Call Me Moby

or, the Whale

[callmemoby]

Page 65 – Chowder

Previously, on Call Me Moby:

Ishmael and Queequeg, having just arrived on Nantucket island, have made their way to the Try Pots hotel, an establishment owned and operated by one Mr. Hosea Hussey. Mrs. Hussey is there, and she asks our heroes if they want cod or clam chowder. They order a bowl of each, eating happily and heartily.

Today's Installment:

Chapter 15. Chowder. Page 65:

We resumed business; and while plying our spoons in the bowl, thinks I to myself, I wonder now if this here has any effect on the head? What's that stultifying saying about chowder-headed people? "But look, Queequeg, ain't that a live eel in your bowl? Where's your harpoon?"

Fishiest of all fishy places was the Try Pots, which well deserved its name; for the pots there were always boiling chowders. Chowder for breakfast, and chowder for dinner, and chowder for supper, till you began to look for fish-bones coming through your clothes. The area before the house was paved with clam-shells. Mrs. Hussey wore a polished necklace of codfish vertebra; and Hosea Hussey had his account books bound in superior old shark-skin. There was a fishy flavor to the milk, too, which I could not at all account for, till one morning happening to take a stroll along the beach among some fishermen's boats, I saw Hosea's brindled cow feeding on fish remnants, and marching along the sand with each foot in a cod's decapitated head, looking very slip-shod, I assure ye.

Supper concluded, we received a lamp, and directions from Mrs. Hussey concerning the nearest way to bed; but, as Queequeg was about to precede me up the stairs, the lady reached forth her arm, and demanded his harpoon; she allowed no harpoon in her chambers. "Why not?" said I; "every true whaleman sleeps with his harpoon—but why not?" "Because it's dangerous," says she. "Ever since young Stiggs coming from that unfort'nt v'y'ge of his, when he was gone four years and a half, with only three barrels of ile, was found dead in my first floor back, with his harpoon in his side; ever since then I allow no boarders to take sich dangerous weepons in their rooms at night. So, Mr. Queequeg" (for she had learned his name), "I will just take this here iron, and keep it for you till morning. But the chowder; clam or cod to-morrow for breakfast, men?"

"Both," says I; "and let's have a couple of smoked herring by way of variety."

The Try Pots

This place sounds pretty ...

FISHY

YEEEEAAAAAAHHHHHHHH

"Chowder-headed people"

The word "chowderhead" is so, so good. I will always associate it with this Calvin and Hobbes strip:

That strip is the second-to-last in one of my favorite C&H storylines, which you can read in full here.

The word "chowderhead", of course, is a straightforward application of the word "chowder" to the word "head". It suggests that the person so named is incapable of clear or perspicacious thought, and rather that their thinking is cloudy, muddled, and thick as a bowl of creamy white chowder. It's an obvious etymology.

It's also completely wrong.

As per the Online Etymology Dictionary:

The derogatory chowderhead (1819) is a corruption of cholter-head (16c.), from jolthead, which is of unknown origin.

Or, if dubious online publications strike you as, well, dubious, then how about this published source?:

Lack of knowledge was also a problem with the word chowderhead: It has nothing whatsoever to do with chowder but is a false etymology based on an attempt to make sense of the 19th cent. word cholterhead "blockhead," which was in turn an attempt to make sense of a 17th cent. word jolterhead (same meaning). These Eng. dialectal words all sounded like chowderhead, which was rationalized to mean someone who had chowder in his/her head instead of brains.

Do you remain unconvinced? Well, here's what the OED says:

If you still don't believe me ... well, frankly, I think you're being a bit intransigent. I mean, really, it's not that crazy a stretch to believe.

But fine. Here's what Wiktionary has to---

Oh, crap.

Well, we'll have to go ahead and fix that, won't we?

There we go. Now do you believe me?

Other stuff on this page

Melville writes "Hosea Hussey wore a polished necklace of codfish vertebra", but I'm pretty sure it should be "vertebrae".

When Mrs. Hussey says "unfort'nt v'y'ge", I honestly can't imagine what this sounds like. She's saying the word "voyage" in one syllable? ... How ... ?

I don't really know what Mrs. Hussey means when she says "ile". This person seems to think it's just eye dialect for "oil".

Word of the Day: jolterhead

Ishmael's Current Mood: fishy 🐠🐟🐡

[callmemoby]

Page 64 – Chowder

Previously, on Call Me Moby:

Ishmael and Queequeg, having just arrived on Nantucket island, have made their way to the Try Pots hotel, an establishment owned and operated by one Mr. Hosea Hussey. Ishmael is lost in a reverie, as per usual, staring up at the sign hanging above the doorway of the hotel.

Today's Installment:

Chapter 15. Chowder. Pages 63–4:

I was called from these reflections by the sight of a freckled woman with yellow hair and a yellow gown, standing in the porch of the inn, under a dull red lamp swinging there, that looked much like an injured eye, and carrying on a brisk scolding with a man in a purple woollen shirt.

"Get along with ye," said she to the man, "or I'll be combing ye!"

"Come on, Queequeg," said I, "all right. There's Mrs. Hussey."

And so it turned out; Mr. Hosea Hussey being from home, but leaving Mrs. Hussey entirely competent to attend to all his affairs. Upon making known our desires for a supper and a bed, Mrs. Hussey, postponing further scolding for the present, ushered us into a little room, and seating us at a table spread with the relics of a recently concluded repast, turned round to us and said—"Clam or Cod?"

"What's that about Cods, ma'am?" said I, with much politeness.

"Clam or Cod?" she repeated.

"A clam for supper? a cold clam; is that what you mean, Mrs. Hussey?" says I, "but that's a rather cold and clammy reception in the winter time, ain't it, Mrs. Hussey?"

But being in a great hurry to resume scolding the man in the purple Shirt, who was waiting for it in the entry, and seeming to hear nothing but the word "clam," Mrs. Hussey hurried towards an open door leading to the kitchen, and bawling out "clam for two," disappeared.

"Queequeg," said I, "do you think that we can make out a supper for us both on one clam?"

However, a warm savory steam from the kitchen served to belie the apparently cheerless prospect before us. But when that smoking chowder came in, the mystery was delightfully explained. Oh, sweet friends! hearken to me. It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuit, and salted pork cut up into little flakes; the whole enriched with butter, and plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt. Our appetites being sharpened by the frosty voyage, and in particular, Queequeg seeing his favourite fishing food before him, and the chowder being surpassingly excellent, we despatched it with great expedition: when leaning back a moment and bethinking me of Mrs. Hussey's clam and cod announcement, I thought I would try a little experiment. Stepping to the kitchen door, I uttered the word "cod" with great emphasis, and resumed my seat. In a few moments the savoury steam came forth again, but with a different flavor, and in good time a fine cod-chowder was placed before us.

Ishmael: a little slow?

Mrs. Hussey is clearly asking Ishmael what kind of chowder he wants for dinner: Clam or cod? Yet all Ishmael can do is (pretend to?) be confused at the prospect of having a single clam for dinner. He even makes a dumb pun about it.

"A clam for supper? a cold clam; is that what you mean, Mrs. Hussey?" says I, "but that's a rather cold and clammy reception in the winter time, ain't it, Mrs. Hussey?"

When Mrs. Hussey shouts down "clam for two!" to the kitchen, Ishmael reaffirms his misinterpretion, and seems convinced that she's going to send up a single clam for him and Queequeg to share for dinner.

I can't tell if Ishmael is being willfully stupid here, or what. He knows the Try Pots is famed for its chowder. Is it really such a huge leap to infer that simply saying "clam" is a shorthand for the type of chowder being ordered up?

I can come up with three possibilities for what's going on:

Ishmael, being but a simple working man, doesn't eat out on the reg, and is therefore unfamiliar with how servers will sometimes shout orders down the line using some kind of slang or shorthand.

Ishmael is super out of it. Maybe he's exhausted, maybe his mind is on other things; but whatever the case, Mrs. Hussey has just caught him way off guard.

Ishmael just ain't too bright.

Possibility #1 is clearly impossible: Ishmael is a sailor, and sailors are the grandmasters of weird and impenetrable argot. I'm really supposed to believe that Ishmael can't intuit that clam is a shortening of clam chowder, but that he has no problem shortening forecastle to friggin' fo'c's'le? Like hell I will.

I also don't believe in possibility #3. I mean, have you read the rest of this book? Ishmael's a lot of things, but a dummy isn't one of them.

So I guess we're left with possibility #2: Ishmael's zonked. Not very satisfying, but there you go.

Purple Shirt Man

Who's this guy Mrs. Hussey is talking to? Why is he in a purple shirt? Are we going to run into him again? Were purple shirts a thing in early 19th-century Nantucket? Why was Mrs. Hussey yelling at him?

Did he look like this?:

Or more like this?:

Clearly, I'm not the only person who wants to know: a search for purple shirt man moby-dick produces nearly half a million hits on Google.

Purple Shirt Man: massive literary mystery---or the greatest mystery in all of American literature? Stay tuned to this blog find out.

"despatched it with great expedition"

When Ishmael says that he despatched his chowder "with great expedition", he's using an alternate spelling of the word dispatch. This spelling doesn't seem to be very much in favor anymore. Except, that is, for one particular context which may be familiar to any Anglophiles or Australophiles in the audience:

A despatch box, as per Wikipedia is:

a wooden box used as a lectern from which frontbench members of Parliament deliver speeches to their parliamentary chamber.

Apparently they "were first used in 17th century Britain, to transport parliamentary documents to the chamber." My guess, then, is that the tradition of using the despatch box as a lectern originated with one singularly lazy MP, who figured he'd be better off bring his whole friggin' suitcase up with him while addressing parliament, rather than simply preparing his damn papers ahead of time.

Ah---how much less rich and intricate this world would be but for incompetent legislators!

The British despatch boxes are modeled on the Australian ones, and were a gift from New Zealand after WWII. They're made from puriri wood, which Wikipedia describes as "the strongest wood in New Zealand". Alas, this was apparently not strong enough to stand up against the furious pen-stabbing of former British PM Gordon Brown, who managed to damage the government's despatch box so profoundly that not even teams of French polishers were able to restore it.[1]

And that's everything you ever wanted to know about despatch boxes!

