Electronic texts can disguise the categorical markers found in their physical counterparts, eliminating many of the paratextual features which position a work within a particular tradition of authorship and readership and enabling the new reader to approach with fewer preconceptions: with the bland egalitarianism of vanilla plain text, there is no such thing as a popular edition or a prestige hardback.
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About The Author and The Pequod
Page Published on June 25, 2008 | Keywords: about, accessibility, biography, web development
This site is the work of a single author, and it provides a space for me to publish my writing and photography in the hope that some of it may prove useful, inspirational or interesting for other readers. I try to keep my real identity hidden, so although you would not have to work too hard to find out who I really am, unless you are of a sleuth-like disposition you can call me Ishmael.
I try to keep the website semi-anonymous for three reasons. Firstly, as I teach at a university I don't want students to find my site and perhaps cause a conflict of interest. Secondly, many of the essays date from a while ago (from my time as an undergraduate in English Literature) whilst my more recent blog posts are written quickly and spontaneously. Because the work presented here is therefore not wholly representative of the quality of my more polished academic writing, my anonymity allows me to control the profile I present to employers and other academics. Finally, the pseudonym reminds that the ideas and opinions contained here are wholly personal ones, and do not necessarily reflect those of any institutions or organisations to which I am affiliated.
As can be gauged from my blog, which records my experiences as a research postgraduate, and from the essays, my main field of work is in literary studies. But simply writing for a specific audience, versed in the discourses of contemporary literary theory, can be dispiriting. Hence here you will also find examples of other essays on culture, travel, politics and other material, as well as creative writing. Finally, if a picture speaks a thousand words, then the literary content of this site is minimal in comparison to that represented by my other main hobby, which is photography.
I hope you enjoy browsing, and your comments are always very welcome, even (or especially) if it is to criticise any of my work in the hope that I might improve it.
According to my big brother over at Statcounter, a substantial number of vistors arrive here searching for the meaning and origin of The Pequod. In response to these questions, you may find the following information helpful:
The Pequod is the ship which features in Herman Melville's 1851 novel Moby Dick. You can find a critical essay on The Significance of the Narrator in Moby Dick in the essays section of this site.
The name of this website follows the image of that ship, which represents what this site is about. When I read Moby Dick, I felt an immediate affinity with the experience of Ishmael, who feels swamped by information in his bibliographical attempt to uncover the myth of the white whale. Just as for him, a "sub-sub-librarian," each new piece of learning seems to spawn new libraries to explore, so to me it sometimes feels that rather than being on a learning curve, my reading develops exponentially, as every critical work cites a hundred other possibilities, every art work seems to draw parallels with its predecesors of which I know little or nothing. So as the ship in that book is a "cannibal of a craft," apparelled with the antiquities and trophies from its many voyages, it seemed an appropriate model for this website, which collects the various experiences and writing I have achieved on the "voyages" of my learning.
After registering the domain name for this site, I discovered that The Pequod was (still is?) a poetry journal which does not currently have a presence on the web. If you have arrived here searching for that organisation, I apologise. Please note that this website is a collection of my own work, and I therefore do not accept submissions, although naturally I am always happy to hear your comments about this site and its content.
Apparently, the word is also an an achronym for Pacific EQUatorial Ocean Dynamics. Whatever that means.
If you are one of the users who finds this page when searching for The Pequod, and you know more than I do about its origins, please send me Your Comments so I can add them here to help other people.
The following free software was used in creation of this site:
Initial pages were written using the powerful editor Chami XHTML Kit; less user-friendly than the former, though with more useful built-in tools, is TSW Webcoder 5, which I am now using.
