For ORNERY PEOPLE: A Stewart Cousin Justifies a Hasty Remarriage

Two months after his first wife died, he married a widow from the neighborhood. When one of his friends told him that it was too early for him to marry again, he said "Well, John, she is just as dead now as she will ever be." 

This has got to go into ORNERY PEOPLE: WHAT WAS A DEPRESSION OKIE?

"Sceptical" posts on the blog LieStoppers about MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE

I really enjoyed the WSJ review by Carl Rollyson. His summary of what is a complex book is succinct and right on target. Rollyson clearly "gets it."

I am about two-thirds of the way through the book-- it is fascinating but not a "quick read." There are so many facets to it.

There is the autobiography of Prof. Parker himself, revealing his humble origins (so different from the Ivy Leaguers that I wonder about some "classism" in their put-downs.) There are convincing expositions about the art of literary biography and the importance of archival research. There is devastating criticism of literary critics who pose as biographers. There is Prof. Parker's obsession with Melville and the very minute details of the great author's life which inform us about Melville's work. Finally, and I agree with Rollyson on this, there is Prof. Parker's burning anger at those who have denied his biographical methods, his conclusions, and even his veracity. Parker is an academic Ahab-- one in search of history, truth and understanding instead of a whale.

Prof. Parker has clearly won the battle with his critics with "Melville Biography," which will long be read after those critics are forgotten. The book is a capstone of his life-long work.

Some may not know that the LieStoppers blog was created in 2006 while lacrosse players at Duke were being falsely charged with rape by a corrupt district attorney, later disbarred, and being hounded by a very vocal "Gang of 88," Duke professors, all while the President of Duke University, Richard Brodhead, let it be known that whatever the lacrosse players did, "it was bad enough." LieStoppers continues while the trial of Brodhead drags on.

Rollyson in Wall Street Journal on Parker's MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY

Much about bloggers here! Rollyson mentions Nicole Perrin by name!

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424127887324532004578358183100732300-lMyQjAxMTAzMDIwOTEyNDkyWj.html?mod=wsj_valettop_email

Dalyon Packer

Ziah Packer

The Case for Flaying Certain Classes of Sub-Literary Malefactors?

Here is a new novel, Emily and Herman by John J. Healey based on a fictional enounter between Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville.
http://www.arcadepub.com/book/?GCOI=55970100770550&

Emily & Herman, A Novel

www.arcadepub.com

Emily & Herman. A delightful romantic account of Emily Dickinson’s and Herman Melville’s...

ENVY

ENVY: Because he was in Coolidge's cabinet, one of my Schlemp cousins got to meet John Buchan.

XXXXX YYYYY Stopped Smoking Today

Today in the San Luis Obispo TRIBUNE a loving obituary for a man whose real name I will not use (although his last name is one of my family names). The obit begins with the name followed by these words: "stopped smoking March 11." That's all the comment on the cause of death, and the whole little obit is written with love. All the hope that he would stop killing himself with cigarettes is in that first sentence.

7 five-star reviews on Amazon for MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE

This is what I wanted in 2002, with the second volume of my biography, when what I got was slander in the NATION, the NEW YORK TIMES, and the NEW REPUBLIC. This time, the NEW YORKER blog listed MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE as one of the Books to Watch Out for in January ("Parker writes with a rare combination of humor and passion that hooks the reader into this potentially arcane subject"), and Carl Rollyson has commented twice in The Biographer's Craft about his upcoming review in the NEW CRITERION. In his first comment he stressed that the book is not just about Melville but "the genre of biography," which is just want I wanted reviewers to say. Now, the Chronicle of Higher Education gave a page to it a few weeks ago which mainly consisted of accurate quotations from me but which was sabotaged by the second paragraph, a fantasy about the causes of my grievances in 2002. The Chronicle simply would not say that I had real grievances--that I had been falsely accused of making up books that Melville finished but that now are lost. Instead, it invented some disagreement with Brodhead over "editorial principles" and weirdly blurred Delbanco's behavior so that it seemed that everything I was later quoted as saying had no basis. The Chronicle, in short, was dishonest in interpolating a phony second paragraph instead of just stating my objections to the reviewers in 2002. Is it so important to protect Richard Brodhead and Andrew Delbanco from their own words?--that I alone in my "black hole" had heard of POEMS? that I had merely surmised the existence of 2 books and therefore could not be trusted anywhere in either volume?

