The Literature of America
Writing about Moby Dick yesterday, I said “Every American should read Moby Dick, it’s our great national epic and you can’t understand the country without it.” Kevin Drum is apparently a Moby hater and demands explanation of this claim.
This leaves me with two problems. One, I was being hyperbolic. Two, I really have no business writing about literature. That said, this comment from Bob McManus basically sums up my feelings about the great American novels:
Huckleberry Finn is good enough for the young ones. There is enough darkness and questioning there
America as psychotic idealism in Moby Dick or corrupt hypocrites as in Gatsby may need some maturation. Although there are even gentler versions of those themes in HF.
I would only say that that’s a bit too dyspeptic of a way to put it. America is the land of strivers, of people who believe in endless possibility, and where triumphs and tragedies spring from this endless reservoir of boundless desire. It’s the kind of place where a president boasting about his plan to expend vast resources on a avowedly pointless mission to the Moon can be remembered as a great moment in political rhetoric:
A country of more practical people probably wouldn’t get into so much trouble. But then again, in a world full of more practical countries perhaps nobody would have ever gone to the Moon. And it seems to me that that would have been a shame. Nevertheless, this is also the kind of country that might decide one day that it wants to try to bring good government to Afghanistan (?!?!) and create an effective centralized state there. Impressive if you can pull it off, but you’ve got to wonder.
74 Responses to “The Literature of America”
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September 2nd, 2009 at 1:04 pm
I can’t decide whether this post is half-way decent, or actually sucks.
September 2nd, 2009 at 1:04 pm
How any of this ties to Moby Dick is beyond me. Ahab chases the white whale not because he has some kind of can-do American spirit. He is after revenge, plain and simple. And the most petty sort of revenge. Moby Dick didn’t kill his family or his best friend. It (absurdly) bit off his leg, and for that Ahab must kill the beast.
Most of the men on board go along with Ahab’s quest either out of a misplaced sense of loyalty, appeals to their manhood, or outright greed (they want that gold piece nailed to the mast!) when in theory Ahab’s quest is entirely disloyal (even mutinous) toward the ship’s owners.
How do we get from that to JFK? Afghanistan and maybe Iraq as misguided revenge I can see. But the moon?
Also, although it ends better, I think you could argue that Huckleberry Finn takes a much darker view of human nature than Moby Dick.
September 2nd, 2009 at 1:11 pm
Gilbert Gottfried did an extended riff on Moby Dick on Letterman probably 25 years ago that was hilarious. Probably the funniest bit was when he went on about how this whale with a mouth the size of Laguardia took just a tiny little nibble out of Ahab. I can’t find it anywhere, though. Stupid internet.
September 2nd, 2009 at 1:14 pm
It takes a nation of strivers to kill that many indians.
September 2nd, 2009 at 1:16 pm
Which brings us back to the thread at the old digs on what high-school first-gen immigrant kids take away from Gatsby.
September 2nd, 2009 at 1:18 pm
Re Rob Mac at 2: “Most of the men on board go along with Ahab’s quest either out of a misplaced sense of loyalty, appeals to their manhood, or outright greed (they want that gold piece nailed to the mast!)”
Damm! This place is a veritable fount of English exam questions:
“Moby Dick vs John Kerry’s 2004 Presidential Campaign: Compare and Contrast “
September 2nd, 2009 at 1:19 pm
“Ahab chases the white whale not because he has some kind of can-do American spirit. He is after revenge, plain and simple”
It doesn’t matter *why* he chases the whale. It’s a quest,
and it’s stupid, and it’s futile, and it’s hubris, and it’s
glorious. And Ahab goes to his death bound to the object of
his obsession, with his ship smashed and his crew scattered
and dying.
It’s a book about the human condition. And it’s a book about
the biology of whales and the technology of 19th-century
whaling. And yes, it’s a book about politics inasmuch as
it shows how a leader – even a deranged leader – can pursue
a goal with the resources of others.
