#billy budd sailor

[cinematic-literature]

In from the Side (2022) by Matt Carter

Book title: Billy Budd, Sailor and Selected Tales (1924) by Herman Melville

[frodolives]

Terence Stamp in Billy Budd (1962).

[ramblingandpie]

Reading Billy Budd and regaling my wife about Handsome Sailors.

Me: "Do you wanna join my virtual class at 2 to talk about Handsome Sailors?"

Claire: "... I've seen Horatio Hornblower. I'm good."

Me: *continues reading while she meanders to another room, then shouts to the other room*

Me: "He's so handsome that he's not afraid of death!"

Claire: "Wait like his handsomeness makes him not fear death or how are these things related?"

Me: "Well. You see. His inherent innocence and goodness radiates in his complexion so is, actually, indistinguishable from his handsomeness."

Claire: "Obviously."

I forgot to tell her that Billy Budd is being killed because he was falsely accused by a dude who is Mostly Handsome But Not As Handsome As Billy, Owing To A Poor Chin And Lack Of Innocence-Aura. Fortunately, she can read about it here on Tumblr.

[peach-pot]

i want to know what book you’re reading for class and found that fanfic of lol

billy budd. it’s fine. I don’t think it’s for me but others would enjoy it I think.

[andrasta14]

I’m reading Billy Budd for the first time right now and like, here I’d thought MOBY DICK was gay...!! 🤣

[acmecorpgraphicsarchive]

(via Gridllr)

Herman Melville, (1924, 1962, 2017), Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative), Edited from the Manuscript with Introduction and Notes by Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Phoenix Books, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, and London, 1962

[biblioklept]

Mass-market Monday | Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories by Herman Melville

Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories by Herman Melville, Herman Melville. No collection editor credited. Bantam Books (1989). No cover designer credited. Cover is a detail of Ships and an Approaching Storm Off Owl’s Head, Maine, 1860 by Fitz Hugh Lane. 278 pages. I read Bartleby in 10th grade and took up I prefer not to as a mantra that I’d throw at poor dear Ms. Hall any time she asked me to do…

[falldowntwicegetuponce]

Everytime I listen to "Billy Budd", a song widely rumoured to be about Johnny Marr, because of the original context (John Marr and Other Sailors and "now it's twelve years on" etc...) I get stuck on the end verse "I would lose both of my legs Oh, if it meant you could be free", because nowadays I instantly think of the awkward title of JMs biography "Set the boy free"... maybe coincidence, maybe not...

[some-greatreward]

billy budd is obviously about marr, like herman melville had a whole poem titled “john marr and other sailors” and it’s part of the same collection as billy budd. so like.

mmm yeah agree, hence why i let myself have the obvious ones, like this one and Speedway and IWSY for example. As well as Angel Angel which is confirmed by moz himself to be about johnny and Hand in Glove which johnny personally signed off on as being about them.

another thing is just, it makes complete sense for personalities like moz (or, if we're taking it back to the original post, p/c) to write these sorts of cryptic, referential songs to the other. like a reference like this would NOT be a coincidence in moz's hands. (and im sure there'd be others we miss but would be obvious to johnny, going off what we know about what their communication style was like when they were still Smiths.) Whereas i feel like someone like johnny wouldn't love to dwell on the past and would probably steer his music away from that kind of association. But i'm not too familiar with solo johnny apart from the hits so happy to be proven wrong by someone who knows better.

i do kind of love it when lyricists refuse to clarify or explain their words though. like it's kind of neat that there's only one person in the world who knows for certain who the subject of IWSY is, and god knows he's taking that to the grave with him

[grandhotelabyss]

In an old interview with Tyler Cowen, Knausgaard called Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius the greatest story ever written—a sentiment with which Cowen agreed. (Cowen seems to read everything, but there's something about an economist—an orthodox heterodox economist, no less!—making pronouncements on literature that makes me suspicious of the claim. Then again, he once wrote, "Shakespeare is very likely the deepest thinker the human race has produced." No argument there.)