Pounded ship biscuit

Ishmael gives us a little recipe for chowder:

It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuit, and salted pork cut up into little flakes; the whole enriched with butter, and plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt.[2]

"Ship biscuit" is another name for what you might better know as hardtack, a long-lasting food used for sustenance on long journeys. I was a little surprised to discover that you can still buy hardtack, though it's mostly sold under the marginally less unappealing name of pilot bread or pilot crackers. I guess I always sort of thought that hardtack had been more or less replaced by MREs and other advanced shelf-stable foodstuffs.

While casting about for info on hardtack, I also came across the book Sailors' Language by William Clark Russell. I have not yet had a chance to dive into it, but the book looks like a pretty amazing resource. There's one page in particular, noted by the British Library, that

looks at a range of slang terms for the terrible food that sailors were forced to endure. These include lobscouse, dandy-funk, dogsbody, seapie, choke-dog, twice-laid, and hishee-hashee. [emphasis mine]

Dandy-funk! Choke-dog! Twice-laid!

Hishee-hashee!!

I could keep going on and on about this stuff. Like, I found one recipe for seapie that calls for a dozen pigeons. And then there's this ship's bill of fare from 1845, right around the time Melville was writing and Ishmael was sailing, for the whaleship Tiger. It reads like something out of a Monty Python sketch:

Sunday ... duff, meat, bread, molasses Monday ... beans, meat, bread Tuesday ... meat, bread Wednesday ... beans, beef, pork, bread Thursday ... duff, meat, bread, molasses Friday ... rice, meat, bread, molasses Saturday ... hasty pudding, meat, bread, molasses

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Ishmael and Queequeg haven't stepped foot aboard a whaling ship yet, and we're still on land, enjoying our chowder at the Try Pots.

Word of the Day: despatched

Ishmael's Current Mood: satisfied 🍲😋🍲

[1]: The money quote from that article:

An official explained: “Of course we can’t say anything. But if he goes on doing it, it is going to be harder and harder to get off.”

Now imagine a French polisher in a beret and wax moustache saying that, and it's immediately like eight times better.

[2]: Fun fact! Dogfish Head (yep---the brewery!) sells a canned chowder that's (supposedly) based on this very recipe from Moby-Dick. Of course, their version is also "infused with 60 Minute IPA", and they suggest pairing it with their Indian Brown Ale. I haven't yet tried it, so no guarantees that it's any good.

[callmemoby]

Pages 63–64 – Chowder

Previously, on Call Me Moby:

Our plucky narrator, Ishmael, arrives in New Bedford late one Saturday night, intending to catch the next ferry out to Nantucket island, where he hopes to join a really cool whaling expedition.

Alas, the next ferry doesn't leave until Monday morning; so he checks into the Spouter-Inn (proprietor: Peter Coffin) and prepares to spend the rest of the weekend in town.

Ishmael makes a fast new friend in his roommate, a Pacific islander named Queequeg. On Sunday morning they both go to church, Christan and pagan alike, and there they look at some tombstones and listen to the pastor preach about Noah and the whale.

Monday finally rolls around, and Ishmael and Queequeg hop aboard a ferry (named the Moss) headed for Nantucket.

In the previous chapter, Ishmael told us lots of really cool information about Nantucket. Here's the tl;dr version:

Nantucket isn't Illinois.

There used to be some Indians there.

Nantucketers are really good at whaling.

Like, super duper good.

Today's Installment:

Chapter 15. Chowder. Pages 63–4:

It was quite late in the evening when the little Moss came snugly to anchor, and Queequeg and I went ashore; so we could attend to no business that day, at least none but a supper and a bed. The landlord of the Spouter-Inn had recommended us to his cousin Hosea Hussey of the Try Pots, whom he asserted to be the proprietor of one of the best kept hotels in all Nantucket, and moreover he had assured us that Cousin Hosea, as he called him, was famous for his chowders. In short, he plainly hinted that we could not possibly do better than try pot-luck at the Try Pots. But the directions he had given us about keeping a yellow warehouse on our starboard hand till we opened a white church to the larboard, and then keeping that on the larboard hand till we made a corner three points to the starboard, and that done, then ask the first man we met where the place was: these crooked directions of his very much puzzled us at first, especially as, at the outset, Queequeg insisted that the yellow warehouse—our first point of departure—must be left on the larboard hand, whereas I had understood Peter Coffin to say it was on the starboard. However, by dint of beating about a little in the dark, and now and then knocking up a peaceable inhabitant to inquire the way, we at last came to something which there was no mistaking.

Two enormous wooden pots painted black, and suspended by asses' ears, swung from the cross-trees of an old top-mast, planted in front of an old doorway. The horns of the cross-trees were sawed off on the other side, so that this old top-mast looked not a little like a gallows. Perhaps I was over sensitive to such impressions at the time, but I could not help staring at this gallows with a vague misgiving. A sort of crick was in my neck as I gazed up to the two remaining horns; yes, two of them, one for Queequeg, and one for me. It's ominous, thinks I. A Coffin my Innkeeper upon landing in my first whaling port; tombstones staring at me in the whalemen's chapel; and here a gallows! and a pair of prodigious black pots too! Are these last throwing out oblique hints touching Tophet?

Chowder

People sure do get passionate about their chowder. It's like how people get so worked up over the differences between Texas, Memphis, Kansas City, and Carolina barbecues, or that absurd debate between New York pizza and Chicago deep dish.[1] Which is to say, chowder is a regionally diverse and divisive food, with a great many elaborations upon the basic recipe. These elaborations include:

New England clam chowder

Manhattan clam chowder

Rhode Island clam chowder

Connecticut clam chowder

Charleston clam chowder

Vermont clam chowder

Pittsburg clam chowder

West Virginia clam chowder

Colorado clam chowder

Kansas City clam chowder

Albuquerque clam chowder

For example, Manhattan clam chowder has a tomato-based red broth. This is disagreeable to New Englanders, who prefer a cream-based white broth. Of course, this disagreement is founded in logic, and makes a lot of sense.

Here's your basic recipe for New England clam chowder:

Go into the ocean and collect a bunch of creepy bottom-feeding mollusks.

Now make a thick soup from the juice you squirt out of a cow.

Take your mollusks and pull out the gross rubbery bits from inside their weird bivalve shells. Toss these rubbery bits into the soup.

Add potatoes, onions, and celery to taste. Bring to a boil.

Serve with oyster crackers.

At this point, the source of the New Englander's disgust will be clear to the reader: the very idea of adding tomatoes to this recipe is abhorrent and unnatural.

However, the Manhattanites have a very reasonable counter-claim, which is this: Oyster crackers don't actually have any oysters in them. This sort of deceptive labeling is sadly typical among New Englanders, who have not been officially affiliated with England for over two-hundred years, and whose land is not especially new.

Gun to my head, I guess I'd side with the New Englanders and claim their clam chowder is number one. This is less because it's particularly good, and more because New Englanders are uniquely insufferable about the whole thing.

Go ahead. Ask anyone from New England about their clam chowder. They'll probably tell you about some tiny seaside shack at the end of the road in Sag's Head or Shaggy Neck or Chippenpiquoitwa or wherever they once had the best chowder of their life and it ruined all subsequent chowders forevermore. Heck, if you ask a Mainer, maybe they'll remind you that a bill was introduced into their state legislature in 1939 that banned putting tomatoes in clam chowder, as though this were a fact to be proud of.

In which case, just smile, nod, step away slowly, and reach for the nearest slice of deep-dish you can find.

Word of the Day: Tophet

Ishmael's Current Mood: trollish 🚎 😈

[1]: All right-thinking people prefer deep dish, of course.

[callmemoby]

Page 63 – Nantucket

Previously, on Call Me Moby:

Ishmael's been talking about how cool Nantucket is.

Today's Installment:

Chapter 14. Nantucket. Page 63:

And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits, issuing from their ant-hill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery world like so many Alexanders; parcelling out among them the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans, as the three pirate powers did Poland. Let America add Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada; let the English overswarm all India, and hang out their blazing banner from the sun; two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer's. For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires; other seamen having but a right of way through it. Merchant ships are but extension bridges; armed ones but floating forts; even pirates and privateers, though following the sea as highwaymen the road, they but plunder other ships, other fragments of the land like themselves, without seeking to draw their living from the bottomless deep itself. The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation. There is his home; there lies his business, which a Noah's flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in China. He lives on the sea, as prairie cocks in the prairie; he hides among the waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters climb the Alps. For years he knows not the land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman. With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.

That time America drew up a plan to invade Canada

This paragraph is littered with allusions to various imperial ambitions throughout history, which I've tried to hyperlink for your Wikipediaing pleasure. Most of it is probably familiar to you from school, though: you've got your Alexander the Greats, your Partitions of Polands (all three of them!)[1], your Mexican-American wars, and your British Rajs.

Bo-ring.

Ishmael also mentions "piling Cuba upon Canada", which got me looking into the various times the US has invaded Canada. There are the boring times: the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 (yawn); but Mental Floss reports a few more interesting examples. They're less "US invasions" and more "militant splinter groups gettin' feisty", but still.

There's James Dickson, who tried to form an Indian federation in Manitoba in 1836, failed, and then disappeared into the wilderness.[2] Then there was the Patriot War of 1837–38, in which a rebel group led by a man named William Mackenzie founded the short-lived Republic of Canada on an island in the Niagara River. And then there were the Fenian Raids, in which various Irish Republican groups were given tacit approval from the US government to try and capture Canada, in order to hold it hostage from the British until they agreed to withdraw from Ireland.

The weirdest America-invading-Canada story, however, has got to be War Plan Red:

As Wikipedia describes, in the 1920s and '30s, the United States "developed a number of color-coded war plans to outline potential US strategies for a variety of hypothetical war scenarios." In one of these scenarios, the US would go to war with the UK, with the expectation that Canada would be the main theater of that war. (In this plan, the nations of the British Empire were color-coded with various shades of red---Canada was crimson, India was ruby, New Zealand was garnet, and so on---hence the name "War Plan Red".)

Nowadays, the idea of a war between the US and UK seems so strange as to be kind of funny. Of course, it wasn't always so---but even into the 1930s there were lingering tensions. In an interview with the Morning News, Kevin Lippert, author of a history of border disputes between the US and Canada, explains:

The concern was that the United States and Britain would end up as enemies in a war, in part because Britain owed us a huge amount of money after WWI, and they were upset that we actually wanted to be repaid. Also they were not happy about the increasing power and presence of the United States on the world stage both in terms of trade and military. So even though we were allies and had been allies in WWI, there was some background tension there.

