91–93 of 93 posts
Love Moby Dick. One thing I've wanted to do for a few years is make the trip to New Bedford Whaling Museum for the annual marathon reading. It's also streamed every year. https://www.whalingmuseum.org/program/the-moby-dick-marathon...
Love Moby Dick. One thing I've wanted to do for a few years is make the trip to New Bedford Whaling Museum for the annual marathon reading. It's also streamed every year. https://www.whalingmuseum.org/program/the-moby-dick-marathon...
I never did hear the annual marathon reading, but I did visit the museum when I lived in Massachusetts and I recommend it.
My wife visited the museum on Nantucket and said that was also a very enjoyable experience.
The language of the reviews is quizzical. I caught myself thinking how high-brow language once was. Then, it dawned on me the sense of intentionality and craftsmanship displayed by each sentence. U up? Who dis? :emoji :emoji :emoji I'm not sure if I'm nostalgic, sad or just a little bit of, "get off my lawn."_
That era was just starting by 1850, but showed in some language, especially in newspapers, and to an extent Mark Twain.
Hemmingway remains the exemplar though.
I strongly suspect that the ornate language also served trust and signalling purposes. With faster communications, that could be indicated by other means (returning texts immediately rather than long exhortations of faith, fearing the correct gods, and infinite gratitude to one's superiors, should one have any). This turns up in business correspondence, and the history of business writing and messaging as communications increased in speed and bandwidth are interesting. A small handful of companies (the Souther Pacific Railroad, DuPont Chemical, General Electric) had an absolutely outsized impact on standards of correspondence and recordkeeping, particularly from about 1880 -- 1910 or so. Even standardisation of fields on memos, most of which were later reflected in RFC 822 email message headers, date to this time, and were aimed at improving ease of reference and filing.