Opening Day of Baseball

It's that Second Christmas for America - Our national Pastime Kicks off today and I'm watching the motor city kitties taking on Herman Melville's favorite team - the NYYankees. The yankees perhaps are the leviathan of the diamond deep, looming beneath the azure waves of the American League perhaps (to borrow from Verne) 20,000 Leagues under the sea swimming from seashore to seashore and town to town. LO, the feared Pinstripes breach, Harken the chase, Rig, a dig, dig, dig, Huzza!

Now, Moby-Dick and Melville fans may take umbrage to Melville being placed alongside the yankees, what with all those Cape Cod allusions and Nantucket nuances not to mention Melville writing peacefully, nurturing his bro-mance with Nathaniel Hawthorne up in Pittsfield, Massachusetts so I can understand the revisionist historians attempting to place his allegiance alongside those other Sea-Worthy Sailors, the Boston Red Sox.

No, Melville is New York through and through from South street seaport to Albany he is a soul of Manhatto, descendant of the New Amsterdam Gansevoorts but there is merit to this line of thought that poses many time-honored persistent ambiguities that loom for all of us straddling that eastern seaboard -
I remember a few years back when Rudy Giuliani, that sage of Cleaned up NYC, got himself in hot water whence attempting a run for the presidency told New Englanders he "liked the red sox as much as the yankees" Ooops.... not a wise choice of words that perhaps foreshadowed his retreat back into obscurity (or into the lucre-filled offices of lobbying-cum-consulting.)

It's a treacherous whaling ground to paddle, but I see what Rudy kinda meant despite his obvious pandering. It's a fence that his Kingmaker of a successor Michael Bloomberg sits atop daily - Bloomberg, from Boston, rules over NYC with cool-head, clear-mind, and smart avoidance of too much huffery concerning allegiance to any team - O, what a brilliant politician he is!

I, too, lived in that world for many years, beginning my earthly sail in downtown manhattan, my first home a few blocks from that brooklyn shore but eventually Harboring into Camden, Maine communing with the Yankee past of my forefathers. Ay, there's the Rub! My Yankee past?
What say you of the Yankees? There is an ambiguity! How could all my neighbors in New England call themselves "Yankees" and follow the red sox? O what a wicked web we weave! What's the magazine of New England you ask? It's Yankee Magazine! What is the soon to be decommissioned Nuclear power plant energizing that state of Maine for many many years? Why it is Maine Yankee! Atomic!

Dizzying! And another Melvillian Duality rears it's head! For what are the red sox without the yankees? or the yankees without the red sox? Who is Ahab without his Whale? Life without death? Sun without darkness?

So as I return to my game and follow my pinstripe pals I recognize and give a shout out to my Boston brethren which , like the post - Moby-Dick world of America's Civil War pitted brother against brother, this game literally pits me against my own older brother, yes he of red sox fan-hood , let us begin the season's battle and let the 'great shroud' of the Baseball sea roll on 'as it rolled five thousand years ago.'

JTM

Hello Blogosphere - I know I'm late to the party

As America's most obsessed amateur Moby-Dick scholar living in the midwest the first question I always get is this -

"Why did Herman Melville name his Great American Novel after a defunct Minneapolis Bar?"

That's a damn good question - I never was here for the tenure of the famously raucous dump known as "Moby Dick's." In fact I didn't moved here until many years after the "home of a whale of a drink" went out of business but in homage to the stories I hear from the aging drunks in this town - apparently it was such a great bar that I felt the only respectable thing to do as a Moby-Dick fan and transplant to Minneapolis was to go on E-Bay and buy a MOBY DICK's Bar T-shirt. - (picture to follow) - And I think I paid 10 bucks in shipping so it could be sent 3 miles from Golden Valley  - BUT - the T-shirt is great... grey - XL and brand new- never worn but for some odd reason it reeks of patchouli. Which BTW is a terrible smell and historically patchouli is only used to cover up other smells which leaves me to wonder - WTF smelled worse in your thin-walled townhome alongside a stripmall in Golden Valley than that? (But i digress...)

Oh - and so you don't completely not learn anything today - here's a better first question -

"When do you use the hyphen when typing  Moby-Dick?"

The answer to that that I've learned is simple - if you're talking about the great American novel that is Herman Melville's masterpiece than u better use the hyphen -

If you are describing the actual whale inside the book then you leave it out -

Don't know why but             BOOK = HYPHEN

                                            WHALE = NO HYPHEN

Easy enough rule which I will certainly F' Up in the writing of this blog many many times.....

Oh - and Mom if you're reading - My language isn't the best either - but on that note I recently learned that there are many meanings of the word "tinker" - most derogatory - you can google it yourself - but funny enough that there's a term called a "Tinker's Curse"- which basically means "a curse that doesn't mean shit because Tinkers curse so much"

Great definition!

Welcome to my blog - 

Come with me while I profanely dissect and discuss the bloated gas-bag of a novel that I love so much that is Moby-Dick.

Thanks for joining me -

JTM