In which I reminisce with @laphamsquarterly.bsky.social about my long career of queering Melville . . .

I spoke to Donovan Hohn of @laphamsquarterly.bsky.social for their Moby Dick podcast. We talked about Chapter 4, my Queequeg and Ishmael fanfic (Quishmael for my fellow old Tumblr heads) and Melville’s unrequited love for Nathaniel Hawthorne. www.laphamsquarterly.org/content/epis...

“That’s the trouble with dreams of power. It stimulates anxiety about a catastrophe that has yet to happen. ” @hernyfreebland.bsky.social in a collage essay which was published by @laphamsquarterly.bsky.social.

“One of the poignancies of Darrow’s life is that it was hard for him to feel better. He wanted people to feel better. There was so much cruelty in the world. I wonder if, in his heart of hearts, Bryan also couldn’t stand that meaninglessness.” www.laphamsquarterly.org/content/epis...

Brenda Wineapple on the hundredth anniversary of Tennessee v. Scopes. www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/t...

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with Brenda Wineapple, longtime member of the Lapham’s Quarterly editorial board. www.laphamsquarterly.org/content/epis...

The collage essay I put together for @laphamsquarterly.bsky.social out of Lewis Lapham’s sentences is excerpted in the new issue of @harpers.bsky.social. Feels fittingly full circle: I sourced many of the sentences from his Harper’s columns, and LQ is effectively Readings through history.

“There’s nothing more extraordinary than the world we live in … We have evolved to pay a lot of attention to our fellow humans. But if we look beyond that, even for an instant, we see that the world is an absolutely amazing place.” www.laphamsquarterly.org/content/epis...

Experiencing history in Assassin’s Creed. www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/i...

Peggy Guggenheim’s Manhattan project. www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/a...

“But what is important to me in ‘The Sermon’ is that he—how can I put this?—he is the person who wants to bring a sense of proportion. And Ahab is the person who wants you to give up any sense of proportionality.” www.laphamsquarterly.org/content/epis...

“Father Mapple is in some strange, almost obscure way, a kind of negative double for Ahab.... he is the person who wants to bring a sense of proportion. Father Mapple kind of supplies a warning and a possible lens for a reading of the entire novel" - Retired Prof/novelist Charles Baxter on Moby Dick

Read Charles Baxter on the literature and politics of charisma. www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/f...

Charles Baxter visits The World in Time to talk with Donovan Hohn about the politics and the mysteries of charisma in Moby Dick. www.laphamsquarterly.org/content/epis...

J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation opened its file on James Baldwin in April 1960 when Baldwin’s name appeared among the signatories to an open letter that the Fair Play for Cuba Committee published as an advertisement in the New York Times. www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/b...

“They really were outsiders, all of them. Sometimes people think, oh, well, he was just drawn to these men who were essentially straight, like he had some kind of complex or something. Maybe. But he was also just drawn to these crazy outsiders. www.laphamsquarterly.org/content/epis...

The FBI reads James Baldwin. www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/b...

“He writes wonderfully about Baldwin. He writes about their early days in Paris. Friedrich had these wonderful, wonderful anecdotes about the trips they took to the south of France that went totally awry.” www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/n...

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with biographer Nicholas Boggs about “Baldwin: A Love Story,” a book three decades in the making. www.laphamsquarterly.org/content/epis...

He entered the world on May 25, 1803. This was in Boston, the city he would later condemn as a necropolis of dead ideas and faint hearts and mercantile mildew. But what he saw as a child was very different. www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/d...

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with writer and biographer James Marcus about his book “Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson.” www.laphamsquarterly.org/content/epis...

You still have a chance to buy back issues during our summer sale. 25% off all available Lapham’s Quarterly back issues, from now until Labor Day. ssl.drgnetwork.com/ecom/AAF/app...

“Some of the fears about loneliness, some of the fears about pain, some of the worries about doubt, about making a good life or the life of right choosing, are issues that trouble us in exactly the same way, or challenge us in exactly the same way.” www.laphamsquarterly.org/content/epis...

