Some vague ramblings, senseless and aimless as a colorless moth
Summer continues apace here in Pacific Northwest, and it has been awful, here in my little apartment.
This place was not designed to deal with this sort of heat. I get the radiant warmth from lower floors, so it is nearly impossible to maintain livable conditions without sitting directly in front of a fan at all times. And, over the past weekend, we had some awful wildfire smoke to boot! Ugh. The rains of fall cannot come soon enough.
Continue reading “Chapter 106: Ahab’s Leg”Okay, okay, I had my fun, let’s get back to serious business.
Honestly, I got most of the way into writing a big thoughtful analysis of the last chapter, but it really comes down to that little joke. That’s all ya need to know to unravel everything. I only get to do that once, I think, the inverse of my old post where I spun like 2000 words out of a one-paragraph chapter. Ah, that was a good one.
Continue reading “Chapter 96: The Try-Works”Enough ruminations about various depictions of whales! Let’s just all agree that true life experiences are very difficult to convey and that the skill of it belongs only to the great masters of craft among us.
Today, we’re talking about a much smaller subject: brit, that food that whales crave. Not the whales that Ahab and co. are actually hunting, but the right whale and some other kinds of whale that do not produce enough or the right kind of oil to be noticed. Continue reading “Chapter 58: Brit”
I have a hankering to dig deeper into an issue that came up in a recent Moby Dick post, but is an example of a larger issue in media.
In that post, I talked about theodicy, the practice of explaining why there is evil in the world when God is supposed to be both all-powerful and benevolent towards humanity. The one I talked about there was an ancient theodicy, from the book of Job. But today, I’d like to talk about the modern form this has taken, as best exemplified in the Stephen King novel/miniseries/film IT. Continue reading “IT and Modern Theodicy: The Big Black Blob Problem”
And now, for something completely different.
After that incredibly long and detailed short story, that microcosm for the book as a whole encapsulated in a single chapter, it’s time for a good ol’ fashioned non-narrative chapter where Ishmael yells at clouds. Or, rather, yells at artists for not knowing what whales look like. Continue reading “Chapter 55: Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales”
The Beige Moth 