 On Friday someone sent me a text message that said 'whats going on tonite' and I sent them one that said 'melville studies'. At the bookstore I looked through almost every book in the poetry section trying to find anyone who wasn't a huge jerk. It's pretty easy to tell I think. There was one okay poem about someone reading MOBY DICK on an airplane. There were no other okay poems.
There were some teenage girls rolling around in my yard but I just went inside and finished it. A few months ago I said I wanted to feel drowned but I didn't feel drowned, it was huger and tinier and solider than drowned. One of the biggest books.
Maybe I was actually being very serious and summer really WON'T Be over until I finish reading this book. I'm sweating so much right now. Sorry that I keep finding ways to control the weather. TY OCTOBER 6, 2007
Book Club parked on Melville Street. Juli went to a fair and rode on MOBY DICK. Someone typed all of MOBY DICK onto the internet and that's how I read chapter cxxiii - "THE MUSKET". There's actually nothing wrong withreading a book on a computer, you can do it if you want.
I'm having a hard time not starting a pre-book club ULYSSES blog.
The chapters have only been a page or two long for a while now, it's really easy to not finish the book but still feel like I'm actively reading it but I think tonight I'm just gonna do the rest. I want to make a MOBY DICK shirt but I don't think anything would be good enough or, like, subtle enough or specific enough and I still need a way to get shirts that are just huge faces of people I know. TY SEPTEMBER 4, 2007
The other day I heard some people on the radio pretending to be Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne meeting Emily Dickinson in the woods, it wasn't very funny. Later I saw Harry and the Potters and thought there should be a band called Moby and the Dicks but I guess there already is but their songs aren't about MOBY DICK which is stupid of them. I'm not finishing this book til I want to finish this book; summer's over when I say it's over. TY AUGUST 20, 2007
I don't know why book club blog stopped for so long, it's still my biggest hit of the summer and I'm still reading the book. Today I went to the pool by myself, nothing is weird or embarrassing or creepy anymore, I got in the water and got out of the water and read MOBY DICK. There was a part today about whale fossils in Mississippi, I wish I had known about them when I was there last week, maybe I can go see the ones in Kansas soon. TY AUGUSRT 5, 2007
Last night I reread the Bible story about Jonah and the two chapters of MOBY DICK about Jonah. That has been my favorite Bible story for a long time because Jonah is always falling asleep and getting mad and that's funny, and it's cool to be insdie of a whale. At the beginning of MOBY DICK a preacher gives a pretty good sermon about Jonah and inthe middle of MOBY DICK there's a chapter that says maybe Jonah just got inside of a dead whale and floated around in it. A weird book store that I have tried to get a job at three times has some books about Jonah and I'm probably going to buy them next week. Everyone is talking about Springfield's crime wave and how all their belongings are getting stolen but I just leave MOBY DICK in my truck all the time with the doors unlocked and the windows down and no one has ever taken it. It absorbs and retains heat really well and even the very middle pages are always warm and I like to lay them open on my arms and face. TY JULY 19, 2007
It is 5:48 am, there are 212 more pages of MOBY DICK. I used Jessica's card to get into the building, Will's password to get onto the computer. I love this summer and I love MOBY DICK.
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Ben Haas said he's going to read MOBY DICK, Joel Haus listened to a tape of it. They probably share a common ancestor. Shannon took MOBY DICK on her roadtrip even though I told her not to, but she probably didn't read it. Matt finished MOBY DICK a long time ago and now he's in Chicago.
