Festivities of whiteness.

Diddy White Party pic.twitter.com/pXfsutl3Jl

— Donna Marie (@sabback) March 22, 2025

Contemplating the meaning of whiteness, I reread Chapter 42 of "Moby Dick," "The Whiteness of the Whale." Help me answer the question as asked by Herman Melville: Why does whiteness symbolize "spiritual things" and also work as an "intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind"?

Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a colour as the visible absence of colour; and at the same time the concrete of all colours; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colourless, all-colour of atheism from which we shrink? 

"Herman Melville captured, without endorsing, the nationalist fervor in his novel 'White Jacket': 'We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people...'"

"'... the Israel of our time. God has predestinated, mankind expects, great things from our race; and great things we feel in our souls.' Walt Whitman joined the chorus: 'Have the elder races halted? / Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond the seas? / We take up the task eternal.' There’s no confidence like adolescent confidence, for a person or a country."

Writes David Brooks, in "How Trump Will Fail" (NYT).

I can see why this image of a wild, raw, aspiring America appeals to Trump....

Do you see why a tame, cooked, demoralized America appeals to his antagonists? 

Not for delectations sweet/Not the cushion and the slipper, not the peaceful and the studious/Not the riches safe and palling, not for us the tame enjoyment....

"This winter, I’ll try to prune more gently, and I’ll probably fail. Perhaps the trees will begin to move incrementally back toward pre-human growth patterns."

"Maybe, decades from now, the next human occupant of this land will give up on them entirely and 'prune them with a spade,' as my dad likes to say. Until then, I’ll stand expectantly under the Belle de Boskoop, which by this time of year should be dropping dozens of big, russeted apples on the ground. It has vigorous, almost uncontrollable branches, and we’ve pruned it hard every year in an attempt at sculpting its form. But it reaches ever upward, each lateral proudly unburdened by fruit. If it never crops, it’ll still be here: the Bartleby of my garden, quietly, stubbornly, declining participation in the grind."

Writes Manjula Martin, in "The Rebellion of a Fruitless Apple Tree/As the rest of our culture thrives on overexposure, why shouldn’t a garden have the right to retain an air of mystery?" (The New Yorker).

I'm blogging this article simply because we have apple trees that don't bear fruit. It's a topic that hits close to home, but I was also delighted to see Bartleby, one of my all-time favorite literary characters. Now, I can't help but feel that commenters will zero in on the word "unburdened," which has been said way too many times in the 2024 election cycle. This post was supposed to be a break from all the election blogging. It's about apple trees.

"It’s true that Captain Ahab can seem quite Trumpian..."

"... never more so than in the unnerving chapter titled 'The Quarter-Deck,' when he persuades the polyglot crew of the Pequod that his own private grievance against Moby Dick—for having 'dismasted' him off the coast of Japan—is theirs, and that mere profit in barrels of whale oil pales in comparison to the chance to eliminate the evil White Whale himself. 'I came here to hunt whales, not my commander’s vengeance,' says Starbuck, the voice then and now for narrow business interests. To which Ahab replies in his lordly way, 'Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.' As Ahab’s unhinged rhetoric escalates, even the reasonable Ishmael, schoolteacher turned sailor, surrenders to the manic mood. 'A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me,' he confesses. 'Ahab’s quenchless feud seemed mine.'"

Writes Christopher Benfey, in "Siding with Ahab/Can we appreciate Herman Melville’s work without attributing to it schemes for the uplift of modern man?" (NYRB).

I wonder what Benfey thinks of Trump, because he seems to disapprove of the many critics who see "Ahab as the totalitarian tyrant menacing democratic freedom in the form of…Ishmael." Why don't readers "align themselves with Ahab"? The crew aligns with Ahab. And:

Not that Ahab isn’t appalling and even, at times, criminal. So is Macbeth; so is Othello. But do we really want our works of the imagination to mirror our own best selves, responsible and even-tempered, doing our small part to make the world a better place?

"The procedure, or the appointment — none of us seem to want to say the word death — has been moved from Thursday morning to the early afternoon."

