Radfar gets hold of the Genuine Barnacle Crucial Edition of TYPEE

A tip of the hat to Tyson Cornell, who brought the Barnacle edition into being.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bernard-radfar/have-yourself-a-very-melv_b_4420787.html

Bernard Radfar

Have Yourself a Very Melville Christmas: In Which We Review Typee, An Old, Perfect Book

Posted: 12/11/2013 12:07 pm
Perhaps it isn't fashionable to review a book written 17 decades earlier. Admittedly, I'm the guy who read the New York Times to the day one year after the date of publication, and doesn't want to know what's happening when everyone else does, if at all.
Literature, however, isn't what's labeled as news, and is the closest we get to immortality that I know of.
The timeline of Herman Melville's life had its own oceanic sway, because he had the cursed fortune of notoriety for Typee early in life. Moby Dick, perhaps the most misassigned book of all time, came to be celebrated, like a message in a bottle, long after this rarely gifted author died being barely able to support his family. Of course, the story of the martyred posthumous life has been told before, the mixed tragedy that the estates of these artists get to enjoy.
And yet we still have the book, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life, quiet, almost buried on the shelf. The subtitle is enough for me, suggestive of the playful spirit behind the book. It is a grand shame Typee is neglected, all that reading pleasure given away to books that may not deserve your hours in quite the same way. Even with the best readers I know I get a dumbfounded expression when I bring up Typee. Like Shibumi and Ultramarine, your eyes might have passed it by, dismissed it out of confusion over the subtle title. Probably high school teachers wouldn't have alienated readers from literature and Melville forever had they dared to assign this book instead. But do they really want us to know the miserable realities of colonialism and Western aggression against the peaceful and natural?
This new, critical edition put together by Hershel Parker, the most prominent biographer and editor of Melville in recent memory, will help us to reexamine this misunderstood book. Jonathan Evison has written one of the finest, funniest forewords I can remember reading, doing justice to a book that must've seemed daunting to write about.
Between novel and travelogue, the pages sing an English that anyone who cares about craft will make pause over. For this is a misapprehended book. In England, despite the Victorian times, they left the manuscript as is, while the Puritans and missionaries of this continent forced him to publish it without many passages. It is Lolita before Lolita, and part of the long history of American censorship and religious fanaticism.
These are tricky times for thinkers. For everyone, actually. But today you, the author or publisher, must decide whether a book is fiction or non-fiction. Exaggerate your experience, contrive anything while claiming it is true, and lawyers will come after you. Herodotus and De Tocqueville may've ended up in debt to the IRS, imprisoned. The labels we give books (novella, literature, popular fiction, crime, young adult, etc.) help the corporations. But a book is a book regardless of which section it gets housed in. I've been known to move Kafka to the comedy section. Dostoevsky to suspense. De Sade, children's or horror, depending on my mood.
The Bible belongs in ancient history and mythology, respectively.
It doesn't matter whether something happened or not, unless you're writing as a historical archivist. Invention is as much a part of the game as dice are to backgammon. As individuals, we make up stories, versions of reality, and call some more real than others. That's our job. And the fireball Melville knew that when he returned from his long Marquesas shipping expedition, ignoring the increasingly reifying tendencies of individuals after a certain kind of non-artistic quest for objectivity.
My promise: You will go on his journey and see what Melville saw, but when he takes his memories from latent image to the visible page, a man is revealed who sees more than what is coming into vision. We don't want the actual journey every time. That's dull reportage. The choices a writer makes define what, from all that could have been said and recorded, is said and recorded, and in what fashion.
There is nothing to critique about Typee. Nothing to say about my assessments of certain passages. No quoting here and there, as is the tradition, as if those little morsels do any justice to the whole. These are the cliches even the culture of ideas have to abide by, they say. All I ask is that some of us, in this time of so much forgetting, remember and read this book.
Bernard Radfar is the author of Mecca Pimp: A Novel of Love and Human Trafficking.

