Great Yarns Spoilt

[El Capitán]

Do you ever try to smoke one o your Gandolf staffs like a cigar?

Don't tempt me to into making a giant pipe. Put a whole jar in there lol.

 

[Richmond B. Funkenhouser]

Don't tempt me to into making a giant pipe. Put a whole jar in there lol.

Do it!

 

[PoplarWight]

Books aside.
Man, they just don't make professions like whaling anymore.

Sailing out to the middle of literal nowhere, to get in a tiny clinker-built whaleboat with the fellas, and attempting to poke a leviathan (that could kill you with one tail swipe) to death with some sticks.

 

[edger]

I agree with you... I teach Economics & Political Science in high school and think all the English teachers are nuts. Of course, all the teachers think I'm nuts.

They probably think the great Thomas Sowell is nuts too, the ejits!

 

[edger]

I'm reading Moby Dick for . . . the fifth time maybe. I remember thoroughly enjoying it the first time read it in the eighth or maybe ninth grade. It was a fascinating tale for required reading. Then my teacher ruined it for me for years. She insisted on dissecting it and finding all sorts of nonsensical meanings in the words. I wonder what it is about great, enjoyable yarns that drives teachers and critics to destroy an author's work and take the joy from it?

Just an idle thought.

Damn! And I thought she’d have been chuffed that Ishmael had to sleep with Queequeg.

 

[edger]

Ahh, and here we see a thread heading right into the ditch.

And that ditch is probably full of dead white male corpses that academe autopsied with a grapefruit knife.

 

[mso489]

I read Moby Dick once or twice in school. I didn't mind the academic interpretion. The non-fiction about the whaling industry in the Nineteenth Century was fascinating enough to carry the day for my reading. But then I read it later on my own, and it was a whole new book. I had no recollection of the humor. Melville is wry and droll and almost Monty Python in places. That I had missed that on the first readings seemed unlikely, but it was true. The allegorical dimensions are still there, but so is the schtick.

At the time, when Melville was at sea, big whaling was like big oil today, a cut-throat corporate money maker that was a huge revenue stream that used people up relentlessly.