An Iteration of Moby Dick

I've been listening to Moby Dick, read by Phoebe Judge, during my long drives to the city and back. Judge also works the podcast Criminal and she's always blown me away with her quiet and polite laying out of an outlandish story. I'm not one to fall asleep to true crime podcasts and I still avoid Criminal as a go-to-sleep option - but I absolutely love her work.

Reading Moby Dick was a wade (sorry) for me. I tried it as a kid and then even as a groan up I could never get past the bit where Ahab held up St Elmo's fire and declared to all onboard that he was after the white whale and that was all there was for it. From there, on reading, the book seemed to descend into intricacies. Ishmael's voice was lost and even Queequeg's harpoon lost all its bearings.

What I discovered on listening to the reading recently was that this is one of the best books ever written on 1800s sea whaling. Melville's diversions into manila rope, the roles of seamen, of Pip offering up his very bones to Ahab, of boys black and white moved from ship to ship, of how to dismantle a whale at sea, of how to boil them down into barrels, of the cooper and carpenter, speak to a whaleman's experience in a time when they were three years at sea.

 It sounds macabre and it was so. Ahab's obsession with the white whale is but a sideline hustle in this book. It's like an instruction manual, a pretty accurate oral history and a call of warning to landlubbers before the great wars.

Vali Myers, Moby Dick, (1974)