About us
"Wisdom and Woe" is a philosophy and literature discussion group dedicated to exploring the world, work, life, and times of Herman Melville and the 19th century Romantic movement. We will read and discuss topics related to:
- Works of Herman Melville: Moby-Dick, Clarel, Bartleby the Scrivener, Billy Budd, The Confidence-Man, Mardi, reviews, correspondence, etc.
- Themes and affinities: whales, cannibals, shipwrecks, theodicy, narcissism, exile, freedom, slavery, redemption, democracy, law, orientalism, Zoroastrianism, Gnosticism, psychology, mythology, etc.
- Influences and sources: the Bible, Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Milton, Cervantes, Dante, Emerson, Kant, Plato, Romanticism, Stoicism, etc.
- Legacy and impact: adaptations, derivations, artworks, analysis, criticism, etc.
- And more
The group is free and open to anybody with an interest in learning and growing by "diving deeper" (as Hawthorne once said of his conversations with Melville) into "time and eternity, things of this world and of the next, and books, and publishers, and all possible and impossible matters."
Regarding the name of the group:
"There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces."
(Moby-Dick, 96)
"Though wisdom be wedded to woe, though the way thereto is by tears, yet all ends in a shout." (Mardi, 2.79)
"The intensest light of reason and revelation combined, can not shed such blazonings upon the deeper truths in man, as will sometimes proceed from his own profoundest gloom. Utter darkness is then his light.... Wherefore is it, that not to know Gloom and Grief is not to know aught that an heroic man should learn?" (Pierre, 9.3)
"The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth." (Ecclesiastes 7:4)
Featured event
![[Series] Circuses and Snake Oil](https://secure.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/d/b/9/4/highres_522356212.jpeg)
[Series] Circuses and Snake Oil
NOTE: This page is intended as a thematic overview of the meetups in the series, but is not itself a meetup. To RSVP, please see the individual events as they are announced on the Wisdom and Woe calendar. This page will be updated regularly to reflect changes to the schedule.
Every day, we need to differentiate truth from lies--whether in the news, commercials, or conversation with friends--while hoaxes and hyperbole confound fantasy and reality in all areas of human endeavor. The field of medicine is particularly susceptible to exploitation, contending among theories natural, supernatural, and artificial; where the stakes are life and death, qualitative and quantitative; and an oft-tenuous orthodoxy staggers the line between knowledge and misinformation. In the 19th century, the showy peddlers of traveling medicine shows and traveling circuses were virtually indistinguishable.
And while Melville is best known for his writings on the hunters of whale oil, unduly neglected are his writings on the sellers of snake oil. In fact, Moby-Dick itself opens (and re-opens) with an image of disease, and acknowledges whale oil's medicinal history. It goes on to warn that the entire world (including "you, reader") is prey to usurpation and "fish stories" of all kinds, alleging "tricks of the stage" by sailors, preachers, prophets, and Fate itself. And Ishmael's "soul searching" is both figurative and literal--meditative and medical, psychological and Cetological--where the "objectifying gaze" of the anatomical (whale) theater mingles with deep introspection; while aboard the Pequod, notions of physical and mental health tumble topsy-turvy.
In a world abounding in con-men, carnival barkers, forgers, fraudsters, hoaxers, humbugs, quacks, and chameleons--with motivations fiscal, fanatical, and farcical--where truth sometimes "requires full as much bolstering as error"--this series asks: what can we know and who can we trust? How to heal body, mind, soul, and "madness maddened?"
