"I cherish the greatest respect towards everybody's religious obligations, never mind how comical..."

"... and could not find it in my heart to undervalue even a congregation of ants worshipping a toad-stool; or those other creatures in certain parts of our earth, who with a degree of footmanism quite unprecedented in other planets, bow down before the torso of a deceased landed proprietor merely on account of the inordinate possessions yet owned and rented in his name."

Herman Melville, "Moby Dick: or, the White Whale," Kindle Locations 1181-1189.

ADDED: From the next paragraph: "... Heaven have mercy on us all—Presbyterians and Pagans alike— for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending."

"Call me Ishmael."

Or Tilda Swinton.

Maurice Sendak says "Go to hell"...

... and a lot of other fascinating art-related things in a beautiful video shot in a beautiful room:



(Via Metafilter.)

"The Top 100 Influential Figures in American History."

I'm going to click through all this, beginning with Herman Melville at #100 — he's "the American Shakespeare." Come with me. #99 is Nixon! Why's Nixon only 99? I know. He's ugly. And we hate him. Have to click to 86 to get to the first woman. It's Mary Baker Eddy, who, of course, influenced health care reform. Another lady at 81. It's Margaret Mead, famous for being had by 3d world pranksters. Nothing more American than that. A woman at 77: Betty Friedan. I never read her book. I thought it was for my parents' generation. My — my my my — generation transcended sex roles. We were star dust, we were golden.

Frank Lloyd Wright is 76. Architects may come and architects may go, and never change your point of view. Not Frank. He'd sock you in the head with a low-hanging roof as soon as look at you. He was from Wisconsin. That's important. So was Georgia O'Keeffe, who might be on this list. She's a woman, you know. 20 bonus points for being a woman? Here's Jane Addams at 64. Another woman. And I, your humble female blogger, would like to register a complaint against my high school speech teacher who rejected my proposal to do a speech on the topic of Jane Addams. He said she wasn't important enough. I used to want to be a social worker.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. is 53. The only judge so far. Another woman at 51: Margaret Sanger. (A "thoroughgoing racist" says Jonah Goldberg.) Not too many Presidents. After Nixon, you have to wait until #44 for another President. It's Lyndon Johnson. I call him "LBJ." Works better in rhyming chants. LOL! It's Eleanor Roosevelt at #42. "She used the first lady’s office and the mass media to become 'first lady of the world.'" Women playing the media to focus attention on themselves. Yeah, I guess that's a big deal in American culture. She's responsible for that? All right then. 

Harriet Beecher Stowe. #41. The power of novels. Rachel Carson is #39. She saved the eagles... and the mosquitoes. Susan B. Anthony is 38. Elizabeth Cady Stanton is #30. Women's rights. Earl Warren is 29. A second judge. Eisenhower is 28. A third President. Eli Whitney deserves to be 27: "His gin made cotton king and sustained an empire for slavery."

John Adams at 25? Come on? Is HBO/David McCullough the arbiter of history? But yeah, he was President. Truman is 21. A 5th President. Man, get a David McCullough biography about you to cement your historical importance. Andrew Jackson is 18. A 6th President. Reagan's 17. That's 7. Theodore Roosevelt is 15. The 8th Prez on the list, and the 2d of what I predict will be 3 Roosevelts. James Madison is 13. The 9th President, a Founding Father. Ulysses S. Grant gets to be 12. A 10th Prez. And he won the war. Woodrow Wilson is #10 and the 11th President on the list. Martin Luther King Jr. is only #8. John Marshall is #7, the 3d judge. Ben Franklin is 6, deservedly. Another Founder at 5: Alexander Hamilton. FDR snags #4 and is the 12th President on the list. Jefferson is #3, so you know who ##1 and 2 are. And Lincoln beats Washington for the top spot. A total of 15 Presidents.

The final count for women was 10. 10 out of 100. (I think.) Fair enough. I'm not going to say there should have been more. If they'd counted femaleness as a plus factor, they'd have had to "plus-factor" a lot of other groups, and they didn't. Not one Native American?! That's politically incorrect.

