Despite my recent silence on the blog, I am still making my way through Moby Dick, slowly but surely. The thing that's making the biggest impression on me in this second half is that I'm realizing there are all these chapters that I love, but had completely forgotten about. Before this second read, there were certain chapters that I remembered as my favorites--"The Lee Shore," "A Squeeze of the Hand," "Cistern and Buckets." But as I read, I find myself saying, over and over, "Oh yeah, this one! I love this part!" See: "The Pequod Meets the Rose Bud," where Stubb cons the Rose Bud out of their Ambergris (and claims that he is holding his nose because "It's a wax nose; I have to hold it on." Ha!); or "The Dubloon," where we get that wonderful parade of crew members watching the dubloon and each other. How could I have forgotten about that!?
Mom, in response to your post, I couldn't find any information about St. Pott's, either. But my footnotes tell me that that whole passage is a parody of some other whaling book, so I'm guessing that "the college of Santa Claus and St. Pott's" is just supposed to sound silly, and that St. Pott's isn't anything.
Finally, I'm enjoying the chapters where he talks about the whale skeleton (why do people think these parts are boring?) Highlights: when trying to measure the skeleton of the beached whale in the Pacific, the natives yell at him, "Dar'st thou measure this our god! That's for us." And this paragraph, from "The Fossil Whale":

When I stand among these mighty Leviathan skeletons, skulls, tusks, jaws, ribs, and vertebrae, all characterized by partial resemblances to the existing breeds of sea-monsters; but at the same time bearing on the other hand similar affinities to the annihilated antechronical Leviathans, their incalculable seniors; I am, by a flood, borne back to that wondrous period, ere time itself can be said to have begun; for time began with man. Here Saturn's grey chaos rolls over me, and I obtain dim, shuddering glimpses into those Polar eternities; when wedged bastions of ice pressed hard upon what are now the Tropics; and in all the 25,000 miles of this world's circumference, not an inhabitable hand's breadth of land was visible. Then the whole world was the whale's; and, king of creation, he left his wake along the present lines of the Andes and the Himmalehs. Who can show a pedigree like Leviathan? Ahab's harpoon had shed older blood than the Pharaoh's. Methuselah seems a schoolboy. I look round to shake hands with Shem. I am horror-struck by this antemosaic, unsourced existence of of the unspeakable terrors of the whale, which, having been before all time, must needs exist after all humane ages are over.

Ah, Melville, what can I even say about that?
We have a chance to be "horror-struck" right here in Mexico City. At the Biblioteca Vasconcelos, where I've never been, there's a whale skeleton hanging from the ceiling (drawn on by artist Gabriel Orozco). My Google Image search suggests that it's not a Sperm Whale skeleton; but I think even a lesser whale might do the trick.

Santa Claus?

I'm weighing in on a trivial question here, not because I don't have a larger issue to address (I have a lot to say about the Doubloon chapter!) but because this is quick and dirty question. 

In chapter 101, "The Decanter," Melville writes, "Dr. Snodhead, a very learned man, professor of Low Dutch and High German in the college of Santa Claus and St. Potts...". Now, aside from the fact that he seems to be deliberately using really funny names in this chapter (Snodhead! Swackhammer! Ye gods!) I was interested in the mention of Santa Claus--I don't thnk the name became a fixture in the American imagination until Nast wrote The Night Before Christmas some years later. But who is St. Potts? I got nada from a quick and dirty Internet search. 

More to come later...waiting with bated breath, baited with stink bait if need be, to hear from the second generation. :-)

Here is all they have at 6 Pearl Street, now an ugly hirise, where Melville was born.  Poor Herman.  Don't you think he deserves a brass plaque at least?  The thing to the right that you can barely make out is a brass (?) bust of Melville in back of a plastic window with a lot of moisture on the inside.  Even up close you can't really see it.

More about the book in my next post - soon.

Happy birthday, Herman!

So I was about to start this post by announcing that I'm all caught up! Except then I looked at the schedule and realized that I'm more than a full week behind. Rats!
This section that I'm in the middle of (I just finished Cistern and Buckets) contains some of my favorite parts of the whole novel. I just love all these weird chapters about whale anatomy, not to mention Cistern and Buckets, which ranks among my top favorite chapters of Moby Dick.
First we have Queequeg birthing Tashtego out of the Sperm whale's head--a Greek myth (Athena + Zeus!) crossed with a rallying cry for midwifery. Then the chapter ends with this gem of a paragraph:

Now, had Tashtego perished in that head, it had been a very precious perishing; smothered in the very whitest and dantiest of fragrant spermaceti; coffined, hearsed, and tombed in the secret inner chamber and sanctum sanctorum of the whale. Only one sweeter end can readily be recalled--the delicious death of an Ohio honey-hunter, who seeking honey in the crotch of a hollow tree, found such exceeding store of it, that leaning too far over, it sucked him in, so that he died embalmed. How many, think ye, have likewise falled into Plato's honey head, and sweetly perished there?

There's a paragraph after my own heart.
All the whale anatomy stuff I like because it seems to tie in with some ideas from earlier in the book--namely, themes of covering/obscuring (see:  The Blanket, and also The Quarter-Deck) and an interest in appearances that I can't quite figure out. I'm thinking, in this section, of chapters 74 and 75--about the  heads of the Sperm and Right whales. What do you guys think is going on there? Do you agree that the book is obsessed with the way whales look?

Melville's Method

This post was motivated by last week's reading, but I haven't managed to post it 'till now.
I've been thinking while reading about why Melville does what he does - why does he intersperse chapters that move the story forward with chapters about minute details of whaling, about whale anatomy, about whatever might be vaguely related to the story but not really part of it.  I am sure there are many reasons, including making whalers of us landlubbers, as in Sara's post.  So I don't claim to know the half of it.  But certainly one of the effects of this slow unveiling of the story is to make us feel we are on the ship at sea with Ahab.  As Eli mentioned, it must be an excruciatingly boring existence, being at sea for three years.  After reading all these things, the general sense I get is that I've been on that ship forever waiting for Moby Dick to appear.  It certainly hasn't been boring, but the sense of a very slow passage of time is certainly there.

Heads up, ya'll

Eli has finished reading Moby Dick! And really liked it. We wouldn't know because he doesn't have internet at the apartment yet, but this is from his lips to mine. Tony hasn't yet finished, but he's pretty much on schedule. The women in the family are falling behind, and I'll be the first to admit that I'm probably the worst. We have to catch up! Let's go, ladies! (I know you're not ladies. I'm not a lady either).