I think you can probably gain a pretty good understanding of
the absurdity of post-WW2 US national security policy by
reading maybe Moby Dick, Alice in Wonderland, and The Baroque
Arsenal (Mary Kaldor). The irrationality is blatant; often
the irrationality is deliberate.
September 2nd, 2009 at 1:20 pm
I’m a Moby Dick lover.
What I really like about Moby Dick, that I think is missing in the other great fiction candidates, is endless depth (pun intended). This is the first book that I read in literature (for me, mid college) where I felt the professor had great insight, but where there were endless themes and ideas to pursue, and where even Melville wasn’t sure where he was headed. The book felt like uncharted, ever-changing waters. And, as literature should, I felt it expanded my mind.
Throughout high school and early college I had read and enjoyed literature. TS Eliot was absurd sophistication, but I enjoyed a lot of Shakespeare and others. But I frequently felt that literature was a kind of puzzle, and that the teachers and masters before me had the keys. They were so clever, much smarter than I. So I sort of resented the show-off teachers and texts.
But with Moby Dick it was different. I felt we were on a journey together.
—
Responding to one of Don Williams’ remarks from yesterday. The Confidence Man is great but unreadable. I think Melville knew it.
September 2nd, 2009 at 1:20 pm
Moby Dick is about striving in the face of insurmountable odds and manic obsession with an elusive goal. Both of these are as uniquely American as Napoleon and Waterloo.
September 2nd, 2009 at 1:22 pm
Let me strive for the impossible and say that some day Matt will read his comments, and he will create new blog posts in response to his readers’ comments, rather than just in response to Kevin Drum and a few others’ responses to him.
(Insert JFKesque rhetoric here.)
September 2nd, 2009 at 1:30 pm
Re Richard at 7: “And yes, it’s a book about politics inasmuch as
it shows how a leader – even a deranged leader – can pursue
a goal with the resources of others.”
——–
Hey, if someone could leave Bob Shrum treading water out in the middle of the Atlantic, I would chip in for the venture.
Actually, I did, come to think of it.
September 2nd, 2009 at 1:35 pm
I’ll take heed of Mr. Yglesias opinions about English Literature when he starts taking heed of the simple rules of English Orthography.
September 2nd, 2009 at 1:35 pm
Let me strive for the impossible and say that some day Matt will read his comments, and he will create new blog posts in response to his readers’ comments
He only does that in response to the trolls.
September 2nd, 2009 at 1:37 pm
this is also the kind of country that might decide one day that it wants to try to bring good government to Afghanistan (?!?!) and create an effective centralized state there.
Yeah. Well, I guess the Great American Novel should have Ahab sailing around the world for seven years, not getting anywhere near finding Moby Dick, and continually redefining terms of “success” (”It’s not about one whale—we’re fighting a ‘war on cetacery.’) No ending, either–you just keep paying for additional plotless volumes.
(Note: if any commenter here actually writes such a book and sells it, I claim ten per cent of both the advance and royalties.)
September 2nd, 2009 at 1:44 pm
Re cube at 8: “The Confidence Man is great but unreadable. I think Melville knew it.”
Yes –but people were asking for the quintessential American novel.
But don’t take my word for it. Ask Bernie Madoff.
Or Dick Cheney.
September 2nd, 2009 at 1:44 pm
Let me strive for the impossible and say that some day Matt will read his comments, and he will create new blog posts in response to his readers’ comments, rather than just in response to Kevin Drum and a few others’ responses to him.
I read the comments every day.
September 2nd, 2009 at 1:48 pm
Hyperbole, like sarcasm, is a cheap adolescent rhetorical trick that rarely works well in writing, as you’ve just discovered. It takes vocal inflections to pull it off, and even when spoken it often fails.
Whenever you’re writing and find yourself being hyperbolic or sarcastic, you should ask yourself whether your point might be more effectively communicated by being straightforward.
