I never knew that Moby Dick had a sequel!
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I know a guy who recites Finnegan’s Wake, set to music, from memory. Or at least he SAYS he does. Who’s gonna know if he’s wrong?
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“Here, I’ll demonstrate!
'riverrun, past Eve and Adams, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, stately, plump Buck Mulligan doth dan the boggyhole frump the sim sala bim, d’artangan footie the branch, umpsheen! cry the hootle-plow, and her breasts heaved…”
“okay, we believe you.”
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That’s Dean Peterson in the video, not Joshua Foer. His TED talk is also worth watching.
Let me know if you want to learn how to do it. It only takes 15-30 minutes. 
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That’s not fun, that’s Farenheit 451’s temporary solution to its dystopia.
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I disagree.
The stuff Melville wrote is a bit outdated, though.
It was in that movie/book as well, but no, people didn’t have TV back then and did all kinds of shit to pass the time. So it was either memorize books or Colonialism. Sometimes both.
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People memorise enormous tracts of the Bible. Hell, large numbers of people memorise the entire Quran! A chapter of Moby Dick pales into insignificance by comparison. The question occurs to me, what book would be worth memorising? I mean, in general, or scientifically, without recourse to religious tracts. The only thing that springs to my mind is “Mathematics for Computing” - which is a bulky volume containing a large number of useful equations. I think that would stump the most enthusiastic mnemonist.
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#79. Beware of the Vulcan greed for knowledge.
-The Ferengi Rules of Acquisition
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That’s Dean Peterson. Not Josh.
In nineteenth-century Europe, when academic discussions were happening about whether or not the Iliad and the Odyssey had been recited by bards before being transcribed, it seems to have been a thing to learn and recite the Iliad’s “Catalog of Ships” section (listing the places that sent ships to Troy under Agamemnon), found partway through Book 2:
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The face the launched a thousand ships … Book 2 lists all of them.
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That Helen got through a LOT of champagne…
The source being worth rereading, it’s (mighty) line 87 here:
https://www.bartleby.com/19/2/23.html
Actually, it might be more worthwhile to memorize this kind of stuff because not only was it written with its memorization in mind, but when you go over and over it, the workings of the poetry starts to become more apparent.
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depends - is it Z Nation or Russian Doll?
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I’m gonna start with that kind of gross chapter 92, the one where they harvest ambergris.
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