didn't have many books, you would want something like this

What could you take out? - the phonology of a whale's head, and the descriptions of all types of whales

Others loved it:  "I copied down many of his phrases..."

A lot of his thoughts were modern about religion and respecting all, about relating all colors with one another

The boat was the defining character- you don't know any of the characters that deeply, so the emotional impact of their deaths is muted

Possibly Pip had a brain injury from the near drowning- and that's why he went mad

It seemed like Pip was Ahab's boy toy

It's American because of the melting pot of people - resourcefulness of the crew members - what's American in 1851 is not American today

"When I read a novel I create a movie in my head and this time I couldn't create a movie"

a reader recommends Melville's The Confidence Man

So claustrophobic, it was a relief when they met up with other ships (gams)

A great visual - when the three masts catch fire and become candles - don't know what it means - can it be taken literally?

Did Melville keep a journal while at sea?  Apparently he differed from Thoreau and Hawthorne and Emerson in that he didn't keep a record of his daily thoughts

A reader suggested In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick, about the Essex

Relationship to Macbeth - he has an obsession about keeping his throne and power

Ahab is infectious - the community is affected by him - it's very complex

What's the connection with King Lear? Christopher Buckley (author of the afterword) refers to this - hard to see. Lear is crazy but he is taken advantage of by two of his daughters - who takes advantage of Ahab?

Should Melville refer to Ahab as an old man?  He was obviously still very vigorous

What does Melville mean when he says he's written a wicked book?  What's wicked?  Buckley says Moby Dick was a 'smackdown of the deity' - is that true?

Connection to Jaws - on the Enderby Ahab and the other captain share their wound stories, like Richard Dreyfus and Robert Shaw in Jaws

Leviathan - from the Bible - Psalm104, verse 26 - also Hobbes' Leviathan,the powerful state with the monopoly on violence

Discussion of the word 'ineffable' - Morrison used the word in her Nobel acceptance speech

Why is Moby Dick a great American novel - how does it compare to Huck Finn?  you have the pairings: Huck and Jim, Ahab and Pip, Ishmael and Queequeg

What is American?  individualism?  Buckley says Ishmael is a nomad and wanderer, the ideal American type - accurate?  what about religiosity?

You can feel Melville struggling

Does the novel have a clear point of view about free will and predestination? Ahab believes in predestination

Material making up Ahab's leg - first whale bone,then wood from one of the destroyed boats - definite foreshadowing

Congratulations!

...to all of our Big Book(s) Challenge finishers, and especially to our two 'big prize' winners: Linda Small and Elizabeth Grant!  Both Linda and Elizabeth, and several other participants, can boast the impressive achievement of completing every single book in the history of the Big Book Challenge from 2011-2019!

Consider what a great achievement this is:

2011 

2012 

2013 

2014 

2015 

2016 

2017

2017 

2018 

2019 

2019 

Thanks to Paul for reminding us of this July 2019 New Yorker article, "Herman Melville at Home" about this year's big book author.  The New Yorker can be found at the Library or through or eMagazine collection, located here (also linked to our homepage).

 

A waxy substance that originates as a secretion in whale intestines...

I'm talking about ambergris, of course.  At the end of chapter 91 when Stubb sort of cons the French ship out of their whale carcass, he mines the ambergris which is used to make perfumes.  My first thought was, "Is this for real?" When I looked this up online, it was commonly referred to as "whale vomit."  Which made me very interested to get a look.  Here are some pictures that I found:  

So yes, it is for real and still valuable. 

Help with Terminology

Please let us know if these are at all helpful!

From: Whaling Tools / National Geographic

From: The Essex, columbia.edu

From: Power Moby Dick, the Online Annotation - http://www.powermobydick.com/Moby143.html

And in Other News...

From the Washington Post

Thanks to your fellow reader Tom for sharing this terrific photo and article!  True, it's a humpback, but still...

