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Henderson the Rain King

When visiting England, be sure to pack a book, not for the flight, but for the restaurants.  All those jokes about comically absent waiters come to vividly aloof life in London.  Maybe it's because they aren't begging for tips, or because most restaurants don't need to free up tables.  Either way, once your food arrives, they don't care if you ever leave.  They'll never, ever bring you the check unless you specifically ask, and then you can wait easily 20 minutes before it arrives.  You should pay right then, because otherwise it'll be another 20 minutes before they pick it up again.  And this pales in comparison to pub etiquette, where you shouldn't expect anyone to bring food in the first place, and you can only purchase a drink by looking forlorn and thirsty.  But you get used to it.  Now that I'm back in the States, when a waiter refills my glass, I think, "Why the free water?  Did I go to school with you?"

I carried around books as little health boosts in the restaurant waiting game, as well as the vessels into which I poured a tall helping of London juice each night.  That metaphor got away from me.  As far as I can tell, London juice would just be Red Bull, like everywhere.  Maybe vodka?  My usual euphemism for vodka is Midnight Sprite.  Go and use that.  The point was, whichever book I was reading, I had the day's events in mind, which seemed to make them differently shaped containers holding a single essence rather than individual sources of new thoughts.  That picture is not one of them, by the way.  But look at that thing.  What the hell?

One London book was Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King.  A friend of mine has read this at least five times in different stages of life.  That's some recommendation.  I've never read anything five times.  I've read a handful of books three times.  On the other hand, I'd read those books again in a heartbeat if I didn't already feel the constant pressure to catch up on all the books I haven't read yet.  Anyway, the story involves a fat, rich, selfish American who goes to Africa because his heart keeps crying, I want!  His heart won't get more specific that that.  Does he find what he's looking for?  Not to get all LeVar Burton on you, but read the book yourself, lazy pie.  I'm busy fixing the engines.

I enjoyed Henderson, although the ending was somehow unsatisfying, and I think it's an interesting choice for a favorite book.  It doesn't try too hard to be important literature.  Bellow slips all his little observations about life and death into throwaway sentences spoken by unreliable or comic characters, and the narrator is so much of an idiot that at first he's downright unlikeable.  Later, though, I started to feel the sequence of pity, amusement, and empathy that I feel with Dostoevsky characters, especially the overwrought, intellectually paralyzed ones.  Ivan Karamazov, the Underground Man, Kirilov, and so on.  Nabokov wrote a lot of these guys, too, the thinky douchebag.  That's the literary term.  (Post-structuralism.)

One favorite bit:  Henderson and his guide, Romilayu, have been captured by a possibly hostile tribe and left in a guest hut for the night.  They don't have any idea what will happen to them in the morning.  Henderson discovers a dead body in the hut.  Is it some kind of warning, or a frame-up?  He decides to drag out the corpse and leave it in a ditch somewhere.  Romilayu thinks they should just go to sleep and not make trouble, but Henderson's offended by the morgue-like accommodations.

"You damned fool," I said to Romilayu, who stood off half-concealed.  "Pick up this guy's feet, and help me carry.  If we see anybody you can just drop them and beat it.  I'll run for it alone."

He obeyed me, and, as if dressed in a second man and groaning, my head filled with flashes and thick noises, I went into the lane.  And a voice within me rose and said, "Do you love death so much?  Then here, have some."

"I do not love it," I said.  "Who told you that?  That's a mistake."

In a movie version, the voice within Henderson would get at least second billing and someone would have to get Morgan Freeman to go buck wild in the voiceover booth.  Thanks to his ever-present, irrational heart, Henderson's narration has a mood of barely controlled delirium, giving a sense of constant motion to a book where, honestly, not that much happens.  You can't get away from his thoughts any more than he can.  I think that's part of the point, that no matter how far you think you've traveled, you're still you, inflicting your horrible self on the locals.  I'm sure I irritated everyone I came across in ways I never even noticed.  In England, is it rude to sit around reading in a restaurant?  My brain and stomach were satisfied, but after a couple hours, the heart cries out, "Here sits a man in search of a soul.  I want!  I want the check, and maybe a mint.  Really, the mouth wants that, but I'm cool with it, too."

