Wednesday reading

Reading now: Moby Dick, still. Nearly there! I'm on chapter 104 of 135. Which means my recent reading has included ch. 94, "A Squeeze of the Hand," aka "squeezing sperm is the best and I really love my fellow man," ch. 95, "The Cassock," aka "an entire chapter about whale dick, in which I will repeatedly mention how absolutely massive whale dick is," and 99, "The Doubloon," aka "did Stubb just refer to Queequeg's penis there, and by the way, is Queequeg's penis tattooed?"

(In re: "The Doubloon," the chapter recounts various crew members looking at the doubloon that Ahab nailed to the mast a while back, and interpreting it in various ways. Stubb, hiding, watches Queequeg examine the zodiac pictures on the doubloon and compare them with his own tattoos:

As I live he's comparing notes; looking at his thigh bone; thinks the sun is in the thigh, or in the calf, or in the bowels, I suppose, as the old women talk Surgeon's Astronomy in the back country. And by Jove, he's found something there in the vicinity of his thigh--I guess it's Sagittarius, or the Archer.

"Thigh" is a frequent euphemism for the genitals (a common biblical one in the King James version, and if there's one thing Melville loves more than sailors and whale facts it's a biblical reference), so finding an archer/arrow "in the vicinity of his thigh" sounds like another dick joke to me.)


Recently finished: Ellen Datlow's latest Best Horror of the Year (last year's one). I usually like Datlow's anthologies--she has a preference for relatively low violence and gore, and so do I--and this was no exception.


Reading next: Vol. 4 of The Department of Truth, which the comics shop expects in next week. And vol. 3 of Something is Killing the Children. And maybe a book that isn't Moby Dick? I do think I should re-read MD, too, but I'm going to give it a little time.

50 new things in 2023, part 6/50

Some music this week! I listened to Jens Lekman's 2022 album The Linden Trees Are Still in Blossom, which is a re-release of his now-discontinued 2007 album Night Falls Over Kortedala plus some new songs. I've previously listened to a few songs from NFOK but not the whole album, so it counts as new to me.

It's interesting to hear Lekman's early style along with his later style; I prefer the later one, which is less indebted to twee 1970s pop and syrupy strings. (Having said this, there are some fantastic songs from the original album, including "The Opposite Of Hallelujah," "Your Arms Around Me," "Shirin," "Friday Night at the Drive-In Bingo," and the song that made me start listening to Lekman in the first place, "A Postcard to Nina." And most of these are on the less strings-and-ridiculous-synths side of things.)

What really draws me to Lekman are the lyrics--I'm much more a lyrics appreciator than a music appreciator--and his lyrical style has matured too, without fundamentally changing. There's the slice of life plus punch in the gut stuff, the melancholy (shoutout to "Your Beat Kicks Back Like Death," which does a hell of a lot with its opening line, "We're all gonna die"), the self-conscious and sometimes self-puncturing romanticism, the intense focus on little moments.

To me the greatest delight was the title track, "The Linden Trees Are Still In Blossom." It's a follow-up song to "A Postcard to Nina," which not only adds to the (apparently true) story in the original song, but directly addresses the fact that homophobia's not a thing of the past. It made me cry, and not much does that these days. I hope Nina sent him that postcard.

fossils

Having now read chapter 104 of Moby Dick, "The Fossil Whale," I can now add Melville to Tennyson on my mental list of literary writers who, pre-Darwin*, tried to make sense of fossil evidence of extinct species.

Melville:

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 ante-chronical 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 upon 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 Pharaohs'. Methuselah seems a schoolboy. I look round to shake hands with Shem. I am horror-struck at this antemosaic, unsourced existence of the unspeakable terrors of the whale, which, having been before all time, must needs exist after all human ages are over.

And Tennyson, from In Memoriam; earlier in the poem he's been grieving over how nature cares for the type (species) but not the individual life, and then it gets worse:

"So careful of the type?" but no.
From scarped cliff and quarried stone
She [nature] cries, "A thousand types are gone:
I care for nothing, all shall go.
Thou makest thine appeal to me:
I bring to life, I bring to death:
The spirit does but mean the breath:
I know no more."

They both arrive at the horror of the uncaring universe. Tennyson ultimately rejects the idea; I don't think Melville's going to.

Does anybody know of other pre-Darwin writers who look at this issue? It's something I'm kind of fascinated by.


*Of course knowledge of fossils and of deep geological time pre-date The Origin of Species. It's the gap between that knowledge--that time is orders of magnitude longer than the Biblical narrative, and that hundreds, thousands, countless species supposedly specially created by God have simply ceased to exist--and Darwin's explanation of mechanisms that is so interesting. And I think maybe it's from that gap specifically that Melville's particular kind of cosmic horror comes.