A Year of Melville

I’ve joked with a friend that if I were to ever seriously maintain a blog I would call it Loomings and fill it with rantings about one of my favorite books, Moby-Dick.

Well, today he pointed me to this interesting article with the following jibe:

If you are ever gonna start a Loomings blog, today is that day [ed. August 1st being Melville’s birthday]. In fact…if you want to do it right, you should start it as a daily blog and blog the next year until his 200th b-day.

I laughed, but goddamn him the idea has me intrigued! The sense of artificial urgency implied by those nice round numbers is keeping the wheels in my head turning. As it happens, I’ve recently made some life changes which will afford me some time to kill every day commuting by train anyway.

Now, if I were to do such a thing, what might the schedule look like? With 135 chapters (plus epilogue), one would have to average 2-3 chapters per week to cover the whole novel in a year. I would also like to take a closer look at the etymologies and extracts which I think few readers pay much attention to. There are 94 such items which implies a pace of 1-2 extracts per week. There is more than enough content here to fill a year of daily posts without even casting around for original ideas or timely news items…