bloodygranuaile | Entries tagged with whales

For a brief moment I was trying to plan a trip to Nantucket this month, before I had to concede defeat and realize that I had too much other stuff on my plate, including too much traveling, to squeeze it into this particular damp drizzly November of my soul and also the freakishly warm and drought-y November of the actual calendar. But before deciding to defer this trip I had already put a hold on Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, which I had intended to be my ferry reading. Despite being tragically unable to read it on or while traveling to Nantucket, I had an absolutely great time reading this book, partly because I read much of it while taking time off work, and partly because it’s just that good.

The sinking of the Essex, a whaleship that sailed out of Nantucket in 1819, is now best known as being the real-life tragedy that inspired Herman Melville’s classic Moby-Dick, a book that I am, with the help of an enabling crew of terminally online boat gays, increasingly not normal about. In Moby-Dick the attack by the titular whale happens right at the end, and then Ishmael as the sole survivor is quickly picked up by another ship. So I was a bit surprised to find that that was not at all what happened with the Essex–most of the crew (or possibly the entire crew?) survived the initial sinking, and then most of them died over the next two months as the three whaleboats full of men wandered around the Pacific making bad decisions and eventually resorting to cannibalism, before they got close enough to the South American coast to be intercepted and rescued. (I probably shouldn’t have been surprised about a book about a shipwreck involving cannibalism, but I was, in part because my mother recommended the book to me and she does not usually go in for books full of fucked-up gross shit the way I do.)

Another difference between this book and Moby-Dick is that Moby-Dick is an extremely long book that takes me a long time to read (so far, four months for my first read and two years for my second), whereas In the Heart of the Sea clocks in at a tidy 250 pages or so and I ripped through it in like three days. If I didn’t have things to do in my life I could probably have read this in one sitting. It’s definitely a triumph of narrative nonfiction if speed of reading is any metric. It’s also really fun in how it engages with its source materials–the ship’s first mate, Owen Chase, wrote an account of his travails, which became a reasonably popular publication and which Melville read while out whaling in the Pacific. It turns out that the ship’s cabin boy, Thomas Nickerson, also wrote a memoir about it, which nobody read or published for over a century, and which definitely challenges some of the things Chase wrote. Other accounts derived from interviews with the few other survivors, including the unlucky Captain Pollard, also exist, and I found it very interesting how each of these takes allocated responsibility for the various disasters and successes of the voyage.

Philbrick doesn’t shy away from discussing the more uncomfortable aspects of this trial, stressing that while it is a ripping good story and an impressive feat of not-capsizing-the-tiny-boats, it is not exactly a feel-good story of the indomitability of the human spirit in the face of adversity, either. A bunch of this adversity was self-inflicted due to plain old racist fearmongering about cannibals, and the pattern of deaths raise some uncomfortable questions about Nantucket clannishness vs. its self-congratulatory history as a bastion of Quaker abolitionism and therefore Definitely Not Racist. It’s not a story about heroes; it is for sure however a story about taking some guys and putting them in extreme situations, which is pretty much what I read boat books for. A+ boat book, a modern classic for a reason.

Today I finished reading two years’ worth of insane emails from my buddy Ishmael! That’s right, reading Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick over the course of a semester back in college wasn’t slow enough for me, so I have been reading Whale Weekly, an email newsletter that delivers the text of the book stretched out over the course of the whole two-year journey of the Pequod.

In the past fifteen years since I last read this book I’ve considered myself to have a very love-hate relationship with it, and also with whales and whaling, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve had to admit to myself that even the “hate” part of the love-hate relationship is fun. Reading this book again, and reading it in such a format as irregularly delivered emails, has really brought home how true that is. Email is a very weird format for a book such as this and one that is not particularly kind to the long-winded, lyrical, old-fashioned writing. I did occasionally end up skimming some emails because it’s just really hard to read emails that are long walls of text with huge unbroken paragraphs full of incredibly long sentences written in outdated Quaker dialect with lots of thees and thous. There are reasons you’re supposed to write emails using bullet points and white space and stuff. For a good number of the emails, my main emotional reaction was that I ought to buy a nice fancy hardback copy of the book again so I could read it far away from any modern attention-splintering machines and maybe it’d be easier to focus.