I got honey all over MOBY DICK. TY JULY 6, 2007
Today I didn't have any money to buy lunch so I sat in my truck reading MOBY DICK and eating a really old piece of string cheese while every other employee in the Frisco building came out and smoked in their cars. I like to think that when people see me reading it they think I'm reading THE BIBLE, they're about the same shape and size. Sometimes I want to put MOBY DICK and THE BIBLE as my favorite books on my facebook profile, mostly to be confrontational. Usually people are always confronting me about the books they see me reading but only one person has said anything to me about MOBY DICK and it was this: "MOBY DICK, huh? Story of a whale, huh?" "Yeah" I said, "story of a whale" and that was all they wanted to know. This happened while my friend Mario was trying to call me from on top of a hoodoo. TY JUNE 29, 2007
Book club isn't going very good - Matt told his grandma the ending because I haven't finished it yet, I haven't even read any chapters in a week. But I HAVE started reading THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON and HARRIET THE SPY and FAMOUS AMERICANS and last night I finished THE VOYAGE OF THE DAWN TREADER, which was helpful for MOBY DICK because now I remember the difference between port and starboard. TY JUNE 22, 2007
It is the 18th day of book club and Matt is done with the book and I am on chapter 54 out of 135. TY JUNE 18, 2007
After doing a very small amount of research I have figured out that before this book club the only person I knew who had read MOBY DICK was Ben Fisher and he read it when he was in fourth grade.
The other night I had a dream that was clearly influenced by MOBY DICK but this is not an appropriate place to tell about the dream.
The finback is getting good reviews: I showed a copy of it to my brother in another town; Shannon asked where I bought it; Matt slept on top of it.
TY JUNE 18, 2007
 I actually hadn't put the whale in the jar yet when I said that and I decided not to since I looked at it some more and it's a finback. TY JUNE 12, 2007
I bought a stretchy toy whale for one dollar and I put it in a jar full of cleaning products, hopefully that will turn it white. I'm on chapter thirty six. TY JUNE 11, 2007
My favorite chapter of MOBY DICK is the first one, I've read it three times. It talks about being aware of your lungs and also about how when people are in the woods they will not stop walking until they find water in the woods, and that happened to me this morning.
When I was reading the chapter about all the typesof whales I really wanted to be a finback whale. They keep their fin out in the air and sun while the rest of them is underwater and their fin is like a sundial and I want to be able to do that.
We saw KNOCKED UP three days ago and it was pretty good, I laughed sometimes. I WANT to like movies but they're just not FOR me.
I looked at Herman Melville and he is handsome in some pictures, and it will be easy to keep him and Captain Ahab separate. There is a drawing of Captain Ahab on the spine of my book and I wwas skeptical of it all along but after I read the first Ahab chapters I knew it wasn't even close to right so I found a giant black marker and got rid of it.
My copy of MOBY DICK says it is the 150th annivesary edition and it's hard not to think about that all the time. Since I haven't looked Melville up on wikipedia yet I don't know anything about him, I don't even know what he looks like. I'm worried that if I look at him Captain Ahab will never stop looking like him. It's hard to imagine MOBY DICk being written ten yeas before the Civil War even started, but it's hard to imagine anything that happened in America between the writing of the constitution and the Civil War. What was going on then? Herman Melville was being born and writing MOBY DICK, I guess. He wrote MOBY DICK before Joseph Conrad was even born and I'm telling you that because MOBY DICK makes me want to read HEART OF DARKNESS, even though MOBY DICK makes me feel very healthy and HEART OF DARKNESS makes me feel sick and sweaty. They're both Adventures Of The Body And Spirit and I like to think about the differences between the ocean and the jungle, and it's interesting to compare the racism in them. HEART OF DARKNESS really makes me feel like I'm oozing down a river and then crawling through the jungle, I hope by the end of MOBY DICK I feel like I've drowned. I just assume some people are going to drown. The book club part of this book is not going very well, but tomorrow we're going to see KNOCKED UP, to celebrate book club. TY JUNE 6 2007
This was just a joke blog but now it's the real one because Matt won't respond to my myspace messages. We have different aesthetics about this sort of thing we will change everything later. I am on chapter eight of MOBY DICK but I can't talk about it righ tnow. I love all the quotes about whales at the beginning. I was writing down good sentences I found about lions for a year or so but I think I lost them all when I moved last week. I'm going to go home and read more chapter sof MOBY DICK. TY JUNE 4 2007
This is our book club blog about MOBY DICK> We wanted to have a book club and we wanted to read MOBDY DICK so there you go. Matt's mom hugged him when she gound out. Matt started a day early but I started on the right day. He also read a sentence outloud to me a day early and I was a little mad. Then we went and had some beers in preparation for book club. I haven't started the book yet. TY JUNE 1 2007
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