September 2nd, 2009 at 1:50 pm
Why do we have to a THE great American novel? I doubt the Brits or Frogs are exercised about it for their respective countries.
For what it’s worth Charles Olson’s CALL ME ISHMAEL in an outstanding contribution to understanding Melville and the American character.
September 2nd, 2009 at 2:01 pm
I can’t believe I got frontpaged.
He is after revenge, plain and simple.
No, Moby Dick was evil Ultimate evil, transcendental evil, the evilest evil ever until Commonism, race-mixing, and universal healthcare. Ahab and the others may have varied slightly in motivations and justifications but they were fighting evil.
Both of these are as uniquely American as Napoleon and Waterloo.
No, I do think there is something different but not unique, about America, or at least the Northeastern Puritan tradition that was of the novel and that dominated for so long. I think it is a negation, not a building or rebuilding or recreating but an escape and destruction from the old. Millenilism is not about the New Society but about the fall of the old one.
One way to see the difference is to look at the American and French Revolutions. The American Revolution and Constitution is remarkable for what it doesn’t do as much as for what it does.
And to this day some foreigners view America as the enthusiastic negation/destruction of culture and history deliberately without a positive replacement. Killing evil rather than creating good. Puritans.
September 2nd, 2009 at 2:06 pm
Re: And to this day some foreigners view America as the enthusiastic negation/destruction of culture and history deliberately without a positive replacement. Killing evil rather than creating good
I’m not a foreigner, but I would thoroughly endorse this statement.
September 2nd, 2009 at 2:07 pm
I can’t decide whether this post is half-way decent, or actually sucks.
It sucks. Big time.
The kiddies should read Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. If you stare into the abyss don’t be surprised when you find it staring back into you. “Exterminate the Brutes!” Belgian colonialism in Africa, now there was something.
Matt:
“Nevertheless, this is also the kind of country that might decide one day that it wants to try to bring good government to Afghanistan (?!?!) and create an effective centralized state there.”
Helping the Afghans get their dirt poor war-ravaged country up and running shouldn’t be that hard when there’s no where to go but up. It’s certainly a better response to 9/11 than “exterminate the brutes!” We’ve progressed (or gotten slack according to those like Hector, depending on your view).
September 2nd, 2009 at 2:09 pm
I read the comments every day.
Big mistake.
September 2nd, 2009 at 2:12 pm
The French have had what, 5-6 Constitutions, each accompanied with the necessary Revolution at some level? And America is supposed to be the great experimenters with our 200 year-old antique?
America just sucks at institutional innovation. We are destruction. That ain’t all bad. We destroyed slavery and the old South, we destroyed fascism, we destroyed totalitarian communism. We also destroyed many good and innocent things. We destroyed Vietnam and Iraq. Moby Dick may be the GAN, but it is a hard lesson. Adults only.
Moon landings are just beads & baubles.
September 2nd, 2009 at 2:13 pm
Matt, its a neo-colonial project.
September 2nd, 2009 at 2:14 pm
No adult has to read, but some people do. If you read a lot or if you read selectively but well, you’ll gain an education about parts of the world you’ll never get around to seeing. None of it’s required. There’s no test at the end of life. Moby Dick is a story about a whaling voyage with a crazy man at the steering wheel. When I read it, I could never have imagined any of it. None of it seemed explicit in what went before so I was constantly surprised. I’m glad I read it.
September 2nd, 2009 at 2:17 pm
“Why do we have to a THE great American novel? I doubt the Brits or Frogs are exercised about it for their respective countries.”
For the British, *the* great literature is Shakespeare,
and if you’ve got Hamlet and The Tempest, then it’s hard
to compete. Though the best of Dickens, and Thackeray’s
Vanity Fair, are pretty damn awesome in their own way.
I’m not really up on French lit, maybe Voltaire, Racine,
and Moliere occupy a similar position ?
