Thanks to Robin, I finally read War and Peace, so I will most certainly join her for the Kristin Lavransdatter readalong.
Author Archives: Nerdishly
After an HPB* run
*Half Price Books
Seen at the Museum of Science and Industry
Of course, this model of the whaler Alice Mandell attracted my attention.
“Hast seen the White Whale?”
My childhood bicycle featured a seat like the red one.
Following its capture, the U-505 was renamed the USS Nemo
to prevent the Germans from realizing it had not sunk.
A Moby Dick reference began our visit; a 20,000 Leagues reference concluded it.
Acquisitions
“And many consider themselves loners.”
From Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century (2017):
p. 88
For this community, making an effort to gather in person was no trifling thing. Members spend much of the year scattered across the country. Often they lack the gas money to drive long distances in a straight shot. And many consider themselves loners. Among the hermits, RV Sue has cultivated an especially solitary reputation, pleading with her blog readers not to drop in on her campsites unannounced, explaining that “blogging suits me well because I can interact with all kinds of interesting people without having to actually meet them.” Some of her fans have written about coming across a familiar seventeen-foot Casita during their travels — then realizing who that trailer belonged to and immediately hightailing it in the other direction.
A few new books
Newly acquired
“Being squeezed involves one’s finances, one’s social status, and one’s self-image.”
Janesville (Amy Goldstein), Nomadland (Jessica Bruder), and Squeezed (Alissa Quart) have formed a fascinating — and sobering — trilogy.
Among other things, being middle-class is a matter of having access to certain goods and services. It’s not just the house or the car you can buy. This status is also more granular, reflecting refined varieties of knowledge and information: the middle class knows where to send their children to school, where to get medical treatment, child care, career advice or training, or other kinds of help. Perhaps most importantly, class status is about how you even find out about these things to begin with, which again brings us to “cultural capital.”
When I recall “cultural capital,” I think of my favorite theorist from when I was a graduate student, Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu theorized that capital extends beyond economics, encompassing credentials, skills, and tastes. Financial capital is convertible — if you have the latter, you can gain cultural capital through education. Then, if you have the former, you can convert that back into even more economic capital through the right social networks.
Rereading Moby Dick
Chapter 41: Moby-Dick
Here, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man, chasing with curses a Job’s whale round the world, at the head of a crew, too, chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals — morally enfeebled also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or right-mindedness in Starbuck, the invulnerable jollity of indifference and recklessness in Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity in Flask. Such a crew, so officered, seemed specially picked and packed by some infernal fatality to help him to his monomaniac revenge. How it was that they so aboundingly responded to the old man’s ire — by what evil magic their souls were possessed, that at times his hate seemed almost theirs; the White Whale as much their insufferable foe as his; how all this came to be — what the White Whale was to them, or how to their unconscious understandings, also, in some dim, unsuspected way, he might have seemed the gliding great demon of the seas of life, — all this to explain, would be to dive deeper than Ishmael can go. The subterranean miner that works in us all, how can one tell whither leads his shaft by the ever shifting, muffled sound of his pick?
“Thus ended this voyage beneath the seas.”
Read in anticipation of seeing the Lookingglass Theatre production.
“Captain Nemo,” I said to my host who had just stretched out on a divan, “this library would do honor to more than one palace on land, and I am really astounded to think that it travels with you into the ocean depths.”
“Where could one find greater solitude or silence, Professor?” replied Captain Nemo. “Can you boast of greater tranquility in your office at the museum?”
“No, Monsieur, and I must admit that it is very shabby alongside yours. Why, you have six or seven thousand books…”
“Twelve thousand, Monsieur Aronnax. These are my only ties with life on dry land….”
p. 187
“A cannibal can still be an honorable man,” replied Conseil, “just as a glutton can be honest. One doesn’t exclude the other.”
“That’s all very well, Conseil. I’ll even grant you that these cannibals are honorable and that they go about devouring their prisoners honorably. But since I don’t like the idea of being devoured, even honorably, I’ll stay on guard, for the commander of the Nautilus seems to be taking no precautions whatsoever. Now to work.”
Nerdishly 