 

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 The text is that of the Northwestern-Newberry edition.

Cousin Ben Tindall's Gift--a Window to Fill an Empty Rectangle

A fanciful scene based on a photograph of Angel del Mar under construction and on another photograph of a whale breaching in front of Morro Rock.  Ben's bigger gift was intelligent friendship.

The late Ben Tindall's daughter Erica Rollings--a very great artist in glass

https://www.facebook.com/EricaRollingsGlassWorks

Samples--but she works in sets.
 

Ben Tindall--Brilliant Man and Much Loved "Internet Cousin"

John Tindall Obituary

John Benton Tindall - SAVANNAH - John Benton Tindall, Jr., 81, died on December 5th, 2013. Ben was the son of John Benton Tindall of Water Valley, Mississippi, and Anna Karin Andersen Tindall of Northport, New York. He departed life from his adopted home of Savannah, Georgia, where he retired to Skidaway Island with his wife, Becca. Ben was a proud graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, class of 1956, and honorably served his country for 2 2 years. He has always been an integral part of the Long Grey Line and will continue to be throughout eternity. He was a pilot and a professor of Mathematics at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He received his Master's Degree in Mathematics at the University of Utah and his Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Operations Research in 1972. Upon retiring from the military in 1977, Ben continued to contribute to advanced technologies with RCA, ITT, and ARS of Arlington, Virginia. Ben was also an accomplished artist in the making of Tiffany style lamps and produced a large collection. He had a passion for his family and their genealogical roots. Ben is survived by his beloved wife, Becca, their three children and their spouses: Erica Rollings (Robert); John Benton Tindall III (Cindy); and Paul Tindall (Josie). His wonderful grandchildren are Henry Rollings and Jackson Rollings of Savannah and Bergen Tindall and Dana Tindall of Durham, Pennsylvania. Services for Ben will be private. If desired, please donate to the American Diabetes Association or the West Point Association of Graduates, 698 Mills Road, West Point, NY 10996. .

Savannah Morning News on Dec. 8, 2013

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Photograph: Ben, Becca, Heddy, Hershel-- 2007

This last half year I accumulated many great stories I will never get to tell him. I'll miss him the rest of my life.

English Barbarism in Colonial Virginia 1733--What sub-sheriffs did for their pay

This is from the January 1894 Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, occasioned by a review the previous year that expressed skepticism that British punishments were enacted in the colonies. My interest in one of the sub-sheriffs brought this to my attention.

Ancestors who Put Themselves Out There and Paid the Price

I keep finding more ancestors who were fined for "fornication" in Colonial Virginia. They were Quakers who could not marry in the Anglican Church but could make "pennance" [sic] by paying up whenever the local authorities decided they had a little cash ahead. How could I have ended up so mild-mannered and non-confrontational?

Greylock from "Greylock View" 1905, with second note on location.

A gift from Leonard Hall today.

I believe the view is toward Mt. Greylock looking north north west from atop the ridge which extends from Dalton to Cheshire.  I’d say the vantage point would be somewhere east of Rt. 8 above the present day Petricca concrete structures plant.  That long body of water is Cheshire Lake (a.k.a. Cheshire Reservoir).  That view is not available today since what was pasture in 1905 is now pretty dense woods. 

So says my resource friend Ruth's resource friend Bob D. People who know their stuff are treasures. 

Bob kept gnawing at this:

By the way, I used Google Maps to more accurately determine the sight line to Greylock in that photograph.  My earlier assessment was accurate; but I can now say with some certainty that the site was from a point on the hill rather nearby here.  That hill site is known locally as “The Boulders” for some neat glacier-carved rock outcroppings on top.  It is still owned by Crane & Co; I expect that inviting meadow was a popular picnic spot in 1905.  It is wooded now, but it might be possible to see some of that view in winter, after the leaves have fallen off the hardwoods there.