Heidi Go Seek: Photoshop, Moby-Dick, and the word 'vagina'

(Day 7 has been lost in the Flu. May be found later.)

Day: 8

Countdown: 33

Suggestion: Learn the basics of Photoshop

I used the word ‘vagina' in a scholarly essay I wrote about Moby-Dick in graduate school.

Yes, yes, I did. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t just float the word around for no reason; it wasn’t as if I were referring to my vagina. But what I wrote still took a risk.

So after handing in the essay, I called my professor and left an urgent message begging him not to read it. An hour later, I left a breezy “hey-ya-know-that-first-message-I-left-sounding-panicked-and-crazy?-Just-ignore-it” message for my professor.

Well done, I thought to myself, now you don’t seem like complete nutter at all.

However, a week later when my professor handed the paper back to me, I learned a huge lesson in risk-taking: he called my paper 'brilliant.'

The real brilliance, obviously, is Moby-Dick, and the real risk-taker, Melville. This is why I decided to combine my desire to learn the basics of Photoshop (yes, I've gone this long without learning) with showing people just how incredibly brilliant Moby-Dick and Melville are.

Challenge: to choose five completely random pages in the book and find a quote on each page that – even out of context – shows Melville’s skill as a writer and depth as a thinker. In short, it would be good, thought-provoking stuff.

Second challenge: create a multi-page collage in Photoshop using those quotes.

(Yea, I know it ain't pretty, but I learned as I did. Such are beginnings, sometimes.)

"Old man of oceans! of all this fiery life of thine, what will at length remain but one little heap of ashes!...'Well, well; I heard Ahab mutter, 'Here some one thrusts these cards into these old hands of mine; swears that I must play them, and no others.' And damn me, Ahab, but thou actest right; live in the game, and die it!"

"...that one most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a second; and a second ended only begins a third and so on, for ever and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort."

"I was told there were still smaller ones [whale vertebrae], but they had been lost by some little cannibal urchins, the priest's children, who had stolen them to play marbles with. Thus we see how that the spine of even the hugest of living things tapers off at last into simple child's play."