Nathaniel Philbrick answers the question Why Read Moby-Dick: “the level of the language is like no other,” but also “it’s as close to being our American Bible as we have.”
Why Read Moby Dick?
Always Label Your Milk
Among other things he left out of his famous poem, William Carlos Williams failed to give us any details about the kitchen in which he ate plums. At The Toast, Mallory Ortberg rewrites the poem so it takes place in a communal dorm kitchen.
Resurrecting Dylan Thomas
The Welsh government is hoping that Dylan Thomas can do for Swansea what James Joyce has done for Dublin. This year, officials have announced that £750,000 will be made available for the DT 100 Festival, which will celebrate the centennial of the poet’s birth. Aside from boosting tourism, however, the festival’s organizers also hope to “raise the status of Thomas,” who many feel has “[been] neglected [and had] his work … overshadowed by a conception of the man as a drunkard, scrounger and womaniser.”
This Week In Good People
In Bogotá, Colombia, a garbage collector by the name of Jose Gutierrez has been working tirelessly to rescue thrown-away children’s books for use in his homemade community library. If this doesn’t immediately call to mind Bohumil Hrabal’s classic Too Loud a Solitude, then it might be time for a re-read. Also, check out this Millions essay by John Yargo on Hrabal’s rambling fiction.
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Ancient Poetics
Recommended Reading: Chloe Garcia Roberts and Guangchen Chen on translating ninth century poet Li Shangyin.
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Babies (And Their Parents) Prefer Paper
E-books may be gaining market share in a lot of demographics, but there’s one age-group in which paper still reigns supreme: toddlers.
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The Week of Lydia Davis
If you don’t have a New Yorker subscription and can’t read Dana Goodyear’s wonderful profile of Lydia Davis, then you can at the very least check out the Can’t and Won’t author’s interview with Quarterly Conversation. Or, of course, you could just go straight to the source and mainline some of her short fiction directly.
Seminar-Worthy Stocking Stuffers
In a piece for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Sarah Mesle reviews Mallory Ortberg‘s Texts from Jane Eyre, which “is not only a major work of bathroom humor reading, but also a significant contribution to feminist literary criticism. It is difficult to imagine another book that would both be a perfect stocking stuffer and an exemplary text for a seminar in literary studies.”
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