"It is not down on any map; true places never are."
— Herman Melville
Welcome to Ronkville. Established: 2007 Population: 1 (though we get a lot of visitors passing through)
Click the timestamp to go to the full post or source. And read The Ronkville Morning Bugle to keep up on what news is buzzing around our little hamlet today.
The spring day lasts
visitors Go ahead, ask me a question.
Click the timestamp to go to the full post or source. And read The Ronkville Morning Bugle to keep up on what news is buzzing around our little hamlet today.
The spring day lasts
a little longer
around water
~ Issa
visitors Go ahead, ask me a question.
April 15, 2013
October 25, 2012
August 1, 2012
“Art” by Herman Melville
ART
In placid hours well-pleased we dream
Of many a brave unbodied scheme.
But form to lend, pulsed life create,
What unlike things must meet and mate:
A flame to melt—a wind to freeze;
Sad patience—joyous energies;
Humility—yet pride and scorn;
Instinct and study; love and hate;
Audacity—reverence. These must mate,
And fuse with Jacob’s mystic heart,
To wrestle with the angel—Art.
August 1, 2012
"A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities."
— Herman Melville
August 1, 2012
"It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation."
— Herman Melville
August 1, 2012
Today is the birthday of novelist and poet Herman Melville
He was born in New York City in 1819. His father died when Melville was 12, leaving the family almost penniless.
As a young man, he tried working as a banker, a teacher and at 26, “went to sea.”
He jumped ship in the South Pacific and lived with the Typee natives for several months which gave him the materials for his novel Typees: A Peep Into Polynesian Life.
Melville left the sea life, married and settled down in the Berkshires in western Massachusetts, where he befriended his neighbor, Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Moby-Dick was published in 1851, but was not well received. Neither were the equally “difficult” novels Pierre and The Confidence Man.
To make a living, he took a job as a customs inspector in New York, where he quietly worked for the next 20 years.
He died of a heart attack at the age of 72, and his obituary in the local New York Times was just four lines.
His writing was “rediscovered” by critics and students in the 1920s, and his complete works
July 3, 2012
"At my years, and with my disposition, or rather, constitution, one gets to care less and less for everything except downright good feeling. Life is so short, and so ridiculous and irrational (from a certain point of view) that one knows not what to make of it, unless—well, finish the sentence for yourself."
—
Herman Melville (1819-1891), U.S. author
in a letter, Mar. 31, 1877, to his brother-in-law, John C. Hoadley
April 12, 2012
"It is not down on any map; true places never are."
— Herman Melville
January 7, 2012
September 28, 2011
Herman Melville Died on this day (Sept. 28) in 1891. He is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx, New York, USA
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Most people have never read it. But they know the story. I have reread it a bunch of times. Almost every year the past decade. It’s not my favorite book, but I always get something from it.
More on my rereading next weekend on the Weekends in Paradelle blog, but for today…
You can read the book cover-to-cover this weekend with a few hundred Melville fans if you are in New Bedford, Massachussets where the author shipped out on the whale ship Acushnet in January 1841.
Here’s what going on…
New Bedford Whaling Museum’s 16th Annual Moby-Dick Marathon Weekend:
Last night was a public lecture, “Moby-Dick in American Popular Culture,” with Dr. Timothy Marr, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Saturday, January 7
10:00 a.m.: Stump the Scholars quiz program.
11:30 a.m.: Moby-Dick “Extracts,” Melville Society, Bourne Bldg.
12:00 noon: Moby-Dick Marathon begins, Bourne Bldg.
1:30 p.m.: Chapters 7– 9 in the Seamen’s Bethel with tenor Jonathan Boyd.
2:30 p.m.: Marathon continues, Jacobs Family Gallery.
3:00-5:00 p.m.: Chat with a Melville scholar, Wattles Family Gallery.
3:00-5:00 p.m.: “Imaging Moby!” exhibit tour with Dr. Robert Wallace, Northern Kentucky University
7:00 p.m.: Chapter 40, “Midnight, Forecastle” performed by Culture*Park, Cook Theater.
8:00 p.m.: Marathon continues through the night, Jacobs Family Gallery.
Sunday, January 8
1:00 p.m.: Marathon concludes with the Epilogue.
Free Admission
Live-streaming www.whalingmuseum.org
Tweet #MDM16