Word: whaled
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Melville did not mean the heavens. He was inclined to look for an evil principle at work in the heart of things: at sea, the white whale, Moby Dick, would serve the purpose. Around his home in the Berkshires of Massachusetts, Melville had to strain himself to turn a locomotive into a dark metaphysic: "Hark! here comes that old dragon again--that gigantic gad-fly of a Moloch--snort! puff! scream!" "Great improvements of the age!" he wrote contemptuously. "Who wants to travel so fast? My grandfather did not, and he was no fool." Earlier in the 19th century, there...
...terrorist, in any case, dreams of such results. Any one of those suitcases on the conveyor belt is the seedpod of our death. The furniture really does conceal monsters. Each rental truck is an apocalypse idling at the curb. Each 747 takes on some unsettling metaphysic of Jonah-eating whale, or Moby Dick. Paranoia renders nature and its objects darkly volitional, satanic. The intent of terrorism, we know, is to break down the boundaries and sane categories of the mind and to make everyone start thinking like a psychotic...
...when I was living in the Jordan Co-op and reading Moby Dick (a dismal combination). It took me about two months to read, in which time I also re-read The Great Gatsby and plowed through endless fashion magazines to avoid sloshing in the tracks of the white whale. Although I'm an American history and literature concentrator, I have as yet evaded a re-reading of Melville's tome (sacrilege in many Harvard quarters), but I think Ahab's ghost may return to haunt me next year in 19th-century literature...
...think you've seen this film before, a few years ago, when it was called Free Willy, and you dozed in your seat as your child sat rapt in communion with a lonely lad and his pet whale. Now it's Flipper, a remake of the 1963 film that spawned two sequels and a TV series. But it's still the same primal kitsch: boy finds dolphin, boy loves dolphin, adults wonder what's the big deal with the boy and his dolphin. Jeez! Adults don't understand anything...
Palumbi has also done research on marine conservation. According to Knoll, Palumbi has developed a technique for the molecular fingerprinting of whale meat, which would help in enforcing international laws against whale hunting...