Yep - I’m a huge Melville fan, always have been. Every year since it’s inception I participate in a Melville Marathon where the entire 135 chapters of Moby Dick are read out loud aboard the last true wooden whaler in the world, the Charles W. Morgan. There people from the Seaport Museum dressed in period garb serve iced lemonade and biscuits. It’s really fun! The smell of burlap and oaken casks erupt in the lower hold of the Morgan.
People sign up for chapters and read for a 24 hour period. The best times are at night, and in the wee hours of the morning. I can’t wait!
Will we have to call you Ishmael for the duration? 
How long does each speaker read for? Not the full 24 hours straight, surely?
Ya know, you’re among the least conventional and least boring people I know. That sounds really cool and y’all, without a doubt, are going to have a great time. Dang, I wish we had something like that going on here.
If I had a choice, I’d skip every other chapter. The story’s interesting - the in-depth whaling descriptions, not so much. It’d make it go faster.
No, no people sign up per chapter. So you can stay and read a while, and leave and come back, or whatever. I’ll probably stay for my favorite chapters…and leave then go back for the ending.
Hey man, the spice o’ life is sometimes just liv’in. Plus I’m only there for the free food. 
Try not to snicker when you read out “dick”
What chapters are you reading?
Which ones would you really like to read?
Are there any chapters that all the readers fight over?
The first chapter I would LOVE to read. It’s entitled “Loomings”. I just want to say…“My name is Ishmael…”
But unfortunately that distinction goes to the charactor dressed as Melville himself. He reads the Epilogue and the first chapter. I’d love to read the chapter where Queequeg makes his coffin. Or when the Ishmael is talking about Ahab from the hold, when everyone can hear his peg leg clunking on the deck above. Or when the old salty dogs are telling tales of the white beast.
Your link doesn’t work, but I love the experience as described.
I’ve written on this board before that I’d like to memorize a very short novel (maybe something by Donald Westlake, writing as Richard Stark) or maybe something such as The Crying of Lot 49, or The Turn of the Screw and then set up in public places to tell the tale from memory. But doing a public reading on a ship over 24 hours in period garb – man, that’s cool!
If you enjoy public readings, you would have loved a one-man show by French actor Fabrice Luchini. His show, called Fabrice Luchini dit… involved just the man himself reading texts from Baudelaire, Hugo, Céline, etc. Fantastic performance. Even people who didn’t know any French found the show impressive, just because of Luchini’s stage presence, expressiveness and impeccable diction.
I also recall a show called Southern Gothic, a one-woman show where the actress told/acted out stories by Flannery O’Connor, Faulkner, etc. As I recall, it was a touch over-the-top, but lots of fun nonetheless. I gotta try to make time for this kind of stuff.
I really liked that book, but I don’t know if I could hang around while the whole thing was read aloud.
I would if I had the time, though, and I would really like to go aboard the Charles W. Morgan.
The movie is good, too.
“Oh, ye whale! Ye damn-ed whale!”
Why am I having a vision of the episode of Cheers where Frasier is reading Dickens to the barflys?
I didn’t enjoy being forced to read the book in HS, the image I have of Ishmael laying in his hammock, hearing Ahab walking back and forth on the deck, the peg leg, the foot, "one foot in life, one in death’, that has always stayed with me.
Will you be dressed as a character?
Can you dress as an employee of a certain coffee shop?
Never read Moby Dick, but my favorite Melville story is Benito Cereno.
I also agree. It sounds kinda cool. I want free food.
At which time the crowd rises as one, booing and pelting you with fish for misquoting one of the most famous lines in American literature.
And they’re bored silly with Great Expectations until Frasier adds in a bloodythirsty doll that lives in the sewers. Good episode. “Lillith, I’m not…proud… of what I’ve done here today…”
Maybe if Melville gets a bit heavy toward 3 a.m., Phlosphr can drag in a starship, a pot-bellied captain, a pointy-eared cold fish and a doctor with irritable bowel syndrome.
A guy I worked with spent ages reading Moby Dick. He used to bring it to work and read it at lunchtime. Some kind of self flagellation I guess. One day I picked up the book and opened it to where he was up to and began to read aloud to everyone at work, The Whiteness of the Whale. Boring. pointless Chapter 42 about how the white whale is WHITE and just how WHITE it is and what the significance is of it being WHITE.
I wanted to rip my eyes out so that I didn’t have to read any more of this dross, but fortunately dear reader my audience beat me to it and managed to rend them from my head in mid chapter.
So excuse any typos.
I probably can’t make it to the marathon, but I’ll have to come down and check out the ship sometime.
That sounds crazy! And much better than listening to it on tape. Which I did. Couldn’t help but snicker over all that sexual frustration and seemingly gay innuendo. Damn seamen.
:smack: Double :smack:
"Call me Ishamel…"
[bZebra** - I won’t be dressed in charactor - sadly, I actually like dressing in charactor at the Seaport. I also participate in Nautical Nighmares, which is a walk in October through the entire Seaport - though no lights are lit, only candles. I dress in charactor for that. I grow my beard a little, and bring my favorite Sherlock (pipe) and sit in the tavern usually - though last year I was in the smitty. Smoke away while people walk by on the tours. Very fun stuff.