First off, I haven't studied Maryanne Wolf's neuroscientific research on "deep reading" and its claimed benefits. But, as a person who has read most of the major thick books like Moby Dick, War & Peace, Les Miserables, Middlemarch, Proust, and reading cover-to-cover the old computer books like the 3-ring binders of C Language[1], my lifetime reading experience could offer counterpoint to why "deep reading" seems to be a lost activity: Most of the text out there is just not good quality that deserves or rewards deep reading. My pet theory is that the rampant skimming or "shallow reading"…
> He was a prolific writer on social and political issues, while Tolkien, bless him, was deep down the rabbit hole of Middle Earth (as demonstrated by his writings and letters). Tolkien was a social/political writer and lord of the rings was a social/politic text. One of the central themes of LoTR revolved around the central social/political question of the fate of the british empire in the first half of the 20th century. Namely that as transportation improved, it wouldn't be just the colonizers striving outward, but the colonized striving in and overruning the idyllic and white shire. The…
One past thread: The Original 1851 Reviews of Moby Dick - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15209719 - Sept 2017 (29 comments) Related: 'Bartleby the Scrivener' – Herman Melville (1853) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28671613 - Sept 2021 (3 comments) The Man Who Edited Melville (1982) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24736842 - Oct 2020 (1 comment) Herman Melville at Home - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20547911 - July 2019 (2 comments) What Happened to the Book Herman Melville Wrote After ‘Moby-Dick’? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16983571 - May 2018…
One of the things that I think is strange about Moby Dick is the shift in language. SPOILERS: So most of the book is just a beautiful snapshot of a very odd slice of life in the early 1800s, namely whalers. However, not just any whaler, the book is very clear on this, sperm whalers. Also, not just any sperm whalers, nantucketers. Even though the majority of the crew is international, they are on a nantucket ship, with a nantucket captain, and are thus honorary nantucketers. Ok, so anyway, most of the book is just about learning what their life is like, and it's unusual in the way because…
I don't remember much about Moby Dick. a. "Call me Ishmael" = The First Three Words b. Queequeg's Coffin = The Last Bit. c. there was a chapter called Cetology. d. Ambergris is (I think) Whale Sperm, e. At some point in the novel, I'm PRETTY sure someone puts on a whale penis and runs around. They're huge, whale penii, like 6 feet, easy. That's about it, and I'm sure Herman Melville (I guess I remember that too) would be a little irked, but... ...if I had an idea, tomorrow, to write a book about an old guy chasing after a whale, I'd stop myself. My point is, that one of the -other-…
I'm getting downvoted, so I wanted to give a couple examples of very very good and novel writing to prove that Martin is a hack, in regards to his technical skill at writing. > All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then,…
Investigating details that are not “all that important” is I would argue what makes Moby Dick a masterpiece. Many are bored to death by whaling details and look to “improve” Melville’s work by cutting that out and keeping only the “plot”. However, buried within all the whaling details is the narrator looking deeply into all things, trying to find the purpose and point of it all, to see if he can ascertain some truth. He’ll offer some conclusions one chapter, only to contradict them the next. What is truth? What’s the point of this all? This tool, this skill, this ship, this life, this world?…
Similar here, but I eventually realized it wasn't normal and wasn't who I wanted to be. I sought professional help. I learned Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which I've internalized since I'm a programmer. CBT is like a language I can use to program myself. Just today I spontaneously told myself "Stop making things up! you don't need to come up with a reason or wild rationalization for every feeling" I used to really resonate with the writings of Dostoyevsky and Melville. The opening paragraph of Moby Dick was a favorite: “Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having…
Hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely regarded as errors - outputs that deviate from factual accuracy. However, in creative or exploratory contexts, these "mistakes" may represent unexpected avenues for innovation. We introduce Purposefully Induced Psychosis (PIP), a novel approach that amplifies LLM hallucinations for imaginative tasks such as speculative fiction, interactive storytelling, and mixed-reality simulations. Drawing on Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, where Pip's "madness" reveals profound insight, we reframe hallucinations as a source of computational imagination…
Compare the summary of the book to the summary of the Wikipedia article on Moby Dick (https://labs.kagi.com/ai/sum?url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...) > Moby-Dick is a novel by Herman Melville about the obsessive quest of Ahab, captain of the whaling ship Pequod, for revenge on the white sperm whale Moby Dick, which crippled him on the ship's previous voyage. The novel follows Ishmael, a sailor on the Pequod, as he narrates the story of Ahab's monomaniacal pursuit of Moby Dick. Along the way, Ishmael and his fellow crew members encounter a variety of characters and situations, including the…