Thursday 27 May 2010

Moby-Dick: a drawing a day

I recently started following the awesome blog of Matt Kish, One Drawing for Every Page of Moby-Dick. Yep, you heard that right: this guy is working through Melville's Moby-Dick one page at a time, creating a picture for each of the 552 pages. A project of cetological proportions! And he has produced some very striking and unusual interpretations of the story. (I must confess, I've started collecting illustrated editions of Moby-Dick – so I'm a bit obsessed with this sort of thing. I haven't quite managed to get a first edition though...)

If you're interested in this greatest of all novels, there's also a reading group blogging their way through Moby-Dick at the moment. Anyway, here are some examples of the daily pictures (click to enlarge):

14 comments:

  1. What an awesome project!

    Have you seen the pop-up version? A friend gave me a copy recently and it looks great.

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  2. Oh yes, I posted here once before on the pop-up version: it's a tour de force, and my kids adore it. I'm also currently reading them the new Marvel graphic novel version — it's actually better than the cheesy cover suggests.

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  3. Wow, this is incredible. Do you ever have those experiences where you're just kind of bowled over by what others are able to imagine? I am sometimes flat-out awed at the creativity of my fellow human beings. This is one of those times.

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  4. Come on. Some of those editions are reasonably priced for a man of your means!

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  5. A project like this one, it takes a kind of tender-loving inversion of Ahab's "bigotry of purpose". After James K.A., and against Ahab, I am almost tempted to kneel.

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  6. With some kidding aside I think there is a lost art in reading slowly with no sense of urgency towards completion (though this artist may in fact feel urgent!). I have tried to maintain my Hebrew in this way at times by slowly transcribing verses with attention to vocalization and its pointing not worrying about how much I am retaining. A good discipline . . . though again much less demanding than what this fellow has undertaken!

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  7. decent book, and not exactly a rubberstamp of calvinism--and ahab's no hero, tho mistaken as such (usually by zionists). not so decent hipster ahht.

    tho' why bother with Melville when you have Pomo's or 30 books of Barth?

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  8. Because that kind of Calvinist theodicy is anti-Bible, Melville is better than Pomos, and Barth dug some Moby-dick!

    Are a lot of Zionists writing about Ahab?

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  9. Aye, me heartie Rev. Fabulous seems to fancy the diabolical Capn Ahab as the hero of the bloody thing, Moe B. Dick that is, when the intellectual battle so to speak involves the savage sage Queequeg and slightly mad seaman Ishmael.

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  10. Who is Rev. Fabulous? Surely you don't mean Kim?

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  11. Fellow named Zak Smith did an illustration for every page of Gravity's Rainbow a couple years ago, also very interesting. http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/zak_smith/title.htm

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