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!