Whales, cont.

After a hiatus, I’ve gone back to Moby Dick.

Readers, you’ve had a narrow escape. This entry was going to be a long quotation from Chapter XXXII, about how Ishmael classifies the whale as a fish.

I read that quotation again and again, and I asked myself: “Would it improve the world to post this?” I decided it wouldn’t. Delete, delete.

Thinking about the general state of the world is a symptom of depression.

I’m much happier than I was some years ago. But melancholy still afflicts me – especially when my physical health is lousy. At present I’m not suffering too terribly. My throat is sore, and my body aches; but I’ve been able to go to work, and I’m not always wracked by pain.

Karin also is sick and sad. One of us gave it to the other.

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Having just finished reading a good book about El Salvador, I’m revisiting some classics: Huckleberry Finn and The Sun Also Rises. The Twain book is about as enjoyable as it was 23 or 24 years ago. The Hemingway book, I’m reading for the third time. I understand it better than I used to. In high school, there were some things I didn’t pick up on, like that the narrator had had his penis injured during the war. And this time I noticed right away that Georgette is a prostitute; before, I’d taken it for granted that the narrator wanted to buy her her dinner.

A literary gathering

Kenny had invited over some Koreans and Japanese. When I walked in, the party was winding down. The revelers were sitting on the floor with their dregs of Asian booze; Lost in Translation was on TV, but nobody was paying attention.

I was an instant hit. “You are very handsome,” said the Asians. (Males, all of them.)

I decided these guys were all right.

“All Americans are very handsome,” said the Asians.

This irked me, for I knew that by “Americans” they meant gringos, not South Americans. But I quietly forgave them.

Soon I had them debating which was better – Korea or Japan. Or rather, I had the Koreans debating against each other. The Japanese wouldn’t debate that issue; to them, the answer was clear enough.

Then I showed them which novel I’d been reading that day: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. There were grunts of approval all around. “He’s a good writer,” said one of the Koreans. “He describes everything.” “What do you mean, everything?” said his compatriot. “I mean, he describes all the clothes everyone wears,” explained the first Korean.

I hadn’t noticed that, but I’d noticed how Murakami would describe everyone’s food: spaghetti, stir-fry, cheese-and-tomato sandwiches. I really like it when a novelist will do that; it’s a trick I associate with Hemingway. That prosaic sensualist. That glutton.

The first Korean had earned a degree in English literature, but his favorite writer was Yeats. And so tonight I looked at some of Yeats’s poems.

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A Crazed Girl

That crazed girl improvising her music,
Her poetry, dancing upon the shore,
Her soul in division from itself
Climbing, falling she knew not where,
Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship
Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare
A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing
Heroically lost, heroically found.

No matter what disaster occurred
She stood in desperate music wound
Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph
Where the bales and the baskets lay
No common intelligible sound
But sang, ‘O sea-starved hungry sea.’

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