Structurally, this book makes some interesting choices, and not just the chapters devoted to incorrect whale facts, which is the sort of thing nineteenth-century audiences were fine with because they didn’t have Google or whaling museums to learn whale facts (correct or otherwise) from. The beginning of the book sets up Ishmael and Queequeg’s relationship in a way that makes you think it’s going to be an emotional throughline that takes up substantial page space throughout the book; instead, it fades very much into the background as the voyage goes on, with Queequeg popping up in a couple of key chapters regarding his illness and the crafting of the coffin-life-buoy but otherwise yielding most of the page space to Ahab, Stubb, Starbuck, Flask, and Pip. In the final showdown with the whale, we don’t even see Queequeg die–it’s Tashtego who, out of the “pagan harpooneers,” is dramatically illustrated as the last man visible when the ship goes down. It’s honestly a little disorienting sometimes, and also Queequeg is a great character (period-typical racial cringe aside) so it’s a bummer when he disappears from the action.

That said it must be admitted that none of the weird shit in this book, so matter how hard it may be to follow at times or how much it doesn’t fit the expected beats of a nautical adventure, or even how much period-typical racial cringe there is or how incorrect the whale facts are, make this any less of a masterpiece. It’s postmodern before postmodernism existed. It’s about God and fate and nature and hubris, and most of what it says about those things is contradictory. Three different people are having three very different mental breakdowns all at the same time. It has more Biblical imagery than you can shake a stick at but a conspicuous lack of a Jesus figure, which is refreshing in Western literature. If I recall correctly most of the Biblical references are pretty Old Testament, especially the names. Not as many Johns and Pauls as you usually get; in addition to our famous Ishmael and Ahab, there’s an Elijah and a ship called the Rachel. I guess the Old Testament vibe makes sense given where the story ends up.

Getting to the end of this has re-sparked some of my (occasionally reluctant) interest in whaling and whaling disasters. My mental list of Age of Sail related books I want to read is expanding and I am distressed that I cannot read like half a dozen of these books simultaneously while also going on another field trip to New Bedford and also checking out the Moby-Dick exhibit at the PEM. Well, I should be able to squeeze in time to go to the PEM at least; maybe next weekend.

WELL THAT ONLY TOOK ME THE ENTIRE MONTH OF JANUARY.

But I did pull it off just in time for book club, by which I mean I was reading the last twenty pages or so at book club.

This is the BSpec book club, and we read Ken Liu's Grace of Kings, which had been on The List for a while. It's a political/military epic fantasy, drawing on pseudo-medieval Chinese myth and history rather than pseudo-medieval European myth and history. I do kind of wish I'd read it closer to when it first came out, though, if only because it's really hard right now to get invested in the collapse of fictional empires when the real-world empire I live in is actually for reals collapsing right around me. Also the real world one has more spies. Like, there are some spies in Grace of Kings, but the news is like ALL SPIES lately.

Anyway. The short version of the plot is that a bunch of squabbling kingdoms have been forcibly united under an oppressive Emperor for about a generation. When the Emperor dies, his young son becomes Emperor, but the kid is deliberately spoiled and kept away from governing so his aides can jockey for power. Against this backdrop, a popular uprising against the Empire starts, which eventually becomes a whole bunch of different factions reclaiming their own lands (sound familiar?). The two biggest players in this struggle who emerge are Kuni Garu, a jovial trickster type, and Mata Zyndu, a preternaturally tall and strong scion of a deposed royal family who is fearsomely unbeatable in battle and super uptight. He's basically a Terminator. Despite being polar opposites, they team up to become the rebellion's power couple for a while, but eventually fall out over something stupid that Mata is too rigid-minded to ever patch up properly. In the background of all this, a pantheon of gods all designate certain characters their pawns and try to influence the situation so "their" favorite mortals can "win."