ADDED: Actually there were a couple more Presidents, Polk and John Quincy Adams. I'm noticing this leaning over Meade's shoulder as he clicks through. Sorry. My effort was studiously haphazard.

Babu Sassi, the man who lives in his crane, at the top of the Burj Dubai, the tallest building, and hasn't been down to the ground for over a year.

BLDGblog is entranced:

Whether or not this is even true – after all, I never think truth is the point in stories like this – 1) the idea of appropriating a construction crane as a new form of domestic space – a kind of parasitic sub-structure attached to the very thing it's helped to construct (perhaps raising the question: what is the ontology of construction cranes?) – is totally awesome; 2) further, the idea that crane operators are subject to these sorts of urban rumors and speculations brings me back to the idea that there might be a burgeoning comparative literature of mega-construction sites taking shape today, with this particular case representing a strong subgenre: mythic construction worker stories, John Henry-esque figures who single-handedly assemble whole floors of Dubai skyscrapers at midnight, with a cigarette in one hand and a hammer in the other (or so the myths go), as a kind of oral history of the global construction trade; and, finally, 3) there should be some kind of TV show – or a book, or a magazine interview series – similar to Dirty Jobs in which you go around visiting people who live in absurd places – like construction cranes atop the Burj Dubai, or extremely distant lighthouses, or remote drawbridge operation rooms on the south Chinese coast, or the janitorial supply chambers of inner London high-rises – in order to capture what could be called the new infrastructural domesticity: people who go to sleep at night, and brush their teeth, and shave, and change clothes, and shower, inside jungle radar towers for the French foreign legion, or up above the train tracks of Grand Central Station because their shift starts at 3am and they have to stay close to the job.

This is, of course, a wonderful subject for movies and books. Perhaps you can help me think of some. I thought first of one of my favorite movies, the one where Shirley Temple lives in a lighthouse. Then I thought of "Bartleby the Scrivener" -- spoiler alert:

Upon more closely examining the place, I surmised that for an indefinite period Bartleby must have ate, dressed, and slept in my office, and that too without plate, mirror, or bed. The cushioned seat of a ricketty old sofa in one corner bore the faint impress of a lean, reclining form. Rolled away under his desk, I found a blanket; under the empty grate, a blacking box and brush; on a chair, a tin basin, with soap and a ragged towel; in a newspaper a few crumbs of ginger-nuts and a morsel of cheese. Yet, thought I, it is evident enough that Bartleby has been making his home here, keeping bachelor’s hall all by himself. Immediately then the thought came sweeping across me, What miserable friendlessness and loneliness are here revealed! His poverty is great; but his solitude, how horrible! Think of it. Of a Sunday, Wall-street is deserted as Petra; and every night of every day it is an emptiness. This building too, which of week-days hums with industry and life, at nightfall echoes with sheer vacancy, and all through Sunday is forlorn. And here Bartleby makes his home; sole spectator of a solitude which he has seen all populous—a sort of innocent and transformed Marius brooding among the ruins of Carthage!

"I used to feel that I spent too much of my time in my pajamas doing nothing..."

"... and I’d think 'in the time that I don't spend writing, I could raise a family of five.' In a lot of ways, being a writer is lonely and alienating. You hear about the work ethic of people like Joyce Carol Oates and John Updike and you think 'well, God bless them, but I don’t know how they do it.' Most of the rest of us just wind up watching Oprah. I was roaming the neighborhood every day, lingering at the dog run with my dog. It was really bad. I just wasn’t doing enough, and I feel like law school sort of gave me my voice back. When you have a lot to do, you get a lot done. At least that’s how it’s been for me."

That's Elizabeth Wurtzel trying to give a believable answer to the question why she went from the life of a writer into the big law firm lawyer's life. So you think, with all my free time I could be raising 5 kids, so.... I'll go to law school and work in a big law firm?

