The book in question "Leviathan", is a history of American whaling.
One thing it has taught me is that there was a fair bit left out of the movie version of Moby Dick:
Nor is there anything like skinning the whale’s penis, “longer than a Kentuckian is tall,” and wearing it as a tunic while you slice up the fat harvested from the rest of its body. Melville’s narrator, Ishmael, claims that the mincer of blubber usually wore such a tunic, in a clerical cut that made him look like “a candidate for an archbishoprick.” For “Moby-Dick,” Melville drew on scientific, historical, and journalistic accounts of whales, but he had a reputation for blurring the line between fact and fiction, and scholars have noted that for this chapter “none of Melville’s fish documents was particularly helpful.” In other words, he may have made the tunic up, for the sake of the archiepiscopal pun and perhaps, too, as a symbol.It's a really interesting read. Go to it.
2 comments:
Nope, got this one - they're only one week behind schedule at the moment. It is a great essay. You just had to quote the bit about the whale's dick, though, didn't you?
Oh come, it's bizarre and funny.
Have you ever read Moby Dick? I haven't, and would probably prefer to read this nonfiction account of whaling if I had the time to read anything about it.
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