Moby Dick for Breakfast

No, this isn't a recipe post.

I have gone all four decades plus of my life without reading Herman Melville's Moby Dick, a situation I find myself in a position to remedy. Of particular shame is the fact that my mother used to teach that book to high school students. So, instead of the abyss that is pre-5am cable television, I consume breakfast and the classic tale of obsession at once. And not in print, either: this will be my first e-book read.

The technicals: I'm reading it on a netbook with a stand-alone (and free) application called Calibre. I'm very pleased with it and the options for print size and general appearance of the page. For the work itself, I downloaded it from Project Gutenberg (also free) and I'm quite successfully resisting the urge to turn the netbook on its side to read it. Not necessary, and, in fact, clumsy. Reading it keyboard down is quite sufficient. I've even been known to haul it into waiting areas/rooms, since it's unnecessary to be connected to the Internet to use Calibre. The only problem? If your netbook/laptop isn't booted up, you'll have to wait for that. It kind of rules out the quick "pick up and read".

Why an e-book? The wave of the future, friends. My future, especially, as you will soon see.

At the moment, though, I'm about half-way through Moby Dick and I am surprised at how friendly and accommodating the narrator is for the age of the work. There is, of course, more archaic knowledge about whales and whaling than I can almost stand, but the sentence structure is so fluid and pretty that it "feels" in my mind as if it's being "spoken" in a classic boilerplate hand. Melville, it seems, could write just about anything and it would turn out pleasant.

Some words are more pleasant than others, however. A few of my favorite quotes:

• There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.
• ...There is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.
• ...It's against my principles to drink with the man I've diddled.
• ...Man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.

I'm enjoying it immensely. Can't wait for tomorrow morning.

A Question:
Have you taken any forays into e-books? Did you like the format? What was it like?

Wordshopping: Guns at Obama's Town Hall Meetings

When an Arizona man was questioned by a reporter about why he was carrying a gun outside a Town Hall meeting where the President of the United States was speaking, his response was "It's time to water the tree of liberty."

I agree. Not with the act he is justifying, no, that's ridiculous. That's what happens when you don't think about what you're doing because you're only thinking about your opinion.

But I still agree with the words he spoke taken completely out of context, wordshopped, barely recognizable remarks from Thomas Jefferson used in support of a position without regard for the intentions of the speaker or the situation in which they were spoken. The notion that the tree of liberty is in distress? Oh, yes. It's dry. Very dry. Desiccated. A veritable Hawkeye Pierce martini of a tree.

I suspect that we would even agree on the cause of the tree's need of a long, cool drink: tyranny. Despite the hazard of examining the issue further, both of us feel that certain core rights are being taken away from us. But the divide between our opinions comes when we talk about which rights are in danger.

The speaker was making a reference to President Obama's "tyrannical" gun control measures "taking away" his right to own guns. I don't know that there actually is any legislation in the works along those lines, but when you're wordshopping, relevance to reality isn't really necessary. You only need the words that produce fear and/or anger and support for your position (see "death panel"). "Tyrannical"? A little old-school, but that works. It even looks creepy, which helps. "Tyrant?" Nah, not so much, but "tyrannical"? Not bad. Dinosaurian overtones. Chomp ya right up. "You. It's what's for dinner."

So, which rights do I think are in danger from tyranny? The right to free speech, of course. Let's wordshop the situation. A group of people who are within their constitutional rights to have guns in public ("armed protestors") is standing outside a venue ("barricaded") where unarmed people ("prospective victims") go to speak their minds ("the opposition") and to get answers to questions about an entirely different issue ("avoiding the real problem"). String together the wordshopped version and who would want to go to that? Not me. I would have made the "choice" to stay away and keep my "socialist" solutions to myself and stay "safe".

Isn't that fun? You have to be careful, though, because a good wordshopping shouldn't be examined too closely. It tends to lose its ability to motivate once people actually look at the issue and the original text in depth. So we won't, otherwise we "treehuggers" wouldn't be in "complete agreement" about the tree of liberty issue.

"Liberating", isn't it?