Carnivalesque – Call Me Ishmael

When stripping a whale of its blubber, one of the ship’s harpooneers must go overboard to attend the finer points of the operation. Standing on a slippery whale’s back in rolling ocean waters is no easy (or safe) feat, especially with an ever-present swarm of sharks snapping at the carcass on which he stands. The […]

If you spend enough time with a book, you start to notice things that you would have no reason to notice on a first, or even second, read. These noticings tend to seem like deliberate inclusions by the storyteller, but also tend to have no clear purpose in the story itself. A professor of mine […]

Moby-Dick is in some ways like a bunch of smaller books — Ishmael’s Moody Journey of Discovery, A Pocket Guide to the Whale Fishery, A Treatise on Whiteness, Ishmael and Queequeg Find a Friend — all crammed together into one super awesome book. Unlike Infinite Jest-esque post-modern behemoths, these stories are much more compartmentalized than […]