Midterm 1 (pt 2)

In my previous post I talked about how I have become incredibly interested in Entertainment in the digital age. I want to know how it affects people and whether it is a good or bad thing. Connecting this to Moby Dick shouldn't be hard at all. This book is a perfect example of the digital age's sometimes incredibly short attention span.

I talked to a lot of people about the book. Before I even picked it up for the very first time, my brother would tell me about how difficult it was to get through. He, of course, was saying this in an admiring way. He thought the book was amazing, but didn't think I would ever be able to read it. Victoria always read fantasy books that were easy to read with big print. She'd never read something as sophisticated as Moby Dick.

Ha. The joke's on him.

But, he did succeed in destroying any and all desire I had in reading the book. When I saw it on the booklist, I was extremely depressed and disheartened.

I read to be entertained. It's like my tv, I'd rather read than watch almost any TV show (with the possible exception of Supernatural, but that's a story for another time.) A lot of kids in my high school complained about how they hated reading. My sister-in-law says that she hates reading with pride in her voice. My mother in law simply states that she doesn't have enough time for something like that (but she has plenty of time for scrapbooking, explain that.) Books aren't entertaining for them. They don't care about them.

That would make Moby dick -20 on a scale of 1 to 10 in entertainment.

But pure entertainment isn't the only interesting thing about Moby Dick (or the potential lack thereof). I have said this many times, but Moby Dick reminds me of a pre-internet Wikipedia. A lot of the information I find extremely fascinating, if I wasn't reading it in novel format. I actually did look up whales on Wikipedia while reading the book because I wanted to know more about the sperm whale. Wikipedia is one of the largest websites in the world, so there must be some entertainment to reading mindless facts about things.

This might seem like a ridiculous ramble, with no inherent value to helping me write my paper. But actually this is helping me a ton. Moby Dick IS entertaining, but it likes to hide it. Just like all of the references it has in its pages, just like all of the hidden meaning we've been exploring throughout this semester, it's entertainment value has been hiding as well. It goes back to that idea of where we should categorize Moby Dick. I was very foolish at the beginning of this class, thinking that it would be easy to just stick Moby Dick in the novel category and be done with it. I didn't believe Professor Wickman when he said that it wasn't that simple. When we read Moby Dick a just a novel, it is boring. There is hardly a plot, it doesn't get exciting until the very end. But if we read Moby Dick as a Wiki, then we would find tons of information about whaling and the way whalers thought about themselves. If we read it as an allegory, we can find immense amounts of symbols that reflect our own life, even in just thinking that Queequeg represents the internet.

I could probably go on and on in this rambling manner about constitutes as entertainment within Moby Dick. I could go into fandoms, maybe find out whether there is a fandom for Moby Dick. There must be, considering how many things Dr. Burton was able to find through the Long Tail. I think that Moby Dick is difficult for the average reader to understand and appreciate, simply because it is something so different than anything they (or I) have ever come across before. I want to explore the idea of where Moby Dick should be categorized, how it can be made more accessible to people who don't think they'd be able to find it entertaining. I think that writing this paper will help me discover different things about the book that I didn't notice before, different ways that it entertained me or informed me when I didn't even realize I was doing it. I'm excited to get started.

Topics I want to tackle:

1. Moby Dick's success and failing as a novel
2. Moby Dick's association with Wikipedia
3. Reading Moby Dick as an Allegory
4. The Fandom of Moby dick
5. Why do people keep reading it?
6. Why does the average reader of Moby Dick say about the book? (Non academics)
7. Scholars fascination with Moby Dick
8. Being a classic doesn't make it boring.
9. Why the beginning is so engaging, and why that tricks the reader into thinking the book will be something that it's not.

I'll probably need to cut out some of those, but I think I can tie the majority of them together. This is going to be a lot more fun than I originally thought.