Schedule:
- Freud and Philosophy - Paul Ricœur - 6/28
- The Melancholy of Resistance - László Krasznahorkai - 7/5, 7/12, 7/19
- [Movie] Werckmeister Harmonies - 7/26
- The Anatomy of Melancholy - Robert Burton - 8/2
- Hamlet - Shakespeare - 8/9
- Bartleby, the Scrivener - Herman Melville - 8/16
- Genoa: A Telling of Wonders - Paul Metcalf - 8/23, 8/30
- [Movie] Freaks - 9/6
- Chang and Eng - Darin Strauss - 9/13
- Religio Medici - Sir Thomas Browne - 9/20
- A Journal of the Plague Year - Daniel Defoe - 9/27, 10/4, 10/11
- The Stark Munro Letters - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - 10/18, 10/25
- Tales of the Medical Abyss - Edgar Allan Poe - 11/1
- The Adventures of Roderick Random - Tobias Smollett - 11/8, 11/15, 11/29
- [Movie] The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser - 11/22
- The Sorrows of Young Werther - Goethe - 12/6
- Misery and Madness - Herman Melville - 12/13, 12/20
- Hydropathy; Or, The Cold Water Cure - R. T. Claridge - 12/27
- Elsie Venner - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. - 1/3, 1/10, 1/17
- House Calls - Herman Melville - 1/24
- [Movie] Powder - 1/31
- Something Wicked This Way Comes - Ray Bradbury - 2/7
- [Movie] Take Shelter - 2/14
- The Covenant of Water - Abraham Verghese - 2/21, 2/28, 3/14, 3/28
- [Movie] The Road to Wellville - 3/7
- [Movie] The Elephant Man - 3/21
- The Confidence-Man - Herman Melville - 4/4, 4/11, 4/18
- The Illustrated Man - Ray Bradbury - 4/25, 5/2
- Doctor Dogbody's Leg - James Hall - 5/9, 5/16
- Phenomenology of Perception - Merleau-Ponty - 5/23
- The Autobiography of a Quack and the Case of George Dedlow - S. Weir Mitchell - 5/27 [Thu]
- The Yellow Wallpaper - Charlotte Perkins Gilman - 5/30
- Lincoln's Melancholy - Joshua Shenk - 6/6
- [Movie] Embrace of the Serpent - 6/13
- The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey - Candice Millard - 6/20
- [Movie] The Mad Whale - 6/27
- Hard Cash - Charles Reade - 7/4, 7/18, 7/25, 8/1
- [Movie] Suddenly, Last Summer - 7/11
- On the Nonexistence of Monomania - Jean-Pierre Falret - 8/5 [Thu]
- Ten Days in a Mad-House - Nellie Bly - 8/8
- Organon of the Medical Art - Samuel Hahnemann - 8/15
- Moby-Dick - Herman Melville - 8/22, 8/29, 9/5, 9/12, 9/19, 9/26, 10/3, 10/10, 10/17
- [Movie] Moby Dick - 10/24
- The Circus of Dr. Lao - Charles G. Finney - 10/31
- [Movie] Wings of Desire - 11/7
- The Confessions - Saint Augustine - x1
- The Sickness Unto Death - Kierkegaard - x2
- Confessions of an English Opium-Eater - De Quincy - x1
- The Death of Ivan Ilyich - Leo Tolstoy - x1 [Thu]
- Lunar Caustic - Malcolm Lowry - x1
- Notes from the Underground - Dostoevsky - x1
- The Genealogy of Morals - Nietzsche - x1
- [Movie] Bartleby - x1
- The Varieties of Religious Experience - William James - x1
- Maladies of the Will - Jennifer L. Fleissner - x1
- Asylums - Erving Goffman - x2
- [Movie] Persona - x1
- Madness and Civilization - Foucault - x1
- [Movie] The Book of Vision - x1
- Middlemarch - George Eliot - x8
- [Movie] A Hidden Life - x1
- Barnum's Own Story - P. T. Barnum - x1
- Human Circus - Herman Melville - x1
- The Apostles - Herman Melville - x1
- [Movie] A Cure for Wellness - x1
- Devil in the White City - Erik Larson - x?
