The Sandy Hook killings recall the Biblical massacre of the innocents, referenced in “Moby Dick.”
With a little imagination, “Moby Dick” can be dramatized as a story about race relations.
Literary allusions are flying fast and free in this primary season.
Posted in Blake (William), Bunyan (John), Carroll (Lewis), Hawthorne (Nathaniel), Melville (Herman), Milne (A. A.) | Also tagged Alice in Wonderland, Herman Melville, John Bunyan, Lewis Carroll, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Pilgrim's Progress, Presidential campaign, Scarlet Letter, William Blake |
Nathaniel Philbrick describes “Moby Dick” as a “metaphysical survival manual” which helps us understand the nature of tyrants.
Our students, displaced by mold, are being housed in a cruise ship. A campus production of “As You Like It” may have given administrators the idea.
Posted in Dahl (Roald), Melville (Herman), Porter (Katherine Anne), Shakespeare (William) | Also tagged 2000 Leagues under the Sea, As You Like It, Beatles, Education, Herman Melville, Jules Verne, Katherine Anne Porter, Mold, Ship of Fools, St. Mary's College of Maryland, William Shakespeare |
Randy Kennedy has written a superb article in the New York Times that points out parallels between the Gulf oil spill and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Kennedy says that, in the 19th century, New England whalers had to venture further and further afield to find oil-producing whales (they had depleted the local stock). Melville’s apocalyptic vision is eerily prescient.
Yesterday we buried a long-time friend, 98-year-old Maurine Holbert Hogaboom, a New York actress who had retired to southern Maryland. Tomorrow we commemorate the tenth anniversary of the death of my oldest son Justin. April, a month of new beginnings, has too often proved cruel as well. Nature often works ironically. Justin, feeling joyous on a [...]
