Last night, there being nothing to watch on Freeview, we made a start on Captain Jean-Luc Picard taking on Moby Dick, a film which I had forgotten started life on television, had probably watched once or twice before, while BH denied all knowledge, even when well into it. The point here being that I quite often find that I am watching a repeat quite a few minutes after it starts, it taking that long to jog the memory into life. BH claimed that she had been put off the film by the book, which she had found very heavy going.
That being as it may be, on this occasion we thought the film rather good, certainly as far as we got, despite some slipshod staging. There were several occasions, for example, when we had a team of seamen pulling very heartily on a rope, with the rope going nowhere. Surely it is not that difficult to have the extras pull a rope in the ordinary way?
Today I was moved to check when I last read the book, thinking that it had been reasonably recently. However, the blog archive only revealed references 1 through 4, none of them about Moby Dick.
Next stop a cursory visit to the bookshelves, which turned up nothing. We thought that we had owned both 'Typee' and 'Moby Dick' at some point, both in an Everyman edition, but maybe they had been culled in favour of the Kindle, along with plenty of better books. Inspection of the Kindle revealed 'Moby Dick' on page 3 of the index, 'Billy Budd' on page 6 and 'Typee' on page 8 (of 15). Which, given that this index lists books most recently looked at first, suggests that Moby Dick was indeed read fairly recently, certainly more recently that Billy Budd who was noticed in 2013. It looks as if that is the nearest to running down the date that I am going to get.
On the other hand, while turning the pages on the Kindle version of 'Moby Dick', the bookmark was fairly near the beginning, at the place where he has to share a room with the harpooner. I was surprised at how different the book was from the film, even over those three or four pages, with the film having been considerably simplified and coloured up for the benefit of the tired viewer. I might well read some more.
In the meantime, checking up on Patrick Stewart, I find that he comes from a fairly ordinary background, no Bullingdon Club or 'Footlights' for him, but somehow made his way in classical acting, starting with the RSC and going on to a long run with them. After which, somewhat against his bent for the stage, he became famous in 'Star Trek', no doubt where I first became aware of him as a person, rather than as a face.
Next thing to check up is the matter of typhus, a bug-borne complaint, often fatal and the cause of much sickness - and millions of deaths on the eastern front during the first world war and its Russian sequelae. Wikipedia talks of one ship being struck down, but one might have thought that crowded 19th century ships generally would have been vulnerable. But I don't recall coming across typhus in that connection. Finding out about typhus being a by-product of my reading Dr. Zhivago, where there is a good deal of it.
Reference 1a: pumpkinstrokemarrow. The rather unhelpful Microsoft default rendering of the web address given at 1b. At least I now think that it is Microsoft rather than Google.
Reference 1b: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=typee.
Reference 2: psmv2: Billy Budd
Reference 3: psmv3: Emoji Dick. Concerning, inter alia, someone who saw fit to translate 'Moby Dick' into emojis. I wonder how many people flogged their way through it?
Reference 4: psmv4: Wight three. Perhaps this or some other Melville paid a visit to the island at some point.
No comments:
Post a Comment