- American Chamber of Horrors - Ruth deForest Lamb - x1
- The Magic Mountain - Thomas Mann - x8
- The Whalebone Theater - Joanna Quinn - x3
- [Movie] Hamlet - x1
- [Movie] Fanny and Alexander - x1
Extracts:
- "Begone! You are all alike. The name of doctor, the dream of helper, condemns you. For years I have been but a gallipot for you experimentizers to rinse your experiments into, and now, in this livid skin, partake of the nature of my contents. Begone! I hate ye." (The Confidence-Man, 16)
- "But he who dodges hospitals and jails, and walks fast crossing graveyards... not that man is fitted to sit down on tomb-stones, and break the green damp mould with unfathomably wondrous Solomon." (Moby-Dick, 96)
- "What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish? What all men’s minds and opinions but Loose-Fish? What is the principle of religious belief in them but a Loose-Fish? What to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but Loose-Fish? What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?" (Moby-Dick, 89)
- "... so much trash belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature..." (1851 review of Moby-Dick)
Upcoming events
5
Genoa: A Telling of Wonders - Paul Metcalf (week 1)
·OnlineOnlineMichael Mills, the narrator of Genoa: A Telling of Wonders (Paul Metcalf, 1965), is a trained physician who has abnegated all medical practice. Paralyzed by his professional responsibility and haunted by the crimes of his brother, he retreats to an isolated attic, where he meditates on fatherhood, loss, madness, health, faith, Herman Melville, Christopher Columbus, and the mysteries of the human body.
He particularly directs his thought to the grim science of "teratology," i.e., congenital birth defects. (The phenomenon, which originally signified "monstrous portents or wonders," renders the novel's subtitle.) The themes of inheritance and monstrosity converge upon American myth and history, where Michael wrestles with notions of genetic and historical determinism, and his withdrawal turns emblematic of the failures of science and civilization. The book itself presents like a "Frankenstein patchwork" of ruminations, memories, and quotations set off in disparate italics, boldface, and indentation.
Paul Metcalf (1917-1999) was the great-grandson of Herman Melville. He said that he wrote Genoa in order to escape the long literary shadow of his progenitor (not unlike the burdened quest of its narrator). The result is "truly, unmistakably original": a "helixing of quotation and consciousness, with its multiple fonts and its open-ended grammatical structures... and its huge, unquenchable obsessions with the past." (Rick Moody)
Schedule:
- Week 1 (8/23): Chapters 1-4 (ending "The Indes")
- Week 2 (8/30): Chapters 5-7 (starting "Journal Down the Straights")
Genoa: A Telling of Wonders:
Collected Works of Paul Metcalf, Volume I:
Supplemental:
- Wonder song by Natalie Merchant
Extracts:
- "Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity." (Moby-Dick, 1)
- "... the department of Morbid Anatomy was his peculiar love; and... he had a most unsightly collection of Parisian casts, in plaster and wax, representing all imaginable malformations of the human members, both organic and induced by disease. Chief among these was a cast, often to be met with in the Anatomical Museums of Europe.... All your eyes and all your horrified soul were fast fascinated and frozen by the sight of a hideous, crumpled horn, like that of a ram, downward growing out from the forehead.... The horn seemed the mark of a curse for some mysterious sin, conceived and committed before the spirit had entered the flesh." (White-Jacket, 61)
- "What was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish, in which Columbus struck the Spanish standard by way of waifing it for his royal master and mistress?" (Moby-Dick, 89)
- "The bleakness, the savageness of glens between, seem to make Genoa rather the capital and fortified camp of Satan: fortified against the Archangels. Clouds rolling round ramparts aerial. &c." (Journals, 12 April 1857)
This meetup is part of the series Circuses and Snake Oil.
18 attendeesGenoa: A Telling of Wonders - Paul Metcalf (week 2)
·OnlineOnlineMichael Mills, the narrator of Genoa: A Telling of Wonders (Paul Metcalf, 1965), is a trained physician who has abnegated all medical practice. Paralyzed by his professional responsibility and haunted by the crimes of his brother, he retreats to an isolated attic, where he meditates on fatherhood, loss, madness, health, faith, Herman Melville, Christopher Columbus, and the mysteries of the human body.