So, the thugs will probably come, but for now Amazon has not been hacked. Let them come on, but please, let them use their real names, not hide behind pseudonyms like "flotsam," the first and most vicious commentator on the Chronicle article--which was a set up inviting such comments.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful 5.0 out of 5 stars You Must Read This Book!, January 23, 2013 By  David Weddle - See all my reviews Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?) This review is from: Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative (Hardcover) Over the past 40 years a virus has invaded the cloistered enclaves of academia. A virus called "theory" -- literary theory, film theory, art theory, architectural theory, Semiotics, and New Criticism to name just a few strains. Each version boils down to the same thing: a secret language created by inbred academics permeated with multisyllabic nonsense words, and tortured incomprehensible syntax that does not seek to communicate meaning, but to obscure it to all but a chosen few. These phantasmagoric theories do not teach students how to write a novel, a work of nonfiction, or how to paint, or sculpt, or build a house. It is an astounding fraud perpetrated on unsuspecting university students and the parents who have to mortgage their homes to pay for this carnival midway malarkey. In his groundbreaking new book, Melville Biography - An Inside Narrative, Hershel Parker goes to war against the theorists with an Old Testament wrath. I say, bravo! Parker brilliantly portrays how the rise of theory has degraded academic standards and slowly strangled the art of original research. The apostles of New Criticism argue that it is not important what Herman Melville intended when he wrote his masterworks; nor is it important what impact social events and commercial pressures had on his work. All that matters is the marvelous web of theories the New Critics can spin around his work. Parker calls this out for what it is: a rationalization for laziness, and a supreme act of narcissism. Behind Parker's rage is a passionate plea for academics not to cede the field of original research to journalists. He fervently hopes they will shake off the fever that has gripped them for almost half a century and embrace once again the fundamentals of scholarship. Anyone concerned about the state of our universities and the quality of our social discourse must read this outstanding book. Help other customers find the most helpful reviews  Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Report abuse | Permalink Comment Comment (1) A. Apter says: Bravo! the four reviews of this book yours included are some of the best reviews I’ve read on amazon 6 of 6 people found the following review helpful 5.0 out of 5 stars A Good Time Coming, January 22, 2013 By  Yankee Reader - See all my reviews This review is from: Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative (Hardcover) Parker's new book was on display at MLA in Boston earlier this month (Jan 2013), so I bought one of the copies on the spot. Much controversy surrounded Parker's earlier two-volume biography of Melville, and I wanted to see how Parker would shape his public justification in this work. The book accomplishes that, but in the larger context of Parker's own life of scholarship and continuing discoveries in Melville Biography. Parker could have published his central section, the exposure of bad scholarship and irresponsible reviewing, without going farther, but the presence of Parts I and III shows the process of scholarship and its fruits in a way that goes far beyond the structured arguments of Part II. Many years ago from Randall's DUKEDOM LARGE ENOUGH I recognized the joy of book collecting and the value of early editions to the scholar. Parker's book should stimulate an equal appreciation of the scholar's life and work at the same time he increases our appreciation of Melville's. MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE functions as both prologue and epilogue to Herman Melville: A Biography (Herman Melville: A Biography (Volume 1, 1819-1851), Herman Melville: A Biography (Volume 2, 1851-1891)), as Parker's Melville: The Making of the Poet expands his second volume of the big biography. Parker's work compares to that of the great Shakespeare scholars: E. K. Chambers, who in volume after volume established the modern understanding of Shakespeare and his theatre, S. Schoenbaum, who sorted out Shakespeare's lives, and Andrew Gurr, the modern Chambers. None of these had to deal with the resistance Parker did when presenting his profound research, including paradigm-shifting discoveries that were ignored or denied by his reviewers. Hereafter, as Melville said about a contemporary writer, "a grateful posterity will take the best care" of Hershel Parker. Help other customers find the most helpful reviews  Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Report abuse | Permalink Comment Comment 7 of 8 people found the following review helpful 5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating and Beautifully Written!, January 17, 2013 By  J O'Connell "Jack" (New England) - See all my reviews Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?) This review is from: Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative (Hardcover) If you have any interest in Melville, Moby-Dick, literary biography ... or beautiful, lucid prose, Professor Parker's magnificent new book is for you. I can't recommend it highly enough. Imagine: A brilliant scholar who can write! No wonder Parker understands Melville better than any of the many Melvillians working today--he is a fellow writer. The book is chock-full of so many illuminating and fascinating elements. Whether he is explaining to us--always so clearly and entertainingly--what he knows of Melville's hotel dinner with Hawthorne, at which HM presented one of the first copies of Moby-Dick to its deidcatee, and how he knows it, or elucidating the enormity of the cost HM (and his family) paid for his genius and it manifestation on