Technorati Tags: London, travel, Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King, the heart, waiters, Africa, mint, frogs and lions

England Expects That Every Man Will Do His Duty

If I had to sum up my London trip in one dead person, it would be Horatio Nelson.  (Lazier writers require hundreds of dead folks to sum up London, as in 28 Days Later.)  I didn't plan for Nelson to become so ubiquitous, but in retrospect, it makes sense.  I've just finished Patrick O'Brian's 21-book Aubrey/Maturin series, and much of Jack Aubrey's character is drawn from Nelson, even though Nelson himself also exists within the series' historical timeline.  Nelson changed the face of history; you couldn't leave him out.  The fictional Aubrey fought under Nelson at the Battle of the Nile, before the series opens, but Nelson the character only briefly appears in one book, as I recall.  That's good, because in the first few books, all Jack's daring sea maneuvers and ruses de guerre were actually Nelson.  No one wants to talk to fictional characters based on themselves.  So awkward.  And it can only occur in fiction, so if it happens to you, you know that you're fictional, too.

In London, I saw Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square, the extensive and fascinating Nelson's Navy exhibit at the National Maritime Museum, including the clothes he died in, the room where his body lay in state, a collection of Nelson portraits and nautically themed paintings, including Turner's Battle of Trafalgar, seen here, Nelson's memorial statue in St. Paul's Cathedral, and descended into the crypt of St. Paul's to see his tomb.  He's there with Christopher Wren, the Duke of Wellington, John Donne, Florence Nightingale, and other historic memorialized bones.  Maybe it was all the earlier Nelson research, or the overwhelming beauty of St. Paul's, but touching his tomb really stirred something in me.  I don't have much to stir, but it definitely rotated and I think some slopped over.

There's no shortage of poignant moments in Nelson's life.  I also saw one of the letters he wrote just before the Battle of Trafalgar, to his illegitimate daughter Horatia, telling her to give her mother, Lady Emma Hamilton, a kiss for him.  After his death, the British government went against his wishes and refused to support Lady Hamilton, who wound up in debtor's prison with her daughter, fled the country, and died an alcoholic.  But Horatia turned out all right.  She married and had a bunch of children, most of whom were named after Nelson in varying degrees.  That's what you start when you name your daughter Horatia.  I'm willing to give Lord Nelson a pass on that one.  Horatio Sanz, no.  Not until he wins at least three more decisive naval battles.

Technorati Tags: Nelson, Horatio Nelson, Lord Nelson, Trafalgar, St. Paul's Cathedral, Emma Hamilton, Lady Hamilton, Patrick O'Brian, Jack Aubrey

Harry Potter Has Many Feelings

Harry Potter is an ordinary teenage boy, with one difference.  He feels things.  His scar hurts.  It hurts a lot.  And every time his scar hurts, his glasses get pinchy.  Because Harry Potter is the Boy Who Feels Two Things.

Spoiler-free examples:

p. 21:  . . . Harry, whose sadness mixed with a sense of humiliation . . .

p. 40:  Harry was embarrassed and astonished himself.

p. 41: . . . said Harry, torn between annoyance and a desire to laugh . . .

p. 181: . . . while inside him a kind of quiet eruption sent joy and grief thundering in equal measure through his veins.  [Ugh.]

p. 206: . . . their expressions reflected the mingled shock and gratitude he felt.

p.326:  He did not want his excited trepidation tainted with resentment.  [Without resentment, that's just one emotion, right?  No.  Excited trepidation.  Tricky!]

p. 327: . . . he felt a little lurch of apprehension and anticipation.

p. 362: . . . hardly knowing whether he was trying to hold in his anger or protect himself from the weight of his own disillusionment.

p. 368:  All the same, a little more fear leavened his exhilaration . . . [Shockingly, this takes place during Passover, when we feel only unleavened fear.]

p. 396:  "Fine," said Harry, half amused, half irritated.

p. 508:  Harry met her eyes with a mixture of defiance and shame.

