No one loves whaling as much as Father Mapple loves whaling. Dude is like former NFL players who defend the league against its critics. Can’t let go of the lifestyle.

This August, as we prepare to unleash a truly remarkable fall catalog, MobyLives will be taking a bit of a breather. We’ll still post the occasional news item or feature, but for most of this month we’ll be posting a roundup like this every morning. We will, of course, remain active on Twitter and Facebook. We hope you have a great August, and that you’ll keep checking in with us!

• The Orwell Estate took Amazon to task for egregiously misquoting George Orwell to prove a point about… something in their ongoing feud with Hachette. And Bill Hamilton, Orwell’s literary executor, doesn’t hold back—they accused Amazon of “doublespeak” and compared the corporation to Nineteen Eighty-Four‘s Ministry of Truth. “As the literary executor for the Orwell estate, I’m both appalled and wryly amused that Amazon’s tactics should come straight out of Orwell’s own nightmare dystopia, 1984,” Hamilton wrote to The New York Times. “It doesn’t say much for Amazon’s regard for truth, or its powers of literary understanding. Or perhaps Amazon just doesn’t care about the authors it is selling. If that’s the case, why should we listen to a word it says about the value of books?” (The New York Times)
• Speaking of Orwell, George Packer has a nice piece in The New Yorker, “Amazon v. Hachette: What Would Orwell Think?” Here’s Packer: “Like Orwell, we ought to be able to hold in our heads the complex idea that what is good for readers might ultimately be bad for writers. After all, Amazon is not a literary nonprofit; it’s a corporate giant that wants to sell everything to everyone. Lately, Wall Street has been unhappy with the company’s financial performance, and, in response, Amazon has started to raise prices on, for example, its Prime memberships. That’s what the dispute with Hachette is really about: Amazon’s need for higher profits.” Back in February, Packer wrote a long feature on Amazon that quotes Melville House co-publisher Dennis Johnson extensively. (The New Yorker)
• The robots think your writing is pretentious and they aren’t having any of it. Annie Murphy Paul reports on the rise of computer programs that grade student essays, and how they may be even more effective than human teachers at getting students to stop using “In summation”. (The Hechinger Report)
• The UK website Flubit will help you undercut Amazon. Do it just to watch the Amazon smile turn into a tight, furious grimace. (Forbes)
• Get yourself in the mood for Lars Iyer’s Wittgenstein Jr (4th September), Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is now a webpage. Hyperlinks have never been so daunting. (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus)
• Want to start a bookstore? Richard Kemp has some advice. “My experience over the last three years challenges this and shows you can succeed in a hostile trading environment. But be warned. It takes a lot of hard work. You will not be rich. But you will have a sustainable business along with just about the best job of any on the high street.” (BookTrade)
• Moby-Dick gets the Clickhole treatment. (Clickhole)

Today’s passage from Moby-Dick: 

It is not probable that this monomania in him took its instant rise at the precise time of his bodily dismemberment. Then, in darting at the monster, knife in hand, he had but given loose to a sudden, passionate, corporal animosity; and when he received the stroke that tore him, he probably but felt the agonizing bodily laceration, but nothing more. Yet, when by this collision forced to turn towards home, and for long months of days and weeks, Ahab and anguish lay stretched together in one hammock, rounding in mid winter that dreary, howling Patagonian Cape; then it was, that his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another; and so interfusing, made him mad. That it was only then, on the homeward voyage, after the encounter, that the final monomania seized him, seems all but certain from the fact that, at intervals during the passage, he was a raving lunatic; and, though unlimbed of a leg, yet such vital strength yet lurked in his Egyptian chest, and was moreover intensified by his delirium, that his mates were forced to lace him fast, even there, as he sailed, raving in his hammock. In a strait-jacket, he swung to the mad rockings of the gales. And, when running into more sufferable latitudes, the ship, with mild stun’sails spread, floated across the tranquil tropics, and, to all appearances, the old man’s delirium seemed left behind him with the Cape Horn swells, and he came forth from his dark den into the blessed light and air; even then, when he bore that firm, collected front, however pale, and issued his calm orders once again; and his mates thanked God the direful madness was now gone; even then, Ahab, in his hidden self, raved on. Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form. Ahab’s full lunacy subsided not, but deepeningly contracted; like the unabated Hudson, when that noble Northman flows narrowly, but unfathomably through the Highland gorge. But, as in his narrow-flowing monomania, not one jot of Ahab’s broad madness had been left behind; so in that broad madness, not one jot of his great natural intellect had perished. That before living agent, now became the living instrument. If such a furious trope may stand, his special lunacy stormed his general sanity, and carried it, and turned all its concentred cannon upon its own mad mark; so that far from having lost his strength, Ahab, to that one end, did now possess a thousand fold more potency than ever he had sanely brought to bear upon any one reasonable object.–Chapter 41 

Today’s song: “Blue is the Frequency” by Royal Trux