"Another lifetime of waiting. By 9 a.m., the clouds have broken, and my mother is already dressed, her hair in curlers. She is sitting on the bed, looking at her computer. My sister and I suggest a walk. My mother declines: 'I’m doing emails. Just unsubscribing from Politico.' 'Mom!' We splutter. 'We can do that! It’s your last day on earth!' Which it is, and so we desist. Around noon, we go down to the hotel bar. My mother orders a whiskey-soda, ice cream, and a glass of Barolo. She enjoys the wine so much that I suggest she could just not go through with it and stay in this exact hotel and drink herself into oblivion for the rest of her life. Like Bartleby, she’d prefer not to."

From "The Last Thing My Mother Wanted/Healthy at age 74, she decided there was nothing on earth still keeping her here, not even us" (NY Magazine)(the mother opts for assisted suicide, available in Switzerland)("She had a three-pronged rationale... The world was going to hell, and she did not want to see more; she did not get joy out of the everyday pleasures of life or her relationships; and she did not want to face the degradations of aging").

I don't think I'd ever seen Bartleby used in the context of suicide, but here's a 2011 New Yorker column by Ian Crouch, "Bartleby and Social Media: I Would Prefer Not To":

"What are some famous examples — in truth or fiction — of a character who puts a lot of effort into being able to be lazy?"

I ask ChatGPT, a propos of the previous post about the "Lazy Girl" jobs. I was influenced by a comment from Jamie, who wrote, "Heinlein wrote a story called 'The Man Who Was Too Lazy To Fail,' about a smart but lazy guy who spends his life and career thinking up efficiencies and ends up very successful."

ChatGPT answered me:

"Plum-pudding is the term bestowed upon certain fragmentary parts of the whale's flesh, here and there adhering to the blanket of blubber..."

"... and often participating to a considerable degree in its unctuousness. It is a most refreshing, convivial, beautiful object to behold. As its name imports, it is of an exceedingly rich, mottled tint, with a bestreaked snowy and golden ground, dotted with spots of the deepest crimson and purple. It is plums of rubies, in pictures of citron. Spite of reason, it is hard to keep yourself from eating it. I confess, that once I stole behind the foremast to try it. It tasted something as I should conceive a royal cutlet from the thigh of Louis le Gros might have tasted, supposing him to have been killed the first day after the venison season, and that particular venison season contemporary with an unusually fine vintage of the vineyards of Champagne."

Just a fragment of "Moby Dick," pulled up this morning as part of a real-world conversation that I am too discreet to recount.

A royal cutlet from the thigh of Louis le Gros — that killed me.

"[O]ver $40 million somehow became little more than the price of vanity of a college to refuse to admit its original error and to apologize for its conduct."

"It was a complete failure of leadership by the president, the board, and the college. No one seemed willing to take the responsibility to say 'enough' and stop the burning of added costs year after year. So the college continued to gush money as it racked up losses in court. They have frittered away the assets and reputation of a school with a wonderful history and stellar academic reputation ... all to pursue a small grocery like Captain Ahab and his whale. Indeed, the final filing should just quote Melville to capture the blind rage needed to sustain this ill-conceived effort: 'From hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.'"

Writes Jonathan Turley, in "Oberlin’s Revenge Mania: College Finally Runs Out of Appeals in Campaign Against Family-Owned Bakery."

"Rather than working late on a Friday evening, organising the annual team-building trip to Slough or volunteering to supervise the boss’s teenager on work experience..."

"... the quiet quitters are avoiding the above and beyond, the hustle culture mentality, or what psychologists call 'occupational citizenship behaviours.'... TikTok posts about quiet quitting may have been inspired by Chinese social media: #TangPing, or lying flat, is a now-censored hashtag apparently prompted by China’s shrinking workforce and long-hours culture.... 'The search for meaning has become far more apparent. There was a sense of our own mortality during the pandemic, something quite existential around people thinking "What should work mean for me? How can I do a role that’s more aligned to my values?"'"

From "Quiet quitting: why doing the bare minimum at work has gone global/The meaninglessness of modern work – and the pandemic – has led many to question their approach to their jobs" (The Guardian). 

I blogged about quiet quitting 2 weeks ago, here. And I blogged about tangping in June 2021, here. And click my tag "idleness" for various manifestations of my interest in this concept over the years — my blogging years. 

But I've been interested in it for as long as I remember. The Guardian article mentions "Bartleby, the Scrivener," which had a big impact on me when I was a high school student. Talk about a quiet quitter! 