 I mentioned in a previous post J.K. Rowling's prose style, which started out barely tolerable and got worse with each book, perhaps because she forced herself to knock them out so rapidly.  Consider this a simultaneous expression of annoyance mixed with more annoyance.  When characters feel two things simultaneously, neither emotion makes much impact on the reader.  Readers can figure out how a character feels in any given situation if you have well-defined characters acting realistically.  The English language doesn't have a lot of subtle words for emotions, but it has a lot of verbs, so let us use our brains a little and extrapolate motivation from action.  Or write in Russian, it has tons of emotions.  Japanese seems to have a lot, too, and I think at some point every single one of them has been displayed on a game show.  Japanese people have an emotion that encompasses saltiness, fear of lions and a desire to win.

 Or, if you want to exhaustively describe someone's inner life, create a timeline of emotion.  I've never been half amused, half irritated all in one go.  One feeling flows into another, following certain channels previously carved into my mind.  Henry James set most of his novels in other peoples' heads, but he created little stories out of their interior struggles, rather than just tagging a line of dialogue with two adjectives.  Daniel Radcliffe can figure out how to say this shit in the movie without Rowling beating us over the head with, "Harry is angry!  Also, he's sad!"

In conclusion and in summary, I feel conflicted about this subject.  On the one hand, this style of writing is insulting to the reader.  On the other hand, maybe the Harry Potter reader deserves to be insulted.  But if it were written less insultingly, no insult would be necessary.  Let's not head any further down that path.  Unlike J.K. Rowling's prose and Celine Dion's heart, I won't go on forever.

Technorati Tags: books, writing, J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter, emotion, Daniel Radcliffe, potions, lotions, love

Times Square

I only just discovered, from this New Yorker article, that Times Square was named after the New York Times.  It was called Longacre Square until the Times built their offices there in 1904.  I've been to Times Square countless times and never wondered about the name.  Now that I think about it, it sounds odd to name a square after something plural.  Reds Square?  Washingtons Square?  If it were Time Square, I would probably have just assumed it was a reference to the ball drop.  The next time I design a city I'll name part of it Annual Slowly Descending Ball Square.

 My memory for these "aha!" moments is directly proportional to how obvious the connection should have been.  When I was a kid I loved Chip's Ahoy! cookies, and I loved the ocean, but never realized the name was a play on "Ships ahoy!"  If I'd seen a barbershop called "Hair She Blows!" I think I would have caught that one, but who knows?  Wow, that's atrocious.  Looks like I can come up with terrible names for barbershops on the fly.

I've been reading Patrick O'Brian's 21-novel Aubrey/Maturin series for a couple of years now and I'm on the last book.  (I read other books as well these past couple years, so my reading rate isn't as slow as you might think.  Also, I savor every page and stop to look up every early 19th century nautical or medical term.  But I admit that as I get older, I read less often than I should.)  In every Aubrey/Maturin novel there's at least one common phrase that suddenly takes on new meaning when you discover its nautical origins.  Sailors had a lot of free time to come up with odd phrases and adapt ordinary words to a multitude of shipboard objects.  Then the phrases and meanings filtered back into ordinary speech, stripped of context.  I won't give any away, because it's a rare pleasure to suddenly re-think a word you never noticed before.  But for example, I find it cute that on a ship, the word "ship," as a verb, means at least three different things, in addition to the noun that the sailor stands on the whole damn time.  The Times Square ball has nautical origins, too, which may be why I ended up on this tangent, and seems a good place to stop.

Technorati Tags: Times Square, New York Times, New Yorker, Chips Ahoy, Patrick O'Brian, Aubrey/Maturin, nautical terms, words

Harry Potter and the [Joke goes here]

I'm sick of Harry Potter.  I've read all the previous books but I want to skip this one.  If I ever want to know what "finally" happens to Harry and his cheesy magical world, I can find out without reading 784 pages of characters dying, characters almost dying, characters dying and coming back, and characters caring about other characters, who promptly die.  Once you stop caring about the plot, there's no going back, because the prose sure as hell can't hold your interest.

My new favorite example of J.K. Rowling's style, from Nicholas Lezard in The Guardian:

Here, from page 324 of The Order of the Phoenix, to give you a typical example, are six consecutive descriptions of the way people speak. "...said Snape maliciously," "... said Harry furiously", " ... he said glumly", "... said Hermione severely", "... said Ron indignantly", " ... said Hermione loftily". Do I need to explain why that is such second-rate writing?

