Herman Melville seems to have got the idea to write a novel about a mad hunt for a fearsome whale during an ocean voyage, but he wrote most of “Moby-Dick” on land, in a valley, on a farm, in a house a-dither with his wife, his sisters, and his mother, a family man’s Walden. He named the farm Arrowhead, after the relics he dug up with his plow, and he wrote in a second-floor room that looked out on mountains in the distance and, nearer by, on fields of pumpkins and corn, crops he sowed to feed his animals, “my friends the horse & cow.” In the barn, he liked to watch them eat, especially the cow; he loved the way she moved her jaws. “She does it so mildly & with such a sanctity,” he wrote, the year he kept on his desk a copy of Thomas Beale’s “Natural History of the Sperm Whale.” On the door of his writing room, he installed a lock. By the hearth, he kept a harpoon; he used it as a poker.
There is no knowing Herman Melville. This summer marks the two-hundredth anniversary of his birth and the hundredth anniversary of his revival. Born in 1819, he died in 1891, forgotten, only to be rediscovered around the centennial of his birth, in 1919. Since then, his fame has known no bounds, his reputation no rest, his life no privacy. His papers have been published, the notes he made in his books digitized, a log of his every day compiled, each movement traced, all utterances analyzed, every dog-eared page scanned and uploaded, like so much hay tossed up to a loft. And yet, as Andrew Delbanco wrote in a canny biography, “Melville: His World and Work” (2005), “the quest for the private Melville has usually led to a dead end.”
Over the course of his career, Manson has worked almost every angle the advice industry has to offer. He started out as a pickup artist before pivoting to what he calls “personal development.” His first book, self-published in 2011, was a deconstruction of the principles of pickup artistry called Models: Attract Women Through Honesty, and with every subsequent publication he’s widened his scope, from The Subtle Art’s focus on living a meaningful life to Everything Is Fucked’s argument that the best thing we can do for ourselves and the world is to stop freaking out so much.
It’s that latter point that’s a somewhat unexpected position to take in 2019, when so much in the world feels fraught and precarious. Between escalating political tensions and the pressing threat of climate change, it’s hard to take it seriously when a rich white man says that, actually, our lives are better than they’ve ever been, and we’re just incapable of seeing that fact.
But maybe that’s to be expected of someone working in a profession that’s narrowly focused on the self. Manson’s success, and the limits of his ideas, suggest that self-help alone might not be enough to cure what ails us. What’s the role of a self-help guru when there’s so much happening in the world that’s outside any single person’s control?
I asked for $50 a month in poetry-related supplies. In return, I promised to produce original poems for office occasions and distribute emails to the New York office which illustrated various poetic forms. Those were different times, the heady height of the dot com boom, when whether a service needed to be provided (pet food delivery straight to your door, for example) weighed less as a factor than the fact that it could be provided, and that people might invest in it, once they developed a taste for it. A poet laureate in a law firm? The T.S. Eliot fan and I decided that this would be an excellent use of our new overlords’ money.
We had a deal.
For years, I counted this inability to drive as one of many personal failures. More recently, I’ve wondered whether I performed an accidental kindness for the world. I am one of those Darth Vader pedestrians who loudly tailgate couples moving slowly up the sidewalk, and I’m sure that I would be a twit behind the wheel. Perhaps I was protected from a bad move by my own incompetence—one of those mercies which the universe often bestows on the young (who rarely appreciate the gift). In America today, there are more cars than drivers. Yet our investment in these vehicles has yielded dubious returns. Since 1899, more than 3.6 million people have died in traffic accidents in the United States, and more than eighty million have been injured; pedestrian fatalities have risen in the past few years. The road has emerged as the setting for our most violent illustrations of systemic racism, combustion engines have helped create a climate crisis, and the quest for oil has led our soldiers into war.
Every technology has costs, but lately we’ve had reason to question even cars’ putative benefits. Free men and women on the open road have turned out to be such disastrous drivers that carmakers are developing computers to replace them. When the people of the future look back at our century of auto life, will they regard it as a useful stage of forward motion or as a wrong turn? Is it possible that, a hundred years from now, the age of gassing up and driving will be seen as just a cul-de-sac in transportation history, a trip we never should have taken?
The obstacles to absolute precision, Küffen soon discovered, are many. For starters, the moon is very far away, and even light takes more than a second to travel the 238,900 miles between here and there. So too did the audiovisual data beamed back down into the analog television sets of the roughly 500 million people watching as Armstrong descended the ladder of the lunar module. Add the time to process that data, and the delay between the moment Armstrong took the step and the moment viewers on Earth saw it extends to as long as a few seconds, by some accounts.
Even accounting for lag, synchronizing the audio with the video still poses a problem, mainly because hardly any of what’s audible in the recordings is visible in the footage. Had Armstrong taken out a bass drum and given it a thump just before stepping off the ladder, that moment would have anchored the sights to the sounds. But when the astronauts spoke, their reflective visors concealed their lips.
J. Michael Straczynski's Becoming Superman is much more than a rag-to-riches story — and not only because he goes from rags to riches about half a dozen times.
Becoming Superman: My Journey From Poverty to Hollywood is a touching, devastating, unexpectedly funny memoir about a man born into a destructive, abusive environment who went on to overcome his demons — both physical and psychological — and forge a trailblazing career in animation, television, comics and movies. This memoir is simultaneously painful and inspiring, infuriating and full of hope, humorous and depressing. It is everything good storytelling should be, regardless of medium.
True little waves, from high above in a window seat
so few of you have enough of yourselves
to fold over onto, forming a dress