paper, Parker is always your favorite college lecturer--wise, informed, enthused, reasoned, often funny, and empathetic. He desires to tell you why he loves Melville and why you will, too. Parker also knows the value of archival research--and the hours and miles logged during the creation of his definitive two-volume life of HM are stunning. Mr. Parker has the ability to convey the excitement of the true research scholar in the moment of "the find," as in this passage: "There will always be a few literary detectives who devote months or years to the pursuit of documents in the confidence that at last they will sit at midnight in a little bare motel room in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and turn through a big shoebox full of what looks like only bills of lading until they spy a blue folded paper, clearly a letter, a letter with the signature `Really Thine, H Melville'..." Melville, our greatest novelist, deserves Parker, our greatest biographer. My own opinion is that Parker was robbed of the Pulitzer for Herman Melville: A Biography. Is it too much to hope that the Pulitzer committee corrects its mistake by selecting Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative for next year's prize? Help other customers find the most helpful reviews  Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Report abuse | Permalink Comment Comment (1) A. Apter says: Thanks. I think you prodded me over the edge. I have to read this. 4 of 4 people found the following review helpful 5.0 out of 5 stars Joining the Chorus of Praise, January 22, 2013 By  Robert Pratt Hastie - See all my reviews Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?) This review is from: Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative (Hardcover) Heartily I join with Jack O'Connell in his chorus of praise for Hershel Parker's marvelous new book Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative. Much of what I would say about it to my friends he has already elegantly enumerated in his review so I won't repeat his points here, with all of which I agree. I would only add that if your subject is Melville, then like the deep-diving writer himself, you have to want more More MORE from his biographer and the only MORE biographer of Melville is Dr. Parker. That he has been attacked by the lesser "researchers" in the field for the archival-based detail-oriented biographic approach (isn't that the essence of scholarship?)is baffling to me and I don't blame him a bit for fighting back in this book with a vitriol equal to that which has been flung at him. (Who can help thinking of Moby-Dick under attack by harpoons?) But what is new here is a rare glimpse of the personal cost of scholarship, not only in regard to inexcusable reviews but to eyes and vertebrae and lungs, day after weary day bending over microfiche machines and difficult-to-decipher documents, seeking out the gold nugget that will increase our understanding of the details of Melville's life. (There is also an update on new information regarding Melville which has been found since the 2-volume biography.) I am especially pleased therefore in this book to learn something of the personal life of this matchless Melville scholar himself. In fact, what is so special about Dr. Parker's 2-volume biography about Melville is that it is all about Melville, not about Parker, whereas in most of the New Criticism biographies the subject of the biography too often is lost in the fog of the self-serving viewpoint of the biographer whose main purpose is to prove some academic/sociologic/sexual thesis. Not so with Dr. Parker who is all Melville all the time. But at least now, with the Inside Narrative, we at last see something of Hershel as well. I am personally delighted. Robert Pratt Hastie Help other customers find the most helpful reviews  Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Report abuse | Permalink Comment Comment (1) Initial post: Jan 25, 2013 8:26:04 AM PST R. Parrish says: And as an aside... As someone who followed the Duke lacrosse case closely, it was interesting to also discover within a portrait of Richard Brodhead, and to notice that his earlier attitudes and actions may have foreshadowed the path he was to take a few years later, when confronted with a crisis of another sort, when he was President of Duke University. In the lacrosse case, he seemed to exhibit a primary concern for public reaction (otherwise known as PR), to the extent that he appeared (at least to this observer) to be willing to sacrifice even innocent students for the sake of a university's image. For example, he stated, when interviewed near the case's end (Jan. 2007), "Why didn't I join with the defense team and file motions with them? Because it was essential that we not be seen as a partisan player in this..." --which is pious-sounding; but it a catch-all excuse which just as easily could have been uttered by a bystander at any lynching; and on reflection, seems ( when taken in connection with other examples of Brodhead's indifference or even outright hostility to his falsely-accused students) to suggest a kind of callousness on his part towards the unjustified suffering of others. (Perhaps he was in agreement with Duke's Board Chair, Robert K. Steel, who said it would be "best for Duke" if the falsely-accused went to trial, and even if they were convicted; and when asked to explain his failure to defend them, replied, "Sometimes individuals have to suffer for the good of the organization.") Towards the author of the Melville biographies, and even towards Melville himself, we seem to see a similar frame of mind exhibited: "Brodhead's false accusations against me must be in some way a consequence of his New Critical training and practice, I decided. In sober truth, if your training leads you to dehumanize Melville, to be blind to his agony, how can you not carry your training over to the way you treat real living people...? If you think that facts about authors are not real and authors are not real, then you may come to see living people outside your own private circle as unreal. Cut them and they do not bleed, or if they do bleed their suffering can never be of the significance of your own discomforts of the discomforts of your class...Some of the behavior of the Melville critics who refuse to look at documentary evidence is innate in their character, I assume, but some of their actions, I would think, must be a consequence of lifelong practice of a dehumanizing literary approach, the New Criticism. Their nature is subdued to what it works in, like the dyer's hand." (p. 173) Alas, the committee searching for a new president for Duke could not avail itself of the discussions about Brodhead's nature as presented in this volume; otherwise its considerations might have turned in another direction; and its ensuing disgrace (which forever tainted the university for its role in "Scottsboro II") might have been averted. 