Call Me Ishmael Book

Yes, I read MOBY-DICK and, no, I didn't fully understand it. I enjoyed the book, though. Reading Herman Melville is like hanging out after class with that freaky teacher who is a well of information and smells a little bad. Everyone makes fun of him, but years later, after all the other meaningless lessons of classrooms past have faded, his oddball instruction resonate. That's the wonder of fiction. Like poetry, you don't have to understand it to get it. That doesn't mean there isn't value in interpretation. But criticism is a different type of art form, one that is rarely practiced, but a lodestar to follow for those who wish to criticize is CALL ME ISHMAEL by Charles Olson. Yes, I don't fully understand it either, but he makes some beautiful connections between Melville's masterpiece and Shakespeare, the Bible and the United States, which he does in a fragmentary and lyrical style that stands as its own thing of beauty, not separate but unique.