Personally, I might bestow the honour on The Dead, but it's really more of a novella, and I'm admittedly quite the Deadhead. (To be clear, in the high arts a "Deadhead" is the moniker we attribute to readers obsessed with the poetic intensities of swift cessations: Death in Venice, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, the deaths of Sula, Septimus, Billy Budd, and Pierce Inverarity, etc. Indeed, poetic intensities and swift cessations may simply be the novella tout court. On the subject of jam bands—and cheese—I remain mysteriously silent.)

Might Joyce have authored the greatest story, the greatest novel, and the greatest love letters? (Forgive me, sweet Jane, for such futile superlatives against your soul-stirring pen. I am half agony, half cope.) I suppose Borges is more Beethovenian in his revolutionizing of the form, whereas Joyce aimed for a Bach-like perfection as it existed at the time.

Of course, one mustn't forget the dozen or so contenders from Poe, Kafka, and Chekhov, not to mention The Lottery and A Good Man is Hard to Find. What do you think? As always, thank you for your splendid insights! And to the anonymous hundreds reading this, or, at this point in my unsolicited soliloquy, the anonymous dozen skimming, please subscribe to John's serialized novel!

Thank you, David! Yes, I find Cowen dispiritingly, exhaustingly, demoralizingly well-read. Someone I admire on Substack recently gave a list of 10 pieces of advice for undergraduates, and I liked nine of them, but I didn't like the first: everything, he said, is interesting. But everything is not interesting. The undergraduate, the veritable ephebe, is right to be bored by some things. If I found everything interesting, who would I be? I almost cultivate my non-interests. With so many books I do want to read in the world, it's a relief to know there are also many books (books about economics, for example) that I do not want to read. Really, only obsessions matter. The personality, to be a personality, must have its limits, as must the work of art, even if as a novelist, I do aspire in my own way to the "everything and nothing" Borges imputed to Shakespeare, or to the Homeric as against the Virgilian in Mark Van Doren's line that Virgil is a style, Homer a world. Only Borges could be Homeric in a short story, though; for the rest of us—yes, even for Joyce—it takes a novel. A fellow Deadhead, I agree with you that that is a novella in the death-obsessed ranks of the great novellas. I add Heart of Darkness, The Metamorphosis, and Nella Larsen's Quicksand to your fine catalogue.

(Incidentally, when I was in college, a friend dragged me to see a jam band called The String Cheese Incident. They played a theater on the ground floor of Soldiers and Sailors Hall on the University of Pittsburgh campus, upstairs of which the great Gothic scene of Lecter's escape in Silence of the Lambs had been filmed a little less than a decade before. Jam bands don't do it for me; I was heavy bored at that concert, I have to tell you; Chesterton's neglected cheese be damned, poets have their right to silence on some subjects—because, again, everything is not interesting.)

Now to your question. When I think of great short stories, I do not, like George Saunders, think of 19th-century Russians. (19th-century Russians are better at length, when they go on and on and on—even, if you ask me, Chekhov, as I said earlier this year in praise of his novella, The Duel, a great novella not quite belonging to your catalogue inasmuch as it defeats death, more or less.) No, I think of 19th-century Americans. I think of "Ligeia" and "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Man of the Crowd," and I think of "Bartleby, the Scrivener" and "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids" and "Benito Cereno," and I think of "The Author of Beltraffio" and "The Middle Years" and "The Figure in the Carpet." Above all, I think of Hawthorne, of "Young Goodman Brown" and "The Minister's Black Veil" and "Ethan Brand" and "Wakefield" and "The May-Pole of Merry Mount" and "The Artist of the Beautiful" and "The Birth-Mark" and (my favorite) "Rappaccini's Daughter." A great deal of Borges is already in those stories, these tales or parables or half-allegories—I do agree with both Knausgaard and Cowen that Borges's "Tlön," or maybe "The Aleph," must be the paradigm of the modern story—and a great deal of Kafka, Jackson, and O'Connor, too.