Somewhat noisier examples from my high school English classes that got into my head: "Walden" and "The World Is Too Much With Us":

"It’s good to know that Melville, according to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s son, Julian, had the company of 'a black Newfoundland dog, shaggy like himself, good natured and simple.'"

"('My shaggy ally' was how [Emily] Dickinson referred to her own Newfie, Carlo.) Readers of Moby-Dick may remember that after Ishmael wakes up in Queequeg’s arms in the Spouter-Inn, and complains of the 'unbecomingness of his hugging a fellow male in that matrimonial sort of style,' Queequeg 'shook himself all over like a Newfoundland dog just from the water.'"

 
Writes Christopher Benfey in   "Shaggy Allies/It’s comforting to know that Melville, isolated in an old farmhouse in Pittsfield, had the company of a dog" (NYRB).

I looked up the passage in my own (Kindle) copy of the book:

"Fish leather is here, it’s sustainable – and it’s made from invasive species..."

The Guardian reports.

Actually the full headline is "Fish leather is here, it’s sustainable – and it’s made from invasive species to boot," but I didn't like "to boot." The "and" already carries the meaning of adding one more thing, and "to boot" has nothing to do with a boot — yet boots are made of leather. That's just annoying.

The word "boot" in "to boot," going back to Old English, means "good, advantage, profit, use" (OED). It has a Germanic origin. The "boot" that is the footwear originates in French. It's a different lineage.

Anyway:

Lionfish... devour[] an estimated 79% of young marine life within five weeks of entering a coral reef system.... So Chavda and a team of ecologically aware fellow scuba enthusiasts decided to act by establishing Inversa, which turns lionfish into a new product: fish leather.... 

Inversa does not hunt the lionfish itself. Instead, it relies on educating and encouraging largely poor fishermen and women in often remote places to catch them....

So the ecological goal came first. Whether a commercially viable enterprise can be made out of lionfish leather is another matter. I doubt it! These are pretty small fish. How are you going to manufacture that into saleable leather goods? It's not like making a sharkskin suit.

That's a joke. A sharkskin suit is made out of wool (or silk), but it's called "sharkskin" because it looks like a shark's skin. And yet, when Herman Melville refers to sharkskin in "Moby-Dick," it seems to be real shark skin:

"I may be skeptical of the metaverse but I’m way more skeptical of the singularity. The singularity imagines a world in which our consciousness can transcend our bodies..."

"... where the virtual world of the metaverse would be the collective space our disembodied consciousness inhabits. Every few years, someone writes a book assuring us that the rate of technological change is so high that computers will increase beyond the complexity of the human brain and either we will be uploadable into the Matrix or machine intelligence will so outpace human intelligence that the machines will be where it’s at. I’m skeptical because human bodies are hard. I’ve been a Type 1 diabetic for more than 35 years. Get me a functional mechanical pancreas that can actually manage my chronic disease as well as I manage it with insulin shots and then maybe we can talk about uploading my consciousness into silicon."

Said Ethan Zuckerman, an associate professor of public policy, quoted in "Is Meta’s Facial Recognition Retreat Another Head Fake?" (NYT).

That reminds me... I've been reading Jonathan Franzen's new book, "Crossroads," and I encountered the word "metempsychosis." A 15-year-old boy — we've been told and shown that he's a genius — is watching his younger brother running in a heavy snowstorm:

Fisherman in Yemen haul in a dead sperm whale and discover, inside it, ambergris worth $1.5 million.

 

On the topic of ambergris, there is this from Herman Melville's "Moby Dick":

"How to Draw Literary Cartoons."

Interview with the artist, Amy Kurzweil, here. Sample:

What’s your favorite New Yorker cartoon trope or cliché (e.g., desert island, grim reaper, Rapunzel tower)? 

I’ll go with the Moby Dick trope, because whales are easy to draw, and I like a good metaphor for the unattainable.

Ah, yes... I was just reading those pages in "The New Yorker Encyclopedia of Cartoons":

 

AND: Here's the video with the title that's in the post title. I've moved it below the fold because it's autoplaying. I hate that. But it's a nice video about the great subject of drawing. And they even talk about the "Seinfeld" episode with the confusion about New Yorker cartoons:

At the Moby Dick Café...

 

... you can pursue your dreams.

"When Christopher Columbus encountered a severe storm while returning from America, he is said to have written on parchment what he had found in the New World..."

