the power of lists: moby-dick, album-a-day, and the man who taught me that writers have rhythm

I have in my life, for reasons various and innumerable, derived great pleasure from the practice of list-keeping. While one could say with some confidence that my organizational style is generally more, uh, stylistic than organizational (a phrase I first heard from this entry’s titular man), I am fastidious when it comes to the enumeration of the banal details of, well, basically everything.

This is why, even though the album-a-day project was less than successful on the blog front, I have a tidy record of all of the albums I enjoyed in this capacity for the duration of the M-Dick hiatus (available upon request, of course, but not to be shared here otherwise; what purpose would that serve?).

This is why, after months of false starts and broken promises (they’re just like pie crusts!), I fell back in love with Herman Melville.

This is why I know that Jay Hepner will be missed.

At least when I deliberately abandoned Ishmael to pursue science, I left him at a logical place: the departure of the Pequod from Nantucket. At first, this chapter seems have been invented purely for the purpose of belaboring the elusiveness of Captain Ahab, who has still not appeared on deck. Taking that intellectual stance early on in the chapter greatly reduced my desire to actually read it, given that, you know, nothing was going to happen. Peleg and Bildad are running around the deck, barking instructions in their characteristic (caricatured) ways. It’s irritating for two reasons: it’s full of ship-type terms that I don’t care about, and I know that they’re not enduring characters to the narrative because they are not actually going to sail away with the Pequod so who really cares what they have to say, anyway?

Then, the chapter ends:

Ship and boast diverged; the cold, damp night breeze blew between; a screaming gull flew overhead; the two hulls wildly rolled; we gave three heavy-hearted cheers, and blindly plunged like fate into the lone Atlantic.

It’s a list. Melville didn’t have to make it a list. He definitely didn’t have to use that many semicolons, and the linear passage of time assures us that he wasn’t just trying to piss off Kurt Vonnegut. (I mean, I don’t think that Melville even went to college, so. You know. Whatever, KV.) Melville’s lists are powerful because they form the internal rhythm of novel, one that I never even noticed before now. It’s an attractive anatomy. The rhythm of a writer can draw you in the same way that the rhythm of a musician can. I learned that from Jay Hepner.

Mr. Hepner was an English instructor at my high school, the guy who would grade your essays when your actual teacher couldn’t, leaving complicated notes about the precision of language and the pain it brought him to see you overwrite your introductory paragraphs. He told me, among other things, to read William Zinsser’s On Writing Well. In this “classic guide to writing nonfiction”, Zinsser dedicates a chapter to something that I’ve spent a long time thinking about: voice. “Go with what seems inevitable in your own heritage,” Zinsser writes. “Embrace it and it may lead you to eloquence.”

Since Hep passed away this fall, I have been struggling to find some phrase, some heritage, that could lead me to that sort of eloquence. I listened to Neil Young. I looked at some of the papers I’d written, ones with his handwriting on them, ones where he’d urged me to reconsider my syntax or my adjective choice. I wouldn’t want to embarrass him with some heavy-handed tribute, but, as is so often the case with great teachers, it’s hard to say what you mean without being sentimental. So let’s leave it at this: Jay Hepner, I have been trying to take your advice, and I think that it’s served me well so far. I have to say that, knowing that you’re gone, even though I haven’t seen you in years, I’ve had my own case of the hypos.

I wish it were so easy as hopping on a whaling ship to get rid of them.

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