From Hell's Heart I Stab at Thee

So, I finished reading Moby Dick. What a load of whale oil. It didn't take quite as long as the Pequod's actual journey, but all in all I would rather have spent the time watching Star Trek: Nemesis over and over again until my eyes bled.

Maybe Melville was born a couple of hundred years too soon. In some ways, the book reads like a blog. The chapters are mostly a few pages long, loosely related but not what you would call a tight story. Spoiler Alert: the first time we see the whale is like page 485 of 500. It's not exactly an action yarn. Nor is it really the deep psychological character study of Ahab that I expected. He's obsessed with the whale that bit his leg off. We get it. The whole thing could have been a short story.

We will not speak of this again. But I will have my revenge on Herman Melville, if it's the last thing I do.

Gotta be the Dick

Some of you know I've been reading Moby Dick.


Still reading that, you ask?


Why, yes, I respond.


Why so long?* 


Because the shit is boring, thanks for asking.

Seriously, unless you're looking for a do-it-yourself whaling manual, I can't think of a single reason why anyone would want to read this thing. Except for one spectacularly good chapter that doesn't even really fit in the story, it's about like reading a precocious thirteen year old's diary of the year they spent studying for the National Spelling Bee. Or listening to a really old person who doesn't know how to tell stories tell a story. You know the ones I mean. Each digression becomes more detailed and tedious than the one before, until everyone forgets why they are even in the same room. I can usually manage about ten pages before blessed sleep rescues me from this hundred and fifty year old heart-warming tale of a xenophobic know-it-all who wants to make sure I know every frakking thing he had for breakfast one morning in eighteen-fifty-kill-me.

I guess I understand the appeal when the book was written, back in the days when most people had only read two books or less, all they knew was hunting and farming, and South America might as well have been Jupiter. A whale was like a dinosaur to them, so I guess Moby Dick is sort of like Jurassic Park of the nineteenth century. You know what? Jurassic Park sucked, too.

So anyway, the reason I bring this up is that I think it's affecting my writing. In the same way that we are what we eat,** I think we write what we read. And since Melville is an undisciplined rambler with a sharp eye for irrelevant detail, this is not a good thing for me. I think this post serves as an excellent example of this effect.

I'm what I like to euphemistically refer to as a non-linear thinker in the best of times, and my story-telling is in constant danger of being derailed by runaway digressions creating a chain reaction and destroying my train of thought. Being exposed to this kind of meandering crap for this amount of time cannot be good for me.

There is hope on the horizon. I've got the new Terry Pratchett waiting, and maybe some Irving after that. Now if I can just kill this whale (or whatever happens) and get through this piece of crap before I die of boredom.

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* I'm having a really hard time with this one, trying to choose between the tried and true "That's what she said," and the slightly more esoteric, "That's a bit of a personal question, don't you think?" Opinions?

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** That way being simultaneously "completely" and "not at all."

Blow me down -- I may owe Martha Connor an apology

I love to read. I don't read a lot compared to some of my more literary friends, or my wife, but I get the sense that it's a lot for general purpose 21st century America. Between all the Harry Potter and crazy food books and whatever else I stumble across, I try to read a classic every year or two. It helps me feel cultured and refined while I'm scratching my bits and grazing on old M&M's I find in the couch cushions.

The last one I read was The Count of Monte Cristo, which was really cheating, because even though it's like a thousand pages, with about as many characters, it's been one of my favorite books since I saw the Mr. Magoo version on television as a kid. It has perhaps the most skillfully constructed plot of anything I have ever read, making even A Prayer for Owen Meany seem simple by comparison. Plus, if you've ever felt like you wanted revenge on pretty much everyone you know, The Count of Monte Cristo is the book for you. Also, excellent sandwich.

This time I decided to take on the leviathan. That's right, I'm reading Moby Dick. It's not my first attempt at the Great White Novel. I tried it back in high school, but I crashed early against the waves of irrelevant exposition and pointless descriptions of items of furniture, road signs and the buttons on the clothes of transient characters. I don't think I made fifty pages, and like the story's protagonist, it's a result I cannot abide. Many of the classic books simply lost my interest, or weren't my style, but I have always felt defeated by Moby Dick. So I strapped on my peg leg and took another shot.