He particularly directs his thought to the grim science of "teratology," i.e., congenital birth defects. (The phenomenon, which originally signified "monstrous portents or wonders," renders the novel's subtitle.) The themes of inheritance and monstrosity converge upon American myth and history, where Michael wrestles with notions of genetic and historical determinism, and his withdrawal turns emblematic of the failures of science and civilization. The book itself presents like a "Frankenstein patchwork" of ruminations, memories, and quotations set off in disparate italics, boldface, and indentation.
Paul Metcalf (1917-1999) was the great-grandson of Herman Melville. He said that he wrote Genoa in order to escape the long literary shadow of his progenitor (not unlike the burdened quest of its narrator). The result is "truly, unmistakably original": a "helixing of quotation and consciousness, with its multiple fonts and its open-ended grammatical structures... and its huge, unquenchable obsessions with the past." (Rick Moody)
Schedule:
- Week 1 (8/23): Chapters 1-4 (ending "The Indes")
- Week 2 (8/30): Chapters 5-7 (starting "Journal Down the Straights")
Genoa: A Telling of Wonders:
Collected Works of Paul Metcalf, Volume I:
Supplemental:
- Wonder song by Natalie Merchant
Extracts:
- "Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity." (Moby-Dick, 1)
- "... the department of Morbid Anatomy was his peculiar love; and... he had a most unsightly collection of Parisian casts, in plaster and wax, representing all imaginable malformations of the human members, both organic and induced by disease. Chief among these was a cast, often to be met with in the Anatomical Museums of Europe.... All your eyes and all your horrified soul were fast fascinated and frozen by the sight of a hideous, crumpled horn, like that of a ram, downward growing out from the forehead.... The horn seemed the mark of a curse for some mysterious sin, conceived and committed before the spirit had entered the flesh." (White-Jacket, 61)
- "What was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish, in which Columbus struck the Spanish standard by way of waifing it for his royal master and mistress?" (Moby-Dick, 89)
- "The bleakness, the savageness of glens between, seem to make Genoa rather the capital and fortified camp of Satan: fortified against the Archangels. Clouds rolling round ramparts aerial. &c." (Journals, 12 April 1857)
This meetup is part of the series Circuses and Snake Oil.
10 attendees![[Movie] Freaks](https://secure.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/a/2/6/2/highres_534941570.jpeg)
[Movie] Freaks
·OnlineOnlineDirector Tod Browning has been called "the Edgar Allan Poe of cinema," known for his pioneering films of horror and the macabre. His groundbreaking career spanned the silent and sound film eras, including the genre-defining Dracula (1931) and the reputation-ruining Freaks (1932).
Freaks features an unforgettable cast of real-life sideshow performers, portraying a circus troupe on the fringes of mainstream society. 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die says "No mere plot summary can do justice to this alarming yet profound movie.... It is a supreme oddity (freak?) of world cinema considered by many to be the most remarkable film in" Browning's remarkable career.
The film was received with revulsion upon release, and is today regarded as a cult classic. It only survives in a softened (expurgated) form that, nevertheless (and even with age), remains provocative and unmistakably unsettling. It "truly must be seen to be believed": is it horror or dark melodrama? Exploitative or sympathetic?
About the movie:
- Runtime: 1h 4m
- Year: 1932
- Unrated Content Advisory
- Language: English
- Starring: Wallace Ford, Leila Hyams, Olga Baclanova, Roscoe Ates
- Director: Tod Browning
- Trailer: Freaks
This meetup will consist of a live viewing, accompanied by discussion and analysis.
