"Draw Me Ishmael"

30 June 2025: I hadn't realized this exhibit was still at the Peabody Essex Museum and was thrilled to get a chance to see it. What a gem this museum is, too. I will think about Anila Quayyum Agha's beautiful "All the Flowers Are for Me" for a long time, too.

"Whitman, Melville, and Baseball"

20 October 2024: 

“Did you see the baseball boys are home from their tour around the world? How I’d like to meet them — talk with them: maybe ask them some questions...That’s beautiful: the hurrah game! well — it’s our game: that’s the chief fact in connection with it: America’s game: has the snap, go, fling, of the American atmosphere — belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly, as our constitutions, laws: is just as important in the sum total of our historic life." --Whitman on baseball in 1889.

The Yankees won the ALCS yesterday and are off to their first World Series since 2009. I am, of course, delighted. But if they hadn't clinched it last night--if the series had gone on and maybe even if they lost it--I would still be delighted by the games. That's one way you know you love baseball, I think: even when your team loses, you can have a blast. Anyway, for a trivia game I am writing for some colleagues, I came across this piece about Whitman, Melville, and baseball. Well worth a read!

American Icons: Moby-Dick

15 August 2017: "Now that I've read a lot of Melville, I know that it's something he repeats over and over again: that it's better to make a terrible mistake, it's better to make an utter fool of yourself and to risk catastrophe than to be safe as an artist." --Tony Kushner, talking about Herman Melville and Moby-Dick in this episode of Studio 360: American Icons.

I listened to this while mowing the lawn today and a terrific discussion of the book and its power.

On "Bartleby"

"There are very few stories that, on re-reading after re-reading, seem to become impossibly more perfect, but Herman Melville’s eerie, aching story Bartleby, the Scrivener is one such. Like a parable without an obvious moral, it is defiance raised to the metaphysical."

Check out this interesting piece on a favorite, frustrating, endlessly rewarding short story.

Last full day...

16 May 2014: Our last full day found us in Pittsfield, visiting Arrowhead, where Melville wrote Moby Dick. Despite some rain, it was a great day. By Friday, we had all fallen into such a comfortable rhythm with each other. I am so grateful for having such wonderful travel companions. This trip caused me such anxiety beforehand, but it really turned out to be lovely.

Hawthorne on Melville

Wineapple's book continues to provide great little glimpses of Hawthorne and his world. Much has been written about Hawthorne and Melville's relationship and it seems like Hawthorne wasn't the good friend that Melville needed him to be. But Hawthorne clearly got Melville. He writes in his journal, "If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us" (293).

The barn at Arrowhead, where Melville and Hawthorne would sit and talk when Hawthorne visited.

Undeliverable mail...

Via Andrew Sullivan, a devastating reminder of the war in Afghanistan--something we don't talk about nearly enough these days.

Makes me think of Melville's Bartleby toiling away in the dead letter office: "On errands of life, these letters speed to death. Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!"

Emerson Place

As an English teacher, I find myself wondering every once in a while what difference my work makes in the world. These are only temporary doubts, of course--I am a firm believer in the value of what I do, but it's nice to see results, no matter how unexpected. Today I got an email from one of my former Richmond students. I'll paste most of it below, although I've changed his name and taken out some of the cheesier parts:

"Dr. Hanrahan,

Hello! It's John Smith, one of your students who wishes you were still at Richmond. I just thought you might find it amusing that I'm interning for an advertising and marketing agency in Washington, DC, and we are doing all the brochures and signage for a community in Lebanon, NH called Emerson Place. Inspired, I proposed that the floorplans be named after his contemporaries and those who he influenced, which was approved. So now there are some two-bedroom, one and a half bath apartments in Lebanon called the Alcott, the Poe, the Melville, and the Thoreau.

Also, the art director incorporated a bit of Emerson into the brochures; the quote(s) "Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem to be confidences or sides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profound thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart" are in an Emerson-looking font around the borders of each page.

I hope everything is going well for you where you have landed. If you have any additional reading recommendations in the vein of anything you had us read in the class (esp. American Gothic like Lippard) please do let me know. Keep up the good work and keep inspiring people!"

Okay, so I left in some of the cheese. Sue me. (This is the spot where my always hilarious mother would jump in and say, "What, did you give him an 'A'?" She says stuff like that any time I tell her anything nice my students say about me. It's so very funny.)

Seriously, though, how strange (and amusing) to think that someday the upwardly-mobile in New Hampshire will be living in rooms named after great nineteenth-century American writers--all because of a class I taught one semester at the University of Richmond. Not exactly my ideal idea of changing the world, but I'll take what I can get. Too bad they didn't take it a step further and name one "The Fanny Fern." I guess that's asking too much. And no, I have no idea what that (wonderful) quotation from Emerson has to do with apartment layouts. I suppose the art director thought it sounded nice and intelligent. Emerson is so very quotable, but lots of times the contexts seem strange.