“Thick”I could not slim down all the synonymous and related words that “thick” and “density” conjure for me in Moby Dick. I began to lose my harness on the original word and anything which was not narrow, shallow, thin, or simple suddenly seemed “thick”. So I noticed Ishmael’s trend to digress on vastness, broadness, width, fat, immensity, ubiquity and the most fun—the infinite! Suddenly the whole book seemed all about the thickness of living and ideas and oceans and whales and books and endless everything and endless nothing and basically whatever we see and find in it all—whether madness or a nice, juicy steak. So, I felt a desire to show something which was thick, and dense and bulky and odd and which would make me want to digress while making it and looking at it also. I felt obliged to show the vast white whale himself. And the think spurt of blood and I was admittedly baffled at how to describe Ahab’s broad madness… so I cut out a large hole—to let us all question that one. I showed a big bloody hunk of blubber, lots of britty clusters, dense, twisted rope, the herds of shark, the sea, Queqeegs’s intricate and infinite tattoos and his golden, bulk. I also felt obliged to show great amounts of pages and words. So by the semi-white whale’s tail I also placed pictures of books words books and words and globe and a lobster at rest on a book.
2 comments:
Wow, this is awesome! I had a mental picture of this when we talked about it in class, but there is no way I could have imagined how original and creative it is. I love that while you also used books and words in the book attached to the tail, you also took all the meanings and instances of your words and used them as visual images and ideas. The creativity of this project shows what is possible for the work we do in school. I feel like we get so caught up in writing reports and taking tests that we forget that we're allowed to take chances and do something different!
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