It has not exactly been smooth sailing. I wasn't sure I was going to make it through the pages and pages of random cetacean-related quotations that open the book, but I persevered*, and before I knew it I was paddling along through a quirky -- if somewhat dull -- story of budding man-love between a grumpy sailor and his heavily inked heathen boy toy. It wasn't exactly a thrilling read, but a bit like canoeing a sluggish river. You wish there were a following current to lessen the effort required, but at least the water is deep enough, and it's more or less downstream.

Then I got to Chapter 9, "The Sermon." This chapter was not only seven pages of some of the best prose I have read**, but if I had ever heard a sermon like this one in person, I might still go to church. Melville manages to gracefully blend the fire and brimstone of old time religion with Age of Reason thinking to make the most compelling case for religion that I can recall hearing. And while a little heavily allegorical in both setting and tone, it's a compelling read. A gem like "The Sermon" will make the effort required to get through rest of the book worth it for me. The chapter seems somewhat fitted into the story, in that it doesn't really advance the plot to any significant degree, and none of our continuing characters speak a word. I suspect it was something Melville knew was too good not to work in somewhere.

So I think I may owe my twelfth grade English teacher an apology, even though she was kind of a bitch to me most of the time. I think she thought she was pushing me to excellence, but she was really just pissing me off. Oops, this is probably not how the best apologies start, but she's not going to read this anyway. Okay, here goes. Miss Connor, I'm sorry you were a bitch I told you that Moby Dick was the most tedious piece of crap I have ever had the misfortune to attempt to read. That honor now reverts to Silas Marner.

I'm not apologizing to Melville. At least not yet. First off, he's dead. Second, the jury is still out on this book. So far we have ten percent brilliant writing balanced against ninety percent fishy-smelling tedium. Sort of like three weeks at a bed and breakfast in an old seaside village, watching someone inventory the whole town's possessions with their new video camera.

So now I'm back to the long search for the next sign of life. Melville just spent almost a page telling us that we can really only feel warm when a part of us is cold, while Ishmael shares pillow talk and wrestles with his new boyfriend***. Hopefully I will be able to endure. Who knows? If I get through Moby Dick, maybe I will take another shot at A Tale of Two Cities.

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* I skimmed.

** At least old school eighteenth century type prose. I don't know that I would read Melville's blog if he had one.

*** Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Food, glorious food

A few years ago I went on the South Beach Diet. It was a great diet, the food was yummy, I lost a bunch of weight, and I should be on it right now, but it forbids drinking for the first two weeks and it's football season. Besides the weight I lost, I noticed three things about the diet:

1. I had to go to the grocery store all the damn time.
2. It was expensive and took time out of my day.
3. The only things I bought from the middle of the store were spices and sugar free Jello Pudding.

It turns out that this is not an accident.

My brother persuaded me to read The Omnivore's Dilemma a few months ago, and now I kind of feel like kicking his ass for making me want to be a farmer. And a hunter, and possibly a mushroom gatherer. (Not that I've never gathered a mushroom before, but that's a completely different subject.) If you haven't read the book, I highly recommend it. It's not really like The Jungle, or Diet for a New America -- the type of book that will gross you out to the point that you never want to eat again. It's more like Super Size Me: Behind the Music. The author builds a compelling case that the American food industry is a perfect storm of government waste, corporate greed, environmental irresponsibility and petroleum use, and that we are all paying the price.

American food has been industrialized and commodotized so that it is cheap to produce, easy to transport, easy to store and easy to sell. Note that taste, nutrition and cultural considerations do not appear on the list. Would it surprise you to know that "natural raspberry flavoring" probably has no part of a raspberry in it? It surprised me.

The New York Times reported recently that the new Smart Choices food labeling program, which features a green check mark on the front of packaging so that busy consumers can know what is good for them even if their Mom is not there, considers Froot Loops to be sufficiently healthful to earn the mark. Defended by the President of the Smart Choices Board because its better than doughnuts, Froot Loops made the cut due to its added vitamins, and because the total sugars don't exceed the program guidelines.

She also said the program was influenced by research into consumer behavior that showed that, while shoppers wanted more information, they did not want to hear negative messages or feel their choices were being dictated to them. So in other words, we want to buy what we were going to buy anyway but feel like it is good for us. I mean, come on. I've eaten my share of Cocoa Puffs, but I never tried to convince myself they were health food.