War Plan Red is the only of the Color Plans to get a popular history book written about it, but Wikipedia also lists plenty of others, including: War Plan Gold (war with France), War Plan Green (war with Mexico), War Plan Yellow (war with China),[3] and War Plan Indigo (a plan to occupy Iceland).[4] Wikipedia's accuracy on this matter, however, is questionable; for instance, the citation for War Plan Gold leads to this purchasing page for a board game. That might fly for Wikipedia, but not for a serious work of academic scholarship like this blog.

🙄

Floating forts

I spent all my time talking about the US invading Canada, which means I'm out of space to natter endlessly on about yet another topic inspired by some random throwaway phrase of Ishmael's: floating forts.

Which sucks, because floating forts are super cool!

See? Super cool!

Word of the Day: terraqueous

Ishmael's Current Mood: terraqueous 🌊🌏🌍🌎💧

[1]: Or four, or five, or six, depending on how you count these things.

[2]: A story that sounds totally fascinating, and which I hope to investigate further at a later date.

[3]: Really, US Military? Yellow? You couldn't even try?

[4]: Good---I've never trusted those shifty Icelanders. They have all these volcanos, but it's a land of ice? Last I checked, volcanos are made of lava, and lava melts ice.

Something fishy's going on up there, is all I'm saying.

[callmemoby]

Nantucket Odyssey

Today's update is a Nantucket-related interlude, care of my father. He recently wrote me in an email:

I'd be remiss if I didn't make you aware that your first cousin thrice removed (Emil Guba) wrote the definitive work on Nantucket, including some information about Moshup (different spelling).

And wouldn't you know it? The full copy of Emil Guba's Nantucket Odyssey is available at archive.org.

Ironically, my cousin Emil was originally drawn to Nantucket "to explore its fascinating fungous flora and by an organized interest there in the Island's natural science." I say ironically because ... well, do you remember this line of Melville's from page 62?

... people there plant toadstools before their houses, to get under the shade in summer time; that one blade of grass makes an oasis, three blades in a day's walk a prairie ...

As my dad quipped in his email to me, presumably Emil went to Nantucket for the shade. (Or a leisurely stroll through the prairie, perhaps.)

What strikes me most about Nantucket Odyssey is how the island seems to have inspired the same kind of rhapsodical devotion in my cousin as it inspired in Ishmael. For example, check out the following passage from Emil's book:

Take out your map and look at it. There it is anchored in the ocean in a quiet corner of the world, long and low like a giant whale with her little whales by her side, Tuckernuck, Muskeget, and the Gravelly Islands. This is "The Far Away Island," "The Land Far Out at Sea," "The Glacier's Gift"; a blot of sand, ponds and moors "where summer is five Septembers long"; a "lamb chop" of 30,000 acres dumped into the ocean south of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and peopled by Indians long before its discovery by the adventurous navigators of the Old World. No other domain of the United States along the eastern coast line is so far from the mainland. None has had more recognition, none is more dearly cherished, none so charming and alluring.

That opening line ("Take out your map and look at it") had such an Ishmael-y ring to it, I went straight to the online text of Moby-Dick to see if I could find a similar passage.

Well! Look what I found:

Nantucket! Take out your map and look at it. See what a real corner of the world it occupies; how it stands there, away off shore, more lonely than the Eddystone lighthouse.

(That's from the chapter we're reading right now, Chapter 14.)

Emil Guba left us a little easter egg in his text! He lifted the "take out your map" line directly from Melville.[1] The distinction between homage and plagiarism isn't always clear, but this usage strikes me as totally innocent.

(Anyway, who in their right mind would try to plagiarize one of the most famous works of English literature? Is that even possible? Like, could you plagiarize Shakespeare, or the King James Bible? These things have seeped so thoroughly into our popular culture that any quote-pulling from them could probably be considered an intentional allusion rather than plagiarism.)

Nantucket Odyssey also features information about the legendary origins of Nantucket, including tales of the giant Moshup (known previously to us as Maushope):

This legendary giant is credited with the origin of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard. One sleepless, restless night on Cape Cod, his moccasins filled with sand. Becoming enraged, he flung them from his feet, both falling nearby into the ocean to build the islands. After establishing his residence at Devil's Den, in a similar exciting spell he metamorphosed his five children into fishes and threw his wife over on Seaconnet Point near Newport, Rhode Island, where she was changed to stone. There she remains, a misshapen rock.

Yeah, I hate it when I get sand in my shoes, too.

I'll leave you with the following paragraph, in which my cousin throws some serious shade:

Indian legend also ascribes the origin of Nantucket to Moshup's pipe full of ashes. Moshup emptied his pipe after a thoughtful smoke on Martha's Vineyard and the wind carried the ashes out to sea, to the eastward, where they settled to form a picturesque, rolling island. This legend explains the origin of the derisive name, 'The Devil's Ash Heap" which Nantucket has been jocosely called by an occasional envious historian among its neighbors with a sense of greater importance of his own small island.

I wonder what other "small island" that could possibly be ...

[1]: We can pretty safely assume it's lifted, for two reasons. First, Guba's writing a book about Nantucket; why not allude to the "Nantucket" chapter of Moby-Dick, a book widely regarded as one of the greatest classics of American literature?

Second, the probability that Guba and Melville independently stumbled upon the same exact sequence of eight words is astronomically small---somewhere in the realm of 1 in 1016.

That number comes from a heuristic given by linguist Geoff Pullum, writing on Language Log:

... according to modern estimates of the entropy in ordinary running English text [thanks to Fernando Pereira for information that led me to revised this post on April 26], if you graph the word positions in English text against the number of words that would be grammatically possible as the next word given the last few words of the text, although the numbers vacillate wildly, the average across them all tends to settle in at something approaching 100. If that's right, then at any arbitrary starting point in an arbitrary text, if text was being composed at random, the probability that you will find the next 14 words match some previously designated sequence of 14 words is very roughly in the region of 1 in 1028, i.e., 0.0000000000000000000000000001.

When we apply the same reasoning to the eight-word passage above, we get 1 in 1016.

[callmemoby]

Pages 62–63 – Nantucket

Previously, on Call Me Moby:

Ishmael has been telling us about Nantucket. Here's the executive summary of what we've learned so far:

NANTUCKET:

Way out in the middle of nowhere

Lots of sand

Not so much flora

Mushrooms? (good for shade??)

Did I mention it's an island?

Sand sand sand sand san

Not Illinois

Today's Installment:

Chapter 14. Nantucket. Pages 62–3:

Look now at the wondrous traditional story of how this island was settled by the red-men. Thus goes the legend. In olden times an eagle swooped down upon the New England coast, and carried off an infant Indian in his talons. With loud lament the parents saw their child borne out of sight over the wide waters. They resolved to follow in the same direction. Setting out in their canoes, after a perilous passage they discovered the island, and there they found an empty ivory casket,—the poor little Indian's skeleton.

What wonder, then, that these Nantucketers, born on a beach, should take to the sea for a livelihood! They first caught crabs and quohogs in the sand; grown bolder, they waded out with nets for mackerel; more experienced, they pushed off in boats and captured cod; and at last, launching a navy of great ships on the sea, explored this watery world; put an incessant belt of circumnavigations round it; peeped in at Behring's Straits; and in all seasons and all oceans declared everlasting war with the mightiest animated mass that has survived the flood; most monstrous and most mountainous! That Himmalehan, salt-sea Mastodon, clothed with such portentousness of unconscious power, that his very panics are more to be dreaded than his most fearless and malicious assaults!

Red-man

Yes, Ishmael is racially insensitive. As has been very well established. Fortunately, we've culturally advanced a long way since the days of—

Oh, right. Nevermind.

The Tale of Maushope

The Indian legend narrated by Ishmael is a slight modification of the tale of Maushope, which I found recounted in an 1882 book with the very forthcoming title: The Island of Nantucket : What It Was and What It Is : Being a Complete Index and Guide to This Noted Resort : Containing Descriptors of Everything on or about the Island in Regard to Which the Visitor or Resident May Desire Information, Including : Its History, People, Agriculture, Botany, Conchology and Geology.

(Whew!)

The story told in The Island of Nantucket : What It Was and What It Is : Being a Complete Index and Guide to This Noted Resort : Containing Descriptors of Everything on or about the Island in Regard to Which the Visitor or Resident May Desire Information, Including : Its History, People, Agriculture, Botany, Conchology and Geology is basically the same as the story Ishmael tells, except in The Island of Nantucket : What It Was and What It Is : Being a Complete Index and Guide to This Noted Resort : Containing Descriptors of Everything on or about the Island in Regard to Which the Visitor or Resident May Desire Information, Including : Its History, People, Agriculture, Botany, Conchology and Geology's version, there are lots of children who get carried away by a giant bird (not just one), and only one person (not several) who goes off in search of them.[1]

Here's the relevant passage:

"In former times, a great many moons ago, a bird, extraordinary for its size, used often to visit the south shore of Cape Cod, and carry from thence in its talons a vast number of small children. Maushope, who was an Indian giant, as fame reports, resided in these parts. Enraged at the havoc among the children, he, on a certain time, waded into the sea in pursuit of the bird, till he had crossed the sound, and reached Nantucket. Before Maushope forded the sound, the island was unknown to the red men. Maushope found the bones of the children in a heap under a large tree. He then, wishing to smoke his pipe, ransacked the island for tobacco; but finding none, he filled his pipe with poke, —a weed which the Indians sometimes used as a substitute. Ever since this memorable event, fogs have been frequent on the Cape. In allusion to this tradition, when the aborigines observed a fog rising, they would say, 'There comes old Maushope's smoke.'" (Col. Mass. Hist. Soc, Vol. V., First Series, page 57.)

Please, take a moment to picture the scene: an eranged giant tromps through the sea and comes to a heretofore undiscovered island at the end of the world. He then stumbles upon an enormous heap of human skeletons that belong to a vast number of small children who have been carried off from his hometown by a giant bird. And Maushope's immediate reaction is:

Damn, where'd I put my smokes?

What the hell?

Oy. Maybe Edward K. Godfrey, compiler of The Island of Nantucket : What It Was and What It Is : Being a Complete Index and Guide to This Noted Resort : Containing Descriptors of Everything on or about the Island in Regard to Which the Visitor or Resident May Desire Information, Including : Its History, People, Agriculture, Botany, Conchology and Geology, can shed some illuminating light on this disturbingly morbid tale:

It is to be regretted that there is so little of this tradition; for of course the reader is anxious to know if Maushope caught the bird, and if so, how or in what manner he succeeded in capturing it.

