Thoughts Literary and Otherwise

Take your Second Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick and put a little post it on page twenty.  Underlining lines 4-8 on that page wouldn't be a BAD idea, and, if the library gets mad at you, go ahead and tell the library police that I told you to.  It is not rare that a book gives you "the key to it all" so early on, just barely two pages into the text, but it is extremely rare to do it so well.  Here are the lines, uttered towards the end of Ishmael's redirect from his thoughts of shuffling off this mortal coil to an extended reverie about the allure of water: "An still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting,  mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned.  But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans.  It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all." If there is one thing Charter students excel at, it is knowledge of myth....

Yes, I said it.  Nick is a turd.  I asked you last week about his "reliability" as a narrator--an unfair questions for reasons I have often recently enumerated.  Mostly, we trust people.  We trust appearances.  We go with the flow.  We HAVE to!  We couldn't get along very well in the world if we were constantly questioning motives and hidden agendas at every turn, now, could we?  In literature, though, we must. But I digress. Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby , the semi-wealthy, well-born midwesterner with ridiculously wealthy friends, is a turd.   He is not a turd in the sense that Tom Sawyer is a turd--a delusional romantic.  Nick is a guy who is, at this point of the book, self-delusional.  There is hope, though.  Nick starts to become the man he says he is towards the end of the book, but it takes great tragedy and a few deaths to make that happen. Look at what he says about himself as we start the book....

We have had occasion, more often in American Literature than in AP Literature, to speak of the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche.  As you recall, American Literature students, we spoke and wrote at some length of his ideas of the Uber-munch and the morality of power.  We could see that working in the famous and oft-discussed Sherburn-Boggs incident in Huckleberry Finn ,  in which the richest man in town gunned down one of the poorest, drunkest, and least harmful men simply because he needed to maintain what some students called "face."  He had power and he couldn't endure what Twain called "blackguarding." Nietzsche is more famous for another statement, though.  He coined the phrase, "God is dead."  (It sounds better in German, "Gott ist tot.")  The implications of this phrase brought us the literature we have today--and the confusion, for better or for worse. Please bear in mind, students, I, Mr. Waterhouse, am not telling you that God is dea...

Twelve days ago we bugged out of Charter.  You were rushed through school and given copies of books.  I rushed to campus and grabbed everything I could find,  fortunately this picture, from the middle of an old paperback edition of Moby-Dick , which copy has now disintegrated, was among my effects.  It is a picture of the kind of head that Queequeg was trying to sell. As I write this morning, I am staring at my mantle and wondering, if I could get a skull like this for the right price, whether I would purchase it, as those New Bedford folks apparently did.  I've purchased far more foolish items.  That's certain. These New Bedfordites (New Bedfordians?) were living in as cosmopolitan a place as could be found on earth.  It was the center of a large worldwide industry and its ships, along with those from Nantucket, ruled the oceans--nearly 3/4 of the world!  Following whales, these whalers mapped the sea and made the first contact with numero...

I know you always want me to name names in my stories, but you wouldn't know this name--although a few of the teachers-who-came-back might.  Nonetheless, each time I get to page six of The Great Gatsby (my edition does NOT have Leo DiCaprio's face on it), I think of this kid. It was over a decade ago--maybe even fifteen years.  It was August, first period, day one of school.  This kid came in, "Good morning, Mr. Waterhouse.  How are you?"  He had this way, too, of nodding his head and smiling as he spoke. Just odd.  A bit unnerving.   Now, as you know, I make it a point to remain completely aloof from Freshmen and Sophomores.  This greeting and the manner in which it was given left me a bit frightened.  In other words, "Who is this punk and what exactly does he want?" As class ended, he sprang to the door and held it open for everyone.  When his last classmate had exited, he said, "Have a nice day, Mr. Waterhouse."  Nodding....

In a lot of ways, a "stray" (i.e. carefully curated) extract (gathered by the painstaking burrower and grub-worm and poor devil of a Sub-Sub), set the tone for the entire novel.  What Ahab does in chasing and seeking the life of Moby Dick takes on epic implications set against the back drop of Job 41.  Job 41 New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) 41  [ a ] “Can you draw out Leviathan [ b ] with a fishhook,      or press down its tongue with a cord? 2  Can you put a rope in its nose,      or pierce its jaw with a hook? 3  Will it make many supplications to you?      Will it speak soft words to you? 4  Will it make a covenant with you      to be taken as your servant forever? 5  Will you play with it as with a bird,      or will you put it on leash for your girls? 6  Will traders bargain over it?      Will they divide it up a...

You are reading, or at least being told to read, my favorite book.  It may be the most difficult book you ever read--it's among the most difficult I've read.  Difficulty does not equate with greatness, though, and I'm not quite sure what DOES, but what I AM sure of is that all that stuff Dante and Milton FAILED to do, Melville does do.  Like a lot of things I throw at you, my hope is that you remember where this book is when all this education stuff is done.  I needed it.  You may as well. While on the subject of greatness, here is a short excerpt from an essay by the great D. H. Lawrence on Melville and Moby-Dick . But he was a deep, great artist, even if he was rather a sententious man. He was a real American in that he always felt his audience in front of him. But when he ceases to be American, when he forgets all audience, and gives us his sheer apprehension of the world, then he is wonderful, his book commands a stillness in the soul, an awe. (Here is...

Hello, American Literature students.  First off, congratulations to the approximately 80% of you who completed the work for week one.  I was particularly proud to see the humor in the parodies of "This is just to say."  I am always reminded, when I read this poem, of an incident involving a certain child of mine and some Girl Scout Thin Mint Cookies.  I woke up one morning, this particular child was about three, and found that the box of cookies had been torn open, the plastic sleeves ripped and scattered, and all the cookies gone the way of all cookies.  I noticed a pre-literate scrawl on the box.  "What does it say?" I asked the obviously guilty party.  "It says, 'I did it, and I'm not sorry.'"  Second, the AP students are a bit jealous, I would surmise.  They may actually look wistfully in your direction, while maintaining proper social distancing, and mumble angrily.  "Why can't WE read Gatsby ?" Well, AP, you can.  I'...

Welcome to my blog! Many years ago, when there used to be "Summer Assignments" for AP Lit students, when I was younger and more into that sort of thing, I set up a now defunct and destroyed blog to facilitate remote discussion.  It worked really well then--and it will work again now, in this the strangest of times. My intention here is to post something for each lesson, for each class, AP or American Literature, starting on Monday as the American Literature sections start taking a deep dive into the decadence of The Great Gatsby and the AP Literature students start reading the greatest book ever written on this continent, Moby-Dick .  That "something" will try to mirror the kinds of things I would say in class, that is to say, mirror my mind--the questions I ask, the epiphanies I always have, the insights I'd share with you if you were behind me in line at Von's or Ralph's. These "somethings" should help you understand the texts we are rea...