I Could Finish My Homework, Or I Could Think About Whales, God

I was at my cousin’s wedding, which was lovely, and the service was lead by a monsignor, a guy above bishops. He was conversational and Herman Melville turned up in his sermon. I’d just read In The Heart of The Sea, a book based on the boat-staving sperm whale who inspired Meville’s Moby Dick, so I thought yes, Melville, you’ve got me, Father. Now what about the novelist?

Mostly what I’m thinking about is that it would be hard to write so many sermons.

At this wedding in LA, my friend Danichi wedding, which was also beautiful, but the priest, a young guy, not catholic, so I guess he would not be a priest, he talked about Kierkegaard. And quoted him. In his service before the vows. Very bad. So many hip philosophers to choose from when speaking about love. Why that one.

I’ll admit that I was dehydrated at this time from a late night. And I also had food poisoning from a vegan restaurant in Silver Lake that Munchie chose for us to eat at for brunch. And the day before, in a bathroom of a San Francisco Starbucks (serves me right) my glasses fell into the urinal while I was peeing, and suddenly I was peeing all over my glasses, and urinal water, my glasses sat in urinal water. And I kid you not, I had fleas. Or maybe bedbugs, from the Fisherman’s Wharf Hostel. I wrapped my clothes in trash bags and dumped those bags in a public trash can.

So, bitten, blind, nauseous, and headached, and very, very ashamed, I can’t remember the quote, but the important thing to know is this—that Kierkegaard was a miserable creature who hounded his intended fiancée, and after begging her for marriage, he backed out of the deal so that he could, I don't know, be, what, severe and anxious? Which is his right. But really, what I’m wondering is, what a brave and worldly, or not even worldly but practical monsignor to use the skeptic Herman Melville, and what a poor move to use that emo Dane.

What was the Melville quote? I thought I’d never find it. I knew I wanted to look it up but I thought, nope, that thing is gone. Turns out it’s everywhere:

“We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.”  

The context was, it’s OK not to be a good Catholic, and get this, the guy actually said it, it’s OK not even to be Catholic, just so long as you are decent to people. I wanted to cry if that were the kind of thing I could do. I’d been waiting to hear that for years. This is the closest I’d come to God in decades. How can he say such good things? Probably this guy is an atheist who knows he has a fun job, I thought.

But to the literature point, it sounds like Melville—“A thousand fibers… among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes” a third of Moby Dick is just wild flashes of rhetoric and cadence. Can you read scansion? I bet that line has some meter. 

But then I read this blog, melvilliana.blogspot.com, and they found that above quote in a sermon by Henry Melville (no relation?) a British preacher, 1855. Herman the Novelist was alive then, had just finished his whale book a few years prior. How about that. And what does it all mean, and etc. 

I don’t like Moby Dick as much as I used to. So many encyclopedia chapters where the author tries to prove to you that he’s smart and knows his shit. All this is because critics made fun of his early books—Omoo, Typee, Mardi, Red Burn, White Jacket—said that he made it all up, and knew nothing of Fiji and these other, to New England, uncivilized communities where people were always doing it and having a good guilt free time. Although he published these books as novels, I’m not sure what genre expectations were at the time, but they came off as too outrageous for most.

So I’ve just been skipping those encyclopedic I-will-prove-it! chapters. I write “Herman, no!” under those chapter titles. Why I still read it, aside from my love for setting and novels set in small spaces is how Ishmael, although he does not really believe, still challenges himself to. Either because he is lonely, worried, or because (not or, but and) he realizes that there is some value in the practice of belief. Or that haters are often coming from a place of wanting to believe.

Now, I am not that person, but I do like reading a book about that person. And I also like that London preacher Henry Melville’s quotation got misattributed to a spiritual mess of a guy like Herman Melville, whose now classic novel was almost unanimously hated in his lifetime and earned him no money in large part to his narrator’s endless knocks against his Protestant countrymen and his embrace of taking transcendence where he could get it.

Things to Appear in a Later Zine

Three things I think about often which I want to know more about later.

Moths – I like moths because they smash their faces into light bulbs. Pretty basic metaphors, oh yes, I am a fan of those. The Pandora moth will willingly walk into a flame. Sometime I wish I had more of these powers. To will myself into danger. When I travel I collect stories of people making mistakes. One half of me hears the story and thinks, Oh goodness, I’m certainly glad to have insurance and a place of my own at home, while the other half hates that I cannot stay awake for thirty hours, endure hangovers heroically, and not have shaky hands when I get angry. Somehow, reading about the strange habits of insects and animals in science-made-fun type books relaxes me into appreciating my safe and flameless lifestyle.