Um ... I guess those are important questions, too??

Behring's Straits

I've been reading about the Bering Strait for the past half hour, and it's totally fascinating. Did you know that there are two islands, Big Diomede and Little Diomede, in the middle of the Strait? Big Diomede belongs to Russia and has no permanent population, whereas Little Diomede is part of the U.S. and home to the town of---surprise, surprise---Diomede, Alaska, population 115.

There's so much to say about the Bering Strait. But I'll limit myself to two of my favorite factoids I found while researching on Wikipedia.

First: Big and Little Diomede are separated by the International Date Line. This means that, despite being only 2.4 miles apart geographically, the islands are 21 hours apart in terms of time zones.

Because of this, Wikipedia says that "the islands are sometimes called Tomorrow Island (Big Diomede) and Yesterday Isle (Little Diomede)." Which is 100% totally adorbs.

My second fun Bering Strait fact is that there have been numerous proposals throughout the years to build a bridge or tunnel crossing the Strait.

If that sounds bonkers to you, that's because it is. But maybe not as totally bonkers as it seems at first blush! Word on the Wikipedia street is that the Strait isn't actually too crazy deep---only 55m, compared to, say, the Chunnel's deepest point at 75m---and the currents aren't all that severe. There aren't even any icebergs to contend with!

The cost of a Bering Strait tunnel or bridge has been estimated several times over the decades, anywhere from $1 to $100 billion. Which is a lot of money---but not an impossible lot of money.

However, Wikipedia does mention one slight catch:

This excludes the cost of new roads and railways to reach the bridge. Aside from the obvious technical challenges of building two 40-kilometre (25 mi) bridges or a more than 80-kilometre (50 mi) tunnel across the strait, another major challenge is that, as of 2011, there is nothing on either side of the Bering Strait to connect the bridge to.

womp womp

Himmalehan, salt-sea Mastodon

Before we wrap up for the day, one final bit of interpretation for ya. Himmalehan is Ishmael's super weird old-timey spelling of Himalayan, as in the mountain range. Now, he's not saying there's a Mastodon living in the Himalayas; rather, he's merely using these words metonymically to describe a creature that's super duper huge. Like, not just Mastodon-huge. Himalayan Mastodon-huge.

Alas, Ishmael never actually names the creature he's referring to. I wonder what this Himmalehan, salt-sea Mastodon could be---

Oh, right.

Word of the Day: circumnavigations

Try circumnavigating something today!

Ishmael's Current Mood: grizzly 🐻

[1]: Which makes a lot less sense than Ishmael's version, but whatever.

[callmemoby]

Page 62 – Nantucket

Previously, on Call Me Moby:

Ishmael and Queequeg are on a ferry to Nantucket island, where they plan to join a whaling expedition upon arrival. Mid-ferry trip, one of the other country-bumpkin passengers starts making fun of Queequeg. Queequeg retaliates by roughing up the bumpkin a bit. The ship's captain is called in to handle the situation, but before things get too gnarly, a flying boom sweeps across the deck and knocks the bumpkin overboard. Queequeg jumps into the water and saves him. Because Queequeg is awesome.

Today's Installment:

Chapter 14. Nantucket. Page 62:

Nothing more happened on the passage worthy the mentioning; so, after a fine run, we safely arrived in Nantucket.

Nantucket! Take out your map and look at it. See what a real corner of the world it occupies; how it stands there, away off shore, more lonely than the Eddystone lighthouse. Look at it—a mere hillock, and elbow of sand; all beach, without a background. There is more sand there than you would use in twenty years as a substitute for blotting paper. Some gamesome wights will tell you that they have to plant weeds there, they don't grow naturally; that they import Canada thistles; that they have to send beyond seas for a spile to stop a leak in an oil cask; that pieces of wood in Nantucket are carried about like bits of the true cross in Rome; that people there plant toadstools before their houses, to get under the shade in summer time; that one blade of grass makes an oasis, three blades in a day's walk a prairie; that they wear quicksand shoes, something like Laplander snow-shoes; that they are so shut up, belted about, every way inclosed, surrounded, and made an utter island of by the ocean, that to their very chairs and tables small clams will sometimes be found adhering, as to the backs of sea turtles. But these extravaganzas only show that Nantucket is no Illinois.

Three cheers (and posts) for Chapter 14!

Chapter 14 is a mere page and a half long, but it's chock-full of so much good stuff that I think I'm going to break it into three separate posts. This will be the first of those three posts. Aren't you excited?

Eddystone Lighthouse

The Eddystone Lighthouse is situated on the Eddystone Rocks, off the southwest coast of Plymoth, England. The specific lighthouse Ishmael is referring to is probably Smeaton's Tower, the third lighthouse built at Eddystone, which operated from 1759–1877. The tower was dismantled and moved to Plymouth, where you can still see it standing today.

It tweets regularly at @SmeatonsTower.

Let me just say: lighthouses are cool. Like, come on! They're these lonely sentinels standing out on the farthest flung corners of the earth. How can you not fall in love with them, at least a little bit? They're these symbols of quiet stoicism, silently beating their steadfast messages in light against the pitch-black sky, providing safe passage to all lost sailors. They represent the understated spirit of endurance that is the best part of what makes us human, and which makes civilization possible. The romance of the lighthouse isn't the flashy romance of the explorer or the conquistador; it's the fogbound romance of solitary, selfless vigilance. There's a reason why one of the seven wonders of the world was a lighthouse, after all. To the sailor, a lighthouse symbolizes home, safety; it is a beacon of hope set against the starless horizon, the nightlight of the sea, the ever-present blue canary in the outlet by the light switch.

In short, lighthouses are pretty nifty!

Blotting paper and pounce

Ishmael mentions that there's more sand in Nantucket "than you would use in twenty years as a substitute for blotting paper." He's referring here to the old practice of using pounce to dry ink, back before ballpoint pens and computer printers took all the romance out of writing a letter to a pal.

As far as I can tell, pounce tended not to be your everyday beach sand, but rather was ground pumice or cuttlefish bone (which has a surprisingly wide variety of uses). You'd store it in a pounce pot, which kind of looks like a salt shaker. I imagine you'd keep it on your desk, next to your inkwell.

Ishmael says there's more sand on Nantucket than you could use in twenty years. Is this a reasonable claim? Let's do some back-of-the-envelope calculations to find out.

First, let's assume our pounce user is a fabulous letter-writer. In fact, let's go crazy and assume our pen pal is patently prolific, writing on the order of 100 pages per day. (Yeesh, talk about carpal tunnel.)

Furthermore, let's also assume she's a bad environmentalist and never learned to conserve: she uses a cubic centimeter of pounce per page. (This seems like an absurd overestimate, but whatever.)

Time to mulitply!

At 100 pages per day, she'll end up writing 100 x 365 x 20 = 730,000 pages in twenty years.

Using the above assumptions, that's 730,000 cubic centimeters of pounce, or 730 liters of pounce---substantially shy of a cubic yard.

Considering that a cubic yard of sand weighs not much more than a ton, and that you can buy a ton of sand for as little as $25, I think it's safe to say that Ishmael pretty significantly underestimated the amount of sand in his comparison. Even though I have no idea how much sand is on Nantucket, I'm willing to bet it's a little more than my bank account could handle.

Gamesome wights

Wight is a weird word. If you ask Google for a definition, it says a wight is "a person of a specified kind." Which, despite having the word specified in it, is a definition that feels somehow more vague than if it had just said "a person", full stop.

Despite knowing that Ishmael is using the word in this generic sense, it tickles me to think that there's a D&D campaign out there where some weird wight is going around and asking adventurers if they know about the flora of Nantucket Island.

"Nantucket is no Illinois"

Damn right it's not! Suck it, Nantucket!

Word of the Day: spile

Ishmael's Current Mood: rhapsodical 🎹🎷

[callmemoby]

Page 61 – Wheelbarrow

Previously, on Call Me Moby:

Ishmael and Queequeg are out on the deck of the Moss, enjoying the salt breeze and foaming ocean spray. The other passengers, a bunch of greenhorn bumpkins, eye the two men curiously. One of the bumpkins starts making fun of Queequeg behind his back. Queequeg retaliates by flipping the man in the air. Although unhamred, the bumpkin is freaked out, and he complains to the captain about Queequeg.

The captain comes onto deck and gives Queequeg a stern talking to, telling our friend to "mind your eye".

Today's Installment:

Chapter 13. Wheelbarrow. Page 61:

But it so happened just then, that it was high time for the Captain to mind his own eye. The prodigious strain upon the main-sail had parted the weather-sheet, and the tremendous boom was now flying from side to side, completely sweeping the entire after part of the deck. The poor fellow whom Queequeg had handled so roughly, was swept overboard; all hands were in a panic; and to attempt snatching at the boom to stay it, seemed madness. It flew from right to left, and back again, almost in one ticking of a watch, and every instant seemed on the point of snapping into splinters. Nothing was done, and nothing seemed capable of being done; those on deck rushed towards the bows, and stood eyeing the boom as if it were the lower jaw of an exasperated whale. In the midst of this consternation, Queequeg dropped deftly to his knees, and crawling under the path of the boom, whipped hold of a rope, secured one end to the bulwarks, and then flinging the other like a lasso, caught it round the boom as it swept over his head, and at the next jerk, the spar was that way trapped, and all was safe. The schooner was run into the wind, and while the hands were clearing away the stern boat, Queequeg, stripped to the waist, darted from the side with a long living arc of a leap. For three minutes or more he was seen swimming like a dog, throwing his long arms straight out before him, and by turns revealing his brawny shoulders through the freezing foam. I looked at the grand and glorious fellow, but saw no one to be saved. The greenhorn had gone down. Shooting himself perpendicularly from the water, Queequeg, now took an instant's glance around him, and seeming to see just how matters were, dived down and disappeared. A few minutes more, and he rose again, one arm still striking out, and with the other dragging a lifeless form. The boat soon picked them up. The poor bumpkin was restored. All hands voted Queequeg a noble trump; the captain begged his pardon. From that hour I clove to Queequeg like a barnacle; yea, till poor Queequeg took his last long dive.

