Skip to main content

Call Me Ishmael

By
I've been reading Iain Sinclair's American Smoke and enjoying his anecdotes while on the trail of the Beats.  His favorite is Charles Olson, the unofficial bard of Gloucester, MA, whose major work was The Maximus Poems, published posthumously in 1983.  But, what attracted me was his study of Melville's Moby-Dick, simply titled Call Me Ishmael, first published in 1947.

Olson was apparently the first to recognize there were two books, the pre-Shakespeare and the post-Shakespeare  Moby-Dick.  In the first telling Ahab had a mostly incidental role, but upon reading King Lear Melville recast his Ahab as a latter-day Lear, obsessed with vengeance at the cost of everything else around him.  Other scholars have since bolstered this idea, noting the profound influence Shakepseare had on Melville.

The essay had first appeared  as Lear and Moby-Dick in 1938, but Olson worked on it continuously over a 10 year span, incorporating his ideas on "Empire," which he felt Melville strongly alluded to in his novel.  This allowed Olson to parallel Moby-Dick with the Cold War, which had begun shortly after WWII.

Charles Olson at work
American Smoke is well worth reading, especially as Sinclair delves into persons who were outside our usual understanding of the Beats, yet had a powerful influence on literature.  As Sinclair tells it, Kerouac met up with Olson once but was apparently too drunk to really engage with him.  One of those lost opportunities.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro
228 comments
Read more

Dylan in America

By
Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan.  Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose.  Looks like only yesterday.  Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.
182 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more