Yellowfront Manor

Click for significance:

—McNally Jackson

—NYT

Mr. Squitchy

The country looked underdone, its raw juices squirting out all round. I buttoned out this squitchy air as well as I could with my lean double-breasted dress-coat—my over-coat being so long skirted I only used it in my wagon—and spitefully thrusting my crab-stick into the oozy sod bent my blue form to the steep ascent of the hill.

—Herman Melville, “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo! Or, the Crowning of the Noble Cock of Beneventano,”

found by F.S. (and becrutchéd Melvillean) Sam, at the McNally-Jackson blog

Tarka the Otter

China Miéville finds "an indispensible dissident paradigm for literary canonisation" in a novel from 1946:

“Not all,” Ferris said; “one or two are pinchbeck stuff compared with the rest; but most of them, I believe, are not only this rare sort of book, but first rate as literature.” He ran his fingers slowly along the backs of the books. “Listen to these: Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris; Beckford’s Vathek; the Grossmiths’ Diary of a Nobody; Last and First Men, by Olaf Stapledon; Trelawny’s Adventures of a Younger Son; Canton’s The Invisible Playmate; Baron Corvo’s Hadrian the Seventh; Barbellion’sJournal of a Disappointed Man; Daisy Ashford’s The Young Visiters; Bram Stoker’s Dracula; Margaret Irwin’s Still She Wished for Company; Helen Beauclerc’s Love of the Foolish Angel; Donn Byrne’sMesser Marco Polo; Ollivant’s Owd Bob; Lamb’s Rosamund Gray; Paltock’s Peter Wilkins; Melville’s Moby Dick; Williamson’s Tarka the Otter; and Grahame’s The Golden Age. That’s the tally so far, and I’ve been nearly twenty years making it. That averages one a year. But I’ve gone years without finding one. Of course it’s a purely personal choice. It entails a lot of reading. But then I do a lot.”

(Also, nice use of the word "pinchbeck.")

(Via L.G. Thos.)

From the margins

I had spent my senior year at Wellesley on "Moby-Dick," committing some of it to memory and wallowing in pessimistic transcendentalism. In the years since, I've reread it maybe more often than any other living American (or so I like to think), and I still have my ancient Modern Library edition, with its cryptic penciled marginalia:

"His double vision parallels the whale's," "Wham! ambiguities -- irony -- inscrutability" and (oh, dear), "Is welcoming death the most intense form of living?"

—Sara Lippincott, L.A. Times