Apparently, one big driving force behind all of this is a system of government subsidies that pays farmers to produce more corn, and to a lesser degree, soybeans. While this sounds like a good thing for farmers, it actually drives the price of these commodity grains ever lower, putting the dwindling number of farmers deeper in debt. The only people who really benefit are food manufacturers like Cargill, ADM and General Mills. The current system of farm subsidies has been in place since Earl Butz*, Nixon's Agriculture Secretary, reversed the government's policy on farm subsidies and told family farmers to "get big or get out."

So is there any benefit to all this? Well, remember my list from the South Beach Diet?

1. Whole food is bulky and it spoils. Industrial food is compact, stable and keeps for a long time.
2. Whole food is not really more expensive to grow, but subsidies and cheap petroleum make industrial food ingredients (in the form of corn) cheaper to buy than "real" food can be grown.
3. Industry means growth, so manufacturers have to find new things to sell to get us to buy more and eat more. There is very little unprocessed food in an American supermarket. This leads to innovation and ever cheaper food.

There is a lot of evidence that the industrialization of food is at least partially responsible for many of the health problems that Americans suffer more than others in the world. And there is no question that it costs all of us in the form of taxes, petroleum use and environmental damage. It's up to each of us to decide if the trade-off is worth it. As for me, I'm making my own bread, shopping more at the farmer's market, and trying to think more about what I eat.

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* Butz eventually got fired for telling an extremely (unfunny and) racist joke to a reporter on an airplane. This has to throw his judgment into question, if nothing else.

Readers Anonymous

Okay, I admit it. I'm a reader. And not just blogs or newspapers or magazines. I love to read books. I don't even have to count to know that the wife and I own a thousand or more between us. Most especially I like novels. The thicker the better, unless they are lame, in which case I usually want to kill the author of the fat ones by the time I am finished*. And I will almost always finish. I don't really gravitate to either classics or real trash, though I am capable of enjoying both. I like sci-fi and adventure and quirky stories that are hard to explain.

I doubt very much that you will ever see me in an airplane with my laptop open or playing with my berry. I am always carrying a book, as often as not purchased in the airport, and I will read it from the time I sit down at the gate until I get off the plane at my destination, stopping only to get on the plane, claim the little bag of pretzels (I miss peanuts) and change flights.

I come from a long line of readers. My grandfather was a school teacher in one of those country-ass schoolhouses like in Little House on the Prairie. My father read everything Louis L'Amour and Tom Clancy ever wrote, usually on Sunday afternoons. My mother preferred to read in bed, and probably still does. She always seemed to have the latest thing from the bestseller list. But whether romance or western or suspense, everyone in my house usually had a book.

Being a reader was easy when I was young. Everything was fresh to me, there were new ideas everywhere, and all of my friends and family were always turning me on to a different author or point of view or style of writing. As I got older, it got more difficult. I got more selective, I read up most of the old stuff I knew I was interested in reading, and I learned that most people don't read for pleasure, so it was usually a crap shoot when I went to select a book. I hit the occasional jackpot when a new Tom Robbins novel would appear, or when I discovered and subsequently devoured the Hitchhiker's Trilogy and both Dirk Gently books, or when a friend at work told me about this Harry Potter book that his daughter had been bugging him to read**. But usually I was mildly disappointed.

So as much as I hate to ever encourage data mining or consumer profiling or any of the other creepy big brothery things that people like me figure out how to do to people like us, I have to give props to the Amazon recommender engine thingy. In the last few years it has turned me onto some of the best books I have read in a long time. While I can't remember if Terry Pratchett was Amazon or a lucky grab at the airport, they definitely turned me on to Christopher Moore and Jasper Fforde. Both write books that are intelligent, original, offbeat and funny. Which is right in my wheelhouse.

The Amazon thing does tend to focus a little much on what I have been doing lately, and I suspect that their own sales goals sneak into the equation somewhere, but it has definitely helped me find the good stuff. And it may even have helped a young author or two find their audience. Who knows?

It seems like my AARP card came with a growing interest in non-fiction, but I've always liked history and biography when it was interesting. I could never read enough about WWII or the great voyages of exploration of the last half millenium. And I enjoy poetry and plays and well-written treatments of technology or science. But when it's going to be a day in the air, or on the couch, give me a big fat novel every time.
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* Yes, Herman Melville, I'm talking about you. Be glad you're already dead.
** That's right. I read them all. Multiple times. I will probably read them again. Shut up.