The Russians have Pushkin and Tolstoy.
Perhaps we can get really meta here, and suggest that
because the rise of the USA in 1850-1920 happened to coincide
with the rise of the novel form (due to cheap printing
technology and distribution ?), the goal of writing the Great
Novel became a peculiarly American obsession – and that the
new form seemed especially appropriate for writing about a
nation in the process of transforming itself. The Great
Novel *is* the American writer’s White Whale.
September 2nd, 2009 at 2:20 pm
Bahh, if you want to read about 19th Century nautical life, read the Patrick O’Brian’s “Master and Commander” series (its worth watching the Russell Crowe movie first to see if its your cup of tea). Its a much better read.
As for “literature” that gives some insight on American life, its hard to top Catch-22. Milo Minderbinder would understand the Blue Dogs perfectly.
September 2nd, 2009 at 2:20 pm
While I bow to no one in my love for Moby Dick, I think it’s a mistake to declare that any work of art is necessary to understanding [some big thing, like "America"]. What Melville provides is a profound weaving together of themes, motifs, and ideologies that we’re all familiar with, even if we don’t always recognize them. It helps us to see ourselves more clearly, but it’s not essential.
Also: if there has to be just one, the Great American Novel is Lolita.
September 2nd, 2009 at 2:21 pm
Moby Dick is about hatred – blind, sick burning hatred. I guess that’s one kind of striving, but even Ahab knows he is not striving after endless possibility, but fatal doom. He has displaced the multitude of frustrations with all the little forces that oppress and oppose us onto one single powerful object of all-consuming hatred, and it destroys him.
All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby-Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.
September 2nd, 2009 at 2:25 pm
Bahh, if you want to read about 19th Century nautical life, read the Patrick O’Brian’s “Master and Commander” series (its worth watching the Russell Crowe movie first to see if its your cup of tea). Its a much better read.
So I’d heard. So, I picked one up. I got instead of a novel a whole lot of local color the author had picked up elsewhere. A novel needs a certain amount of detail, but it’s not the end-all and be-all of fiction. Melville knew whaling and the sea and it shows. Patrick O’Brien liked to read about ships and the sea and it shows.
September 2nd, 2009 at 2:26 pm
“Bahh, if you want to read about 19th Century nautical life, read the Patrick O’Brian’s “Master and Commander” series”
I like CS Forester’s Hornblower books. I liked William
Golding’s trilogy. And I tried O’Brian’s stuff and just
found it unbearably turgid and prissy, with implausible
characters, stilted dialogue, and pages of obscure nautical
terminology that didn’t advance the plot at all, but
merely displayed the author’s erudition.
I know some people swear by it, but it really left me cold.
September 2nd, 2009 at 2:30 pm
Matt: The reasons that people often think you don’t read the comments are: 1) You almost never engage with them; 2) Errors in your posts—not small ones like grammar, but big ones like mixing up Germany and Denmark that one time—which your commenters point out go uncorrected for hours, if they ever are; 3) Genuinely offensive or fraudulent comments are never deleted; 4) (and this was The Lorax’s point, I think): every once in a while you’ll post something in response to a point that Kevin Drum or Ezra or somebody made, seemingly unaware that the exact same point had been made, repeatedly and eloquently, by your commenters here, a day or more before. All of these can make you seem aloof from your commenters.
September 2nd, 2009 at 2:33 pm
I am one of those who love O’Brian (much better then Hornblower, if only because he is consistently hilarious and Forester didn’t have a funny bone at all). But is he in the same league with Melville? He is not.
September 2nd, 2009 at 2:37 pm
Genuinely offensive or fraudulent comments are never deleted
This used to bug me too. But in fairness, things may be different now. How long since LoneWacko the Blogwhore put in an appearance? Maybe the banhammer has been quietly activated.
