Comments on: Reading, Writing, No ‘Rithmetic

By: robin d gill

robin d gill — Thu, 12 May 2005 14:14:38 +0000

Re Brothers Karamazov and the Grand Inquisitor.

If you do a search on Dostoevsky in Topsy-turvy 1585 at Amazon (i just tryed the seach inside the book for the first time) you will find out where the idea for the Grand Inquisitor came from. I think it was the discussion of Free-thinkers and conscious pushing of religion by confucian (in a sense, atheistic) rulers in Japan in Golownin’s Memoirs of his captivity there in the early 19c; and that i just recalled was what i was going to comment on until i read someone else’s comment on Melville! As far as i know, my discovery is my own. If you know any Dostoevsky scholars, please tell them to check it out!

Be sure an search Dostoevsky for I did not spell the brothers’ name the same as you do.

By: robin d gill

robin d gill — Thu, 12 May 2005 14:03:11 +0000

OOps! Amazon look-inside-the-book put all 4 of my books up the day after i wrote the above — so they were only a bit slower than google, who did it a book at a time.

As far as Moby Dick goes, the question i would ask is: why don’t we have more such mixes of fiction and nonfiction? I could have sworn that Annie Dillard, when she edited Best American Essays (1988?), mentioned what Melville accomplished and claimed that nonfiction is freer to be creative because it does not need to convince readers about a fictional reality. Yet , as far as i know (my last decade has been spent in writing not reading) neither she nor anyone i have read have mixed fiction and nonfiction Moby style. In fact, the next thing Dillard wrote after pumping the possibilities of non-fiction was a novel!

After reading Hearn’s Adam’s Task and Paglia’s Sexual Personae (around 1990?), i thought interesting nonfiction might take off, but they both started doing journalistic crap (i suppose it is the only thing that pays) and, sorry to be a complainer, but i can’t help wishing for truly stimulating non-fiction books to read and simply do not find it. And i have not yet had my coffee . . .

By: robin d gill

robin d gill — Sun, 08 May 2005 20:13:31 +0000

and there is a good deal of wit in the moby dick off-chapters, melville’s metaphysical musings, falling into the whale’s brain, the eye on two worlds — maybe not haha “funny,” but he clearly writes to entertain the reader who likes ideas, what i call hyperlogic.

for searchable text, try google print.
if you google my name, then go to my books, choose topsy-turvy 1585 and search the word dostoevsky and you should even find out where (i think) the idea for the grand inquisitor came from ( a passage in golownin’s captivity in japan). rdg

by the way, i sent my four books to ggogle print and amazon the same day a couple months ago (both with the proper forms) and amazon does not yet have a single one up!

rise, ye sea slugs!

By: Karen

Karen — Fri, 06 May 2005 21:19:57 +0000

I’ll never find the exact passages (a reason for e-books, searchable text — or does this exist already, and I’ve missed it?), but there’s a bit about Queequeg being royalty in his own land, and because there’s a dearth of furniture there, certain subjects follow him around all day, turning themselves into human chairs and footstools at his whim. Also somebody with a head like a salad. I don’t know. It made me laugh. I can’t recall about Billy Budd, but why not?

By: Booksquare

Booksquare — Fri, 06 May 2005 19:08:28 +0000

You may be the first person to ever say that Melville was funny. Except for maybe his mother, but mothers always think their kids are the cleverest little beasts in the world. I may have to go back and revisit early Moby Dick. Am I wrong in thinking that Billy Budd had a few moments as well?

Your admission doesn’t change your standing around here!

By: Karen

Karen — Fri, 06 May 2005 14:33:42 +0000

Captivated by a certain view of the world . . . that’s an excellent refinement . . . Moby Dick is really funny, too. I used to live next door to a Shakespeare scholar who insisted that Meville was the worst writer in the world, and when I told him that certain lines in MD made me laugh out loud (admittedly, these lines tended to be early on in the story), my standing as a reader/writer dropped considerably. Ah, well.