Frazz by Jef Mallett for April 13, 2021

Shades of “bats aren’t bugs.”

“Around Cape Horn we’ll have to go, go down you blood red roses, go down”

“’cause that is where the whale-fish blow, go down you blood red roses, go down”

MD is also a tour-de-force in literary styles. I wish I had realized that before reading it a few years ago. I should have read the Wikipedia article first. I won’t make that mistake when I soon start “Don Quixote”.

Most books in life are more related to human nature than most people want to admit

I remember reading that chapter where Ishmael opines that whales are fish. I’m impressed that the kid even read part of it.

Do I get a gold star for pointing out that dolphins are also whales?

He’s actually taking it fairly well, under the circumstances. Most kids that age would feel humiliated beyond belief after getting that reaction from the class.

“Call me Ishmael.” is certainly in the running for the best known beginnings of stories.

Talk about an evolutionary tour de force. Land mammals all share a common fish ancestor, yet a land mammal species adapted back to the sea and gave rise to whales. Whales closest relative on land is believed to be the hippo. They share a common land mammal ancestor that lived around 50 million years ago. Isn’t science neat! Yes I’m some sort of nerd… and I read Moby Dick as a teenager and loved it. If I close my eyes I can still see Queequeg like he’s standing right before me.

Starfish aren’t fish either,

… And a Koala isn’t a bear

… and dandelions aren’t lions.

I read it in my youth, but, like most in their teen years, I showed a short attention span for heavy prose and deep dives into human motivations. I have a feeling if I tried to read it now, 7 decades later, I’d have the same problem. Pity about that because the parts I remember are vivid images.

On the other hand, Catcher In The Rye had just been published and we devoured that. Inhaled the story line then, but somehow that one has become a faint memory.

That might probably be because MD included strong imagery and the actual challenges facing a group of men, while CITR was more along the lines of Longfellow’s My Lost Youth, which included this passage: the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.

Marine life can be baffling when it’s definition, allegory and category time. (How nice to see an Ishmael involved in class discussions.)

An eight year old (who isn’t Caulfield) reading Moby-Dick? Maybe there’s another kid for Mrs. Olsen to watch out for.

So this kid is going to fail for reading Moby Dick at HIS age?

He should have made his report about the distinction between “Folio Whales,” “Octavo Whales,” and “Duodecimo Whales,” with a side discussion of why there is no “Quarto Whale.”

Call me Amused.

There is a whole chapter on the biology of whales in the middle of that book. He should have stuck with that chapter for his report.

BTW, that is the most boring chapter in the book and not really relevant to the story. Feel free to skip it.

If he got through Moby Dick at his age, he deserves 5 stars.

I laugh at how many times in a story line/TV/movie a young person is turned on to life/reading through Moby Dick. Personally I think it is the most famous unread novel ever.

The reality behind MD is even more incredible. The 1820 voyage of the Essex.

“Moby Dick” is the most depressing novel I have never been able to finish…

Before I read the story, I thought “Moby Dick” was a venereal disease.

Thanks for bringing back that very sad old joke, while simultaneously lowering the level. :{ (

Smart enough to read at that level but not smart enough to know that whales aren’t fish. Eh, I’ll give him a pass. Jason Fox combines smarts and idiocy all the time.

Whales also have leg bones and muscles. They’re all pretty much atrophied and up in the body cavity where you can’t spot them from the outside, but they’re the vestigial remnants of when their mammalian ancestors were land animals.

The report begins “Call me Frazz”

“Fish” is one of many words that have evolved over time. In the past — before and even after the invention of our current taxonomic system for biology, — it meant any animal that lived its life in the water. Hence, “shellfish”, “starfish”, “jellyfish”, and more.

At one point, there was even a dispute in the Catholic church over whether a particular species of marine duck counted as “fish” for Friday meals, as it was believed to spend its entire life without coming on land.

Moby Dick was published a mere 113 years after Linnaeus first published his ideas on taxonomy and relationships among animals, and it’s unlikely that “the man in the street” (or an ordinary sailor) would even have heard of those ideas, much less used them to rule his choice of words. At that time, whales were commonly thought of as — and called — “fish”, and anyone insisting otherwise would probably have been considered crazy. It’s only since then that the current biologists’ restriction on the meaning of the word has filtered its way into the general population.

So Ishmael wasn’t wrong. It’s those who criticize his usage who are “wrong”… just as wrong as anyone who expects Spaniards to say “water” instead of “agua”. Today’s “English” is — in many “small” ways — a different language from Melville’s.

But it is a meticulous guide to whaling.

It might be noted that part of Ishmael’s “a whale is a fish” argument is in defense of scripture. Scripture says Jonah was swallowed by a great fish, and vomited up whole. A sperm whale might do that, but no known ichthyoid fish could. So Jonah was likely swallowed by a whale, and a whale must be a fish. If you deny that a whale is a fish, you are casting doubt on scripture.

I know some schools where that argument might have saved the kid’s grade, but I don’t think this is one of them.

I was also pretty lost most of the time reading Moby Dick. I thought it funny that Meville knew most people by then were no longer labeling whales as fish, but he preferred the old fashioned view that if its in the water its a fish if its out its not. Reminds me of a joke song that took the helpful phrase “If it doesn’t have a tail it’s not a monkey its an ape” to the extreme of labeling everything either monkey or ape. In 20,000 Leagues I remember Verne saying he didn’t think that we could hunt the giant manatees to extinction because they were “hardy” but that obviously doesn’t account for their around a year long gestation and only one kid to replace the two parents each time. We drove them out before we even had a scientific name for them.

“Look! who’s giving this report you chowderheads or me…?”