My Moby-Dick Library Part IV

again- if you are starting here - go back to the first post entitled - "My Moby-Dick Library"

Hold the Presses!!! Alas our MD Library is not complete (of course in reality it will never be...) because I have unearthed a few more Melvillian texts.

you must be getting weary, dear reader, but let us finish this mental nourishment -

here are a few more I recommend -

Two year before the mast - this was published in the 1840's and Melville read, and most likely- borrowed, from it

this is another retelling of the wreck of the whaleship essex - this time from the youngest surviving member of the crew and a few others

Okay - I need to issue a Mea Culpa - I feel bad cause in a previous post I may have 'brushed off' this book but that wasn't fair - didn't mean to throw philbrook under the proverbial bus so I ran out and got a copy of this and damnit I'm gonna finish it :)

This is a really cool bio - especially the chapter entitled - "Infants, boys, and Men and Ifs eternally'

This is pretty academic but nice - especially as you trace the character of Pip back to 'the fool' in King Lear - I believe Melville made Pip much more regal than most scholars think - and Markels in this book makes a good case for the history of the intellect rather than the history of time -- Borges is smiling somewhere...

The Errant Art of Moby-Dick
A quote from the back cover of this sums up the content and the mode of its delivery -"Combining Heideggerian ontology with a sociopolitical perspective derived primarily from Foucault, blah blah blah'
This book is like grad school homework from hell but you'll be smarter for attempting it - I do recommend reading this even tho the book has the pomposity to begin with a quote from that other gas-bag of a novel -"Gravity's rainbow' - oh, wait, am i now throwing Pynchon under the bus? U bet and don't get me started on Davy Wallace, gas-bag extraordinaire.

This is a cool book about Twain - echoing the scholars of MD who posit that Ahab and ishmael may have been black or mixed as well - I believe Melville invoked a bit more humanity in his black characters than Twain did and this book may (a wee bit) come across as an apologist text for him but it is interesting enough to read.

Monsieur Melville -by Victor-Levy Beaulieu

This is pretty fascinating  - Embarrassingly enough, I admit I bought it at a used bookstore thinking it was a biography of Melville and even made it a bit through it before realizing it was a novel - Strange text showing the author's passion for MD and HM - part bio -part history- part criticism - part psuedo-reality---- it is one of a kind. Full disclosure - the author has a checkered public past of saying dumb things about race and nationalism but his story is unique and his apparent love of his home of quebec comes through.

This set is in three volumes and holds a trove of pictures, art, and history that is lacking in many other actual literary histories. Coming in around 650 pages in total, it is a book much longer than the book it is about - Now that is Love! - JTM