Supplemental:
- The Twisted World of Tod Browning video essay
Extracts:
- "Here, helping himself along with two crotched roots, hobbled a dwarf without legs; another stalked before, one arm fixed in the air, like a lightning rod; a third, more active than any, seal-like, flirted a pair of flippers, and went skipping along; a fourth hopped on a solitary pin, at every bound, spinning round like a top, to gaze; while still another, furnished with feelers or fins, rolled himself up in a ball, bowling over the ground in advance." (Mardi, 2.70)
- "“who are the monsters, we or the cripples?” “You yourself are a monster, for asking the question,” said Mohi." (Mardi, 2.71)
- "Gogle-goggle, fugle-fi, fugle-fogle-orum!" (Mardi, 2.71)
This meetup is part of the series Circuses and Snake Oil.
16 attendees
Chang and Eng - Darin Strauss
·OnlineOnlineChang and Eng Bunker (1811-1874), conjoined at birth in Siam, were the original "Siamese twins." After growing up and meeting the King, they moved to America, gained fame as a circus act, married sisters, and fathered 21 children.
Chang and Eng is a historical novel based on their unique lives. Narrated by the more bookish twin, Eng, it blends fact and fiction to explore their public careers and private lives. The novel gives a poignant, human voice to their legendary story, exploring themes of identity and individuality, the nature of the self, the complexities of intimacy and human relationships, and the exploitation of difference and "otherness."
Chang and Eng (Darin Strauss, 2000) was named a "Best Book of the Year" by both the Los Angeles Times and Newsweek. For his other work, author Darin Strauss has also received the National Book Critics Circle Award and a nomination for the Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize.
Chang and Eng:
Supplemental:
- Circus Stories podcast
- Those Extraordinary Twins by Mark Twain
- The Siamese Twins by Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Extracts:
- "Now envy and antipathy, passions irreconcilable in reason, nevertheless in fact may spring conjoined like Chang and Eng in one birth. Is Envy then such a monster?" (Billy Budd, 12)
- "’Tis side-by-side entwined in ease / Of Chang and Eng the Siamese / When leaning mutually embraced; / And so these improvised twin brothers Dance forward and salute the others" (Clarel, 3.13)
- "It seemed more an intestine feud, than a fight between strangers. Or, rather, it was as if the Siamese Twins, oblivious of their fraternal bond, should rage in unnatural fight." (Israel Potter, 19)
- "Every fine evening, about sunset, these two, the cook and steward, used to sit on the little shelf in the cook-house, leaning up against each other like the Siamese twins, to keep from falling off..." (Redburn, 17)
- "... the two stood together; the old miser leaning against the herb-doctor with something of that air of trustful fraternity with which, when standing, the less strong of the Siamese twins habitually leans against the other." (Confidence-Man, 21)
- "So, then, an elongated Siamese ligature united us.... I saw that this situation of mine was the precise situation of every mortal that breathes; only, in most cases, he, one way or other, has this Siamese connexion with a plurality of other mortals." (Moby-Dick, 72)
- "At variance in their revery move / The spleen of nature and her love: / At variance, yet entangled too— / Like wrestlers." (Clarel, 3.5)
- "O city yonder, / Exposed in penalty and wonder, / Again thou seest me! Hither I / Still drawn am by the guilty tie / Between us; all the load I bear / Only thou know’st, for thou dost share. / As round my heart the phantoms throng / Of tribe and era perished long, / So thou art haunted, sister in wrong!" (Clarel, 3.19)
- "... the mere fact of there being twins always seemed curious; in fact, to me at least, all twins are prodigies; and still I hardly know why this should be; for all of us in our own persons furnish numerous examples of the same phenomenon. Are not our thumbs twins? A regular Castor and Pollux? And all of our fingers? Are not our arms, hands, legs, feet, eyes, ears, all twins; born at one birth, and as much alike as they possibly can be? Can it be, that the Greek grammarians invented their dual number for the particular benefit of twins?" (Redburn, 53)
This meetup is part of the series Circuses and Snake Oil.
8 attendees
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