Honorable mention: I am not an expert on the 19th-century French, but "The Unknown Masterpiece" by Balzac is a new favorite, which I read for the first time just this year. A good tale in its own right, but to have anticipated, almost to the point of clairvoyance, the whole future course of art in one short story from the 1830s—!

Caveat: "Rappaccini's Daughter" has 3000 fewer words than The Dead; and "Benito Cereno" is double the length of "Rappaccini's Daughter." Why type some titles in italics and some in quotation marks? The distinction between novella and story must be qualitative rather than quantitative, with the distinction not quite only about death, since all three narratives at least include if they do not dwell upon swift cessations. "Rappaccini's Daughter" and "Benito Cereno" seem to me to be stories because they are about one thing, as opposed to The Dead, which, like The Scarlet Letter, is about several things—and as opposed, of course, to Moby-Dick and to Ulysses, which are, Aleph-wise, about absolutely everything ("[A]ny man unaccustomed to such sights, to have looked over her side that night, would have almost thought the whole round sea was one huge cheese, and those sharks the maggots in it"; "Cheese digests all but itself. Mity cheese"), and make everything as interesting as ever everything can be.

[books-apples-socks]

me, knees deep in "billy budd, sailor": everyone on this boat is gay my partner, without sparing me a glance: are you talking about black sails again?

[doumekiss]

[churchblogmatics-blog]

Books for political formation

Books that have left an indelible mark on my understanding of politics some way. My political development is unfinished, so this list is unfinished - I'm always open to suggestions

Capital Vol. 1, Karl Marx - unmasks the inherently exploitative social relations embedded within capitalism, critiques capitalism as ineffective/self-destructive (not just immoral)

Capital and Ideology, Thomas Piketty - there is no such thing as a "natural" social order, examines how inequality regimes have emerged and been justified across the world throughout the past 1000 years of history

Nixon Agonistes, Garry Wills - captures a cross-section of American politics over a short period, probing insights into the psychology driving political affinities, documents the evolution of the word "liberal" in American political discourse

What Are We Doing Here?, Marilynne Robinson - provides a constructive, anti-Hobbesian view of society

Poverty, by America, Matthew Desmond - shows the extent to which poverty in America is a policy choice, harm reduction is possible without revolution

The Code of Capital, Katharina Pistor - a cursory overview of the legal strategies to insulate capital from any competing legal claims

Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt - laziness and insistence on self-exoneration is often the psychological engine behind human wickedness and injustice over and above malice

Illness as Metaphor / AIDS and Its Metaphors, Susan Sontag - shows how deeply ingrained prejudicial views of disability is within our collective language and psyche

Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West, Cormac McCarthy - violence has never been excised from politics, the invisibility of violence to the bourgeois is an illusion

Lysistrata, Aristophanes - unmasks the nature of gender politics despite its operation behind closed doors, imagines a project of mass organizing along gender lines

Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud - civility is unfortunately a tenuous prospect

Heroes of the Fourth Turning, Will Arbery - excoriates conservative psychological pathologies

Martin Luther King Jr

A Gift of Love - justice is love in public

Letter From a Birmingham Jail - there are contexts where civil disobedience is mandatory for the Christian, solidarity with the marginalized is always mandatory

The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot - progress is not inevitable

William Faulkner

Absalom, Absalom! - racism is an inexorable part of American capitalism, imperialism cannot be stopped until we are able to free ourselves of our disingenuous national myths

The Sound and the Fury - nostalgia makes you an idiot, unable to understand your present or to predict your future

Herman Melville

Billy Budd, Sailor - history is unavoidably malleable

Moby-Dick - a true-believer demagogue is worse than a cynically disingenuous one, democracy can be an ineffective antidote to a tyrant

Franz Kafka

The Trial - the very procedures instilled to protect (or at least mitigate) injustice can also exacerbate it

The Metamorphosis - modernity interferes with our ability to see and relate to others as human, liberalism's self-advocating and individualistic ethic destroys us from the inside out because it forecloses our ability to recognize this

