air change - with leviathan

August 10, 2001

This Year's Bird List:
Plum Island Bird List

Today's Reading:
The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan

This Year's Reading:
2001 Book List

Today's Starting Pitcher:
xxxxxxxxxxxxx -- rainy day in Baltimore

Out goes the bad air, in comes the good. Or something sort of like that anyway.

With the Red Sox rained out in Baltimore, I changed the radio to WBUR and discovered The Connection on Moby Dick. I immediately called Nancy to notify her that two Melville scholars were on The Connection talking Moby Dick. It's not often I hear a radio talk show about my favorite novel. I loved that a lot of the callers wanted to read their favorite passages. I loved that a descendent of whalers called from New Bedford and mentioned the marathon reading at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. It almost made up for there being no baseball to listen to.

One thing that struck me funny about the Moby Dick discussion, though, was that the host (I forget his name -- all these not Chris Lydon hosts blend together) kept asking where its staying power comes from - why it still resonates today and what is it about the novel itself that makes it so widely read. Uh, the answer is simple. It's widely read because the scholars like it and it has become part of the western canon or at least the American canon. If every high school kid in America is assigned Moby Dick in his/her sophomore year, odds are at least some of those kids will like it. See once academe deems (say that three times fast) something worthy it gets a chance to see if falls on fertile soil so to speak.

I happen to like Moby Dick a lot. The thing I'm trying to get at clumsily here is that there are probably a whole lot of books that would also move me and dozens of others that never caught the attention of academe so never made it to the attention of future generations. It's kind of like the Oprah phenomenon. Once Oprah chooses a book, a whole lot more people read it than otherwise would. However, there are plenty of other equally good or better books that don't get the Oprah treatment.

And I could get started on the Modern Library 100 list again but I'm too tired for that and I know I'm not making the sense I wanted to make tonight. But I really did enjoy hearing all those people talk about the leviathan, the revenge-driven maniac, the sea, and the city of New Bedford.