Was there ever such unconsciousness? He did not seem to think that he at all deserved a medal from the Humane and Magnanimous Societies. He only asked for water—fresh water—something to wipe the brine off; that done, he put on dry clothes, lighted his pipe, and leaning against the bulwarks, and mildly eyeing those around him, seemed to be saying to himself—"It's a mutual, joint-stock world, in all meridians. We cannibals must help these Christians."

First, a correction

I need to correct an error in Tuesday's post, where I was discussing the following line from p. 60:

Sideways leaning, we sideways darted; every ropeyarn tingling like a wire; the two tall masts buckling like Indian canes in land tornadoes.

In my commentary, I said:

Ropeyarn, or rope yarn: "Yarn or thread composing the strands of a rope." Which is to say, it's rope.

But I received a message from a loyal reader the other day:

I’m sure you’ve considered this, but I think in context ropeyarn ≠ rope. Like, he’s talking about the individual strands of the rope. It’s taut—so taut that each individual strand within the rope is tingling.

Which seems fair! I guess I was being needlessly snarky to Melville. Sorry, Melville.

(Image credit: Lexy Folkes)

Next, some definitions

Now that Ishmael's at sea, he's throwing lots of sailing terminology at us. Let's try and get it all sorted out.

First, a weather-sheet. According to Merriam-Webster, it's a rope that extends the windward corner of a square sail.

Great!

Now, what's a square sail?

Well! It's one of these:

And the windward corner of a sail is the corner of the sail that is facing the wind.

Double great!

Now, what does it mean when Merriam-Webster tells us that the weather-sheet is a rope that "extends the corner of a sail"? Like, how does a rope extend a sail? Isn't a sail a sheet of fabric? If you want to extend a sheet of fabric, don't you need ... more fabric? And not a rope?[1]

And then Melville says that the wind "parted the weather-sheet"---but if the weather-sheet is a rope ... how do you part a rope?

And what does any of this have to do with the boom?

There are probably really good answers to all of these questions. Actually, more likely, the questions themselves are incoherent, and belie a fundamental misunderstanding of how sailing works on my part.

Fortunately, none of that matters.

Why? Because: it has no bearing on the plot. Melville could have as soon written:

"A sailing thingamajigger broke and then everyone was super sad, and also someone fell into the sea!!"

... and the book would have been essentially the same.[3]

If you really care which rope broke its jib and splintered the mainmast to the larboard bos'n, you're probably a hardcore sailor and already understand all this nonsense anyway. All us normal people care about is this: the bumpkin got knocked overboard, and Queequeg jumped in and saved him. Bam. End of story.

The larger moral here?

If you're like me, a mere landlubber wending your way through Moby-Dick as best you can, you'd do well to choose your battles. I.e., if you can get the gist of what's happening in the book, maybe just keep ploughing forward and don't sweat the sailorly details too much.

"But Greg, isn't it your job to explain all this sailing stuff to us? Isn't that the whole reason we're reading this blog in the first place?"

No! Shut up!

Word of the Day: perpendicularly (use it in your next mathematics research paper!)

Ishmael's Current Mood: humane and magnanimous ⛑🎁

[1]: I understand that you could use the rope as rigging to support the sail extension. But that doesn't mean I'm extending the sail with a rope. Like, let's saying I'm building a road, and I want to extend it by a few hundred feet. To build the extension, I'll also build a sidewalk alongside the road---but I wouldn't say that the sidewalk extends the road. That would be sheer lunacy.[2]

[2]: The more I think about it, the more I realize that I've just been misinterpreting the Merriam-Webster definition above---specifically, the meaning of the word extends as used in that definition. So, um, maybe just ignore the above footnote, and also the comment in the post body to which it's attached.

[3]: And as a fun bonus, it'd probably spawn a whole new sub-field of historical textual analysis.

[callmemoby]

Page 60 – Wheelbarrow

Previously, on Call Me Moby:

We've finally made it onto an honest-to-god ship. That's right! After over fifty pages of faffing about on land, Ishmael and Queequeg have finally found themselves aboard the Moss, a packet schooner.

"The Moss?" I can hear some of you asking. "I thought the ship in Moby-Dick was supposed to be the Pequod."

Yes, well. Hold on to your trowsers, smarty-pants! We're not there yet. The Moss is simply bringing our protagonists from New Bedford to Nantucket. There I'm sure they'll stumble upon the Pequod sooner or later.

For now, Ishmael and Queequeg are out on the deck of the Moss, enjoying the salt breeze and foaming ocean spray.

Today's Installment:

Chapter 13. Wheelbarrow. Page 60:

At the same foam-fountain, Queequeg seemed to drink and reel with me. His dusky nostrils swelled apart; he showed his filed and pointed teeth. On, on we flew; and our offing gained, the Moss did homage to the blast; ducked and dived her bows as a slave before the Sultan. Sideways leaning, we sideways darted; every ropeyarn tingling like a wire; the two tall masts buckling like Indian canes in land tornadoes. So full of this reeling scene were we, as we stood by the plunging bowsprit, that for some time we did not notice the jeering glances of the passengers, a lubber-like assembly, who marvelled that two fellow beings should be so companionable; as though a white man were anything more dignified than a whitewashed negro. But there were some boobies and bumpkins there, who, by their intense greenness, must have come from the heart and centre of all verdure. Queequeg caught one of these young saplings mimicking him behind his back. I thought the bumpkin's hour of doom was come. Dropping his harpoon, the brawny savage caught him in his arms, and by an almost miraculous dexterity and strength, sent him high up bodily into the air; then slightly tapping his stern in mid-somerset, the fellow landed with bursting lungs upon his feet, while Queequeg, turning his back upon him, lighted his tomahawk pipe and passed it to me for a puff.

"Capting! Capting!" yelled the bumpkin, running towards that officer; "Capting, Capting, here's the devil."

"Hallo, you sir," cried the Captain, a gaunt rib of the sea, stalking up to Queequeg, "what in thunder do you mean by that? Don't you know you might have killed that chap?"

"What him say?" said Queequeg, as he mildly turned to me.

"He say," said I, "that you came near kill-e that man there," pointing to the still shivering greenhorn.

"Kill-e," cried Queequeg, twisting his tattooed face into an unearthly expression of disdain, "ah! him bevy small-e fish-e; Queequeg no kill-e so small-e fish-e; Queequeg kill-e big whale!"

"Look you," roared the Captain, "I'll kill-e you, you cannibal, if you try any more of your tricks aboard here; so mind your eye."

Some clarifications

There are a few passages here that are tricky to parse. Therefore, I shall provide a few helpful translations to assist the troubled reader:

Sideways leaning, we sideways darted; every ropeyarn tingling like a wire; the two tall masts buckling like Indian canes in land tornadoes.

Some definitions:

Ropeyarn, or rope yarn: "Yarn or thread composing the strands of a rope." Which is to say, it's rope.

Indian canes: Don't think Navajo walking sticks; instead, think palm leaves. A.k.a. rattan or manila. The "Indian" here refers to the subcontinent, not Native Americans.[1]

land tornados: I mean, I know I'm a lousy land-lubbing boobie, Ishmael, but come on. They're tornados. Just call them tornados.

But there were some boobies and bumpkins there, who, by their intense greenness, must have come from the heart and centre of all verdure.

Greenness has two complementary meanings here: the bumpkins are "green" in that they're inexperienced with sailing, but they're also literally turning green from seasickness. Either way, they're a bunch of land-lubbing idiots who've clearly never been on a boat before.

The brawny savage [...] sent him high up bodily into the air; then slightly tapping his stern in mid-somerset, the fellow landed with bursting lungs upon his feet.

Queequeg grabbed the bumpkin up, twirled him around in the air, and then, after giving him a small smack on the bum, dropped him back to his feet.

Importantly, Queequeg did not send the bumpkin to Somerset a county in England where you can find the historic city of Bath. Instead, somerset is simply an archaic spelling of the word "somersault". Which isn't as exciting, but there you go.

Pointed teeth

Early on in the passage, Ishmael notes Queequeg's pointed teeth:

His dusky nostrils swelled apart; he showed his filed and pointed teeth.

Tooth filing is a pretty widespread practice, done in cultures everywhere from Mexico to Bali to Congo. Even the Vikings seem to have hopped onto the tooth modification bandwagon at some point.

From what I can tell, though, tooth sharpening is slightly less common. Take those crazy Vikings, for example: they only filed furrows into their teeth, without actually sharpening them into points. Mesoamerican tooth filing, too, was more about carving designs than sharpening. And (as per the very reputably-named stufftoblowyourmind.com) in the Balinese mesangih ceremony, canines and incisors are filed down---not sharpened---out of the belief that teeth symbolize anger, greed, and other savage human instincts.

It was easiest for me to find examples of tooth-sharpening in Africa; but since Queequeg is a Pacific islander, I wanted to find evidence of the practice a little closer to his home. The best I could come up with were the Mentawai people of Indonesia, where "women are encouraged to have their teeth chiseled and filed in order to 'restore balance to their bodies' and increase their appeal."

Apart from these traditional cultural practices, the other context in which tooth-sharpening may be familiar to you is amongst sideshow performers, like Erik Sprague, a.k.a. the Lizardman.

The Lizardman has a whole page on his site about his experience with getting his teeth sharpened by one Dr. Harvey Winters of Albany, NY. (Apparently it cost $250 per tooth.)

Googling Dr. Winters's name brought me to the professional website of one Dr. Harvey Winter---no S---of Albany, NY. I eagerly examined his list of offered cosmetic procedures, but---alas!---although veneers, implants, crowns, bondings, restorations, and tooth whitening are all there on the page, there's no mention whatsoever of tooth sharpenings. Very disappointing.

I hold out hope that there's a dentist named Harvey Winters somewhere out there in Albany who just happens to have really terrible SEO.

Word of the Day: boobie *snicker snicker*

Ishmael's Current Mood: mischievous 👹

[1]: Have you ever wanted to know all about the classification of Indian canes and their zonal distribution? I mean, who hasn't, right? It's you're lucky day!

[callmemoby]

Page 59 – Wheelbarrow

Previously on Call Me Moby:

Ishmael and his new friend Queequeg are walking to the docks of New Bedford, where they plan to board the Moss, a packet schooner bound for Nantucket island. There they plan to find a whaling voyage on which to sign aboard as seamen.