 You have to turn off your brain when you read Harry Potter.  I think that's why readers get hooked on the plot, because they're already numbed by the repetition and clichés.  After around the third book, even the plot started repeating itself, and we had to settle for the same old school year with the same easily-solved mysteries and interchangeable villains.  To be fair, these are children's books.  Children like repetition and need a lot of adverbs to explain how characters feel.  On the other hand, children also like giving each other purple nurples and after six of those you can see how I might be reluctant to receive a seventh.

My favorite part of Harry Potter has always been the fonts.  When Harry receives a letter, you'll actually see the letterhead and signature.  Newspaper articles and posters appear in news type, with big headers.  Sometimes there's even a little wax seal!  It's always a delightful surprise.  It feels like someone suddenly popped a piece of candy in my mouth.  Still, that's the only pleasure that sticks with me after reading all those pages, because the writing itself is just an artless series of instructions.  Harry does this, says that, and this new character or setting looks like that familiar fantasy image.  You don't even need to write a separate script for the movie adaptation -- there's nothing to adapt.  That's why the first couple of movies just let Chris Columbus expecto his patronum all over the screen, if you know what I mean.

Let's play our own game with a copy of Order of the Phoenix.  I'll select a page at random and show you the most clichéd part, adding a word or two from one of the many works of Harry Potter fan fiction here on the web.  Can you find them all?

There was an appreciative laugh and an outbreak of applause as Dumbledore sat down neatly and threw his long, turgid, glistening beard over his shoulder so as to keep it out of the way of his plate -- for food had appeared out of nowhere, so that the five long, engorged tables were groaning under joints of and pies and dishes of vegetables, bread, sauces, dildos, and flagons of pumpkin juice.

Harry, who was sweating profusely, looked desperately about the heaving, thrusting dungeon.  His own cauldron was issuing copious amounts of dark gray steam; Ron's was in a passionate embrace spitting green sparks.  Seamus was feverishly prodding the flames at the base of his cauldron with the tip of his wand, as they had gone out.  They all collapsed in a tangled heap of exhausted flesh.

Deprived of their usual car-washing and lawn-mowing pursuits, the inhabitants of Privet Drive had retreated into the shade of their cool houses, windows thrown wide in the hope of tempting in a nonexistent breeze.  The only person left outdoors was a teenage boy who was lying flat on his back in a flower bed, masturbating.

Technorati Tags: Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling, writing, parody, nonprofit use of brief quotes for purposes of parody, which is OK

Judge a Book by its Cover

Judge a Book by its Cover is a North Carolina librarian's guided tour of the worst book covers of all time.  It includes pulp fiction paperbacks as well as modern works of suck, and even books that are actually good but have been assigned to the graphic designer of Sorority Scandal at Martian Wizard School.  This cover of Billy Budd is going to really disappoint someone who expects to read about a guy towing a ship into harbor using only his wang.

On the other hand, Billy Budd starts out with a general description of the "Handsome Sailor," a type of guy often found around the docks of yesteryear.  Melville then slips into first person and describes a particularly attractive African sailor he saw one time.  The second paragraph gives more and more detail about just how hot this guy was, how everyone turned to look, as the narrator gets all worked up.  The third paragraph is just, "To return."  Then he continues with the actual story.

So Billy Budd has a bit of homoerotic humor in it already.  But this cover should have been reserved for Salty McBoner's Lusty Tales of the Deck Heaved and I Slipped.

Technorati Tags: books, book covers, blog, Billy Budd, Melville, lusty tales, "To return."

Book Burning, Blood Letting

A bookstore in Kansas City is burning books to protest lack of interest in reading.  It seems like a publicity stunt, as you can "save" a book for $1 plus postage.  Are people reading less literature?  Maybe so, but burning books makes you look like a jerk.  Almost every time you hear about a book burning, it's the work of a bunch of jerks.  If you need to warm a shivering puppy, it's probably OK, but even then, you should use a newspaper or even your own body heat.  Hugging a puppy back to health usually won't make you look like a jerk.