John Milton

Areopagitica - freedom of speech is as much about the individual's freedom to render judgment on speech as it is about the speakers ability to speak, the problem with censorship is the top-down nature of it, not in the governed people's discernment of quality or value

Paradise Lost - similar to Birmingham Jail, the character of Abdiel represents righteous opposition to Earthly principalities

The Autobiography of Malcolm X - the psychological, spiritual, emotional toll that being black in America takes on a person, black empowerment is a necessary step towards black liberation

Ursula LeGuin

The Lathe of Heaven - structural reform can only be undertaken democratically, no change is without trade-offs so changes must be broadly accepted and supported by the populace who will inevitably bear the unforeseen burden that results

The Ones Who Walk Away From the Omelas - shows the extent to which our brains are broken by imperialistic thinking, exploitation is a necessary feature of the worlds we are capable of imagining

[princess-of-the-corner]

Toontown: Corporate Clash Recap: Barnacle Boatyard Mainline Tasks (Dover)

Last time on Toontown Corporate Clash: We helped HQ Officer Wade with his problems.

This time, we speak with Dover in

Red Rover, Red Rover

-

The first and only step in this Toontask is to speak with Dover in Barnacle Boatyard’s Toon HQ.

Dover is a yellow horse in an eyepatch and sailor cap.

“Hey there!”

“I’ve heard you’ve been doing great things so far.”

“I sure am glad, because those things should include mine as well!”

“Sorry if that came off a bit rough, I’m just really new to this and I could use the help…”

“So the first big thing I have on my list is assisting the schooling locations around Barnacle Boatyard.”

“We need to start right away in setting them up to teach Toons how to prepare themselves from the Cogs.”

“If you could help get Professor Pearl at School of Fish Tutoring on the right page, that would help lots.”

“Thanks, [Toon Name]!”

Completing this “task” earns the player 242 experience and 8 jellybeans.

It also gives you your next task in the Dover arc:

First Day of School

Professor Pearl’s shop, the School of Fish Tutoring, can be found on Anchor Avenue.

Speak to the Professor to earn 242 experience and 8 jellybeans.

You are now tasked with recovering 3 Pencils from Pencil Pushers anywhere in Toontown.

Once you’ve recovered them, you can return them to Professor Pearl for 242 more experience and 8 more jellybeans.

Now you need to recover 2 books from the Lawbots.

Bringing those back earns you 242 experience and 8 jellybeans, and Professor Pearl sends you back to Dover to turn in your task.

“You’re really whipping Barnacle Boatyard into tip-top shape aren’t you?”

“I’m really glad I got you working with me to be honest! You make my job so much easier.”

“So I’m gonna give you this next one on my list…”

“It says here Billy Budd has had some troubles recently since the Cogs came and needs some assistance.”

“If you could go over to his shop, Billy Budd’s Big Bargain Binnacle Barn over on Buccaneer Boulevard and see what’s up, that’d be a big help.”

“Good luck!”

You are rewarded with 1696 experience and 58 jellybeans for completing this task. Which brings us to our next step on the agenda:

Big Binnacle Bash

The first step is, of course, speaking with Billy Budd, who rewards the player with 364 experience and 12 jellybeans, and tasks you with fishing up a binnacle from any of the ponds around town.

Bringing the binnacle back to Billy Budd rewards the player with 364 experience and 12 jellybeans. However, he needs it fixed, and so sends you to speak with Admiral Hook at Hook’s Clock Repair on Buccaneer Boulevard. After all, how different could a compass be from a clock? (For context, a binnacle is usually placed at the helm of a ship to protect a compass from the elements while still keeping the navigational equipment visible.)

Admiral Hook does give the player 364 experience and 12 jellybeans, but as it turns out, there’s a lot of difference between a compass and a clock.

So, you’re tasked with defeating 3 level 3+ Cogs in Barnacle Boatyard.

Reporting back to Admiral Hook after doing this earns the player 1819 experience and 62 jellybeans, and you can now return to Billy Budd.