Queequeg has just told us an amusing story of a time when he had been asked to use a wheelbarrow; being unfamiliar with the tool and unwilling to ask instruction in its use, he simply picked up the barrow and carried it along on his shoulders. Oh, how silly of you, Queequeg!

Today's installment picks up immediately after Ishmael's response to Queequeg after hearing the story: "You might have known better than that, one would think. Didn't the people laugh?"

Today's Installment:

Chapter 13. Wheelbarrow. Page 59:

Upon this, he told me another story. The people of his island of Rokovoko, it seems, at their wedding feasts express the fragrant water of young cocoanuts into a large stained calabash like a punchbowl; and this punchbowl always forms the great central ornament on the braided mat where the feast is held. Now a certain grand merchant ship once touched at Rokovoko, and its commander—from all accounts, a very stately punctilious gentleman, at least for a sea captain—this commander was invited to the wedding feast of Queequeg's sister, a pretty young princess just turned of ten. Well; when all the wedding guests were assembled at the bride's bamboo cottage, this Captain marches in, and being assigned the post of honour, placed himself over against the punchbowl, and between the High Priest and his majesty the King, Queequeg's father. Grace being said,—for those people have their grace as well as we—though Queequeg told me that unlike us, who at such times look downwards to our platters, they, on the contrary, copying the ducks, glance upwards to the great Giver of all feasts—Grace, I say, being said, the High Priest opens the banquet by the immemorial ceremony of the island; that is, dipping his consecrated and consecrating fingers into the bowl before the blessed beverage circulates. Seeing himself placed next the Priest, and noting the ceremony, and thinking himself—being Captain of a ship—as having plain precedence over a mere island King, especially in the King's own house—the Captain coolly proceeds to wash his hands in the punchbowl;—taking it I suppose for a huge finger-glass. "Now," said Queequeg, "what you tink now?—Didn't our people laugh?"

At last, passage paid, and luggage safe, we stood on board the schooner. Hoisting sail, it glided down the Acushnet river. On one side, New Bedford rose in terraces of streets, their ice-covered trees all glittering in the clear, cold air. Huge hills and mountains of casks on casks were piled upon her wharves, and side by side the world-wandering whale ships lay silent and safely moored at last; while from others came a sound of carpenters and coopers, with blended noises of fires and forges to melt the pitch, all betokening that new cruises were on the start; that one most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a second; and a second ended, only begins a third, and so on, for ever and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort.

Gaining the more open water, the bracing breeze waxed fresh; the little Moss tossed the quick foam from her bows, as a young colt his snortings. How I snuffed that Tartar air!—how I spurned that turnpike earth!—that common highway all over dented with the marks of slavish heels and hoofs; and turned me to admire the magnanimity of the sea which will permit no records.

Queequeg's story

It's a classic comic reversal: the self-important sea captain misinterprets the customs of a people he feels superior to, and is thus made to look foolish. Ho ho ho!

The larger point is that any time you venture outside your cultural comfort zone, you're gonna get laughed at. It's just going to happen. And you know what? That's OK.

In some sense, getting laughed at is the best thing that can happen in such a circumstance. Much better than to accidentally spark a fight---or worse, an intergalactic war.

"What you tink now?"

This is the first direct quotation we've heard from Queequeg in nearly ten chapters (ever since the end of chapter 3, by my reckoning). For whatever reason, we've been getting all of Queequeg's conversation indirectly, via Ishmael's narration.

By denying Queequeg a direct voice in the story for so long, it feels like Ishmael is actually dehumanizing Queequeg. And I feel like this is precisely the opposite of what he's trying to do---judging by all the ink he spills about how he and Queequeg are such great friends, and how when you really get down to it pagans are no different from you or me.

It's possible I'm reading too much into things. But Queequeg's narrative silence is just so conspicuous. The two men have been chatting nearly continuously for the past three chapters, and we don't get a single word of Queequeg's speech for any of it? Really? Why does Ishmael feel it necessary to speak on Queequeg's behalf?

One reason might be that quoting Queequeg directly for any of this would result in a story that's unnecessarily digressive and full of difficult-to-understand language. Had this been any novel other than Moby-Dick and any narrator other than Ishmael, such reasoning might even be convincing. But as it stands, I don't think we can let Ishmael off the hook.

Thus, even when we forgive his non-PC language (all his heathens and savages and so on), and his general preoccupation with Queequeg's foreignness---and even admitting that his treatment of Pacific islander culture is probably pretty progressive as compared to his contemporaries---we still see Ishmael's racism on display in subtle ways.

There's also the matter of eye dialect, but I think I'll save that one for another time.

Punctuational funambulism

See if you can spot the following combos on this page:

comma-dash (,—)

semicolon-dash (;—)

question mark-dash (?—)

exclamation point-dash (!—)

Also, check out the semicolon in the fourth sentence. It's absolutely insane. I mean, like, nutso–bonkers–off-the-wall crazy. I 100% guarantee that if you were to submit a piece with a sentence like that to a writing workshop, everyone in the group, instructor included, would absolutely flip their shit. They'd be throwing Lynne Truss books at you and shouting things about Omitting Needless Words and wouldn't stop hurting you until you finally mortified yourself at the base of a marble statue of E.B. White using a whip made of Oxford commas.

Why? Well; Melville starts the sentence with "Well"---already a massive no-no; any self-respecting MFA professor is going to red-line the heck out of that, no question---and then he just drops a fat fucking semicolon in there. Because: why not?

Melville: the author who---I certainly wouldn't have expected it;---who could have?---but he doesn't give any fucks, whatsoever.(!)

Or, more succinctly:

Well; Melville Doesn't Give Any Fucks

My favs

I'm still reeling from that semicolon. But before I go, I'll leave you with a favorite passage to ponder as you go about your weekend:

... from others came a sound of carpenters and coopers, with blended noises of fires and forges to melt the pitch, all betokening that new cruises were on the start; that one most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a second; and a second ended, only begins a third, and so on, for ever and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort.

Word of the Day: punctilious

Ishmael's Current Mood: cocoa-nutty 🌴🌰

[ourrisd]

Logging vs Blogging

The RISD and Brown students in a Wintersession studio that revolved around the history of whaling didn’t start by reading the fabulous Herman Melville tome Moby Dick. 

Instead, they first made their own sketchbooks – hand-binding basic journals using waxed thread to suggest old whaling logs. 

As they bound their blank books, students got into the spirit of the studio by listening to selections from Moby Dick, which inspired a certain monomania in synch with their contemporary explorations of a legendary industry.

Throughout the five-week studio – called Illuminating the Ocean Deep – students filled these books with sketches and notes made during repeated visits to the New Bedford [MA] Whaling Museum, where Painting Critic Martin Smick MFA 09 PT encouraged them to stick with 19th-century tradition and record their thoughts on paper vs smartphones.

photos by Jo Sittenfeld MFA 08 PH

[callmemoby]

Page 58 – Wheelbarrow

Previously on Call Me Moby:

Ishmael and his new friend Queequeg spent Sunday night in their room at the Spouter Inn, chatting away like schoolboys at summer camp. Queequeg told the story of his childhood on the remote Pacific island of Rokovoko, and how he eventually made his way to New England by way of a visiting Sag Harbor ship.

Before falling asleep, Ishmael and Queequeg vowed to stick together from here on out. Their plan is to go to Nantucket island together, where they will sign up aboard the first whaling expedition they can find.

Other things to know:

Queequeg has been hawking embalmed heads out on the streets of New Bedford.

Peter Coffin is the name of the proprietor of the Spouter Inn.

Today's Installment:

Chapter 13. Wheelbarrow. Page 58:

Next morning, Monday, after disposing of the embalmed head to a barber, for a block, I settled my own and comrade's bill; using, however, my comrade's money. The grinning landlord, as well as the boarders, seemed amazingly tickled at the sudden friendship which had sprung up between me and Queequeg—especially as Peter Coffin's cock and bull stories about him had previously so much alarmed me concerning the very person whom I now companied with.

We borrowed a wheelbarrow, and embarking our things, including my own poor carpet-bag, and Queequeg's canvas sack and hammock, away we went down to "the Moss," the little Nantucket packet schooner moored at the wharf. As we were going along the people stared; not at Queequeg so much—for they were used to seeing cannibals like him in their streets,—but at seeing him and me upon such confidential terms. But we heeded them not, going along wheeling the barrow by turns, and Queequeg now and then stopping to adjust the sheath on his harpoon barbs. I asked him why he carried such a troublesome thing with him ashore, and whether all whaling ships did not find their own harpoons. To this, in substance, he replied, that though what I hinted was true enough, yet he had a particular affection for his own harpoon, because it was of assured stuff, well tried in many a mortal combat, and deeply intimate with the hearts of whales. In short, like many inland reapers and mowers, who go into the farmers' meadows armed with their own scythes—though in no wise obliged to furnish them—even so, Queequeg, for his own private reasons, preferred his own harpoon.

Shifting the barrow from my hand to his, he told me a funny story about the first wheelbarrow he had ever seen. It was in Sag Harbor. The owners of his ship, it seems, had lent him one, in which to carry his heavy chest to his boarding house. Not to seem ignorant about the thing—though in truth he was entirely so, concerning the precise way in which to manage the barrow—Queequeg puts his chest upon it; lashes it fast; and then shoulders the barrow and marches up the wharf. "Why," said I, "Queequeg, you might have known better than that, one would think. Didn't the people laugh?"

The little Nantucket packet schooner

My guess is that most modern readers of Moby-Dick know pretty much squat about sailing. If that describes you, never fear! You and me are in the same boat.

...

Get it?

The same---boat?

YEAAAAAAHH!!!

Anyway, here's what you need to know:

A packet ship was a "small boat designed for domestic mail, passenger, and freight transportation [...] and featured regularly scheduled service."[1]

A schooner is "a type of glass for serving drinks."

Hope that clears things up for you.

Episode IV: A New Trope

I spent a good hour on TV Tropes trying to figure out if there was a name for the trope we see in this chapter, where everyone in town stops and stares as they silently judge Ishmael and Queequeg walking down the street together. I couldn't find anything. There's the Record Needle Scratch, but of course we have no record to scratch in a novel. There's the Fish Out of Water, but really it's not Ishamel who's out of his element---it's the townspeople who are thrown by him and Queequeg. Blithe Spirit or Convicted by Public Opinion may be better matches, but even these feel wrong, because they're vague. I'm talking about a specific type of scene, not just a character trope.