September 2nd, 2009 at 2:42 pm
America just sucks at institutional innovation. We are destruction. That ain’t all bad. We destroyed slavery and the old South, we destroyed fascism, we destroyed totalitarian communism. We also destroyed many good and innocent things. We destroyed Vietnam and Iraq. Moby Dick may be the GAN, but it is a hard lesson. Adults only.
We invented the fuckin’ Intertubes, chump, no matter what CERN says. Where would you be bitching without that, in letters to the editor? And online porn: let’s see Islam and its “vital energy” withstand that.
And Rock ‘n Roll. And hip hop/rap. And jazz, which isn’t my cup of tea but still.
September 2nd, 2009 at 2:45 pm
I would be extremely interested to know how MY’s regular readers and commenters feel about this.
Is it still true?
September 2nd, 2009 at 2:47 pm
All this talk of the GAN means I have to mention Absalom, Absalom!
The outsider rejected and scorned by his idea of high and gracious society decides to recreate himself out of whole cloth into the image of what he despises, in a new place where he is unknown, and in his maniacal quest to realize his ambition destroys those around him and, ultimately, himself, all the while inadvertently sowing the seeds for his eventual replacement by that which he consciously rejects (specifically, a racially mixed America). And of course the whole thing is a story really being made up out of fragments of local memory by the self-loathing southern liberal Quentin with the assistance of alternately skeptical and uncomprehending Canandian friend Shreve at the bastion of American elitism, Harvard? I mean, how perfect does it have to be?
September 2nd, 2009 at 2:57 pm
“(its worth watching the Russell Crowe movie first to see if its your cup of tea)”
You can’t go far wrong with a movie about sailing ships:
they just look magnificent on the big screen. And “Master
and Commander” was ok from that point of view. The faux-naif
stuff about science and evolution and the Galapagos Islands,
however, was really a waste of time. Look, we *know* these
are fictional characters; we *know* that the author knows
about Darwin; putting anachronistic ideas into the mouths
of fictional characters doesn’t help, it just breaks the
illusion.
This is a problem that everyone writing historical fiction
has to grapple with: if you’re writing in the 20th or 21st
century and you know about Freud and Darwin and Einstein
and quantum mechanics and WW2 and nuclear weapons, how do
you reflect that perspective through your 19th-century
characters ?
Forester makes it simple: he just ignores that stuff and
writes ripping yarns about battling the French.
Golding uses his 19th-century characters to illuminate
more modern themes, while exploiting the irony that the
characters themselves don’t understand what’s going on
and don’t have the conceptual framework or even the language
to describe it. I think that’s a very satisfying approach
if you can pull it off.
John Fowles, with The French Lieutenant’s Woman, insists
on deconstructing it all and giving us explicit passages
of modern commentary on the character’s thoughts, feelings,
and actions. I always felt that wasn’t really fair to the
characters: can’t they have their own existence without
being constantly judged with 150 years of hindsight ?
And how can they come alive with the author prodding and
dissecting them every few pages ?
As for O’Brien, he seems to give his characters somewhat
anachronistic thoughts and words. Which felt jarring to me.
But I didn’t stick with it long enough to get to the
“consistently hilarious”. So don’t trust my take on it.
September 2nd, 2009 at 3:15 pm
I’ve never thought of the ‘great American novel’ as something that ‘explains’ America. It’s not a textbook. Rather novels like Moby Dick (and yes, Lolita) are only possible because of America, and so powerfully do they derive from this idea, that they then become part of necessary literature and have a powerful affect upon later generations. I do think that everybody, if they want to understand America, ought to read Moby Dick. It is quintessential.
Moby Dick if it is about anyone thing, is about the awakening from fatalism and pre-destination that is attendant upon monarchies and empires: it’s the first working class novel about a working class (sailors) who had a choice of whether to be serfs or citizens. It’s big and it’s messy and it’s gloriously funny and it’s only because America made the choice NOT to be a colony and instead to be a democracy that it could be conceived and written at all..
