User:Majgab31
From 1850s
Contents |
[edit] Gabriel Majeski's Userpage
[edit] Moby Dick
I recently bought a Patagonia jacket that has a huge pocket inside the chest, and because we hadn't sat down to dinner yet I was still wearing this jacket and, in the pocket, my 851-page Modern Library edition of Moby Dick, thick enough to stop a bullet. I thought of the part in the beginning when Ishmael is watching the cannibal Queequeg worship a wooden idol and thinks/says: "I cherish the greatest respect towards everybody's religious obligations, no matter how comical." I thought of the chapter in which the sailors wonder whether Moby Dick is immortal (he has been harpooned many times, and yet continues to swim) and ubiquitous (he has been seen on opposite sides of the Earth within small windows of time). Ahab's beef with Moby Dick is a beef with time and space itself, a confrontation with all of those things we pretend to have a handle on; Ahab is fighting against the howling, dimly perceived infinite. It's a fight he cannot win, a thing he cannot overcome, and yet he is maniacally determined to, the way certain people who want to live forever become Christians. These "strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful" thoughts (that's from chapter 35) were swimming through my mind and it was Christmas and my stepmother was looking fuzzy and I was feeling fruity, so I just said it. I said: "Literature is my religion."
My stepmother blinked.
(From - My Higher Power: On Moby Dick, Jonathan Franzen, and Eternal Life. - By Christopher Frizzelle)
[edit] Literary Criticisms
"I know that the whale Moby Dick is not my grandmother. I know that the whale Moby Dick might be the Republic of Ireland. Somewhere in the middle is responsible literary analysis"
- My Father; Mark E. Majeski
A Theory of Moby Dick by William S. Gleim The New England Quarterly, Vol.2, No. 3. (Jul.,1929), pp. 402-419
Our Best Novels "F.R.'s" List of Twenty-five - A Review of the Field. The New York Times, Published Septeber 24, 1898
After Reading the Last Pages of Moby-Dick by John Tagliabue College English, Vol. 19, No. 6, Poetry and Professors Issue. (Mar., 1950), p241.
Moby Dick and Rabelais by Whitney Hastings Wells Modern Language Notes, Vol. 38, No. 2. (Feb., 1923), p. 123.
The Spirit of the Times Reviews Moby Dick by John Francis Mc Dermott The New England Quarterly, Vol. 30, No. 3. (Sep., 1957), pp. 392-395.