Frederico Garcia Lorca – Lorca I might only like because he was in the Clash song, “Spanish Bombs,” and the Clash I might only like because their s/t album was the first non-MTV group I listened to, although the album I’m thinking about now is actually London Calling. The song “Spanish Bombs” is track 6 on London Calling.

It is a love-lost song from the POV of a casino owner who hears a bomb going off outside his window, and he cannot decide whether maybe it’s contemporary violence or maybe he is actually caught in the Spanish Civil War. Anyhow, “Frederico Lorca’s dead and gone” is a lyric, and from there I bought Lorca’s Selected Verse and in 8 years of owning it understood none of it until maybe a year ago. To the point, I love the sound of his name, Lorca, his illustrations are spooky and easy to reproduce, and he writes lines like “woodcutter / cut down my shadow.”

Windows/Romance – These are two bigger topics I’m trying to decide how I care about. I’ve drawn hundreds of windows in my notebooks. The painting of Goethe looking out a Roman window raises my spirits when I see it. Looking out windows in hotels and homes that are not my own, particularly during snow or rain is very satisfying. There is a Hallmark card inside of me that makes me drawn to deep sentimental shit like windows and atmosphere in art as established by weather. Bob Dylan is like that, too, in his autobiography and his songs. There’s a passage in his Chronicles #1 where he has to dredge his legs through a flooded plain to get to Woody Guthrie’s house to ask the family for access to some unreleased songs. I think when he reaches their front porch covered in mud he meets the daughter or son or mother, and upon asking, Can I see those songs? He told me I could see them, they just say, Nope. Close the door. How dies any of this matter? Only in the way the following things loosely connect.

1.     I enjoy the fall, or movies in which the fall is featured prominently.

2.     Neruda’s poems, provided they are not just about sex.

3.     How fun travel is as a thing to plan and plot. But upon getting to the destination, how you must realize that you are just as likely to get a headache, feel intensely lonely for an hour or so, or have swass when trying to enjoy some magnificent building. And have fun as well.

4.     The Ramones and how they are absolutely a pop group, but one with songs about being afraid of the dark and loving household drugs.  

More Orwell

This summer I'm not sure what I tried to focus on reading. 

Last summer I read a bunch of Orwell. His essays, a biography, and two of his books. One of them was Down and Out in Paris and London, a sort of glancing around anthropology that's a little like Burroughs' Junky and Queer as in it's written for casual readers and leaves you feeling satisfied and not too much like a guy at the zoo. He follows life under the poverty line in France and England. 

If it's read as true, Orwell half stumbles and have drives himself into the life of a tramp, to use his words, shortly after getting out of military training. Happily, he doesn't get hot for Paris and spends most of his time hanging out with castaways from all over Europe. In particular, a  former Russian officer who is lonely for monarchs.   

The quotes below come from the Down and Out book. Some are Orwell and some are lines of dialogue from his peers. 


- He is, somehow, profoundly disgusting to see. 
- By strict economy he managed to always be half starved and half drunk.
- Rackety
- Rickety
- Inveterately 
- Bad luck seemed to have turned him half witted in only a single day. 
- ...And you can never go there again. 
- It is the suburbs, as it were, of poverty.
- I would not flinch, I had been a soldier, remember. 
- He sat up in bed and renewed the situation.
- A duke is a duke, even in exile. (on a duke leaving the bar w/out having paid his bill)
- Of course, one is always a patriot; but still--Did not Moses say something about spoiling the Egyptians? As an Englishman you will have read the Bible. What I mean is, would you object to earning money from Communists?
- The doorkeeper is a cunning swine.
- English eh? He said, if you work well--he made the motion of up-ending a bottle and sucked noisily. If you don't--he gave the doorpost several vigorous kicks. 
- I counted the number of times I was called __?__ during the day. 
- We are a notable set of people.
- It is worth describing...
- Owing to... 
- The bad ones are past imagining.
- People have a way of taking for granted that all work is done for a sound purpose. 
- It is a fear of a supposedly dangerous mob that makes nearly all intelligent people conservative in their opinions.
- The thought of not being poor made me very patriotic.
- D'ysa want to go across my knee?
- His ignorance was limitless and appalling.
- Forced idleness is one of the worst evils of poverty.
- The Salvation Army stinks of charity.