Posts Tagged ‘Moby-Dick’
The High(est) Ground…
Because one never knows when one will need to know: The List of Lists of Lists.
[TotH to Pop Loser]
(Readers may also enjoy Third Coast‘s wonderful radio special “The List Show.”)
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As we scrawl scintillating series, we might send carefully-lined birthday greetings to Herman Melville; he was born on this date in 1819. The author of Moby Dick (along with other novels, short stores, and essays) was a fan of an altogether different kind of listing:
I am sick of these terra firma toils and cares; sick of the dust and reek of towns. Let me hear the clatter of hailstones on icebergs, and not the dull tramp of these plodders, plodding their dull way from their cradles to their graves. Let me snuff thee up, sea-breeze! and whinny in thy spray. Forbid it, sea-gods! intercede for me with Neptune, O sweet Amphitrite, that no dull clod may fall on my coffin! Be mine the tomb that swallowed up Pharaoh and all his hosts; let me lie down with Drake, where he sleeps in the sea.
– White Jacket (1850)
Getting the picture…
“AmStar 7,” by Wollex
Your correspondent makes lots of use of Wikimedia Commons, “a database of 8,052,028 [as of January 2, 2011] freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute.” Most (Roughly) Daily use is in the almanac section, memorializing each date’s honoree. But the Commons contains a wealth of other, less archival photos as well…
“The Commons Picture of the Year is a competition that was first run in 2006. It aims to identify the best freely-licensed images from those that during the year have been awarded Featured picture status.”
See the photo above, and 2010’s 22 other winners at Web Urbanist.
As we adjust out f-stops, we might recall that it was on this date in 1841 that Herman Melville shipped out to the South Seas on the whaler Acushnet. The ship anchored near Tahiti, where Melville was jailed for his part in a mutiny; he escaped, and wandered around the South Sea islands for two years. In 1846, he published his first novel, Typee, based on his Polynesian adventures. His second book, Omoo (1847), also dealt with the region. Those two novels were popular successes, but his third, Mardi (1849), more experimental in nature, failed to catch on with the public. In 1851, Harper & Brothers published Moby-Dick— at first another flop… it wasn’t recognized as the classic it’s become for many years.
The Acushnet, hunting (source: Columbia University)
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