August 1st, 2007
Moby-Dick, you wily whale, you’ve struck again!
Today I went out driving in search of a good annotated version of Moby-Dick, because I like to get a little literary criticism with my reading. When it comes to the so-called classics, I recognize that in some ways I’m out of my depth. On one level, you can just read them and enjoy them as stories – and if you have a bit of a background in English you can probably extract a lot of extra meat from it, but let’s face it: people far smarter and more educated than I have put uncounted hours into understanding the deep content of these old tomes, and why should I reinvent the wheel? Or miss out on some interesting commentary?
Anyway, the local store only had a musty, cracked copy with no annotations, which I already have at home, so I had to go further afield. In a journey not totally divorced in concept from a certain crazy sailor’s quest to find and kill a white whale, I drove all around the valley in search of a book to buy. At last I found a good edition, I think – it has brief annotations, a goodly sized introduction, and a dictionary of nautical terms!
But though I got the whale, the whale got me back: all my driving in the convertible was done, accidentally, without sunblock. I am now sporting some alarming red splotches on my sunward facing surfaces, the stripe where the seatbelt lay excepted.