Nor, it must be said, does the great American novel have to be, in literature terms, great… In terms of both being made possible by America and possibly remaking America the single biggest impact by any single novel is probably Uncle Tom’ Cabin and is likewise an absolutely necessary read: it portrays a very real, and very cruel, America and is a novel that made people sit up and take notice. As straight up literature, Uncle Toms Cabin isn’t in the same league as Moby Dick or Lolita, but it is similar in that it is singularly American and, lacking knowledge of it means you lack understanding of the time and place in which it was written…
September 2nd, 2009 at 3:26 pm
Simple is as simple does. Don’t get me wrong, Forster is good for entertainment. O’Brien gets you to really think, however. If that’s not what you’re after in literature, thats’ fine. But don’t pretend that novels are just slower versions of TV.
OBrien makes it interesting by contrast: the hulking bruiser Aubrey, who should never be left unsupervised ashore juxtaposed against the twee Dr. Maturin, erudite and conflicted spy who’s constantly barging into new discoveries. Suddenly the novel isn’t about a single moment in time but the twists that connects the past, the present and the future… Sure the reader is aware of Einstein, Darwin, etc… But Maturin and Aubrey aren’t and their different reactions to the onrushing future is, frankly, fascinating.
September 2nd, 2009 at 3:44 pm
“OBrien makes it interesting by contrast: the hulking bruiser Aubrey, who should never be left unsupervised ashore juxtaposed against the twee Dr. Maturin, erudite and conflicted spy who’s constantly barging into new discoveries.”
I guess. I just don’t get it myself. The whole idea of
having a ship’s doctor be a spy seemed utterly unworkable:
what kind of spying can you do if you’re stuck on a ship
for months at a time ? And the Aubrey/Maturin odd couple
seems about as subtle as Laurel and Hardy. But if it
floats your three-masted barque, good for you.
Anyhow, I recommend Golding’s trilogy Rites of Passage,
Close Quarters, Fire Down Below as something that works
both as literature and as a good 19th-century nautical yarn.
If you want to think, there’s plenty to think about; if
you want to know how to secure a mainmast that’s threatening
to fall out of the ship, that’s in there too.
September 2nd, 2009 at 3:45 pm
What tomemos said. Whatever, though. The blog still works well with a bunch of commentators riffing off what Matt says and going back and forth amongst each other.
September 2nd, 2009 at 3:48 pm
petr’s comments (#39 and 40) are very perceptive.
When I read Moby Dick I focused on the ocean as metaphor: exploration of the mind, god, unconscious, stuff like that. To me, Melville (like Shakespeare) seemed very Freudian. I don’t think a writer needs to be writing in the 20th century to address deep, current issues.
September 2nd, 2009 at 3:53 pm
Truly, I do not understand why so many ignore me when I speak of cetology. A grasp of cetology is crucial in comprehending a tale about a wild spermaceti!
September 2nd, 2009 at 3:56 pm
Reading Moby Dick, you quickly realize that if there (1) had been decent PTSD treatment available for whaling vessel captains and (2) Starbuck had had a radio he could use to contact the Pequod’s owners, the book would be mainly about the forbidden love between Ishmael and Queequeg.
September 2nd, 2009 at 3:56 pm
petr wrote: I do think that everybody, if they want to understand America, ought to read Moby Dick.
Agreed, but that’s very different from MY’s initial claim: “you can’t understand the country without it.”
It is quintessential.
Actually, I think that’s exactly what it isn’t, as the beautiful description of the novel you offer in your next paragraph demonstrates. Despite its allegorical framing, Moby Dick doesn’t transcend, doesn’t seek to unify its elements. It is insistently earthly (and earthy). It’s contradictory, heteroglossic, dialogic, and subversive. The point, I suppose, is that it is a novel, not an epic, and these are two radically opposed genres.