Am I crazy? Like, isn't there a scene in She's All That or whatever where the dorky girl walks down her high school hallway rocking her new glasses-free glamour, and all the other students are stopped mid-conversation just gawking at her?

I've never seen She's All That, so I have no idea. I tried looking it up but all I found was this incredibly strange demonstration of what a 55-year-old movie executive thinks a high school prom looks like.[2]

Something barrowed

I like how Melville handles Queequeg's wheelbarrow story here. By choosing to have Queequeg narrate the story as an event that happened long ago, it becomes a nice bit of characterization, rather than just another excuse to have a laugh at Queequeg's expense.

Imagine if Melville had written Queequeg's confusion over the wheelbarrow as though it were happening in the novel's present. Ishmael would've been stuck explaining to him how a wheelbarrow works, and Queequeg would end up looking the fool. Maybe he'd be embarassed, or maybe he'd shrug the embarassment off as just another quiddity of living amongst Christians. But either way, what's highlighted is Queequeg's weirdness. He'd be dehumanized.

In the way Melville has chosen to write things, however, Queequeg has enough distance from the wheelbarrow incident to see the humor in it, and he tells the story to Ishmael of his own volition. The wheelbarrow joke isn't just something being foisted upon Queequeg by Melville;[3] it's something he owns for himself. Which means it's possible for us to laugh with Queequeg here rather than at him. Thus, Queequeg is characterized as not just some humorless heathen, but a real person with self-awareness and a sense of humor.

Hooray for Queequeg!

Word of the Day: barrow

Ishmael's Current Mood: amused 😄

[1]: Fun fact: Wikipedia apparently loves packet ships so much that it has five different articles about them.

[2]: What would the 2016 version of this scene look like? It'd probably have a lot more twerking. And sexting. And sexting while twerking.

[3]: Well, technically it is, because this is a book and so none of the characters actually have any volition. But by writing things this way, Melville has at least provided Queequeg with the illusion of agency---which ultimately is the most a character in a novel can hope for.

[callmemoby]

Page 57 – Biographical

Previously on Call Me Moby:

Ishmael has been relating to us the history of his newfound friend and roommate, Queequeg.

Queequeg is from Rokovoko, an island in the South Pacific, where he was born the son of a king. One day a Sag Harbor ship came to the island, inspiring in Queequeg an irresistible desire to visit the lands of Christendom. He snuck onto the vessel just as it was leaving port, and eventually convinced the captain to let him stay on board as a member of the crew.

Thus Queequeg became a whaleman. He hoped to learn from Christendom how to make life better back for his kinsmen on Rokovoko. To his chagrin, however, he found that Christians are no less wicked than heathens.

Today's Installment:

Chapter 12. Biographical---Page 57:

By hints, I asked him whether he did not propose going back, and having a coronation; since he might now consider his father dead and gone, he being very old and feeble at the last accounts. He answered no, not yet; and added that he was fearful Christianity, or rather Christians, had unfitted him for ascending the pure and undefiled throne of thirty pagan Kings before him. But by and by, he said, he would return,—as soon as he felt himself baptized again. For the nonce, however, he proposed to sail about, and sow his wild oats in all four oceans. They had made a harpooneer of him, and that barbed iron was in lieu of a sceptre now.

I asked him what might be his immediate purpose, touching his future movements. He answered, to go to sea again, in his old vocation. Upon this, I told him that whaling was my own design, and informed him of my intention to sail out of Nantucket, as being the most promising port for an adventurous whaleman to embark from. He at once resolved to accompany me to that island, ship aboard the same vessel, get into the same watch, the same boat, the same mess with me, in short to share my every hap; with both my hands in his, boldly dip into the Potluck of both worlds. To all this I joyously assented; for besides the affection I now felt for Queequeg, he was an experienced harpooneer, and as such, could not fail to be of great usefulness to one, who, like me, was wholly ignorant of the mysteries of whaling, though well acquainted with the sea, as known to merchant seamen.

His story being ended with his pipe's last dying puff, Queequeg embraced me, pressed his forehead against mine, and blowing out the light, we rolled over from each other, this way and that, and very soon were sleeping.

Bringing the team together

After nearly fifty pages of wandering about town, eating breakfast, and going to church, we've finally stumbled back upon the main narrative of this damn book: Ishmael and Queequeg, together at last, agree to go a-whaling together! I wouldn't necessarily have expected such substantial narrative progress[1] in a chapter titled "Biographical", but there you go.

I think it's interesting that Moby-Dick begins with a chance encounter at an inn, followed by the rapid decision of the main characters to go adventuring together. You know where else you see this storytelling trope used? Every Dungeons & Dragons campaign that's ever existed.

This got me wondering whether there are any Moby-Dick-based RPGs out there. To my utter astonishment, I could not find a single one.[2] So without further ado, here is my rule set for the very first Moby-Dick RPG!

There are two playable classes: seaman and captain. There can only be one captain per ship.

There is also a GM, who must be called Ishmael.

Every turn, the group rolls a D20.

On a 1--19: The ship encounters no whales; instead, Ishmael opens a Wikipedia page at random and reads the entirety of the article to the players.

On a 20: The ship enters combat.

Combat rules: Each player rolls a D20. Any player who rolls a 1, dies. If the captain rolls a 1, the ship encounters Moby Dick, and all players die.

That's it

The rules have been designed to bore about 95% of players into quitting before finishing a single game, so as to fully capture the experience of reading Moby-Dick.

What are the haps my friends

My experience with the word haps has mostly been in the context of 90s vernacular: I assumed it began life as a piece of genuine slang before getting appropriated by mainstream corporate culture trying to appear "street-wise", and finally settling into retirement as a winking reference to said appropriation, finding use primarily by webcartoonists and other Internet-age ironists.

But as it turns out, the word hap comes from the Old Norse happ. It found its way into the the language via Middle English, and therefore enjoys a status as one of English's oldest words. The OED's earliest reference is from a manuscript, circa 1225, titled Seinte Katerine:

Hef hire heorte up to þe hehe healent.., bisohte him help, & hap, & wisdom.

(Your guess is as good as mine.)

The word haps doesn't merely mean "happenings", but "luck" or "fortune", and in particular "a chance occurrence, especially an event that is considered unlucky."

Crazy, right???

Those weren't the haps my friends

Fine, you caught me. Because the OED actually has this entry for hap, entirely separate from the Old Norse-derived definition:

So I guess my initial impression was correct, all the way down to the ironic usage in the Village Voice.

I'm glad that Ice Cube reference made it into the OED, at least. I'm also totally intrigued by the P. Tysver reference. Some cursory googling didn't really bring up any more information about who this Tysver person is, or what Quarterly magazine they were being published in. If you can find anything more about it, definitely let me know.

Is that it? You never actually talked about Queequeg's history

I mean, sure, I guess not.

You still read the chapter, right? So, like, whatever. Get of my back about it.

Jeez.

Word of the Day: haps

Ishmael's Current Mood: asleep 🛌😴💤

[1]: Substantial relative to the rest of the book---which is a bit like saying that my working knowledge of quantum field theory is pretty good relative to a dog's (i.e., not a lot).

[2]: Aside from this Livejournal entry from 2007, which I think is fair to say doesn't count.

In my researches, I also stumbled upon a RPG Maker game titled Whaling Revolution, about which ... well, I'll let the game's download page speak for itself:

The Whaling World is in trouble. The Greenpeace Empire oppress all that would take to the waves in the name of the Whaling Spirit - the sacred being that created the Universe. Now a dark secret begins to leak to the people, and the tide of revolution begins to roll in. A new hero is about to emerge: you!

Take up your rod, and fight in the name of the Whaling Spirit to save the wacky Whaling World from its ultimate destruction! Live the life you've always wanted: the life of a revolutionary-whaler and saviour of existence!

[callmemoby]

Today's Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: relevant to yesterday's discussion of "true places".

[callmemoby]

Page 56 – Biographical

Previously on Call Me Moby:

Our narrator, Ishmael, is spending the weekend in New Bedford, MA, where he awaits a ship to take him to Nantucket Island. There he plans to find a whaling voyage to sign up on as a petty sailor.

In the meantime, Ishmael has struck up a fast friendship with Queequeg, a so-called "savage" with whom he shares a bedroom. The two men have just spent all night in their room, chatting with each other like pre-teen boys at summer camp.

Ishmael now begins to relate Queequeg's backstory to us.

Today's Installment:

Chapter 12. Biographical, Page 56:

Queequeg was a native of Rokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down in any map; true places never are.

When a new-hatched savage running wild about his native woodlands in a grass clout, followed by the nibbling goats, as if he were a green sapling; even then, in Queequeg's ambitious soul, lurked a strong desire to see something more of Christendom than a specimen whaler or two. His father was a High Chief, a King; his uncle a High Priest; and on the maternal side he boasted aunts who were the wives of unconquerable warriors. There was excellent blood in his veins—royal stuff; though sadly vitiated, I fear, by the cannibal propensity he nourished in his untutored youth.

A Sag Harbor ship visited his father's bay, and Queequeg sought a passage to Christian lands. But the ship, having her full complement of seamen, spurned his suit; and not all the King his father's influence could prevail. But Queequeg vowed a vow. Alone in his canoe, he paddled off to a distant strait, which he knew the ship must pass through when she quitted the island. On one side was a coral reef; on the other a low tongue of land, covered with mangrove thickets that grew out into the water. Hiding his canoe, still afloat, among these thickets, with its prow seaward, he sat down in the stern, paddle low in hand; and when the ship was gliding by, like a flash he darted out; gained her side; with one backward dash of his foot capsized and sank his canoe; climbed up the chains; and throwing himself at full length upon the deck, grappled a ring-bolt there, and swore not to let it go, though hacked in pieces.

In vain the captain threatened to throw him overboard; suspended a cutlass over his naked wrists; Queequeg was the son of a King, and Queequeg budged not. Struck by his desperate dauntlessness, and his wild desire to visit Christendom, the captain at last relented, and told him he might make himself at home. But this fine young savage—this sea Prince of Wales, never saw the Captain's cabin. They put him down among the sailors, and made a whaleman of him. But like Czar Peter content to toil in the shipyards of foreign cities, Queequeg disdained no seeming ignominy, if thereby he might happily gain the power of enlightening his untutored countrymen. For at bottom—so he told me—he was actuated by a profound desire to learn among the Christians, the arts whereby to make his people still happier than they were; and more than that, still better than they were. But, alas! the practices of whalemen soon convinced him that even Christians could be both miserable and wicked; infinitely more so, than all his father's heathens. Arrived at last in old Sag Harbor; and seeing what the sailors did there; and then going on to Nantucket, and seeing how they spent their wages in that place also, poor Queequeg gave it up for lost. Thought he, it's a wicked world in all meridians; I'll die a pagan.