Listen to this PRI story on Moby-Dick

American Icons

American Icons: ‘Moby-Dick’

Studio 360

August 01, 2019 · 4:00 PM EDT

Producer Julie Burstein

Producer Kerrie Hillman

Article on Toni Morrison by Washington University Professor (and Big Book Summer Read scholar and participant) Dr Rafia Zafar

How Toni Morrison Changed Fiction.

Toni Morrison, 1931 - 2019

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

The New York Times

The Wall Street Journal

CNN

The Times of India

Le Monde (Paris)

Berliner Zeitung

The Times (London)

China Daily News

The Japan Times

Egypt Today

SABC News (South Africa)

Buenos Aires News

Happy (belated) 200th, Mr. Melville!

It's true that the 200th anniversary of the birth of Herman Melville was Thursday, August 1, but it's always a good day to celebrate our Moby Dick author.  If you're out of cake, take a few minutes to read two very worthwhile articles published this week:

• Philip Hoare of The Guardian writes that our summer challenge title is the "Mt. Everest of literature" and goes on to explain why it's a mountain worth climbing in Subversive, Queer and Terrifyingly Relevant: Six Reasons Why Moby-Dick Is the Novel for Our Times

• Gabrielle Bellot of Literary Hub gives voice to the difficulties in coming to terms with the motifs of blackness and whiteness we discussed last week in The Literal (and Figurative) Whiteness of Moby Dick

As always, we'd love to read your comments below.

Notes from July Moby Dick Discussions

From the Gallery of Condor Artworks

Stubbs' pipe is like a blowhole

Ishamel and Queequeg  - their intimacy - today the entire focus would be on whether they were gay - in the novel  it's just companionship

Ishmael has no idea what he's getting into

Ishmael - is he always the narrator, or is it occasionally a 3d person omniscient - Ishmael seems to fade away as novel proceeds

The novel is more like a giant magazine

Fedallah - he and the others are called yellow - stereotypical - why did ahab need to hide them?   he needs to have his own men who can go down with him into the fourth boat - the captain is not supposed to go down in the 4th boat, and if Peleg and Bildad had known about Fedallah and the others, they would have realized that Ahab was more interested in Moby Dick than in making money

in the Turner painting - what do the white and the dark mean? Is the white sail safe or dangerous?  The mist is also white and it is dangerous

I liked Ishmael's philosophy about religion - he is open

I thought I would like reading this novel- the basic story is really good, I am skimming the biology, the other stuff - now I think I must have read excerpts in high school, and it left a positive impression on me -now it's different

movie will be like the readers digest condensed version

my brother and his buddies think it's an ode or a paean to homosexuality

There's not a lot of dialogue

For me the fun is in the details - I like history, I love the descriptions,the footnotes (reading a different edition)

It's archaeology, marine biology, all in one

I love the words in here that you don't hear much, such as ineffable

the Extracts (at the beginning):  'this story is bigger than the story'

Is the whaling industry like the Pony Express?   it's a place where a man can be a man and it's dying out - railroads are replacing canals, kerosene is replacing sperm oil

"cetology" chapter - disappointing for me

Melville didn't have that much formal education - it's amazing that he produced this

Chapter 2 - Ishmael peeks into the black church, and backs out quickly; Melville is presenting an exotic, melting pot town

Chapter 42 - even though we want to use whiteness to point to virtue, we're afraid of it - it makes me think of HP Lovecraft, the terror of the chaotic miasma

Or, maybe he's trying to say that color doesn't really mean anything - he says yellow is the color of the sun and cowardice - maybe it means nothing

No sympathetic portrayal of the whale - very different from today

Ahab - what was he like before his encounter with Moby Dick?  Was he better?  Did this bring out the worst in him? - he is a 'swearing good man' - "it's better to sail with a moody good captain than a laughing bad one" - Ishmael says he never saw Ahab on his knees (does that mean he is irreligious?)

