https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/historys-dick-jokes-on-melville-and-hawthorne

[ish mailian]

His humor is as bawdy as Shakespeare's, as Grotesque as Chaucer's, as
blasphemous as  Voltaire's, as satirical as Rabelais's and as daring
as anything P pulls off in GR.


Some might call it crude. Many have.

On Mon, Feb 1, 2016 at 7:03 AM, Jochen Stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com> wrote:
> For the essay being excellent, the author should have checked what you did,
> Ish, don't you think? About when "dick" for penis came into use?
>
> Melville sure was funny, even tongue-in-cheek funny but definitively not
> crude funny.
>
> 2016-02-01 12:38 GMT+01:00 ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com>:
>>
>>  An excellent essay. Witty and clever and fun. It  introduces, in
>> brief, how Melville criticism and scholarship developed and some of
>> the more titillating topics that have fascinated critics over the past
>> century or so.
>>
>> I looked this up and I think that the use of "dick" for the penis,
>> sex, or an asshole (dickhead) probably came into use in America well
>> after the composition and publication of his novels, perhaps after his
>> death in 1891.
>>
>>  In any event, Melville's novels are funny (i.e., queer), humorous
>> (i.e., funny) and Melville, a Confidence-Man sure, used his celebrity,
>> a Christian man who lived with exotic men and women, worked with
>> seamen in the sperm industry to shock, confuse, and amuse his readers.
>>
>> The letters are, imho, beautiful examples of Melville's style. Is he
>> queer or mad? Is Walt Whitman?
>>
>> While I think of it, Melville's reviews (as noted in the dick-joke
>> essay) are an excellent place to start, and CM chapters 14, 33, 44.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Jan 31, 2016 at 5:42 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/historys-dick-jokes-on-melville-and-hawthorne
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
>
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l