Reading these reminds me a bit of reading “Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” that is to say, there’s lots of sort of silly stuff before and around the book. Extras, I guess. I did not expect The Whale to be this way, and by this way I mean scattered, but I guess I didn’t/don’t really expect anything from The Whale, except that reading it is/will be a job.
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higgledy-piggledy: they just don’t use words like that any more.
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Writers hear two different bits of wisdom when trying to decide what they will write about. 1) Write what you know. 2) Write what interests you. The second makes a lot more sense, though I can see why people would be discouraged from writing about kinds of people and places they are unfamiliar with. But would anyone really try to do that? But maybe “know” is sort of a loose term anyway. Do writers need to be told these things? One bit of advice I liked was from Natalie Goldberg. She said “Write about that topic you just can’t stop talking about.” It sounds practical.
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Melville, with these extracts, or quotes about whales, seems to be shouting something. Something like:
THIS IS GONNA BE A BOOK ABOUT WHALES!
or
I AM OBSESSED WITH WHALES AND THAT IS WHY I HAVE WRITTEN A MASTERPIECE ABOUT ONE!
or
GET READY FOR WHALES, FOLKS!
or
HERE’S A CRASH COURSE IN CETOLOGY
and then
NOW LISTEN TO WHAT I HAVE TO CONTRIBUTE!
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The quotes about the oil in whales jumped out at me (of course they did). It’s just so bizarre to think, especially in light of our current world, there is an animal out there, swimming in the ocean, holding within it a “sea of oil.”
What?
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Natalie Goldberg also suggests a writing exercise where the writer picks a word like death, teeth, or sleep, and writes about it non stop for 10 or 20 minutes or so. “Write everything you know about… Now go!”
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WRITING EXERCISE: Everything I know about WHALES:
P’Nui told me that she and P’Gwang went on a whale sightseeing trip while she was near Cape Cod. She saw the tail in the distance. That’s all she saw. One of the extracts mentioned that when a whale snaps his tail, the sound can be heard from three or four miles away. Whales are outrageous. They hold oil? They sing? They are giants.
I barely ever think of whales, or think of the fact that one of my best friends has seen a tail of one; sat in the ocean with one. Maybe my aunt saw some in Alaska, I don’t know. At the moment, seeing a whale seems like it would be the same as going to the moon–something I assumed when I was young that everyone got to do before they died. A natural part of life, or something. But now, seeing a live whale in the ocean seems like something only select people experience. Though, of course, I’m much more likely to see a whale than I am the moon.
Whales have songs they sing to each other and they travel in groups from the north to the south and then the north again, along the American coast. Huge distances. Whenever I think of Jonah I also think of Geppetto and Pinnochio, because they both hung out in whales for a while. I never read the book of Jonah. There’s a ton in the old testament that I’ve never read. My friend read it and she related to Jonah, thinking that she was being disobedient to her call because she didn’t feel like meeting the responsibilities of her job. I think her reaction made me not want to read Jonah–it seemed like it was a story about disobedience and punishment, and that’s not a story I necessarily want to read.
Whales change their song every year. I think I learned this on PBS. Or maybe I made it up. I don’t know.
Whales are really heavy. When sperm whales end up sick and on the beach, it’s an event to get them back in the ocean. It takes a Whale Rider to get them back.
I think some whales have hammerheads. No, wait, that’s sharks.
Killer Whales, like Willy, are not killers. They are usually portrayed as heroes or maybe it’s victims. I don’t know. I never saw the movie. Killer whales are smaller than sperm whales.
Whale hunting may or may not be illegal now. Lot’s of people are into “Saving the whales.” That is interesting, because some of the extracts made it seem like whales were viewed as dragons or monsters of the sea. Scary as hell. Of course they would be scary. If I went with the P’s on their whale “hunt,” would I be sort of scared? Humans are powerful creatures. You know they are powerful when it’s up to them to save monsters.
I think some people eat whale. But I think it’s probably against the law. And I think I heard that indigenous Alaskans used whale “products” for everything: fuel, meat, insulation… More stuff I may or may not have learned on PBS. Whales are useful. That’s what I think I learned. I wouldn’t want the job to kill it though.
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Melville probably would have appreciated google searches.