Doing so grants the player 163 experience and 6 jellybeans, but Billy Bud needs a bit more work done on his boat, and thus sends the player to speak with Salty Stan in From Fore to Aft on Buccaneer Boulevard.

Stan gives the player 163 experience and 6 jellybeans, but needs some spare parts. Namely, 4 of them, recovered from the Cogs right here in Barnacle Boatyard.

Returning them to Salty Stan rewards the player with 163 more experience and 6 more jellybeans, but now he needs time to actually use them in repairs, and thus sends the player out to defeat 3 Cogs in Barnacle Boatyard to pass the time.

Doing this for him earns the player 163 more experience and 6 more jellybeans.

Now you can return to Billy Budd for 163 more experience and 6 additional jellybeans. He needs you to speak with Ree Pare at Flounder and Sink Ship Repairs on Anchor Avenue.

Ree Pare gives the player, you guessed it, 163 experience and 6 jellybeans, but needs you to get them 2 “Spare Metals” from the Cogs in Barnacle Boatyard.

Bring them back to Ree Pare for 163 experience and 6 jellybeans, then report back to Billy Budd, who will do the same as thanks for helping fix his ship (I think that was the plot), and then sends you back to Dover.

“You really ARE good!”

“Like, no kidding, you’re as good as I’ve heard!”

“Honestly I’m very happy. It’s hard to say that since the Cogs came, but I really am. You’ve solved all my major issues in no time!”

“I’m going to hand you over to Misty now, she’s in need of some assistance and I can’t imagine anyone else better than you right now.”

“Thank you and good luck!”

Completing this task earns the player 1627 experience and 56 jellybeans, and also concludes the “Dover Arc” of Barnacle Boatyard’s taskline.

Next time, we check in on Misty.

-

See you’d think I’d have the Red Rover song stuck in my head but no it’s the Pink Rover version.

[cscclibrary]

Some of the world's most beloved and influential authors were born in August! Click their names to find their work in our collection or via OhioLINK.

Herman Melville (August 1, 1819), fiction writer and poet. Notable works: Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, "Bartleby, the Scrivener," Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative).

James Baldwin (August 2, 1924), writer and activist. Notable works: Go Tell It on the Mountain, "Sonny's Blues," Notes of a Native Son.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (August 4, 1792), poet, novelist, playwright, and husband of Mary Shelley. Notable works: "Ozymandias," "A Defense of Poetry," The Cenci.

Guy de Maupassant (August 5, 1850), author of the Naturalist school. Notable works: "The Necklace," "The Horla," Pierre and Jean.

Wendell Berry (August 5, 1934), farmer, environmental activist, writer, and winner of the National Humanities Medal. Notable works: The Unsettling of America, Citizenship Papers, "The Vacation."

Walter Dean Myers (August 12, 1937), author of children's and young adult literature. Notable works: Hoops, Monster, Fallen Angels.

William Maxwell (August 16, 1908), writer and long-time fiction editor at The New Yorker. Notable works: So Long, See You Tomorrow, The Heavenly Tenants.

Ray Bradbury (August 22, 1920), influential author of innumerable science-fiction short stories and novels, many adapted into other media. Notable works: Fahrenheit 451, Something Wicked This Way Comes, "The Veldt."

Dorothy Parker (August 22, 1893), poet, fiction writer, and satirist; member of the Algonquin Round Table. Notable works: Enough Rope, Death and Taxes, Laments for the Living.

Jorge Luis Borges (August 24, 1899), author and translator. Notable works: The Aleph and Other Stories, The Book of Imaginary Beings, "The Library of Babel."

Theodore Dreiser (August 27, 1871), journalist and author of Naturalist fiction. Notable works: Sister Carrie, An American Tragedy.

Mary Shelley (August 30, 1797), novelist and early author of science fiction. Notable works: Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, Mathilda.

Current Columbus State students and employees can check out items with their photo ID, or view ebooks using their Columbus State login and password. For help with research or finding items, contact our Reference department.