What Happens When You Poke the Sea-Bear: The Moby Dick Post-mortem

That was awesome.

I really enjoyed Moby Dick, and not just for the cathartic feeling of not being on a whaling ship in the mid-19th century. I really enjoyed the climax; such pretty language being used to describe so much action. The soliloquies at the last seemed a bit much, but the modern trend toward brevity certainly didn't start with this book anyway.

The unreasonable and reckless pursuit of vengeance, the retention of bitterness and/or ill will, and the willingness to risk all in pursuit of a single event or thing: all of that is there in spades. It's a lot about greed, both spiritual and financial, isn't it? In the end, it mattered little that the crew or the ship or anyone else would be used in search of Ahab's ultimate goal. He wasn't about to turn away from his quest for vengeance. Regardless of the cost.

To be fair, though, many watershed events of human history wouldn't have been possible without the obsessions and lack of reason and enormous human costs sustained by the people who drove those events to fruition. Achieving high goals is often only possible by the rejection of much else in a life. It's how the amazing things get done.

But Ahab wasn't doing anything amazing, even if he thought he was. Melville rendered even the unbelieveable (finding a single whale through more than one ocean, for instance) into an act comparable to changing your socks. Ahab sought vengeance on the whale that took his leg, viewing his injury as a personal insult. He defrauded his partners and killed his crew and himself to get it. He gave up everything, including his perspective, which is the thing that determines what you can give up in the first place. Keep that healthy and everything else stays in line. Lose it and the rest follows.

A Question: Everybody has a story about Moby Dick, it seems. Mine is that my mother taught it. What's yours?

Housekeeping

There are a few issues that have accumulated over the past month due to inattention. So I figured I'd throw them into this single post.

The Moby Dick project: Yeah, I'm done. That post should be out this weekend. After I write it. The first sentence of the post? "That was awesome." More later.

Rebecca asked "This may be a silly question, but are all pc/laptop based books considered e-books?"
First, few questions are silly, and this is not one of them. As with most things computer, the lines get more blurry as you dig deeper into the subject. The working definition for an e-book I like to use is "any longer electronic document that can be read with software on a computer or with a stand-alone device." Length and file format (.pdf and .mobi, among others) seem to be the only loosely consistent definitions of what is and isn't an e-book. It seems mostly to be in the eye of the producer; if you believe your document is long enough to be an e-book and is in an appropriate format, it is, from what I can tell. Wikipedia has as good a definition as any.

Also, your issues with printing from MyScribe may be related to digital rights protection. Check out the FAQ, particularly the last few entries. If MyScribe allows you to bookmark places in the text with a short title for the bookmark as Calibre does, however, you might want to bookmark a passage with a number or keyword and have that appear in a short passage you write in another text document. Or if you like something a little more formal, you could always keep a personal wiki for your subject. Lots of exciting options there, including multiple users.

Tweetless: And finally, why aren't I Twittering? A couple of people have asked me about that, and it isn't for lack of considering it. I'm trying to reach a milestone in my novel project, an overall chapter list of what happens in the book, so that I'm not wild-goose-chasing my own tail down blind alleys in frantic pursuit of red herrings when I sit down to write. It's one of those things that only appears counter-intuitive until you need to take the next step and don't know where your foot should go. Not only will that document serve admirably as a to-do list and a task scheduler, it will give me something to tweet about (and post about) when I do jump into Twitter. Which I will. Just not yet.

Next post? The Moby Dick post-mortem: What Happens When You Poke The Sea-Bear.

Mea Culpa or What Happened to September?

Wow. Is that the date? It has been that long since I posted anything? Anything?

Any excuse for that? Don't think so. Everybody has their things which chew up their time like a puppy with a slipper, and I've been beset with those puppies. But as I look back, small slips of time presented itself when I could have posted something, anything, and I used that for other things. Sleeping. Vegetating in front of the TV. Watching the Chicago Bears first lose a game they should have won and then win a game they should have lost. After all, losing to the Packers was enough agony for at least a hundred words cast into the ether. But nothing from this Bear fan since 1978. About a Packer loss. Sheesh.

I hear some of you saying that I'm being hard on myself and you're right. I need to be harder on myself. None of this will get done unless I do it, regardless of how my day went. Furthermore, I've asked people to participate in this and then I stopped participating. And I'm truly sorry for that.

I shouldn't expect anyone to come back. I'm going to have to earn my readers back. And I will.