Ahab passes the goblet of whiskey and they all drink - is this like communion?

What about the scar on Ahab's face? - a long white streak down the side of his face - is it in fact a scar or a birthmark?

What does Melville feel for Ahab?  -in general, he describes characters as being interesting rather than good or bad

It is hard to get a read on Melville -what is he really thinking

Has great skill in this slow build of tension, adding layers and layers - the world gets bigger, more complex as you go - the fact that Ishmael sees Fedallah and the others before boarding the ship, many pages before we see them again - lots of layering and anticipation

'monomaniacal' and 'phantom' are words that appear frequently - is the universe a phantom-like - thing?

Everyone is confined by a rope - we're all holding on to it - is this a statement about free will? - end of chapter 60

Melville is mythologizing the whaling industry as it fades away

Why does Ahab keep Fedallah and company hidden so long? is there something especially nefarious about them?

It says Ahab is an Egyptian - is that literal, or does it mean he's pharaoh-like?

Queequeg's mark is the infinity symbol - that means something, but what?  does Queequeg have connections to the infinite?

Melville says the novel is a draft of a draft

Everyone is struggling with themselves and others in the whole book

Reading this book is like the white whale

Melville and the (American) English Language

One of the many thrills in reading Moby Dick is the opportunity to broaden one's vocabulary.  If, like me, you don't know a boatswain from a bowsprit, you might take a look at the Whale Words Dictionary, offered by the Whale Release & Strandings Organization of Newfoundland and Labrador.  I was happy to read there that a 'melon' is:

the bulbous forehead of Odontoceti cetaceans, which contains oil and is thought to be involved in sound projection

Even more fun, to me, was an article published a few years ago in The Week which listed Melville's contributions to the Oxford English Dictionary, including words which first appeared in print in Moby Dick, such as:

cetology

"Therefore you must not, in every case at least, take the higgledy-piggledy whale statements, however authentic, in these extracts, for veritable gospel cetology."

Moby Dick, 1851

Cetology is that branch of zoology which studies cetaceous animals such as whales, porpoises, and dolphins. The word cetology comes from the Latin cetus, "any large sea creature," which comes from the Greek ketos, "a whale, a sea monster."

Cholo

"It was in the midst of this repose, that Archy, one of the cordon, whose post was near the after-hatches, whispered to his neighbor, a Cholo, the words above."

Moby Dick, 1851

That's right, Herman Melville was the first, on record at least, to use Cholo in English. However, he doesn't use it with the sense of a derogatory term for someone perceived to be a lower-class Mexican, or a Mexican or Latino gang member, but to refer to "an Indian or mixed-race person of Latin America." This sense of cholo might come from the Nahuatl xolotl, "dog, mutt."

curio

"But be easy, be easy, this here harpooneer I have been tellin' you of has just arrived from the south seas, where he bought up a lot of ‘balmed New Zealand heads (great curios, you know), and he's sold all on 'em but one."

Moby Dick, 1851

A curio is an unusual or odd piece of art or bric-a-brac, and is short for "curiosity." Bric-a-brac are "small, usually ornamental objects valued for their antiquity, rarity, originality, or sentimental associations." The word comes from the French bric-à-brac, "expressive of confusion."

czarship

"It is a witchery of social czarship which there is no withstanding."

Moby Dick, 1851

The word czar is, of course, Russian in origin, but ultimately comes from the Latin Caesar, "Emperor." The title czar was first adopted by the Russian emperor Ivan IV in 1547.

The figurative meaning of "person with dictatorial powers" is from 1866, says the Online Etymology Dictionary, and initially referred to President Andrew Johnson.

plum-puddinger

"After listening to these plum-puddingers till nearly eleven o'clock, I went up stairs to go to bed."

Moby Dick, 1851

Plum-puddinger refers to either a whaling ship that goes out on short voyages or a crew member on such a ship. While Melville's is the earliest recorded use of this term, we assume it was common in nautical vernacular before then.

