Link below to Balckwell's Books podcast on Substack with splendid treatment of MARDI as a loosely structured book of conversations. As well and truly said around 15 minutes in, Melville "just wants to talk about a lot of different things."
Original research and riffs on Herman Melville, authorship, and nineteenth-century American literature.
Saturday, February 25, 2023
Balckwell's Books podcast on MARDI, "Melville's most imaginative novel"
Tuesday, February 21, 2023
Monday, February 20, 2023
Friday, February 17, 2023
Sunday, February 12, 2023
Whiskered, powdered and dandyfied Gansevoort
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| Gansevoort Melville The New York Public Library Digital Collections |
Before and after the 1844 presidential election, some political opponents of Gansevoort Melville (Herman's older lawyer-brother) called him a Broadway exquisite or dandy, mocking his supposedly over-the-top devotion to fashionable clothing and personal appearance. Gansevoort's success as a popular democratic orator eventually won him a respectable diplomatic post in London. Down in Hinds County, Mississippi, editor George W. Harper, age 21, could not resist the chance to depict the newly appointed Secretary of Legation as "a whiskered, powdered and dandyfied stump speaker."
"REWARDED.-- Gansevoort Melville, of New York--a whiskered, powdered and dandyfied stump speaker for Mr. Polk, in Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York, last summer--is going out to London, as secretary of legation, with Mr. McLain." -- Raymond Gazette, August 8, 1845.
- Gansevoort Melville as Broadway exquisite
https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2017/02/gansevoort-melville-as-broadway.html
- Tall, very tall Gansevoort Melville
https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2016/02/glimpse-of-tall-very-tall-gansevoort.html
Wednesday, February 8, 2023
Teenege Nervous Breakdown - The Nighthawks
Patient and attentive readers will find a long-lost poem "To Insensibility" by the eccentric and romantic deaf poet Sophia Hyatt, rescued on Melvilliana at the end of this 2021 post
https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2021/05/teenage-nervous-breakdown-or-melvilles.html
Full disclosure: I never got to see Little Feat live but I heard the Nighthawks do "Teenage Nervous Breakdown" many times at various Atlanta venues, and once at Desperado's in Georgetown.