All Astir

This issue of Leviathan comes with great anticipation for the Eleventh International Melville Society Conference, “Melville’s Crossings,” to be held at King’s College London on June 27–30. If you have not yet registered, please do so soon at <https://melvilleatkings.wordpress.com/registration/>. All speakers must be registered by March 26.

One of the Melville Society panels at the January 2017 MLA Convention, “Melville’s Taxonomies,” chaired by Branka Arsić, was selected by Anthony Appiah for inclusion in this year’s presidential theme, “Boundary Conditions.” As Colin Dewey, who recently finished a term as the Melville’s Society’s Associate Secretary for Programs and Conferences and will now serve as Executive Secretary, notes, the Society has now sponsored three presidential sessions in the last three years. Congratulations to Colin and to the members of the Nominating Committees of the last three years: Dawn Coleman, Jennifer Greiman, Maurice Lee, Elizabeth Renker, and Leonora Warren. Abstracts from both MLA sessions will appear in the June issue of Leviathan.

There will be two Melville Society sessions at the ALA conference, May 25–28, in Boston: “Melville and the Historical Imagination,” chaired by Hoang Gia Phan, and “Melville and Literary Influence: Reframing Tradition,” chaired by David Greven. More information will appear on the Melville Society web-site: <http://melvillesociety.org/>.

The 125th anniversary of Melville’s death was commemorated in “Celebrating Melville: Writer for the World” on September 28, 2016, at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, where he is buried. John Bryant was the featured speaker. The events can be viewed on Woodlawn’s Facebook page under a post for that date. The next day, September 29, the New Bedford Whaling Museum also honored Melville’s death with “Herman Melville’s Afterlife: Revival & Revision,” two illustrated talks given by Mary K. Bercaw Edwards and Wyn Kelley. A “far less ‘grave’ celebration,” in the words of Colin Dewey, observed Melville’s arrival in San Francisco Bay with a Moby-Dick mini-marathon at the Fort Mason Maritime Park Library Reading Room on October 14, 2016.

Beth Hader’s show, “Open Attachments: Recent Work Based on Melville’s Moby Dick,” ran at the Theo Ganz Studio in Beacon, New York, from November 12 until December 4, 2016. Hader writes in her artist statement: “The alternative title to Moby-Dick is ‘or the Whale.’ That alone was lure enough to plunge deeper into this text. All the elements that have always moved me to water, salt sea and swell, are here as well as the time travel to a world both intimately familiar but also completely alien. Connecting through the domestic familiars such as the chowder, the blanket, or the coin flip expression of ‘heads or tails’ become ways into exploring the foreign territory of whaling—the search for light and energy along with its cruel realities.” The show ended with a concert of “whale music” by David Rothenberg, including a performance of Chapter 79, “The Prairie,” which Rothenberg had performed as part of “Moby-Dick: The Big Read”: <http://www.mobydickbigread.com/chapter-79-the-prairie/>.

Two Melville sightings in the United Kingdom highlight why so many scholars eagerly await the 2017 London conference. David Ketterer informed us in October 2016 that the house where Melville stayed in November and December 1849, at 25 Craven St., was for sale. Ketterer reports that Melville would have stayed in one of the two attic bedrooms. Referring to this time in London, Philip Hoare, in “White Whale in the Big Smoke: How the Geography of London Inspired Moby-Dick,” argues that Moby-Dick was born in the boarding house on Craven Street, inspired by J. M. W. Turner’s whaling scenes: “Melville’s Anglophilia was the yeast out of which this great American novel emerged.” Hoare’s article (New Statesman, December 2, 2015) can be accessed at <http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2015/12/white-whale-big-smoke-how-geography-london-inspired-moby-dick>.

This issue of Extracts includes Dawn Coleman’s review of the two Moby-Dick art shows that opened in Cincinnati in April 2016 (mentioned in “All Astir,” Leviathan 18.3). [End Page...