The plum-puddinger is so called because "because the crew has fresh provisions and an abundant supply of plum-pudding," a staple apparently for 19th-century shipmen.

slobgollion

"It is called slobgollion; an appellation original with the whalemen, and even so is the nature of the substance."

Moby Dick, 1851

Slobgollion is whaling slang for a substance found in sperm whale oil, says the OED. In Moby Dick, Melville describes such a substance as "an ineffably oozy, stringy affair," which is obtained "after a prolonged squeezing, and subsequent decanting."

While the origin of slobgollion is unknown, earlier meanings of slob include mud or slime, while the second part of the word could be influenced by gullion, a mean and worthless wretch, or gollin, a kind of fish.

A variation is slumgullion, which in addition to fish offal refers to a cheap and watery drink — first used by Mark Twain in Roughing It — as well as a kind of thin stew.

I challenge you to use 'slobgollion' in a sentence!

Database Joy!

I realize this may not be everyone's cup of tea, but I was excited to discover the Whaling History website, a collaboration between Mystic Seaport Museum and New Bedford Whaling Museum.  The site contains databases of information on American, British, and French offshore whaling expeditions. 

In the American database, I typed the search term 'Essex' and found a list of all the whaling voyages made by a ship of that name.  Scanning the dates, I was able to locate the entry for the voyage of THE Essex, the one sunk by a whale, whose famous story is said to have influenced Melville in writing Moby Dick. 

Here's a glimpse of the database entry for that voyage:

"Stove by a whale and sunk, Nov, 1820" - wow!  The thrill of information!

"Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am" is playing at Plaza Frontenac

https://www.landmarktheatres.com/st-louis/film-info/toni-morrison-the-pieces-i-am

Morrison writes of Melville

Here are some of Toni Morrison’s thoughts on blackness in 19^th century American literature that may inform our upcoming reading of Moby Dick:

“It only seems that the canon of American literature is “naturally” or “inevitably” white…Perhaps some of these [19^th century white American] writers have much more to say than has been realized.  Perhaps some were not so much transcending politics, or escaping blackness, as they were transforming it into intelligible, accessible, yet artistic modes of discourse.  The reexamination of founding literature of the United States for the unspeakable unspoken may reveal those texts to have deeper and other meaning, deeper and other power, deeper and other significances.  One such writer, in particular, it has been almost impossible to keep under lock and key is Herman Melville.”

“…if the white whale is the ideology of race, what Ahab has lost to it is personal dismemberment and family and society and his own place as a human in the world.  The trauma of racism is, for the racist and the victim, the severe fragmentation of the self, and has always seemed to me a cause (not a symptom) of psychosis…”

“I would not like to be understood to argue that Melville was engaged in…simpleminded black/white didacticism, or that he was satanizing white people…What I am suggesting is that he was overwhelmed by the philosophical and metaphysical inconsistencies of an extraordinary and unprecedented idea that had its fullest manifestation in his own time in his own country, and that that idea was the successful assertion of whiteness as ideology.”

Morrison, Toni. The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations. Alfred A. Knopf., 2019.

The Bluest Eye discussions

We had a great first round of discussions.  Here are my notes, very loosely organized.  Please comment and add your own thoughts!

Reactions?

Beautiful

Painful

Compelling

Great social observations of class

Who is the main character?

No way that Pecola could narrate her own story

Ensemble piece rather than Pecola as a main character

Other characters flush out the picture of Pecola - the layers build

Do we accept that Pecola is the main character?  We get to know the other characters
because of her 

The novel opens and closes with her - Morrison has provided these other people
to tell her story so that you can see how inevitable her undoing is

Not so sure that there needs to be one main character - the contrast
between Claudia and Pecola is the main thing - she and her sister learn from
Pecola’s experience

Pecola is the main character in that everybody needed her to feel better,
either sexually, or socially or whatever

Maureen Peal

Maureen Peal is an excellent composite of a certain type of person in the black community

How could Maureen be so hateful?