Actually, I understand the logic. When you are purely a writer, you are hanging around the house a lot. You can feel very odd and at loose ends. If the house is empty, you may think, I could be raising kids what with all the time I spend loafing and moping, but that doesn't mean you want to raise kids (who you must know will be demanding during your creative spurts as well as your down time). It just means, it's a weird way to live, on your own at home. Maybe what you need is not other human beings in the house, but to get out of the house, to have a life that has more to do with interacting with adults and affecting the network of adult activities. Law is the perfect entree.

And a writer needs something to write about. You may venture out into that complex world of adult enterprises and eventually bring it all back home, where you can write again. We were just talking about the way Bill Ayers signed up as a merchant seaman, thinking he'd gather the material he to write a great novel. Was Ayers thinking about Herman Melville? Joseph Conrad? Was Wurtzel thinking about Scott Turow?

America's "literary flowering" was "a rebellion against what was thought of as academic, effete and indoors-y in English writing."

So how can a real, American literary artist take a job as a creative writing professor? Asks David Gessner.

[I]t’s hard to imagine [Thoreau] taking a break from one of his marathon strolls to waste three hours teaching a graduate workshop. Equally difficult is picturing Melville asking a group of undergrads, “What’s at stake in this story?” or Dickinson clapping a colleague on the back after a faculty meeting.

Yes, but did Henry and Herman and Emily have health care insurance and a retirement plan?

Gessner struggles with his cushy life and its obligations:

[C]reation of literature requires a degree of monomania, and that it is, at least in part, an irrational enterprise. It’s hard to throw your whole self into something when that self has another job.

But surely there are some jobs that provide substance and raw material for the writer. (Whaling, for example.) The problem with writers having jobs other than writing occurs when those jobs consume their time and attention, turn them into boring, conventional people, and give back nothing worth writing about.

But Gessner worries that the ideal of just writing is too irrational:

[Y]ou are sitting by yourself trying to make something out of nothing, and you rarely know where you’re going next. Creating your own world is an invitation to solipsism, if not narcissism, and as well as being alone when we work, we are left, for the most part, to judge by ourselves if we have succeeded or failed in our tasks. (Three guesses in which direction we most often lean.) My father succinctly summarized his feelings about my choice to dedicate my 20s to writing fiction. “You’re not living in the real world,” he said. I reacted with a young man’s defensiveness, but in retrospect his assessment seems less critical than a matter of fact.

Which is where teaching comes in. It provides all the practical things that can help prop us up above the morass of our insane callings, not to mention something we can wave at the world like a badge. And don’t forget this bonus: other people. How delightful to work on this thing called a hallway, populated not just by colleagues but by students, all committed to, or at the very least interested in, writing. And this is all without even mentioning the teaching itself. I love teaching.

Ah, yes, academia is lovely. I love teaching. All teachers must say that. But there are other, richer jobs for the writer. And I'm not convinced that a literary writer does well to spend so much time reading and correcting the writing of other people who are not very good. If you're going to teach and write, wouldn't it be better to teach some substantial subject that will have you thinking about something about that real world your father wanted you to live in? History, science, law....

Gessner ends his reverie thusly:

[A] part of me worries that my work has become too professional, too small, and worries that I don’t spend as much time as I should reading or brooding or even fretting. Yes, my lifestyle is more healthful, but is health always the most important thing? The part that answers no to that question is now lying in wait, looking for ways to undermine my so-far-successful teaching career. In fact you could argue that that part of me had a hand in writing this essay, which I am finishing now, a few weeks before going up for tenure. After all, what would that part, my inner monomaniac, like more than to tear off his collar and sabotage the job that keeps him from running wild?

Oh, is that what this essay is all about? Conquering the fear of being denied tenure? What do you think, would tenure denial be a blessing for Mr. Gessner? Do you want him back in his room, brooding and fretting year 'round?

"Illegal pornography ... much of it like today's Calvin Klein underwear ads ."