"... and requested it be forwarded to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, enclosed the parchment in a waxed cloth and placed it into a large wooden barrel to be cast into the sea. The communication was never found."

From "Message in a Bottle," a Wikipedia article. Lots more message-in-a-bottle stories at that link. Examples:

In December 1928, a trapper working at the mouth of the Agawa River, Ontario, found a bottled note from Alice Bettridge, an assistant stewardess in her early twenties who initially survived the December 1927 sinking in a blizzard of the freighter Kamloops and, before she herself perished, wrote "I am the last one left alive, freezing and starving to death on Isle Royale in Lake Superior. I just want mom and dad to know my fate."...

In 1956, Swedish sailor Ake Viking sent a bottled message “To Someone Beautiful and Far Away” that reached a 17-year-old Sicilian girl named Paolina, sparking a correspondence that culminated in their marriage in 1958. The affair attracted so much attention that 4,000 people celebrated their wedding.

The longest time between a message sent and when it was received, as far as we know, is 151 years. A seaman named Chunosuke Matsuyama sent a message from an island in the Pacific in 1784. It was found in Hiraturemura, Japan in 1935.

The message in a bottle is a popular theme. There's Edgar Allan Poe's story "MS. Found in a Bottle" and there's The Police song "Message in a Bottle":



I'm reading that Wikipedia page after clicking over from "Beachcombing," which turns out to be an extremely interesting subject:

"Melville’s ever-philosophical narrator, Ishmael, asks: 'Who ain’t a slave? Tell me that.'"

"From a world he experienced as spherical from atop ships’ masts, Melville perceived a sea-level humanity, embracing and celebrating the latitudes and longitudes of human variation, now termed diversity. When Ishmael finds himself compelled to share a blanket at the sold-out Spouter Inn, he declares, 'No man prefers to sleep two in a bed.' But he settles in, waiting for his mysterious South Seas roommate who, he’s informed, is peddling a shrunken head on the streets of New Bedford. Queequeg’s appearance terrifies Ishmael mute. But after things equilibrate, Ishmael reconsiders: 'For all his tattooings he was on the whole a clean, comely looking cannibal … a human being just as I am. … Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.'... Reflecting on Queequeg’s tatted visage, he concludes: 'Savage though he was, and hideously marred about the face — at least to my taste — his countenance yet had a something in it which was by no means disagreeable. You cannot hide the soul. … Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.'... Nearly two centuries ago, Melville showed us how easy it is to welcome as our own the touches of others, their equivalent colors, customs and beliefs; their journeys, their transitions. And to remember those who, unwelcomed, suffered. How much could have been avoided, and embraced, had we heeded...."

From "Melville’s Whale Was a Warning We Failed to Heed" (NYT).

"The predominantly white and male guardianship of the literary and intellectual high ground tended to view the essential American story as a solo confrontation with the wilderness..."

"... not a love triangle or intimate domestic saga. Nineteenth-century men of letters 'saw the matter of American experience as inherently male,' the literary critic Nina Baym wrote in her 1981 essay 'Melodramas of Beset Manhood.' It was a complete negation of women’s points of view, not just an artistic dismissal. That doesn’t mean American women’s fiction wasn’t popular — like 'Little Women,' Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 'Uncle Tom’s Cabin' could barely keep up with demand after its 1852 publication. But that widespread appeal was used to slight the genre out of hand and further relegate it to the status of mere entertainment. As Ms. Baym noted, Nathaniel Hawthorne, for one, complained in 1855 about the 'damned mob of scribbling women' whose inexplicably popular work he feared would hurt his own book sales. There’s some truth in the notion that women strove to write works that would sell — Ms. Alcott herself said she wrote 'Little Women' 'at record speed for money' while men toiled away on epics like 'Moby-Dick' that would fail to generate much income.... It may be that on its surface, 'Little Women' doesn’t seem as fresh and progressive, comparatively. Maybe men feel it’s too familiar — the book has been turned into a movie no fewer than seven times, including a little-seen version released just last year. But in an era when sequels and remakes clog the film landscape (many of them male-centered), it’s hardly an exception...."

From "Men Are Dismissing ‘Little Women.’ What a Surprise/The rejection of the latest screen adaptation of the beloved novel echoes a long-held sentiment toward women-centered narratives" by Kristy Eldredge (in the NYT). Eldredge is responding to a tweet by Janet Maslin, which read: "The 'Little Women' problem with men is very real. I don’t say that lightly and am very alarmed/In the past day have been told by 3 male friends who usually trust me that they either refuse to see it or probably won’t have time."

