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Moby Dick Chapter 2. The Carpet-Bag

#106: Mar. - May 2012 (Fiction)
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Robert Tulip

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Moby Dick Chapter 2. The Carpet-Bag

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http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2701/270 ... m#2HCH0002

I'm not going to paste the entirety of chapter two here, short as it is, as you can easily read it for yourself by clicking on the hyperlink that I have helpfully provided.

In this chapter, the slow pregnant journey from city to sea arrives at New Bedford in Connecticut, all worldly possessions conveniently stuffed in an old carpet bag. Not one concerned to yield to the impatient reader, Melville makes sure to set the scene well and proper, providing an imaginative thought portrait of this rather hellish place of puritan blubber cutters and adventurers in the wild east.

The legend of the first whalers whose harpoons were cobblestones helps us to start imagining how these killing fields steadily refined their efficiency and effectiveness. Just as the whales themselves were firstly bears who wandered to sea some fifty million years ago*, so the Red Men of Nantucket provided the evolutionary creation story for the scientific carnage of the nineteenth century. Happily HM was unacquainted with the apogee of progress in the explosive harpoons and factory ships of the century between his and ours when old blue almost saw his final end.
H.M. wrote:It was a very dubious-looking, nay, a very dark and dismal night, bitingly cold and cheerless. I knew no one in the place. With anxious grapnels I had sounded my pocket,
Like Saint Paul on the storm-tossed Mediterranean mentioned in Acts 27:14, Melville tells us the Spouter Inn stands a palsied lean-to, its proprietor Peter Coffin providing the perfect resort for Ishmael. Poor Lazarus Osiris has nothing to eat but the aurora borealis and beggars can't be choosers. Leave the rich to drink the tepid tears of orphans! Ishmael is done with blubbering now, we are going a-whaling.



* or perhaps hippos - see How the whale learned to swim - A real Just So Story

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Re: Moby Dick Chapter 2. The Carpet-Bag

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Thank you Robert for including the"real just so srory". Whales were once wolf like. That would make sense. They are social creatures and make lovely haunting sounds. You mentioned you were reading a book on whale songs. Maybe there will be an appropriate chapter where you can introduce us to a passage or two.
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DWill

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Re: Moby Dick Chapter 2. The Carpet-Bag

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Robert Tulip wrote:In this chapter, the slow pregnant journey from city to sea arrives at New Bedford in Connecticut, all worldly possessions conveniently stuffed in an old carpet bag.
Not to be a scold, Robert, since you know more about America than I know about Australia, but New Bedford isn't in my native state of Connecticut, but rather Massachusetts.
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Robert Tulip

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Re: Moby Dick Chapter 2. The Carpet-Bag

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DWill wrote:New Bedford isn't in my native state of Connecticut
ouchiwawa. Thank you. Well at least Connecticut would be a connecting path, he pleads aimlessly? If I can share some personal history, in 1977 my father taught English at Yale University for a year, and we lived as a family in Hamden for 8 months. It is a beautiful part of the world. We drove to Mystic, and I confess in the weakness of my memory I had mixed up Mystic with New Bedford, so I gratefully stand corrected. The cup of clam chowder I had for lunch in Mystic has grown in the recollection into one of the most fantabulous pieces of sustenance a human being could dream of.
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Re: Moby Dick Chapter 2. The Carpet-Bag

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Robert Tulip wrote:
DWill wrote:New Bedford isn't in my native state of Connecticut
ouchiwawa. Thank you. Well at least Connecticut would be a connecting path, he pleads aimlessly? If I can share some personal history, in 1977 my father taught English at Yale University for a year, and we lived as a family in Hamden for 8 months. It is a beautiful part of the world. We drove to Mystic, and I confess in the weakness of my memory I had mixed up Mystic with New Bedford, so I gratefully stand corrected. The cup of clam chowder I had for lunch in Mystic has grown in the recollection into one of the most fantabulous pieces of sustenance a human being could dream of.
Maybe the clam chowder would be for you like Proust's madeleine cake, if you were to have it again. My family lived on Long Island Sound, in Guilford, where my father was a veterinarian. I went to Hopkins Grammar School in New haven for a year in eighth grade, before we moved inland to Storrs, where Dad got a job teaching at UConn. I took several school field trips to Mystic Seaport and can still recall especially the smells of the place.
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Robert Tulip

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Re: Moby Dick Chapter 2. The Carpet-Bag

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DWill wrote:Proust's madeleine cake
In Search of Lost Time certainly rivals Moby Dick or The Whale for the magnificence of the ordinary. The closest I came to an encounter with Proust, apart from the legendary Summarizing Proust Competition, was Alain De Botton's Proust book.* We might consider how Melville can change your life as well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madeleine_(cake)
Marcel Proust wrote:No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. ... Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? ... And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea.
http://www.alaindebotton.com/literature.asp
Alain de Botton wrote:The starting point of How Proust can change your Life is that a great novel can be nothing less than life-transforming. This is an unusual claim: our education system, while stressing that novels are highly worthwhile, rarely investigates why this is so. How Proust can change your Life takes Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time as the basis for a sustained investigation into the power and significance of literature. Proust’s novel, almost a byword for obscurity and irrelevance, emerges as an invaluable source of insight into the workings of love, society, art and the meaning of existence. The book reveals Proust’s thoughts on how to revive a relationship, choose a good doctor, enjoy a holiday, make friends and respond to insult. A vivid portrait of the eccentric yet deeply sympathetic author is built up out of extracts from his letters, essays and fiction and is combined with a commentary on the power of literature to change our lives. A self-help book like few others.
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Robert Tulip

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Re: Moby Dick Chapter 2. The Carpet-Bag

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someone somewhere wrote:Not to be a scold Robert
Well guess what? Jumping ahead to Chapter 16, Melville says the Pequod Indians, source of the name of Captain Ahab's famous vessel, were from Massachussets. As any school boy knows, the Pequod Indians were from Connecticut!!!
Herman the Geographer and keen historian wrote:PEQUOD, you will no doubt remember, was the name of a celebrated tribe of Massachusetts Indians; now extinct as the ancient Medes
And yet, proving my case that greater minds than me have confused these states ...
wikipedia wrote: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pequot Pequot people (pronounced /ˈpiːˌkwɑːt/)[1] are a tribe of Native Americans who, in the 17th century, inhabited much of what is now Connecticut.

Let us hope the Pequod fares better than the Medes
Last edited by Robert Tulip on Sat Mar 03, 2012 5:04 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Moby Dick Chapter 2. The Carpet-Bag

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DWill wrote: Not to be a scold, Robert, since you know more about America than I know about Australia, but New Bedford isn't in my native state of Connecticut, but rather Massachusetts.
Oh good. Prior to coming onto this site I wanted to know exactly where we were and Googled New Bedford.
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Re: Moby Dick Chapter 2. The Carpet-Bag

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Robert Tulip wrote:
someone somewhere wrote:Not to be a scold Robert
Well guess what? Jumping ahead to Chapter 16, Melville says the Pequod Indians, source of the name of Captain Ahab's famous vessel, were from Massachussets. As any school boy knows, the Pequod Indians were from Connecticut!!!
:lol: Okay we know its over there somewhere. The furthest east I have ever been is Winnipeg Manitoba. I find those tiny eastern states a cluster of confusion.
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Re: Moby Dick Chapter 2. The Carpet-Bag

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At the end of chapter 2 I really didn't know what all the ranting was about with Lazarus, Euroclydon, Dives and Moluccas. Over my head.

I did like the name of that one Inn he thought he was going into. Turns out it was a church called The Trap.
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