An obituary for Joel Dorius:

[H]is life [as an English professor at Smith College], in Northampton, Mass., crashed on Sept. 2, 1960, when three state troopers, a local police officer and a United States postal inspector raided the home of a colleague, Newton Arvin, 60, and found boxes of "beefcake" magazines and pictures of men — illegal pornography then, but much of it like today's Calvin Klein underwear ads — and diaries detailing 20 years of his closeted gay life.

Under interrogation, Mr. Arvin — a professor of American literature at Smith, winner of the 1951 National Book Award for his biography of Herman Melville, a friend of the critics Edmund Wilson and Malcolm Crowley and a former lover of Truman Capote — named names, including those of Mr. Dorius and Edward Spofford, both untenured Smith professors. Their homes were raided, too — Mr. Dorius was away at the time — and more materials deemed pornographic were found.

The raids were part of a crackdown on obscenity in the mails by President Eisenhower's postmaster general, Arthur E. Summerfield, whose ban on "Lady Chatterley's Lover" was overturned by the courts. The authorities raided warehouses, seized publications and then went after people on the mailing lists....

All three, and four other men named by Mr. Arvin, were charged with possessing pornography, and Mr. Arvin was charged with being lewd and lascivious. Under pressure by the prosecution, Mr. Arvin testified against the others and received a one-year suspended sentence. He suffered a breakdown, committed himself to a mental hospital and died in 1963.

Mr. Dorius and Mr. Spofford, under a quirk of Massachusetts law, accepted the court's guilty verdict, without presentation of evidence, to preserve their right to appeal. In 1963, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court overturned the convictions of all three professors, ruling that search warrants for the raids were unconstitutional because they had failed to define obscene materials.

Dorius lost his job at Smith, which, just four years ago, made the small gesture of naming a small scholarship after him and Spofford. Dorius, died at age 87, without an apology from the college.

"What scenes would one like to have filmed?"

This is a great question that Robert Hughes asked Vladimir Nabokov in 1965. You can read his answer in one of my favorite books, Strong Opinions. (If you want to get an idea of what Nabokov wrote about in Strong Opinions, you can consult this elaborate index, which someone was nice enough to put together.) Feel free to use the comments section to answer the great question, which assumes someone could have been present at any time and place in history with the equipment to make a film. Here's Nabokov's great answer to the great question:

Shakespeare in the part of the King's Ghost.



The beheading of Louis the Sixteenth, the drums drowning his speech on the scaffold.



Herman Melville at breakfast, feeding a sardine to his cat.



Poe's wedding. Lewis Carroll's picnics.



The Russians leaving Alaska, delighted with the deal. Shot of a seal applauding.

What plays did William Faulkner see? What did he read? I hadn't exactly been wondering, but this article by Javier Marías in Threepenny Review (linked by A&L Daily) has some answers:

Faulkner was a taciturn man who loved silence, and he had only been to the theater five times in his entire life: he had seen Hamlet three times, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Ben Hur, and that was all. He had not read Freud, either, at least so he said on one occasion: "I have never read him. Neither did Shakespeare. I doubt if Melville did either and I'm sure Moby Dick didn't." He read Don Quixote every year.

Ah! I love silence too. And I've been meaning to read Don Quixote ... there's that new translation ...

I liked this part of the article too, about how he lost his job as a post office clerk at the University of Mississippi:

Apparently one of the lecturers there, quite reasonably, complained: the only way he could get his mail was by rummaging around in the rubbish bin at the back door, where the unopened bags of post all too often ended up. Faulkner did not like having his reading interrupted, and the sale of stamps fell alarmingly; by way of explanation, Faulkner told his family that he was not prepared to keep getting up to wait on people at the window and having to be beholden to any son-of-a-bitch who had the two cents to buy a stamp.

Sounds like Newman on Seinfeld ("The Andrea Doria"). I'd watch a sitcom about this Faulkner character. And don't just tell me to watch Barton Fink--Joel Coel is on record saying the John Mahoney character isn't much like Faulkner.