Do public schools still teach Fahrenheit 451?  I hope so.  Like all Bradbury, it's preachy but has a rich, dreamlike quality that you don't see much in science fiction, especially dystopic tales.  I'm sure there are others, but the only one that comes to mind is Riddley Walker, and it isn't really a dystopia.  1984, for example, is well written but it's half textbook and half lecture.  Besides, if you want to read 1984, you could just chat with your most politically active friend, right or left wing, and they'll reference it soon enough.  You'll also get to read Animal Farm that way.  A shortcut: start the conversation with, "Guess what I just heard Paris Hilton say in the mainstream media?  Apparently we're at war!"

Kids read Fahrenheit 451 as a sort of vaccine against burning books.  It's too tempting otherwise.  They innocently think, "Hey, I like books, and I like fire, so what if I put them together?"  Then they're like, "Where'd all the books go?  Why am I in jail?"  Bless their hearts.

Hypothetically, which books should be burned first?  The older ones?  There are plenty of Bibles in the world, so there's no danger of losing it for good.  (That extra-thin Bible paper makes a pretty fire, too, though it's a shame to waste it.)  The newer ones?  There are also plenty of Da Vinci Codes.  Prospero's Books, the Kansas City bookstore, has a "rare advance reading copy" of it for sale.  Why the hell would you keep that?  Wait,  I thought this was the advance reading copy of The Da Vinci Code.

If you could truly eliminate all copies of a book, is worse to burn the works of a dead author, who can't write anything new?  And should you start with literary criticism and other derivative works, before burning the source material?  (I'd say, "yes," unless it's effusive praise of my own writing, in which case it should be etched on a big ass diamond that I can wear on my head.)  As you can see, there are so many moral dilemmas involved in torching a pile of books, that you should avoid it whenever possible.  The next time you want to burn books, have an apple, or a carrot stick, instead.  It sounds crazy but it works.

So, here's a copy of "Dover Beach," by Matthew Arnold.  It's the poem Montag reads in Fahrenheit 451.  Now there's one more copy in the world.  You couldn't burn it if you tried.  What are you, going to burn the Internet?  Good luck with that!  I think you'll find that those blazing-fast download speeds are merely metaphorical.  You also can't use Gametap to flood the Internet.  That time I threatened people on the Animal Crossing forums with it, I was bluffing.  Sorry.  I just wanted an ark full of pets.

Dover Beach

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Agaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

-- Matthew Arnold
 

Who's Gonna Betray Me?

I need a vizier!

I've put off getting a vizier for a while now, hoping that if I were incompetent enough, someone would just show up to take advantage of me.  No dice.  I have djinni, swordsmen, eunuchs, court magicians, courtesans up the wazoo (not literally), and a vast collection of colorful, luxurious fabrics that I spend most of the day draping over other fabrics, but no vizier.  So now I'm a beloved ruler, my word is law, and no one plots secretly to usurp my power for evil purposes.  What about you?  Will you be my downfall?  Please?

I'd really like to meet a traditional, scheming vizier, like in A Thousand and One Nights, or Prince of Persia, or King's Quest VI.  I'd even settle for that one from the Disney movie with the asshole parrot.   You can be sycophantic, or mysterious, or treat me with thinly (or thickly) disguised contempt.  As long as you eventually betray me, I'm easy.

Not to be picky, but I do have one rule: I can't see it coming.  Very important.  You can't just punch me, grab a carpet and run.  I'd prefer a few years of subtly damaging advice, and a slow consolidation of power.  Be insidious, but have fun with it.  I'm open to magical spells, some sort of wish-based trickery, blackmail (I'm very open to blackmail), and by all means, collude with my rivals.  Currently I live at peace with the neighboring kingdoms, but I bet you could teach me how to make enemies.  (I know a little HTML, if that helps.)

So don't telegraph your moves.  Remember the boss fight in Sands of Time, where the vizier would do this long, obvious wind-up before launching a spell?  Don't do that.  Don't say, "Sign this decree, effendi, which gives me full control over all matters of state, so I can throw you in a dungeon, ha ha ha!"  Do you see why that's wrong?  If you kind of cover up the evilest sub-clauses with your hand, I might sign it, but you should really try harder than that.  Do you know what I like to declare?  National holidays.  I'll sign anything that says National Holiday, and without my reading glasses (which I keep in a box on the windowsill) I can't read anything smaller than an 8 point font.

