Who are you calling Slobgollion?
What you don’t want is to shriek “Slobgollion?!” in a public place. But such was my enthusiasm for this formerly unknown word… Continue reading
Tag Archives: moby dick
Moby Dick – Week 4
Dissecting the Whale
From peeling the whale like an orange, to his nose-less and sphinx-like head. Week 4′s serving of Moby Dick delves into the whale in both detail and actuality. That’s a lot of whale anatomy but, by turns gruesomely graphic, profound and occasionally humourous, it is by no means the killer read I remember. (Yep, this is approximately where I jumped ship on former voyages.)
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Moby Dick Takes a Holiday (As do I…)
Moby Dick – Week 4 is under construction, as they say, but it has all gone a bit pear-shaped, since I am away on holiday as of tomorrow. More encouragingly, I am not a big fan of ‘holiday reading’ and do not see why Moby Dick should not serve for that purpose as well as any other book. On the contrary, I am rather delighted by the opportunity to read it by the sea.
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Moby Dick – Week 3
Skrimshander on This!
‘Skrimshander’ and ‘skrimshandering’ are the fascinating words which Melville uses to respectively describe ‘the numerous little ingenious contrivances [the whalemen] elaborately carve out of [Sperm Whale teeth],’ and the art of creating such articles.
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Moby Dick – Week 2 (Part II)
[Enter Ahab]
I was excited by the appearance of some serious whales in the reading for Week 2, but it would be remiss to indulge flippancy at the expense of the main event. Namely, the long awaited emergence of Captain Ahab.
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Moby Dick – Week 2 (Part I)
Here be Whales!
In the second installment of Moby Dick, still going swimmingly (if you will excuse the phrase) the first instance of my customary stumbling block manifests. An apparently endless exposition on whales; a cetology, no less.
But what is this? Only a handful of pages long? See, ‘e not so tough!
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Dr Seuss and Moby Dick
Still in a reading slump and sorely tempted to analyse Dr Seuss (if only this was a joke…) And Gilead is not going so well (which is a tale for another time) but I did enjoy a comment made by Sue McGregor, on Radio 4′s ‘A Good Read,’ earlier this week. She described Moby Dick as a book that ‘a lot of people now find rather unreadable.’ Vindicated!
On a positive note, Melville’s Billy Bud and Other Stories was made to sound very intriguing…
