I went to a racetrack in Centralia on business recently and read part of Moby Dick during the proceedings. I take no pride in keeping my nose down toward something other than a phone in the bleachers, and harbor some shame for being wary of all the people in attendance at something that is definitely not my sort of thing (except for the demolition derby at the end. I love demolition derbies. They are not worth their cost in fossil fuels, but they are otherwise broad and dumb and hilarious in the right ways).

Moby Dick sounds like it was written by my friend Ben. I texted him from the stands about this. “Call you Ishmael; he sounds like you do in emails.” The jaunty, mannered prose and gangrenous, affirmative irony were dead ringers. Even the frequent comedic events in Moby Dick sound like things Ben would come up with, or at least enjoy. I texted that too, then continued, “Your respect for savages and their cultures remind me of Ishmael too,” I continued. Here the irony was mine in using Melville’s poorly aged terminology, and the barb was meant for him as well. Let me be clear that Ben and I share a sincere anti-colonial politics in support of Indigenous nations’ reclamation of land, land stewardship, and sovereignty. As I put my critique to Ben, “If it wasn’t accompanied by an amount of racist caricature and he didn’t sing the praises of colonialism and hunting whales, I’d think the narrator were you.” Qualifying this further that I am only 10 percent through the novel, I still admire Melville’s rendition of the deep, fond, fast friendship between indigenous Polynesian Queequeg and white American Ishmael, all but presuming the two are equals at the start, written in 1851.

Incredibly, on the night these comparisons came to me, I’d forgotten that as recently as a few years ago, Ben had, in fact, hunted whales! He served on a boat for two years, but only hunted them to look at them, not harm them, in an effort to conserve them as an employee of a whale tour ship, one of the better ones that doesn’t intrude very closely upon the resident pods in the straits around the San Juan Islands. Also unlike Ishmael, Ben went back home on shore every day, not out to sea for three years.

The next thing I told Ben was, “I like this book, but the narrator won’t stop talking.” I thought this comment was very funny, true as it is for every novel, until I realized all it amounted to was a caption for a New Yorker cartoon. I told all this to Ben as well. The unanswered texts were already becoming a monologue. “It doesn’t even need the drawing, but most New Yorker cartoons don’t.” Here the barb was mine as a cartoonist toward cartoons that depend very little on their illustrations. “Now *that’s* a cartoon caption,” I said. It should be clear by now that the point of this piece of writing is to make some private texts to a friend public because I am proud of my dumb jokes in them. “That’s the sort of caption that would shoot a monocle right out of someone’s raised hand.” My sense of humor is too broad and course and absurd for New Yorker cartoons.

I hate New Yorker cartoons. My contempt for New Yorker cartoons is as intense as I feared the people at the racetrack’s was, if there was any, toward my reading Moby Dick in the stands. One guy at the tracks made a point to move over from his place across the aisle to sit next to me for a few minutes and ask what I was reading. When I answered, he told me he’d read Moby Dick a long time ago. He looked back up at the races, but intermittently turned to ask if I’d gotten to this or that plot point. We did not become fast friends. We spoke politely but without fondness. I don’t think I am any more prone to prejudices than Ishmael; I’d like to think the situation in the bleachers was a matter of that man’s and my particular interpersonal chemistry, and of timing. I was trying to read, and he should have known not to try to talk to someone in the stands during the races.