1. The media churn up this notion that you're supposed to see films. But, really, there doesn't need to be a reason not to see a film. There needs to be a reason to see a film. And films are aimed at particular sorts of people. It's absurd to criticize anyone, ever, for "rejection" of a film. Reject them all! The presumption is no. Then select only what feels right for you, what's worth your time and attention.

2. Almost no one needs to select another remake of "Little Women" as what they will allow to occupy their own precious mind for 2 hours. It doesn't matter that it's well made and the acting is good or whatever. Select it if it serves you. You don't owe Hollywood anything. Hollywood makes its offer to you, and you will be saying no to almost anything.

3. There's no reason for anyone to feel a gender-based obligation to see this or that. If something doesn't appeal to you, go somewhere else. The movie was made with intense conniving to appeal based on gender. "Little Women" gets the women that go to the movie in response to that appeal. Rather than say men ought to strive against their feeling of gender-based exclusion, I'd say women ought to strive against the pull of gender-based inclusion.

4. Louisa May Alcott herself had a distaste for what she was doing writing that book specifically for females! She wrote in her journal (quoted at "Girls adored ‘Little Women.’ Louisa May Alcott did not." (WaPo): "Mr. N wants a girls’ story, and I begin ‘Little Women.’ … I plod away, though I don’t enjoy this sort of thing. Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters; but our queer plays and experiences may prove interesting, though I doubt it."

5. I wrote "females" under point #4 because you can see she was writing for girls — not women. It's a young adult novel. "Little Women" are "little" in the sense that they are very young. They're girls. It's horrifying that women are catered to with this story over and over again. Why is any adult interested in this material? Ask that, rather than ask why adult men are not interested.

6. Let people be interested in in the stories they're actually interested in. Don't push them to invent an interest to something that does not call out to them. It's awful to lose touch with what you really feel, who you really are, and to generate a false sense of interest in what you've been enticed to think you ought to like. That's a general problem in life, not specific to movies.

7. Does the question what is "the essential American story" have any serious meaning in the context of what movies people are choosing to go to see? Even if it's true that males dominate the activity of deciding what is "essential" and what is "American" — or what is "the intellectual high ground" — that has little relevance to the question of what's the next movie you're going to see. Let's assume "Moby-Dick" is that thing. I don't see any good film adaptations of "Moby-Dick"! The movies aimed at men don't come from an "intellectual high ground." They're low-culture stuff from comic books! Loads and loads of young-adult material.

8. "Moby-Dick" is not "a solo confrontation with the wilderness."

Brandishing a narwhal tusk to fight the London Bridge terrorist.

The terrorist was armed with a knife, and the narwhal tusk was 5 feet long, I'm reading in "Narwhal tusk and fire extinguisher used to tackle London Bridge attacker/Members of the public, including a convicted murderer, bring terrorist to the ground" (The Guardian).

Scotland Yard is investigating how 28-year-old Usman Khan was able to launch the attack in London Bridge, despite being known to the authorities and fitted with an electronic tag to monitor his movements. He was allowed out a year ago after serving time for his part in a plot to blow up the London Stock Exchange.

In footage that has since emerged, Khan is sprayed with a fire extinguisher, while another man tries to suppress the assailant with a narwhal tusk – a long pointed tooth from a type of whale – lunging at him. It is believed the item was pulled from the wall of Fishmongers’ Hall, a grade II-listed building on London Bridge, by a Polish chef called Lucasz....

ADDED: I'm re-reading "Moby-Dick," so let me give you the chapter on the narwhal:

"Go to the meat-market of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds."

"Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal's jaw? Cannibals? who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgment, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy pate-de-foie-gras. But Stubb, he eats the whale by its own light, does he? and that is adding insult to injury, is it? Look at your knife-handle, there, my civilized and enlightened gourmand, dining off that roast beef, what is that handle made of?—what but the bones of the brother of the very ox you are eating? And what do you pick your teeth with, after devouring that fat goose? With a feather of the same fowl. And with what quill did the Secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Cruelty to Ganders formally indite his circulars? It is only within the last month or two that that society passed a resolution to patronize nothing but steel pens."

From Herman Melville, "Moby-Dick."