10.27.07
“All Dick And No Moby”
Writing in The New Yorker a few weeks back, Adam Gopnik analyzed some recently released abridged editions of the canon - including that old terror of American Lit students everywhere, “Moby-Dick”. Some choice quotes:
[The abridged version] still has its phallic reach and point, but lacks its flaccid, anxious self-consciousness: it is all Dick and no Moby.
Books can be snipped at, and made less melodically muddled, but they lose their overtones, their chesty resonance - the same thing that happens, come to think of it, to human castrati.
And, my personal favorite:
Who was the mohel of “Moby-Dick”?
I’m wondering if there’s a theme here…