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While we wait for the main feature......

ORIGINAL: Canoerebel

This AAR didn't even get started before it got hijacked! No boring House Rules. No vows to vigorously slow the Japanese expansion. No reciting of a Pearl Harbor attack with seven damaged battleships that won't be participating in bombardments for a year. We've veered into a master's course in literature!

AH, but the Gorn set the stage with his first post, so we are not high-jacking - merely high-browing.

ORIGINAL: MakeeLearn

While we wait for the main feature......

Wow, I had to save this image. I have not idea how I will use it in my AAR but there must be a way....

Some more nautical lore:

The Song of the Wreck

By Charles (What the!?) Dickens

The wind blew high, the waters raved,
A ship drove on the land,
A hundred human creatures saved
Kneel’d down upon the sand.

Three-score were drown’d, three-score were thrown
Upon the black rocks wild,
And thus among them, left alone,
They found one hideous gorn. [:'(]

The Moon

The moon is an amulating, reticulating, circulating body,
divinely devised to revolved around the earth's surface
in never decreasing concentrating circles;
and is divinely devised to promote
a never decreasing increase in the world's birth rate.

Gorn free, as free as the wind blows... Eloquent, in a 1970's kind of way and describes your efforts against your AW1Steve opponent.

However, if you have to stick to literary works instead of lyrics, just stay away from Tom Clancy. Though I've enjoyed all of his stories, he took a whole page to describe pushing a button to fire. If you do that with your AAR, you'll never be done.

Looking forward to the AAR. Good Luck!
T-Rav

ORIGINAL: Roger Neilson 3

Maybe this is the start?

Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were. In her face were too sharply blended the delicate features of her mother, a Coast aristocrat of French descent, and the heavy ones of her florid Irish father. But it was an arresting face, pointed of chin, square of jaw. Her eyes were pale green without a touch of hazel, starred with bristly black lashes and slightly tilted at the ends. Above them, her thick black brows slanted upward, cutting a startling oblique line in her magnolia-white skin — that skin so prized by Southern women and so carefully guarded with bonnets, veils and mittens against hot Georgia suns.....


Roger

This isn't Gorn With The Wind. Didn't I do that already? Or am I still saving that one up?

Gorn sewed the wind and is reaping a whirlwind.

Now is the winter of our discotheque.

For the unwashed heathens from the South who wouldn't know Nantucket from Phuket, Moby Dick has about three (maybe more) layers of symbolism and it could not possibly be denser in that regard. As a simple example, the White Whale is a symbol for God and Nature at the same time and Ahab is a blasphemer against the natural order. Melville wrote to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne (a great author in his own right) that "I have written a wicked book and feel spotless as the lamb." I'll try to relate this as best I can from memory as I don't have it before me; Aristophanes wrote a story about the origins of humankind (tongue firmly in cheek) saying that originally man was actually man/woman with four legs, four arms and two heads, but God (Zeus I think) got p.o.ed at them and threw thunderbolts splitting us all into the two sexes and warned if we angered him again he would split us in half once more and we should have to hop around on one foot then. Ahab has a streaky scar running down his face looking jagged and pale like a bolt of lightning and has had one leg taken by the White Whale. It's not too late to try reading it again while trying to understand what Melville is actually saying. Huckleberry Finn is one of the greatest books ever written in any language but in my view Moby Dick is a little step above.

This great unwashed heathen from the South knows that Moby-Dick is hyphenated.

The experts sing the acclaim of Tobacco Road too. Highly educated folks and northerners, in particular, appreciated it's depictions of poor, uneducated southerners. The author (Erskine Caldwell, a Georgian) wrote in 1972 that it was an accurate representation of the sharecropper class.

It wasn't, but there's no convincing the washed elite of that fact. From the work I've done, I know that sharecroppers, generally, were decent, hard-working, God-fearing folks. To check that perception, years ago I spoke with Harry Roper, the son of Arthur Raper (Harry changed his last name as an adult). Arthur was a sociologist who lived with, studied, and wrote about the sharecropper class in east Georgia in the 1930s and '40s. Harry grew up there but spent the rest of his life in Maine, detesting southerners partly because of the racism. But Harry told me that Caldwell's depiction of sharecroppers was a weird and demented reflection on reality. He told me that most sharecroppers had two iconic items in their houses - a Bible and a photo of FDR. He knew them as the decent, hardworking folk that are absent from Caldwell's odd and phantasmorgic portrayal.

Appreciation of a book - literature included - is highly subjective. My lack of appreciation for Tobacco Road, though, isn't due to ignorance. Similarly, I'll stick by my dislike of Moby-Dick, no matter what layers Melville used and his ultimate reasons for writing the book.

Gornigula....

There's a funny scene in it, I believe in The Try Works chapter. It's about the method of rendering the Spermaceti (the fatty part of the sperm whale's head and most valuable product derived from a sperm whale) where the crew member who officiates over the processing and does much of the work himself dons a garment crafted from the penis of a sperm whale which protects him from hot spattering oil. Melville calls his station over the vat his Bishopric. The visual image is when you think about it hilarious and the play with words (sperm, spermaceti, bishopric) worth a few chuckles at least. I haven't read MD in thirty years, or Aristophanes for that matter, but remember all this and more.

This AAR is off to a spectacularly unexpected start. Gorn, you've inspired a sensation!

What about the much under appreciated "Horton Hears a Who?"

What about Are You My Mother?

As for that hyphen, the first publication was by a London publisher who did not use a hyphen. The first US publication used a hyphen. The name Moby Dick was derived from the "name" of an actual whale, Mocha Dick, for which I've found no hyphenated version. Since the London publisher had the original manuscript I presume Melville did not hyphenate it, until I see evidence to the contrary.

Also, in the New York edition, printed after the London one, while the hyphen appeared in the title, in the body of the text there was no hyphen.

Hyphens? We talkin' Hyphens?! Don't talk to me about Hyphens!

ORIGINAL: Zorch

Hyphens? We talkin' Hyphens?! Don't talk to me about Hyphens!

So that's what Mein Kampf was about? - starting camps for hyphens? [&:]
No wonder so many people hated the book!

Don't say you haven't been warned!