I think you'll really like it here!  The palace is a bit crowded right now with some heroic urchins and princes who like to perform daring last-minute rescues, but I'm sure they'll keep to themselves.  I'll just be poking around my treasure room, completely distracted by these long-winded stories my wife likes to tell, stumbling upon some old sceptres and lamps that probably don't do anything . . . if you want to borrow them for an art project or something, feel free.  I am allergic to cherries.  I don't know why I said that just now.  Oh well!  I look forward to many years of loyal service (wink, wink) from you.

Compensation: play your cards right, you'll see
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Live Ink or Undead Zombie Ink?

How are you reading this paragraph?  Left to right, up and down, words make sentences, and so on? Well, you’re doing it wrong.  Guess what, you’re illiterate! We all are.  You might say we’re reading-tarded.  But now there’s hope!

A company called Walker Reading Technology has created a tool called Live Ink which reformats text into something that looks like programming code or teenage poetry.  They say the old reading method fights against biology, the new one helps readers absorb information better, and long story short, kids’ test scores are guaranteed to rise like scholastic bottle rockets.

Click the image and see which version reads more easily.  (Article from Venture Beat, via Slashdot.)  This example stacks the deck a bit, though.  The “old school text” is in three different fonts, and written in that irritatingly chatty, rhetorical question style that you see in women’s magazines and “special advertising sections.”  For another example, see the first paragraph of this post.

Now, I’m not saying it doesn’t work.  These are some very smart people with grants from the Department of Education and possibly some studies showing improved test scores.  I’m sure it works like a charm.  Unfortunately, it also sucks.  Like a sucky charm.

Check out their example of Moby-Dick in Live Ink.  Can you imagine reading the entire book this way?  First of all, it would be eighty shajillion pages long.  Secondly, it turns Herman Melville into a shitty teenage poet.  When people first try to write poetry, they break ordinary sentences into tiny breathless fragments because
every
single thought
that comes
into
my
brilliant mind
is so deep
and
meaningful
that they all
(and I)
deserve
your
com-
ple-
te
attention.

That’s not poetry, that’s stuttering.  It all looks and reads the same.  The cure for it is to read a lot of good poetry until you can recognize your favorite poets’ work just by the voice.  If you kept writing all that time, that should be just about when you discover your own voice.  Hopefully it’s a good one, because you’re stuck with it.  Keep in mind, some atrocious poets have distinctive voices, but all good poets do.  You’ll have a lot of fun liquored-up arguments about which is which.

“Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.”  Fuck yeah!  Ishmael is now, at this moment, in da house.  Superficially, here are some impressions that seep from that sentence: a garrulous, somewhat defensive narrator, a rootless wanderer, unlucky but hopeful, and he’s a different man now than he was back then.  And “the watery part of the world” just flows out in the course of conversation -- you’re halfway through the next sentence before you notice its soothing, elegant beauty.

Now, that isn’t a poem, it’s a sentence, in a long, dense book full of sentences like that.  If you like it, you’ll keep reading, and if you don’t, that’s fine too.  Live Ink tries to cram it down your gullet by squeezing it into the ugliest form possible, a “poem” literally written by a machine:

Some years ago
-- never mind
        how long precisely –-
    having little
        or no money
            in my purse,
    and nothing particular
        to interest me on shore,
I thought
    I would
        sail about a little
    and see the watery part
        of the world.

That’s a fucking abomination.  Melville loved language –- he loved digressions, scholarly allusions, colorful jargon, typesetting jokes, conversational rhythms, and letting different styles of writing suddenly bubble up within one man’s narration.  If you strip all that out, “improved comprehension” is laughable.  Listen: A guy goes to sea and his obsessive captain gets killed by a whale.  Now you “comprehend” Moby-Dick as much as you’ll ever need to in ordinary life.

I like the idea of helping people who have trouble reading.  And plenty of sentences are crappy enough that they lose nothing in translation.  But if you really want to read Moby-Dick as opposed to look at its sentences, try an unabridged audiobook.  There’s no shame in that.  However, I can say without exaggeration that if you read the Live Ink version, Herman Melville will claw his way out of the grave, ride the bus to your place, smash through the door, and coil a goddamn rope around your neck.
And then he
will gnaw
your leg off.
Rrraaaah.