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Thar She Blows: The Sound of Animals Fighting

June 24, 2010

I was investigating The Sound of Animals Fighting, a band that Chani suggested in response to my Globalize My Playlist post, and I came across their song “Ahab” from their 2008 album The Ocean and the Sun. At least, I think it’s a song. It’s definitely an acquired taste. Sample it for yourself:

I tried to make out the lyrics, but I couldn’t. So I googled the song and came up with this:

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter – bitter”, he answered,
“But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart.”

Interestingly, these words were not written buy members of the band. Nor were they written by Herman Melville.

These “lyrics” are in fact Stephen Crane’s poem “In the Desert,” which was included in his collection The Black Riders and Other Lines (1895). The novelist Joyce Carol Oates read the poem in college and later used its final lines as the title of her 1995 novel about a working-class city in upstate New York. In an interview with the journalist Don Swaim, Oates said that she understood the poem as “an allegory of the human condition,” in which bitterness and pleasure are intermixed, and also as an allegory of the writer’s relation to her subject. (You can listen to the interview here.)

Crane’s poem, translated into Farsi, also serves as the spoken word “Intro” to The Ocean and the Sun. The album as a whole is lousy with literary references.

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Thar She Blows: BP and the Ahab Parallax

June 13, 2010

The lead article in today’s “Week in Review” section of the New York Times is called “The Ahab Parallax,” and it begins this way:

A specially outfitted ship ventures into deep ocean waters in search of oil, increasingly difficult to find. Lines of authority aboard the ship become tangled. Ambition outstrips ability. The unpredictable forces of nature rear up, and death and destruction follow in their wake. “Some fell flat on their faces,” an eyewitness reported of the stricken crew. “Through the breach, they heard the waters pour.”

The words could well have been spoken by a survivor of the doomed oil rig Deepwater Horizon, which exploded in the Gulf of Mexico in April, killing 11 men and leading to the largest oil spill in United States history. But they come instead, of course, from that wordy, wayward Manhattanite we know as Ishmael, whose own doomed vessel, the whaler Pequod, sailed only through the pages of “Moby-Dick.”

The author of the piece, Randy Kennedy, goes on to note the “parallels between that disaster and the proto-Modernist one imagined by Melville.”  Kennedy argues that “in the same way whalers had to sail farther and farther for their prey, oil companies are drilling deeper and deeper to tap the gulf’s oil, to levels made possible only by the most advanced technology, operating near its limits.”

Ric Burns ‘s documentary Into the Deep: America, Whaling & the World, recently broadcast as part of the PBS series American Experience, does a marvelous job of depicting that imperative “to sail farther and farther” into the deep, and the film is a cautionary tale about what happens to an industry that depends on the exploitation of a finite resource.

I’m putting Kennedy’s article not into the deep, but into the file for the book project that I’m calling “Why Moby-Dick Matters,” currently on the back burner — or perhaps, in the rear try pot.

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