We discussed our nitpicks at book club--such as that the female characters were memorable but there were a limited number of them; meanwhile, the overwhelming number of male characters with often-similar names meant I got a lot of them except the two leads mixed up--but overall this was a pretty solid example of the type of book it is, with a lot of factionalism and strategy and death and fighting. Some elements of the worldbuilding were a little inconsistent or episodic--like, at one point there were mechanical giant whale submarines, but then they were done being used so there just... weren't any more whale submarines. You can't just do this to a girl--if your book is gonna have giant whale submarines at all, it's gotta give us a LOT of giant whale submarines. They are too awesome to be a minor throwaway plot point.

That said, the intrigue is really good, and it's got some interesting meditations on power, morality, the limitations of militarism, and all that sort of stuff that's necessary to make the gods' chess game have more meaning than just a chess game. I'm not as enthused about the sequel as I'd hoped I'd be, though, but that might be partly because I've decided to dedicate the next two years to reading about Nazis. It's really not Ken Liu's fault--anyone writing political fantasy has just had their job made infinitely harder by the vagaries of reality.

Hi all! My head is stuffed up with trying-not-to-get-sick-ness and I seem to have lost the ability to type without hitting the capslock key every five letters, but I thought I'd let you all know that I recently read Goliath, the third and final book in Scott Westerfeld's awesome steampunk alternate history World War I series about the fugitive Prince Aleksandar of Austria-Hungary and his best friend, Deryn Sharp, a girl disguised as a boy who serves as a midshipman on an enormous flying whale.

I adore the crap out of everything about this series.

This final installment contains more of everything I've come to expect from the Leviathan series--historical characters to fill my inner nerd with glee (this installment with bonus William Randolph Hearst and Nikola Tesla!), perspicacious lorises and other wacky made-up animals, Dr. Nora "the lady boffin" Darwin being smooth and awesome, hilarious but also kind of sad thoughts from Aleksandar about "Dylan"'s class and gender performance, clever dialogue peppered with amusing swear words, and steampunky fabulous "Clanker" and "Darwinist" technology.

There are also fun things that surprised me, like some gratuitously fun stuff about THE POWER OF THE MOVIES, and the fictionalized American first-wave women's movement (they wear trousers and have jobs!), and a guest appearance from Lilit, everyone's favorite possibly-lesbian ninjatastic Ottoman revolutionary.

There is also an Obligatory Romance, of course, which is done in a very cute way that is only a little bit annoyingly angsty, and at least it is not triangular, which beats out most of the teen books I've read recently.

The downside to reading this on a Kindle is that the glorious illustrations are not quite as easy to see as they are in print.

Those are all the thoughts I can pull out of my head right now. Goodnight!

Current Mood: sick

As some of you may know, the Capstone course for the English majors my senior year was Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. This scared me off whales (and gin, but that's another story) for about a year, but not before I'd gone to the New Bedford Whaling Museum and purchased Eric Jay Dolin's Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America, because I cannot go anywhere that sells books without buying one. (I also bought a flask. It was pretty sexy.)

I am either over being so over whales, or crazy, because I finally read Dolin's book.

Basically: While Moby-Dick may have good reason to be on Jasper Fforde's "Ten Most Boring Classics" list, whaling is pretty epic and whales are made of awesome.

Leviathan covers some of the history of whaling in the rest of the world, but most of the narrative goes from Captain John Smith's unsuccessful whaling voyage to the Americas in 1614 until the sinking of the Wanderer in 1924. It's a pretty well-rounded book, covering whale biology and what we know of whale evolution (which is apparently not much), the economics of the whaling industry at pretty much all points in time, whaling culture, whale-hunting tools and techniques, the stories of some high-profile wrecks, mutinies and successful voyages, biographic sketches of prominent whalers and whaling families, and snatches of whaling songs. We learn about prominent whaling ports such as Nantucket, New Bedford, San Francisco, and Hawaii, and get to laugh at the English as they repeatedly fail to establish a whaling industry of their own and have to keep buying from us. There are also some stories about women disguising themselves as men and becoming whalemen.

The book also contains two insets full of pictures, which include photographs, line drawings and some advertisements for baleen corsets and spermaceti candle and stuff. It also contains the following disturbing engraving of a beached bull sperm whale:

Jacob Matham's engraving of a beached whale

Jacob Matham's engraving of a beached whale

A lot of stuff about whaling is really not much less disturbing. Leviathan doesn't leave anything out (or if it does, I really don't want to know about it), cheerfully describing the disgusting conditions of whaling vessels and their crewmembers, several horrible and undignified examples of naval discipline, and the effects of various awful diseases (venereal and otherwise) that tended to afflict sailors back in the day.