3 of 3 people found the following review helpful 5.0 out of 5 stars Inspired and inspirational, January 26, 2013 By  Paul Seydor (Los Angeles, California USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)    This review is from: Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative (Hardcover) Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative is Hershel Parker's answer to numerous requests for a one volume version of his magisterial two volume biography of Herman Melville. Reasoning, plausibly, that the moment a single volume appeared, no one would read the original, Professor Parker gives us instead this splendid, wholly new book, which is actually several books in one, among them a biography of a biography; an autobiography of the biographer retracing all the many paths, places, departures, travels, destinations, by ways, swings, and roundabouts, both actual and virtual, by which writers get to know and become intimate with their subject; an odyssey, at once intellectual, spiritual, and deeply personal, of an esteemed literary critic and scholar engaging, grappling, and struggling with some of the largest, most important and central issues of scholarship and criticism of the past century. Parker, a brilliant thinker, can match the most arcane theorists on their own turf, but his is no dry, academic tome: written with verve, style, breathless energy, and unflagging enthusiasm (in the best Emersonian sense of that word), this book is also a stunning critique and stinging rebuke to half a century of critical theory and practice, both inside the academy and outside it in the world of book reviewing and commentary, beginning with the New Criticism and going through structuralism, deconstructionism, postmodernism, to the New Historicism, movements that seek to strip literature and the other arts of every human, social, cultural, and historical context except that of the work itself as an aesthetic object or structure. Arguing against so called "organic unity"--which, as it grew out of the New Criticism, should really be called "hermetically sealed unity"--Parker seeks to restore criticism and scholarship to the study of that far more human and humane, to say nothing of real, unity: that of the artist, his thoughts, his ideas, his feelings, his beliefs, his circumstances, his life and times, and how he transmuted these through the mysteries of talent, imagination, and genius into timeless works of art. Passionate, combative, blazingly eloquent, fearlessly frank and candid, and, yes, there's no sense using lesser words, inspired and inspirational, not least in his celebration of the joys and rewards of old fashioned--that is, patient, dogged, committed, tireless--research, Parker here demonstrates once again that he is a peerless Melvillian, a standard setting scholar, and a truly great critic. --Paul Seydor, author of Peckinpah: The Western Films: A Reconsideration Help other customers find the most helpful reviews  Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Report abuse | Permalink Comment Comment 5.0 out of 5 stars Another great Melville bio, March 11, 2013 By  Robert Perrey "Bob P." (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)    Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?) This review is from: Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative (Hardcover) Hershel Parker, the foremost Melville scholar, has provided another great biography of Herman Melville to add to his definitive two-volume set. Help other customers find the most helpful reviews  Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Report abuse | Permalink Comment Comment 5.0 out of 5 stars Dive right in!, February 11, 2013 By  Another Reader (Watertown, MA USA) - See all my reviews This review is from: Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative (Hardcover) We are, all of us -- readers, writers, publishers, critics, students, and everyone else -- creatures in time and space. I suspect that Hershel Parker grasps the significance of this seemingly obvious statement in uniquely important ways. This book manages to integrate narratives of the biographer's work with narratives of our greatest American writer's creative work, along with critical history and (indirectly) the history of literature in the academy. My own POV: I'm a non-academic office worker who graduated with a BA in literature in the '70s, and discovered Melville only after college. I've tried making up for lost time since, and early on found "Moby-Dick as Doubloon" (Hayford & Parker) rewarding. Only after college did I appreciate the fact that English/American Literature had not always been a core component of higher education curricula, and that what I had learned, and the way I learned it, were in some sense cultural products. This "inside narrative" is rewarding on many levels: listen carefully to Parker in this book, and you can bring light (and yes, heat!) to your reading experience. May even "rattle your cage," as a good book should: but you'll know more about where the author (and you) are coming from! Highly recommended. Help other customers find the most helpful reviews  Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Report abuse | Permalink Comment Comment