And thus an old idolator at heart, he yet lived among these Christians, wore their clothes, and tried to talk their gibberish. Hence the queer ways about him, though now some time from home.

"It is not down in any map; true places never are."

What a fantastic line. Of the numberless gems Melville has strewn throughout his novel so far, this is one of my favorites. It's pithy and profound, straightforward and enigmatic all at once. Like the best poetry, it is a mystical expression of the inexpressible.

So let's ruin all that by applying the rules of mathematical logic to it, shan't we?

Ishmael's statement can be written as a simple if-then proposition:

If a place is true, then it's not on any map.

If we represent the proposition "a place is true" with the letter T, and the proposition "a place is on a map" with the letter M, then we can boil that down to:

T -> ~M

From logic, we know that if a statement is true, then the contrapositive is true:

M -> ~T

In other words: according to Ishmael, if a place is on a map, then it's not true. Which is awfully distressing, to say the least. I mean, what have we been paying all these cartographers to do for the past few millennia? They can't get a single true place properly down on paper? Yeesh.[1]

Needless to say, I'm kidding. Of course there are true places on maps. For example, the Peet's Coffee I'm sitting in right now. It's totally a true place, because I'm sitting here, and I'm truly here. And this Peet's is definitely on Google Maps. Here, I'll look it up for you right now:

Oh. That's, um, weird.

Phantom islands and other fun stuff

That said, Ishmael's not entirely wrong about maps not having true places on them. Even at the most stubbornly literal level, not every place on a map is a true place.

You might think I'm gonna start talking about crazy old-timey maps, the ones with swollen representations of an imagined Terra Australis on them, or Atlantises and El Dorados and other what-have-yous. But I'm not. That's bush-league trivia. No---I'm talking about places that made their onto published maps well into the age of the Internet and satellite imagery, despite the fact that these so-called places straight-up do not exist.

For example: Sandy Island, which you may have heard about in 2012, when it was "undiscovered" by an Australian surveyor ship and taken off of Google Maps. According to Wikipedia, the "island" was charted by James Cook in 1774, and, after getting reported again by a whaling vessel in the 19th century, found its way onto standard naval charts. (It's possible the whalers saw floating pumice in the area and mistook it for an island.)

There are several other phantom islands out there, which you're free to read about on Wikipedia.[2] Cartographical untruths aren't limited to sincere mistakes like the case of Sandy Island, though. There are also plenty of little white lies publishers deliberately introduce into their maps for the purposes of copyright protection.

That's right: Rand McNally has been lying to you.

Here's the thing: when it comes to maps, it can be hard to prove copyright infringement. An infringer can just say their map is based on reality, and so of course it's gonna look similar to another map based on reality. To counter this, publishers will introduce minor discrepancies into their maps: for instance, they might invent a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, or a nonexistent street in a city. These so-called paper towns[4] and trap streets are intended to help publishers catch copyright violators in the act; anyone who accidentally copies a fictitious town or street onto their own map will have a hard time explaining to the law how it got there.

And then there are paper streets, which aren't necessarily copyright traps, but are instead accidental holdovers from city planning documents representing streets that were once planned, but never actually laid down.

The moral of the story: maps are terrible, terrible lies, and you should never trust a single one of them.

Some recommendations

If you're at all interested in geographical oddities and places that resist conventional definition, I'd highly recommend checking out the book Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies by Alastair Bonnett. It is, essentially, a book of short essays, each one exploring a spot on the earth that somehow stretches or defies our traditional notion of place. It's a fascinating survey, and one of my favorite nonfiction books in recent memory.

And if any of that sounds at all interesting to you, definitely check out Atlas Obscura if you haven't already.

What about the rest of the chapter?

Oh, yeah. I guess we've only really talked about the first two sentences so far.

Oh well. I'll get to the Queequeg stuff in the next post. (I assume.)

Word of the Day: ignominy (try using it in an email!)

Ishmael's Current Mood: paper thin 📃

[1]: You too, geographers! Don't think you're off the hook!

[2]: And don't forget vanishing islands, caused by tidal phenomena (or, if you're a medieval sailor, cyptozoological beasts like the aspidochelone).[3]:

[3]: Before you click any of these links, however, make sure you don't have any important appointments coming up, because it make for one hell of a Wiki rathole, believe you me.

[4]: Maybe you've read that John Green book and already know about this stuff. Well, good work, smarty pants.

[callmemoby]

Page 55 – The Nightgown

Previously, on Call Me Moby:

Ishmael and Queequeg are hanging out in their room at the Spouter-Inn. Earlier in the day, they went to a church and listened to a crazy old man (Father Mapple) yell at the congregation about some weird bible story (Noah and the Whale), which probably doesn't have any larger thematic significance to the rest of the novel (it does).

Before all that, Ishmael walked around town. Before that, he had some breakfast. Before that, he was super racist, and before that, he was contemplating suicide. This book isn't crazy at all!

Anyway, Ishmael and Queequeg have just bonded over a book and a smoke, and have become fast friends.

Today's Installment: Chapter 11. The Nightgown, Page 55

Full text:

We had lain thus in bed, chatting and napping at short intervals, and Queequeg now and then affectionately throwing his brown tattooed legs over mine, and then drawing them back; so entirely sociable and free and easy were we; when, at last, by reason of our confabulations, what little nappishness remained in us altogether departed, and we felt like getting up again, though day-break was yet some way down the future.

Yes, we became very wakeful; so much so that our recumbent position began to grow wearisome, and by little and little we found ourselves sitting up; the clothes well tucked around us, leaning against the head-board with our four knees drawn up close together, and our two noses bending over them, as if our kneepans were warming-pans. We felt very nice and snug, the more so since it was so chilly out of doors; indeed out of bed-clothes too, seeing that there was no fire in the room. The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. But if, like Queequeg and me in the bed, the tip of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.

We had been sitting in this crouching manner for some time, when all at once I thought I would open my eyes; for when between sheets, whether by day or by night, and whether asleep or awake, I have a way of always keeping my eyes shut, in order the more to concentrate the snugness of being in bed. Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper element of our essences, though light be more congenial to our clayey part. Upon opening my eyes then, and coming out of my own pleasant and self-created darkness into the imposed and coarse outer gloom of the unilluminated twelve-o'clock-at-night, I experienced a disagreeable revulsion. Nor did I at all object to the hint from Queequeg that perhaps it were best to strike a light, seeing that we were so wide awake; and besides he felt a strong desire to have a few quiet puffs from his Tomahawk. Be it said, that though I had felt such a strong repugnance to his smoking in the bed the night before, yet see how elastic our stiff prejudices grow when love once comes to bend them. For now I liked nothing better than to have Queequeg smoking by me, even in bed, because he seemed to be full of such serene household joy then. I no more felt unduly concerned for the landlord's policy of insurance. I was only alive to the condensed confidential comfortableness of sharing a pipe and a blanket with a real friend. With our shaggy jackets drawn about our shoulders, we now passed the Tomahawk from one to the other, till slowly there grew over us a blue hanging tester of smoke, illuminated by the flame of the new-lit lamp.

Whether it was that this undulating tester rolled the savage away to far distant scenes, I know not, but he now spoke of his native island; and, eager to hear his history, I begged him to go on and tell it. He gladly complied. Though at the time I but ill comprehended not a few of his words, yet subsequent disclosures, when I had become more familiar with his broken phraseology, now enable me to present the whole story such as it may prove in the mere skeleton I give.

Chapter 11 is just over a page long, so I've thrown the whole dang thing into one post. Bam! Right back into the groove of things! I love it!

This page is a goodie, you guys. So good! It's classic Ishmael: absolutely no plot advancement, but a whole lot of philosophizing. Even thematically-speaking this is all stuff we've covered before; Ishmael's just killing time before he introduces the next chapter.[1] But that won't stop him from waxing lyrical on stuff like dialectical monism and the foundational importance of darkness to the human psyche.

Also, we get another PAL ALERT!!!

I mean, what more could you ask for?

"as if our kneepans were warming-pans"

antiquated word for "kneecaps"

+

reference to bed-warming technology made obsolete by electric blankets and hot water bottles

=

pun that stopped working after the 19th century but is still super great

Luxurious discomforts of the rich (fireplace-related)

fireplaces in bedrooms

fireplaces in bathrooms

fireplaces in conservatories

fireplaces in bowling alleys

fireplaces made out of many smaller fireplaces stacked on top of each other

Luxurious discomforts of the rich (other)

pillows made out of diamonds

shower heads that spray molten gold

cars that run on nitroglycerin

certain exotic pets (e.g., vampire bats, muskoxen)

vacations to the moon

haute couture

Quotable Ishmael

I think I'm gonna start doing a regular "quotable Ishamel" segment in these posts. The purpose will be to bring attention to quotes and phrases that I think are super great, but about which I don't have a lot to say beyond "these quotes and phrases are super great, you guys!"

I count at least five in this chapter:

1.

To enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.

2.

Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.

3.

Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper element of our essences, though light be more congenial to our clayey part.[2]

4.

Be it said, that though I had felt such a strong repugnance to his smoking in the bed the night before, yet see how elastic our stiff prejudices grow when love once comes to bend them.

5.

I was only alive to the condensed confidential comfortableness of sharing a pipe and a blanket with a real friend.

Word of the Day: nappishness

Ishmael's Current Mood: cozy koala 🛏🐨

[1]: Which finally promises to reveal Queequeg's backstory! YES!! AWESOME!!!

[2]: I did not know this, but it turns out that clayey is an official, Webster's-sanctioned adjectival form of the word clay. Which is, of course, awesome.

[callmemoby]

And We’re Back!

HI EVERYONE!!

HI!!!!

HIIII!!!!!!!!!!!!

After graduating in December---and then traveling for several weeks in January---I'm finally back home and ready to get bloggin' again. I'd like to try a twice-a-week update schedule for the time being: one post on Monday or Tuesday, the other on Thursday or Friday. We'll see how manageable this schedule proves as I adapt to post-graduate life.

Thanks for reading!