All Astir

The Tenth International Melville Conference, “Melville in a Global Context,” held last June at Keio University in Tokyo, Japan, was a wonderful success. The five-day conference was very well-attended, with participants ranging from first-year graduate students to long-established scholars. The talks were riveting, exciting, and often profound. A full report and photo gallery will appear in the next issue of Leviathan.

Poster for Moby-Dick Marathon in Jerusalem, designed by Naama Lahav.

Image courtesy of Ilana Pardes.

Melville continues to resonate around the world. On June 24, a Moby-Dick marathon was held at Beit Ot Ha-Mutsar in Jerusalem. Hebrew University faculty members, including Ilana Pardes, and students chose a favorite passage, read it aloud, and talked about their choice. A student musical band known as “Sea Sharp” was formed especially for the occasion and performed an array of songs from traditional whaling songs to Elton John’s “Hey Ahab.” During intermission, Led Zeppelin’s instrumental “Moby Dick” was on screen. After the “Epilogue,” the event concluded with the floating coffin scene from the 2000 Coen brothers’ film “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”

Canio’s Book Store in Sag Harbor, NY, also held a Moby-Dick Marathon on June 12–14, 2015. Canio Pavone started the yearly Moby-Dick Marathon 32 years ago, in 1983, to celebrate Sag Harbor’s seafaring history and its literary tradition. The Marathon ran for several years at the bookshop, then at the Old Whaler’s Church, then at John Jermain Memorial Library, but the event had not occurred for a decade or so. Its revitalization this June was a great success. Canio’s Marathon joins the long-running Moby-Dick Marathons at Mystic Seaport and New Bedford Whaling Museum. The Mystic Seaport Moby-Dick Marathon celebrated its 30th year with a 24-hour reading aboard the 1841 whaleship Charles W. Morgan, which began at noon on July 31 and ended at noon on Melville’s birthday, August 1. The New Bedford Whaling Museum will hold its 20th Marathon next January 9–10, 2016, commemorating the anniversary of Melville’s departure on the whaleship Acushnet from New Bedford harbor on January 3, 1841. In addition, the Maritime Museum in San Diego held its first Marathon reading of Moby-Dick August 1–2 aboard the 212-foot Star of India, which was built on the Isle of Man in 1863. There will also be a marathon reading of Moby-Dick as part of the 2015 London Literature Festival October 1–4. It will feature 160 ten-minute readings by actors, writers, and comedians, including Melville’s great-great-great-granddaughter and novelist Liza Klaussmann, Chibundu Onuzo, and A. L. Kennedy. There will be choral performances and Moby-Dick-themed food and drink. In addition, a special reading will take place on Craven Street, Melville’s former London residence, where he lived for a two months in 1849.

Artistic renderings join marathon readings of Moby-Dick in attesting to the continuing interest in Melville’s works. One of these is the three-act theatricalization of Moby-Dick by the LookingglassTheatre Company in Chicago, adapted and directed by David Catlin. In a June 21, 2015, review for the Chicago Tribune, Chris Jones writes: “What is the whale? How do they show him? … Well, he is something of a shape-shifter in this show, but, most strikingly, he is a collection of women—played by Emma Cadd, Kasey Foster and Monica West—all of whom also play the wives and widows and soon-to-be-widows left behind on shore.”

Robert K. Wallace organized a Moby-Dick Arts Fest in Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky in late April. Elizabeth Schultz, Matt Kish, Samuel Otter, and NKU art history major Emma Rose Thompson spoke on “Moby-Dick in the 21st Century” to a large audience at the Cincinnati Art Museum on the evening of April 24. The marathon reading of Moby-Dick at the Covington branch of the Kenton County Library began the next day, drawing a wide variety of student, faculty, and community readers. Scheduled to...