My post has nothing to do with Twitter, although I have wondered if Melville would have been able to write Moby Dick if Twitter had been around. You certainly don’t write a tome like that without a healthy attention span.

My thoughts after having read the first six chapters of Moby Dick:

• Why is Queequeg described by Ishmael as such a mysterious figure?
• Melville is having a rollicking time spinning his yarn. He is not afraid to take walks down long side roads to get where he’s going. And he can easily transition from talking about such disparate topics as the difference between a town-bred dandy and a bumpkin dandy to a meditation on the pervasiveness of whaling life in New Bedford.
• Herman does a great job of communicating the excitement of someone about to embark on a journey. Everything is colored with the heightened awareness of someone whose eyes are wide open in anticipation of where tomorrow will take him.

I have too many Web sites. Okay. There, I’ve said it. That, and I’ve been spending wasting too much time on Twitter trying to build a “readership,” so I can then point people to my sites whenever I post something new. This strategy, however, becomes a problem when you don’t write anything new to point at. (Not to mention the fact that a goodly number of Twitterers–if not a majority–are more interested in talking about how great Twitter is than having an intellectually stimulating discussion.) I have an excuse for being unprolific (Don’t bother looking that word up–it doesn’t exist) this past week. My wife and I drove up to Redwood City when we thought her sister had gone into labor. (She hadn’t.) We left South Pasadena after midnight on Tuesday morning and got in around six, which effectively meant that I spent the last three days walking around in a sort of waking dream, somewhere in the gray area between lucidity and REM sleep.

In other news, I’ve started reading Moby Dick. I thought about committing to post a response after each new chapter I read. But this guy seems to have that base covered. Besides writing insightful responses and crafting cerebral songs in response to each chapter of the book, he was also mentioned in the New York Times. I think I could definitely best him in the musicianship category, though. Not that it’s a contest or anything. Now, to sharpen my spear…