Maureen has the manipulative power and cruelty of an adult, or worse

Soaphead Church

Let’s talk about Soaphead Church - it seemed like he came out of the
blue- he is only alluded to - when Henry abuses Frieda, Claudia asks if he did it like
Soaphead -a foreshadowing   

Why is Soaphead Church in the book?  He’s obviously gay and
doesn’t know what to do with it.  - he’s a vehicle for Pecola’s undoing -
if you accept that Pecola is the main character,then his main role is to push
Pecola over the edge

Pecola is a thing for Soaphead - the only things he connects with are things -
he makes a thing, an instrument of Pecola

Soaphead misquotes the Bible 

Soaphead is seen by the town’s women as untouchable

Soaphead goes further than Job in chastising God - he takes God’s role

Cholly

How should we feel about Cholly

Everyone accepts that Aunt Jimmy died from peach cobbler

Morrison’s description of the old women at Chollly’s aunt’s funeral
almost sounds Buddhist - freedom from striving, fear of pain

Can Cholly be forgiven?

The line after the rape - the only sound she makes is the air coming out of a balloon

Claudia and Frieda

There were no black dolls when I was growing up - a lack of positive images
for African American women

Claudia has conscious disdain for the standards

Difference between poverty and less poverty

Some groups need to feel that there is something lesser than they -
even though Claudia and Frieda care, they liked knowing that Pecola is beneath them

But - only Claudia and Frieda wanted someone to want the baby to live -
they plant the seeds, have more compassion

But - did they want the baby to live so that the cycle of having someone
below them could continue?

Dick and Jane

The Dick and Jane text - sentences collapsed because children couldn’t
make any sense of Dick and Jane

A falling apart of meaning - or is it a taunt

The jammed together words are like a droning that races through her brain

In the 60s the spell was beginning to be broken

Pecola

Where does it actually say the Breedloves are ugly - page 38

Reader sees ugliness as inferior

Pecola is flower that’s a weed

The Bluest Eye

Picture of a couple of places and times

The Bluest Eye has the makings of several books

She put everything into this one first book, it in fact has the makings of several novels

The gorgeous language stands out

Could be the story of many different marginalized peoples

Morrison: beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something
one could do - does this mean ‘beauty is as beauty does’

Idea for the blue eyes comes from: the blue-eyed little girl Pauline
takes care of, Shirley Temple, her mother’s standards of beauty

Is the bluest eye anything that makes us feel more accepted? It could be
any other thing - what is your personal bluest eye?  

You can make a god of anything

Lots of talk about eyes and being seen and not being seen - p 48- shopkeeper
doesn’t see Pecola because for him there is nothing to see

Other topics

Why the sequence of the seasons - beginning with the autumn

The school year?

Seasons may refer to an agricultural year - Pecola has her first period
in the beginning, is impregnated, but it’s all wrong

The prostitutes are good, the preachers are bad

At one time the St. Louis department stores would only hire light-skinned black employees

One reader identifies with the candy store scene - she has had similar experiences

This book has been in the top ten most banned books list several times in recent years

Some wonder whether today’s generation is more obsessed with
material possessions than color

Thursday discussion of "The Bluest Eye"

Some of the things we discussed during the second (Thursday) meeting:

Sense of a class divide as well as race-with Geraldine, her son, Louis Junior, and Maureen Peal, along with the white characters, the Fishers and Mr. Yacobowski, all of whom look down on the rest of the characters.

The MacTeers, Frieda and Claudia and their parents, who are mostly invisible, but obviously pretty good parents
Pecola is invisible and has no sense of self, everyone else sees her as ugly and she is willing to accept the role

Recommended reads from members of the group:
Fire Shut Up in My Bones by Charles Blow
Well Read Black Girl by Glory Edim, ed.