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with Matthew Hollis about his new translation of The Seafarer, about the history of the poem’s improbable survival, and about its rediscovery by the Romantics and the Modernists. www.laphamsquarterly.org/content/epis...

Consider the meanings of the verb to loom, whether Ishmael is likeable or funny, why the antebellum religious press condemned Moby Dick, and what the best medicine might be for “the universal thump” on our podcast. www.laphamsquarterly.org/content/epis...

“If you were to ask a range of readers, ‘Can you think of a 1st sentence?’ You probably get ‘It was the best of times, and the worst of times’ or ‘the worst of times, & the best of times,’ and people would get it backward. But then you get ‘Call me Ishmael.’” www.laphamsquarterly.org/content/epis...

“I write for fun. I write for play. I write for the play of words. I write to discover what I want to say and how to say it—and the nerve to say it.” Read an essay from Greil Marcus. www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/g...

25% off all Lapham’s Quarterly back issues, from now until Labor Day. Which issues do you still need for your collection? ssl.drgnetwork.com/ecom/AAF/app...

Read an excerpt from “On Civil Disobedience: Henry David Thoreau, Hannah Arendt.” @rogerberkowitz.bsky.social @libraryofamerica.bsky.social www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/r...

thrilled to be on the @laphamsquarterly.bsky.social podcast with Donovan Hohn. Great conversation about Civil Disobedience.

25% off all Lapham’s Quarterly back issues, from now until Labor Day. Which issues do you still need for your collection? ssl.drgnetwork.com/ecom/AAF/app...

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn sits down for a conversation with @rogerberkowitz.bsky.social. www.laphamsquarterly.org/content/epis...

With this episode, the second in an intermittent series on the literature, history, and science of the sea, The World in Time launches onto the waters of Moby Dick. www.laphamsquarterly.org/content/epis...

Read Aaron Sachs on Herman Melville’s cosmic cetology. www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/u...

“Moby Dick was read to me by my mother when I was maybe five or six. She made a deal with me that she would continue to read the story as long as I could remember on the following night where the story had gotten to.” www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/s...

“There’s something I find strangely moving about the ‘Extracts’ section of Moby Dick—before we even get into the text—by virtue of the attention that has been paid to the whale.” www.laphamsquarterly.org/content/epis...

“In short, I read, I stole, I arranged, I found energy again in the Laphamian vernacular, I glimpsed some honest hope for these anni horribiles. The result is something I could never have known how to say without him.” www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/m...

Here’s a collage essay I put together for @laphamsquarterly.bsky.social in remembrance of Lewis, who I’ve missed since his passing a year ago. It’s in my voice using 121 of his sentences, or in his voice transmuted by me into the present—really both. Either way, it means a lot to me.

A grand tour through the essays of Lewis H. Lapham. www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/m...

A reading from @danielmendelsohn.bsky.social’s new translation of The Odyssey. www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/g...

Listen to the latest episode of the podcast with @danielmendelsohn.bsky.social — plus archival audio of Lewis H. Lapham talking about his childhood reading of Moby-Dick. www.laphamsquarterly.org/content/epis...

Read @smith-ruiu.bsky.social‬ on nature, grace, and history. www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/c...

This week in history on the internet. www.laphamsquarterly.org/https%3A//ww...

Read a poem from @rbjrichardson.bsky.social‬. www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/f...

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn revisits the topics of Intoxication (Winter 2012) and Disaster (Spring 2016). www.laphamsquarterly.org/content/epis...

“Mr. Clemens, you have been guest of Emperors and Princes and Presidents and Magnates and Artists and— “Yes,” he broke in with a quizzical smile “and of boarding house keepers!” www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/g...

Mark Twain is always worth the time to read. www.laphamsquarterly.org/freedom/swee...

While researching his essay “Twain Dreams: The Enigma of Samuel Clemens,” John Jeremiah Sullivan found a lost story Mark Twain had written in 1865 while reporting for the Territorial Enterprise. www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/l...

This week on The World in Time, John Jeremiah Sullivan brings us a piece of writing by Mark Twain that scholars considered lost. www.laphamsquarterly.org/content/epis...

This week in history on the internet. www.laphamsquarterly.org/https%3A//ww...