Why I cannot Stand Melville

For a long time now, I've always held my own private antifada against Hemingway. I did not like him throughout high school, even though I had been assigned to read his work several times. I felt that he left too much up for grabs in his work, and the repetition of only a few themes in several of his novels made the reader feel as dizzy and drunk as many of his main characters. Yet, the more I read from him, and the older I get, I suppose his work, though minimalist, is not terrible. He leaves many questions up in the air as he writes, and he invites the reader to participate almost as much as he does in the works. Short stories like "Hills like White Elephants" and his book, "A Moveable Feast" has made me appreciate his work a lot more these days.

It's Melville I can't stand now. Why is it absolutely necessary to have a book of over a hundred chapters about whaling? I'm sure, with the recent surge in interest of commercial fisherman and the crab industry, like Discovery Channel's long running series, Deadliest Catch, that there would be a few more select readers of the fishing genre, but I am not one of them. I even grew up near a port and I know somewhat first hand that there is not that much to write about! Not enough, anyway, to fill a hundred chapters. And while I know that this work is a classic, and is well regarded by critics all over, I must say it reminds me of a guy I knew in high school who wrote great short stories, but woe to the person who wished to read his novel.

It was over four hundred pages long, and the first three chapters were, apparently, about some pseudo historical explanation of why the book needed to be so long in the first place.

As a fellow writer, and a poet, I cautioned him on knowing that his audience wouldn't possibly sit still long enough to read three chapters of prologue, and urged him to shorten it to one, even if it was an extremely long chapter, it would infinitely be better than three. I don't know if he ever did, but I do recall my wife- then girlfriend at the time- saying that he had passed around the novel in her English class and it had gotten longer since before.

Know your audience, and what they can tolerate. And I don't know if it's just me, but Melville is not one of those for me.

Short Introduction

Despite what the title claims, or perhaps I should say, contrary to what a short introduction may seem to be, I feel compelled to analyze the composition and history of the short introdu-

Oh, hello. Let me start again, as I see some of you were already dozing off.

Welcome to my blog! Sorry about the mess, I'm still renovating. You may be wondering: why did Nick (if that's my real name) pick such a simple title? Well, it's complicated. Or rather, I am complicated; I feel I wanted to let you off the hook just this once, so as not to seem too pedantic or incorrigable. Although sometimes I can be. And other times I'm just plain weird.

You're probably wondering what this blog aspires to become, or what it's about. To answer that, I have to break it to you gently: I am not sure yet. But I'm sure it will be something worthwhile. A little literature, a little music, some poetry readings perhaps? Why not? And, of course, anything else that may come to mind. As I said before, this is where kinetic thoughts come to their natural state. Entropy. This is where seemingly good thoughts with potential and poise come to die. So Welcome. For anybody with second thoughts, the exit is always in the same place: where you first came in.