Other key moments we discussed:
Soaphead Church and his damaged self, damaging others.
Cholly, Pecola's horrible father, experiencing first sexual experience when forced into rape.

Dick and Jane portions at the start of the chapters, with normal spacing at first and then eventually running together, showing disintegration, this is the way the world is supposed to be. Reading Dick and Jane as  a taunt.

China, Poland, and Miss Marie (the Maginot Line), in many ways the happiest and most (maybe) well adjusted characters (most honest?) in the book

Wednesday night:

Not So Much Fun with Dick and Jane

By the time Morrison was writing The Bluest Eye in the mid-60s, Dick and Jane had been under criticism for years.  But Pecola, whose story is set around 1940, would have experienced the readers at the height of their popularity.  It is estimated that by the early 1950s some 80% of American school children had been introduced to the book series.

From our vantage point, it's easy to see what's problematic about these characters:

"Dick and Jane live in a suburban house surrounded by a white picket fence. Mother cheerfully does the housework. Father wears a suit to work and on weekends mows the grass and washes the car. Dick, the oldest of three, is well behaved and always in motion: bicycle-riding, kite-flying or playing fetch with Spot. His sister Jane is pretty and lighthearted and helps care for their baby sister, Sally, while never upstaging her brother. Illustrators chose her stylish and frilly wardrobe, updated about once every five years, from the catalogues of Sears, Roebuck & Company and Montgomery Ward." 
(Gabriel, Trip. “`Oh, Jane, See How Popular We Are.’.” New York Times, vol. 146, no. 50569, 3 Oct. 1996, p. C1.)

More about Dick and Jane can be found at this blog.  

For next week's discussion, or for commenting below, I'm wondering:

• How do you feel about Morrison's use of Dick and Jane as a frame to the novel?  Is it effective?
• If you used the Dick and Jane series as a student, what are your memories?  
• What are your experiences finding reading materials for children in your lives?  Do you visit children's libraries or bookstores often?  How difficult is it for you to find materials that you believe are meaningful for your child?

Why Black Dolls Matter

"The big, the special, the loving gift was always a big, blue-eyed Baby Doll. From the clucking sounds of adults I knew that the doll represented what they thought was my fondest wish. ... Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs—all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured. 'Here,' they said, 'this is beautiful, and if you are on this day "worthy" you may have it."

In this passage from The Bluest Eye, young Claudia spells out why Pecola Breedlove so desperately desires blue eyes — because blue eyes, white skin, and blond hair represent the pinnacle of beauty, at least according to popular culture.

Researchers have been studying representation in dolls for ages. In 1947, Kenneth and Mamie Clark published this study, asking young African American children to pick out dolls that represent themselves, as well as to pick out dolls that they consider good and bad and that they'd most like to play with. Considered a landmark study, the findings reveal that a majority of the children associate white dolls with "good," black dolls with "bad," and continue to explain that, when asked to pick out the doll that closest represents themselves, several children broke down crying and would not choose.

There have been more black and brown dolls created and sold in the intervening years — I fondly remember cuddling with my black Cabbage Patch Kid, Vivian, and dressing up Whitney, my black Barbie doll, while my daughter has Doc McStuffins toys that she plays with. Even Disney is making strides toward diversity, introducing Tiana from The Princess and the Frog, Moana, Mulan, and Jasmine from Aladdin. But still, newer versions of the Clark study reveal the same results — both black and white children prefer white dolls to black ones, showing that systemic racism starts early.

Check out this blog post for a really great first-person account of why having dolls that look like you matters. As the author says, "All it takes is for one small thought like 'black dolls are stupid compared to white dolls' or “Superman isn’t Mexican” and little by little, you’ll start to pick apart certain things and relate them back to you."

And for those of us who are not people of color, this blog post offers an excellent reason why we not only need to make sure our kids have toys representing a variety of races and cultures, but also by supporting that with experiences and discussion.