All Astir

All Astir The world’s a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete. Moby-Dick, Chapter 8 Jill Barnum, whose life is remembered in this issue in Elizabeth Schultz’s tribute, worked closely with the members of the Melville Society Cultural Project from early in its history, until the summer of 2006. During that time she participated so vigorously in the committee’s constant, sometimes daily, email correspondence that she seemed to have taken up permanent residence in our offices. So, over the period of several years, I had a chance to observe the changing fashions of her electronic signatures, which reflected her wit and poetic imagination. One of the earliest, from January 2003, read: “If I survive this shipwreck, I’ll never go to sea again” (Le Nozze di Figaro). By April of that year her messages concluded with: “Exultation is the going / Of an inland soul to sea” (Emily Dickinson). She ended the year with a quotation from Hilaire Belloc: “The sea is our consolation today as it has been in centuries past. It is the companion of men, and their destination.” Her last signature, starting in the fall of 2004, came with a line from Joshua Slocum, whose global voyage took up considerable space the New Bedford Whaling Museum’s mezzanine exhibit in the Lagoda Room. It read simply: “I had been cast up by old ocean.” During the time we corresponded, although she did not speak of her illness, or, if she did, spared us the grim details, Jill was undergoing surgery and different treatments for her cancer. While teaching a demanding schedule, remaining in close touch with family and friends, and keeping up an active involvement in her church, she contributed heroically to the MSCP’s doings, attended with devotion to the Melville Society’s affairs as Executive Secretary, and in her last year managed the day-to-day responsibilities of editing a volume of essays, “Whole Oceans Away”: Melville and the Pacific (with Wyn Kelley and Christopher Sten, forthcoming from Kent State University Press in 2007). Although she pulled back from many of these commitments last summer, she was copyediting her chapter for “Whole Oceans Away” just weeks before she died. And in her last days, she got out of her hospital bed to sit up, nicely dressed, in a chair to receive the College of Continuing Education Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of Minnesota. Her indomitable, joyful, and inexhaustible spirit enlivened every endeavor she undertook and every person who worked with her. This special issue of Leviathan grew out of conversations with Jill, developing alongside her efforts to put together “Whole Oceans Away,” and 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 79 E X T R A C T S this “Extracts” includes notices of events she cared about deeply, such as the Melville Society panel at ALA. The work that goes on after her death, in the Melville Society and the MSCP, bears the imprint of her untiring dedication to our concerns. Among those concerns, the MSCP’s lecture series at the New Bedford Whaling Museum promises to offer an unusually rich and exciting set of programs in 2007. We begin January 3 with the Melville Society Lecture at the Moby-Dick Marathon. This is our fifth season with the New Bedford Whaling Museum, and John Bryant will start it off with a lecture titled, “Re-Writing Moby-Dick: Re-Reading America.” Then we launch our spring Melville Lyceum lectures with a new topic, “Melville and Cinema.” On March 8, Mary K. Bercaw Edwards of the University of Connecticut will speak on “The World in a Manof -War: Master and Commander and White-Jacket.” Arthur Riss, of Salem State University, follows on April 12 with “The Final Frontier: Moby-Dick, Star Trek, and the Great American Epic.” And Laurie Robertson-Lorant concludes the series on May 10 with “Flashes of Revelation, Blades of Light: Melville’s...