Chowder: Executive Secretary's Report, 2005

Chowder Executive Secretary’s Report, 2005 With recent memories of the 10th annual New Bedford Whaling Museum’s marathon reading of Moby-Dick this past January, launched by incoming President Gail Coffler’s engaging remarks on “Melville’s Allusions to Religion” (see Leviathan 8.1), it’s but a brief ocean-reverie to the year before, when 2005 President Edgar Dryden persuasively presented “Literature and Death: Melville and the Epitaph”—thus initiating the “endless processions” of Melville Society business and pleasures of 2005. A squeeze of the hand to newly elected officers: President Gail Coffler (Suffolk University), Executive Secretary Jill Barnum (University of Minnesota ), Treasurer John Matteson (John Jay College of Criminal Justice), MLA Program Chair M. Thomas Inge (Randolph-Macon College), ALA Program Chair Faith Barrett (Lawrence University), Murray Endowment Committee member Martin Bickman (University of Colorado), Cohen Prize Committee member Robin Grey (University of Illinois-Chicago), and Samuel Otter (University of California-Berkeley), appointed to service on the Nominating Committee by outgoing President Edgar Dryden. The American Literature Association convened May 26-29, in Boston, with the Society panel, ably chaired and moderated by Carol Colatrella (Georgia Institute of Technology), on Transgression, Crime, and Punishment in Melville’s Works. Presenters were John Cyril Barton (University of CaliforniaIrvine ), “Herman Melville and the Spanish Inquisition”; Jason Cooley (Utah State University), “Culpability and Transgression in the Monomania of Ahab”; Bridget Heneghan (Georgia Institute of Technology), “A Ghost of Humanity : Bartleby and the Modern Prison System”; and John Matteson (John Jay College), “‘A New Race Has Sprung Up’: ‘Bartleby’ and the Prudent Person Standard.” Less than a month later, June 22-26, the Society was attracted back to the East Coast for the 5th International Melville Society Conference–Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville: A Sesquicentennial Celebration—an effort mounted by many hands, academics and the community, in New Bedford. We are grateful to the Frederick Douglass Institutes of West Chester University and University of Rochester, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, C
2006 The Authors Journal compilation C
2006 The Melville Society and Blackwell Publishing Inc L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 107 C H O W D E R the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, the New Bedford Whaling Museum, the New Bedford National Historical Park, and University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth. Masterfully co-chaired by Robert Levine and Samuel Otter, the conference delivered thirty panels, dramatic presentations, guided tours, readings, dramatic monologues, and a staged version of “Benito Cereno,” directed by Laurie Robertson-Lorant and adapted from a script by the late Joyce Sparer Adler. Two outstanding keynoters were featured: Eric J. Sundquist, “1855/1955: From Anti-Slavery to Civil Rights”; and Sterling Stuckey, “Cheer and Gloom: Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville on Black Music and Dance,” accompanied with recorded jazz. Exhibitions of Moby-Dick paintings and constructions were on view throughout the conference. The New Bedford Whaling Museum highlighted the literary and historical linkage between Douglass and Melville. A reception at the Kendall Institute honored the generous gifts of Melville first editions from the late Tom Wendel and of prints associated with Melville from the collection of William Reese. Two recent titles published by Spinner Publications were offered for signing by the authors at a reception sponsored by Baker Books: Robert K. Wallace’s Douglass and Melville: Anchored Together in Neighborly Style and Laurie RobertsonLorant ’s The Man Who Lived among the Cannibals: Poems in the Voice of Herman Melville. An expansive New Bedford Conference Supplement of Extracts was published in October 2005; edited by Wyn Kelley, this last stand-alone issue is loaded with information and photos. The conference provided a venue for meetings between the Society’s Executive Committee and New Bedford Whaling Museum administration regarding collaborative projects, programming, and archival endeavors of the Melville Society Cultural Project team. The committee met with a representative from Blackwell Publishing, who detailed the anticipated changes when the publisher would take over the printing and distribution of Leviathan. As of January 30, 2006, Society members overwhelmingly endorsed Blackwell Publishing to produce and...