The search for the Great American Novel is peculiarly American; Spaniards, for example, may well agree that Don Quixote is the greatest thing ever written in their language, but few would make a national fetish of it. And I think the search is motivated by a desire for a singular work that will do the sort of cultural work that the Aeneid did. (This desire for transcendence puts Uncle Tomb’s Cabin out of the running, in my opinion.) When MY calls Moby Dick “our great national epic,” he’s (perhaps unconsciously) modeling the American empire on the Roman. But Moby Dick is not like the Aeneid. (Whether the Aeneid is actually like the imperial ideal of the Aeneid is another question, of course.)
September 2nd, 2009 at 3:59 pm
What tomemos said. Whatever, though. The blog still works well with a bunch of commentators riffing off what Matt says and going back and forth amongst each other.
I think it’s hilarious when people get all pedantic and demanding over something they get over the Internet for free. But whatever, maybe I’m just easily amused.
September 2nd, 2009 at 4:02 pm
“I don’t think a writer needs to be writing in the 20th century to address deep, current issues.”
Of course not. The greatest writers deal with universal
and timeless themes, at the same time as they’re dealing with
the particularities of their own time and their own society.
And Moby Dick does that in spades. The problem I was talking
about was merely that of modern writers choosing to set
their stories in earlier historical periods, giving a
mismatch between the cultural background of the author and
that of the characters. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,
published in 1899, expresses universal truths about psychology
and politics and evil. But if someone tried to write the
same story in 1950, after the Holocaust, I don’t think they
could do it in the same way: the evil in the hearts of men,
and the potential for the industrialization of brutality,
had been made explicit, and you can’t turn back the clock
and write about those themes in the same way after that.
September 2nd, 2009 at 4:10 pm
I read the comments every day.
Interesting. There’s certainly a perception on this end that you’re less engaged in dialog with your readers than might be customary in a blog environment. It’s nice to know you actually do read the comments.
September 2nd, 2009 at 4:24 pm
@Poptarts Who is getting pedantic and demanding?
September 2nd, 2009 at 4:26 pm
Re Anthony at 49: “There’s certainly a perception on this end that you’re less engaged in dialog with your readers ”
———
Matthew has to Lurk on his own blog because we mock him cruelly when he shows up. Google “Petey” AND “Trustfund Scumbag”
September 2nd, 2009 at 4:44 pm
PS Banning the speech of others –especially when they present inconvenient facts — is why the right wing blogs have never amounted to shit. Have little traffic and less influence.
You can find more diversity of opinion in the propaganda sound trucks of Third World Dictators than what you will find on right wing blogs.
They don’t have real conversations –because anyone veering more than a few degrees off the party line is silently banned.
So what you end up with is something masquerading as a discussion and which hilariously resembles the boring exchange of an old time communist cell meeting. Complete with self-criticism by anyone who accidently disputes Chairman Limbaugh.
September 2nd, 2009 at 4:46 pm
Gravity’s Rainbow and Catch-22 cover the Great American Novel niche pretty well.
September 2nd, 2009 at 4:46 pm
… and come to think of it, Heart of Darkness (and
Apocalypse Now) should serve as a warning to what often
happens to noble plans to bring Western civilization to
“backward” countries, by force if necessary. The “force”
bit tends to overwhelm the “civilization” bit.
September 2nd, 2009 at 4:47 pm
Google “Petey” AND “Trustfund Scumbag”
Actually, please don’t do that.
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:12 pm
I can’t decide whether this post is half-way decent, or actually sucks.
Let me help: It sucks. The moon? Embarrassing. Like Bob McDonnell, Yglesias will be disowning this post in 20 years as the burblings of 28 year old kid, swept up in the age of Obama.
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:23 pm
Personally, I think the book that captures our national character is Catch-22.
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:25 pm
myglesias said:
I simply do not believe this.
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:26 pm
@Poptarts Who is getting pedantic and demanding?
