Re: no such thing as bad publicity?

On Wed, Oct 31, 2007 at 12:36:27AM -0500, mimus wrote:
On Wed, 31 Oct 2007 00:23:35 -0400, Joseph Nebus wrote:

Jon Schild <jjs@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Sea Wasp wrote:
The fact that people read "Moby ***" continues to confound me.

Agreed. I tried to read it last year. I failed.

I can't say just what it is about Moby ***, but I liked it.
It's very unlike other stories that I've liked, though; if you go by
the contents label I should have hated it. But I did go in with the
explicit directive to myself to read only until I got bored with its
providing more information about American Whalers of the 19th century
than there *is* information about American Whalers of the 19th
century.

That sequence of informative chapters about whaling in the middle of the
novel really ought to be in an appendix.

It's humorous to see people on Usenet second-guessing the choices of form
and style of an author whose work has stood for so long as a recognized
classic. When I read Usenet, sometimes I am left with the impression that
serious literature was really only invented in the 1980s and that
everything prior is tainted by a kind of rank primitivism, as compared to
modern authorial sophisticates.

Having said that, those final three chapters, "The Chase", days one
through three, are, like, totally gripping.

And, of course (I'm not going to worry about a spoiler warning here), the
whale wins, which is all nice and modern and fuzzy-warm . . . .

Three words: focus group testing.

His best, by far, though, and I speak as something of a Melville fan, is
_The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade_.

Lord, lord.

Haven't read that one, but I hear it's quite good.

.

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