From PRX.

Studio 360.

Tall dry cappuccino at the bar.

Thank you.

So I'm sitting in a Starbucks sipping my usual triple grande latte,

thinking about how weird it is that it's named after

the first mate in Melville's Moby Dick. Starbucks, I mean, not the Grande Late. And then I think,

what an enduring brand. Here I am 150 years after it was written, still thinking of Herman Melville's big, rolling, difficult novel.

You're to look on a white wind.

Come on, then.

And I start remembering scenes from when I first read Moby Dick 30 years ago, the harpoon

chase at night.

The sailor who falls into a dead whale's head at sea,

plummeting toward the bottom until at the last second,

Quee-Quag, the tattooed South Sea Islander, dives in to haul his fellow crewman out.

I remember Captain Ahab swearing vengeance at God and Moby Dick with St. Elmo's fire,

flickering white flames on the yard arms of his ship, the Pequot.

It lights our way to the white whale!

And I remember all those digressive chapters that really had nothing to do with the plot at all.

Regarding the sperm whale's head is a solid oblong, you may on an inclined plane sideways

divide.

The ones that filled about half the book, where Melville meditates at length on the shape of a whale's forehead

...