With our big Moby-Dick event only 10 weeks away, my thoughts are frequently turning to…whales.
They seem to be everywhere. I glanced at the New York Times Magazine Sunday before last, and there was a white whale on the cover. It was not The Great White Whale, but Norway’s celebrity Hvaldimir, a pint-sized (only 2,700 pounds) young beluga, white as the Norwegian snow – “The Whale Who Went AWOL” from the Russian Navy and seems to like being around humans. He retrieved a cellphone, for example, that a woman had dropped into a fjord!
About the same time, the esteemed British weekly The Economist ran a long essay on “The Price of a Whale,” examining whether the environmental value of whales could be calculated by quantifying the amount of carbon they move from the atmosphere into the ocean depths. In other words, are there “practical” reasons as well as ethical ones for not killing whales for their meat? (Hope you are listening, Norway, Iceland, and Japan!)
And, quite recently, the Phoenix ran a photo of one of the mysterious little cut-outs of whales that have been appearing here and there in downtown Bristol (once, in its modest way, a whaling port…though not as much a one as Warren, not to mention New Bedford).
I mention all this just in case you haven’t registered for BookFest 2024 yet…which you can easily do by visiting bristolbookfest.com. The Friday April 5 keynote is free of charge, as is the reception afterwards at the Rogers Free Library. The day-long Saturday April 6 program with its extraordinary speakers costs $40 (students free). Please register for either or both dates as space is limited.
And while you are at bristolbookfest.com, hit the tab that will take you to our fascinating “Lib Guide” – an online anthology of Melville and Moby-Dick lore assembled for BookFest by Roger Williams University research librarian Hannah Goodall. It ranges from whaling history to the Great White Whale in pop culture.