Overall I found Leviathan to be a very well-researched book and an enjoyable read, and not any choppier than is quite inevitable when covering so many different facets of whaling in under four hundred pages. I would recommend it to anyone who hasn't had to read Moby-Dick anytime recently, particularly since it quotes Melville rather extensively and gives a lot of background on Moby-Dick (including Melville's whaling history and the legends of "Mocha Dick," the albino sperm whale that Moby Dick was based on).

My biggest complaint about this book is that whoever wrote the cover copy and chapter titles is way too fond of alliteration. My second biggest complaint is that it left me really, really curious about what whale meat tastes like, and I have no way of satisfying that curiosity due to the current endangered status of whales.

Verdict: Piracy still more interesting than whaling. Whaling probably almost as crappy and dangerous in real life as piracy, possibly more epic due to the gigantic nature of whales, not quite as easily romanticized for pop culture purposes. (Recent sighting of whales in pop culture: in The Sims Medieval, which Liz recently acquired, one of your character's traits can be "Parents Eaten By Whales." The Sim will be obsessed with whales, and will periodically build up "whale rage" and have to go scream at the sea or go on a whaling voyage to kill some whales.)

Fun fact: I own two books entitled Leviathan, and neither of them is Thomas Hobbes'Leviathan. One is Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America, which I bought at the New Bedford Whaling Museum on a field trip last year, and haven't yet read because I got sick of whales.

The second is Scott Westerfield's YA steampunk WWI novel Leviathan, with spiffy illustrations by Keith Thompson. This book isn't about whaling. It is about an alternate version of World War One where the Germanic powers, called "Clankers," have all sorts of ridiculously advanced big metal machines, and the British and their allies, called the "Darwininsts," have even MORE ridiculous bio-engineered... thingies. The main British character calls them "beasties," but she is actually Scottish so she says a lot of weird shit. For example, the "Leviathan" that is the titular character-slash-setting is an airship made out of A WHALE and some other stuff. It is basically an entire ecosystem made out of whale, birds, bees, bats, glowworms, lizards, and machine parts. The Darwinists also fly giant hydrogen-filled jellyfish called Huxleys to do surveillance work.

There are two main characters. The first is Alek, the son of assassinated Hapsburg archduke Franz Ferdinand, who is on the run from the Germans, and also whatever family drama resulted in somebody murdering his parents, which actually had nothing to do with Serbian anarchists and everything to do with Alek's claim to the throne and a bunch of jingoistic bastards' desire for war. The second is Deryn Sharp, a girl who disguises herself as a boy to join the British Air Service, and who gets in the wackiest scrapes ever, even by cross-dressing-adventure-girl standards (and the cross-dressing-adventure-girl genre is HUGE on wacky scrapes, as a general rule). There is political intrigue and drama and battles and some getting stranded in barren wastelands, as you do in this sort of story, and there is a badass lady scientist, who wears a bowler hat, because apparently in this version of history all scientists have to wear bowler hats. Or something.

Deryn (now known as Dylan) and Alek appear to have an Obligatory Romance brewing, but I shall have to read the sequel to see if it goes anywhere. Or Deryn seems to be having a bit of a thing for Alek, at any rate; Alek mostly seems to just be really envious of Deryn/Dylan that he gets to be a regular guy and have wacky hijinks. Alek also thinks that Dylan is surprisingly rowdy and swaggery and competitive and things, which is funny, because Deryn is doing all that on purpose to fit in with the other British Air Service guys and finds being continually swaggery to be "barking" exhausting. Almost as amusing is the fact that Alek speaks more proper English than Deryn, despite being Austrian, because Alek had posh English tutors and Deryn grew up in the UK but not particularly posh.

This book is actually much less silly than I thought it would be, considering it is basically about a flying whale. It's very engaging in both silly and non-silly ways, and I cannot wait to get my hands on Behemoth.