No Shortage of Shoulders to Crayon

Call me Isaac. Not for me the restless wanderings of an Ishmael, whether in the desert or on the sea (which is much the same thing). You won’t find me signing up to sail on a pegleg sea captain’s monomaniacal search for a white-headed whale, “with three holes punctured in his starboard fluke”—or, for that matter, on a two-week luxury cruise around New Zealand, drinks included. It’s just not worth it, what with all the cannibals about. The most celebrated literary cannibal of them all, Queequeg of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, didn’t hesitate to leave his own comfortable South Seas island in search of adventure in distant lands, but then the homoerotic lead harpooner (harpoonist? Melville has it as “harpooneer”) of the Pequod feared neither the behemoths of the deserts nor the leviathans of the seas. Ishmael opined in Moby Dick that Queequeg looked like a man who “never had had a creditor”, like “George Washington, cannibalistically developed”. If…