Melville Matters. OWS Haiku challenge. And another embedded musical diversion for those who enjoy playing anything on their brand new iPads, iPods, tablets, Droids and Kindle Fires.


Melville’s tome concerning the epic voyage in search of the Great Leviathan of the deep is taking up permanent residence in my soul. Hard to fathom (no pun originally intended as I write) that the book never got its due in his lifetime. Makes one wonder who the contemporary equivalent might be. I took a gander at some of what the literary crowd in his day had to say and it only confirms what is more common than not—which is that the universal and the transcendent are often great forests that can not be seen for the individual trees that tower over our own small parcels of land. Melville’s vision was too broad, too focused on the cosmic nature of existence to hold the attention of those seeking simple diversion or the cheap thrill of literary “originality”. He was too guileless and direct to seduce the critics and too sensitive and philosophical to please the masses. And again, I wonder who today might be considered his peer.

Cormac McCarthy comes to mind, but somehow I think he’s really more of an anomaly in that he’s almost a genre unto himself and (I now realize) is almost channeling Melville in such a self-conscious way that he fails to establish a voice that sounds truly personal and organic. He certainly can be dazzling and I think Suttree is a masterpiece in many ways, but I never feel like I could sit down and share a beer with him and shoot the breeze. He’s above it all—like Moses on the mountaintop, whereas Melville sounds like someone you could have a few laughs with and stroll around town sharing stories and observations.

David Foster Wallace may come closer, but he was even more self-consciously literary and pre-occupied with verbal gymnastics and his adrenaline fueled language leaves little room for the reader to ever get truly comfortable or feel like a welcome passenger in his high tech cockpit built for one.

Jonathan Franzen? Don’t get me started!

Of course, Melville’s contemporary alter-ego may be someone we’re not aware of and that would explain everything and be proof of his/her worthiness as a viable candidate for the role since Melville was never all that ambitious or comfortable in his role as a serious novelist. He thought himself more a journalist by inclination and over time came to despair of the value of fiction to express what he called “The truth to the face of falsehood”. He took up writing as a lark in hope (and not a high one) that it might provide some much needed income. And his career lasted little more than 10 years, over which time he experienced much more failure than success. Norman Mailer called writing “The Spooky Art”, but for someone like Melville who had little ambition for fortune or fame (unlike Mailer) , it got spookier and spookier and more and more eccentric with each new attempt to express his vision. I tried reading The Confidence Man, (it’s still sitting on my desk at work as if waiting for me to reconsider) which was the last book he ever submitted for publication and I couldn’t get a handle on it. But Moby Dick is still knockin me out and I’m savoring it like a Bear’s first meal after a long winter’s hibernation. Apropos of Melville’s propensity to question himself as worthy of his calling, in a brief passage Ishmael’s observes something about his noble, pagan, remote island born, multi-tattooed, super-humanly strong and unfailingly honorable and trustworthy companion Queequeg :

“Here was a man some twenty thousand miles from home, by the way of Cape Horn, that is—which was the only way he could get there—thrown among people as strange to him as though he were in the planet Jupiter; and yet he seemed entirely at his ease; preserving the utmost serenity; content with his own companionship; always equal to himself. Surely this was a touch of fine philosophy; though no doubt he had never heard there was such a thing as that. But, perhaps, to be true philosophers, we mortals should not be conscious of so living or so striving. So soon as I hear that such or such a man gives himself out for a philosopher, I conclude that, like the dyspeptic old woman, he must have “broken his digester.”


HARD TIMES HAIKU—OR OCCUPYING WALL STREET ONE SYLLABLE AT A TIME.

Former colleague and blogging mentor (teddyvegas.blogspot.com) has been writing of late about OWS and attendant topics. Back when Obama was elected in 2008 Teddy and a few of his most loyal readers went on a Haikus for Obama tear for a few hours and generated some thirty five or more poly-syllabic odes in honor of the nation’s new Janitor in Chief. So since I got started a few posts back with my Post Empire noodlings, I thought I’d keep the poetic device going, but this time the muse is OWS and related issues, and though I know I’ll never match Teddy’s prodigious numbers, I’ll channel the Melville in me and soldier on even in solitude.


Money talks, they say
It says I don’t care bout you
Or you, or you or…

When they all Trade off
pay-offs better than Madoff’’s
Time to say fuck off

Keynes Marx and Galbraith
Said: Inevitably it’s
Intolerable

Bubbles always burst
Cause greed never stops blowing
How derivative

Ninety nine percent
Versus one is their premise
What’s your point? Asks Trump.

In a private park
A public protest rages
About property


Yesterday I posted Adam Rafferty doing his solo version of “Isn’t she Lovely” by Stevie Wonder. Here’s another version by Bireli Lagrene and Sylvain Luc. For me it’s like watching a great tennis match, but minus the scoring and grunting.