Friday, March 18, 2005

One Line Says it All

From my sister:
This is BookTV, not Court TV. If they were interviewing Herman Melville,
would they put the whale/Moby Dick on for balance?

1 comment:

Space Fission said...

I really liked the comment about Moby Dick. In my article about news media coverage of the trial I also used the great white whale as a metaphor.


http://ideajournal.com/yurman-media.html

[snip]

In deciding to track media coverage of the trial I felt I'd in effect harpooned the great white whale of Holocaust denial and all of the monstrous controversy surrounding it. There's a lot of mixed metaphors about this trial that bring to mind images from Melville's classic novel Moby Dick. For instance, with the verdict against him, one could say Irving's ship, his reputation as a historian, was destroyed by the very creature he created and pursued with the same demonic intensity as Captain Ahab.

[end snip]