The commenters who complain about MY’s spelling are pedantic and the commenters who want MY to engage more are overly demanding and should look for validation elsewhere and those who want unpleasant thought-crimes policed so they aren’t disturbed are demanding. You should be happy he posts a lot and allows comments.
On a positive note, it shows these commenters actually care and take the blog seriously.
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:32 pm
“…those who want unpleasant thought-crimes policed so they aren’t disturbed are demanding. ”
You’re talking about me. I don’t want people banned for having the wrong opinion. However, I do want people banned for posting graphic and misogynistic porn comments (in one infamous episode), or for pretending to be other bloggers and thus slandering them. Just call me “politically correct”!
September 2nd, 2009 at 6:14 pm
Nah. Our national character is somewhere between “The Right Stuff!” and “In Cold Blood”.
September 2nd, 2009 at 6:22 pm
If Mr. Yglesias actually does read these threads (which I would advise against, as most of them are simply awful – what’s wrong with you people?!), I should add that I rather enjoyed this post, speaking as a Moby Dick aficionado.
Also: Make C.A.P. give you an intern to catch the typos, please. It can be very distracting.
September 2nd, 2009 at 6:27 pm
“Gravity’s Rainbow and Catch-22 cover the Great American Novel niche pretty well.”
They certainly do not.
September 2nd, 2009 at 8:08 pm
I really love Death Comes For The Archbishop, speaking of Great American Novels.
September 2nd, 2009 at 9:47 pm
The French have “A la Recherche du Temps Perdu”. We should be glad to be Americans.
September 2nd, 2009 at 11:50 pm
I simply do not believe this.
Still reading!
September 3rd, 2009 at 12:13 am
“Still reading!”
But not responding to the questions about your relationship to the commenters, I see. If a blogger reads comments but doesn’t make a sound…
September 3rd, 2009 at 5:23 am
A country of more practical people probably wouldn’t get into so much trouble. But then again, in a world full of more practical countries perhaps nobody would have ever gone to the Moon. And it seems to me that that would have been a shame.
Hmm, considering the fact that the Russians put the first dog and then man into space, and that snatching German scientists like von Braun in “operation paperclip” was integral to the US manned space program, I don’t think this claim holds any water. As for being impractical, headstrong and ingenuous, I think the French would have a good shot at the top spot – just take a walk around Paris.
September 3rd, 2009 at 6:25 am
Uncle Tom’s Cabin is pretty important for understanding the country, I’d say.
September 3rd, 2009 at 8:04 am
Heller’s _Catch-22_ doesn’t get the attention it deserves as a Great American Novel. It’s sensibilities are post-modern, yet it doesn’t become completely hermetic and unapproachable like, say, _Gravity’s Rainbow_. It may be the finest black comedy in print–certainly as dark and hilarious as _Doctor Strangelove_.
_Uncle Tom’s Cabin_, in my opinion, is too long and too crude–lacking in subtlety, ambiguity, finesse. _Huckleberry Finn_ is an excellent novel in and of itself. So is _Beloved_, for something more recent. _Cabin_ is mostly interesting as a historical artifact, which puts it in a category with books such as Sinclair’s _The Jungle_.
September 3rd, 2009 at 9:28 am
As for books helping you understand the US, I think you definitely need to read Hawthorne, Henry James and Updike.
September 3rd, 2009 at 9:30 am
And I forgot “Winesburg, Ohio” by Sherwood Anderson.
September 4th, 2009 at 7:05 am
[...] Handel you can have, Baroque I can’t listen to.’” Matthew Yglesias is still catching hell for liking Moby-Dick. A Mother Jones blogger retorts: “I didn’t care for it. I’ll [...]
September 5th, 2009 at 10:04 am
[...] zu sein“ ein Lebensprojekt sei, das in der Schule nur angestoßen werden könne, bezeichnet Drum als „Moby Hater“ — immerhin sei „Moby Dick“ so etwas wie das [...]