We doin' this!

Okay, "all"... September is a month of rebirth. Here goes.

First of all, I forgive this man for stealing my name and actually doing a blog with it. Turns out his blog is much better than mine, and also has more to do with his title than mine ever did...plus it can actually be called a "blog", whereas mine is basically a place where sometimes I say I am about to go out to dinner when I feel dumb for not having bothered to write anything for a whole month. So Kudos, enjoy all the traffic that I never deserved.

You may recall a while back that I said something about a band I was in - I am still in this band. We just kicked off our tenure as a live band in Philadelphia with a highly ambitious, multimedia project revolving around a fake politician. The first of three shows was a success, and hopefully next week's will be even better. Here are three pictures from the evening:

I like them best left unexplained.

GEAR SHIFT

I recently started reading this book, and now I find myself always wanting to read it.

I'm on Chapter 15 of 135, about 50 pages in. Some thoughts.

I'd always just assumed this book was really hard to read. It's long, and any time it was brought up, there was a mysterious aura around it, as if the world was saying "Don't even try it - too dense, not enough payoff." Maybe it's that first sentence that is so daunting - "Call me Ishmael." Three simple words, easy to understand, but loaded with a hundred and fifty years of literary significance and over 2000 years of biblical baggage. I suspect those three words are the most famous opening line in American literature simply because most people read them, stopped at the period, and closed the book, petrified of what could possibly lie ahead if those three words could mean so damn much.

This could be complete bullshit. It's probably more that it's a long book with a slightly older form of English than we're used to, and it takes a long time to get to the part with the whale. As I said earlier, 135 chapters, and almost all the actual whale-hunting action is in the final three, from what I can discern from the chapter titles. There's also the fact that Melville takes some very long and seemingly unrelated detours along the way to the battle with the whale - the three chapters on visual depictions of whales, and the two chapters on the shapes of whales' heads, for instance. That is enough to turn anyone off if they're not in exactly the right mood to take the trip along with Ishmael.

Fortunately for me, I was hooked after one paragraph. That first paragraph is not only wrought with rich symbolism, it speaks beautifully to the power of the ocean and is also hysterically funny. I hadn't realized just how funny the book is - I think that if I'd known how effortlessly Melville switches between very deep and moving passages and downright funny writing, I would have been more inclined to read this beast of a book.

The point is, this book is taking over my literary life. Extended meditations on the sea and its power are spectacular. The patience of the story-telling, and Melville's willingness to make the mundane fascinating, is really amazing.

The book is not about a fight with the white whale - it's about the long, complex journey to get to him.

And also about how to tell a right whale's head from a sperm whale's head.