Billy Budd
Aboard the warship Bellipotent, the young orphan Billy Budd was called the Handsome Sailor. Billy was tall, athletic, noble looking; he was friendly, innocent, helpful and ever-cheerful. He was a fierce fighter and a loyal friend. All the men and officers liked him... All but one: Master-at-Arms Claggart. Envious, petty Claggart plotted to make Billy's life miserable. But when a fear of mutinies swept through the fleet, Claggart realized he could do more than just torment the Handsome Sailor... He could frame Billy Budd for treason...
Stats for nerds
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7mentions
7people
2015–2025years
14% recommend71% neutral14% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Moby-Dick really is a great book. If you want a dolphin-sized taste of Melville, try Billy Budd.
- In grade 9 I had to do a book report that compared two books by the same author and I chose Moby Dick and Billy Budd.
My teacher tried to talk me out of it, but I insisted and ultimately she let me do it because Billy Budd is very a short novella.
To this day, Moby Dick is still my second favorite book of all time (with my all time favourite being The Lord of the Rings). I only read it once, 20 years ago, for a book report but it really stuck with me.
- Heh. There are some similarly funny passages in Billy Budd (which I had to read in high school. I did not enjoy it.)
- A Melville bio might be sobering.
Melville's Moby Dick was so widely ignored (at best) that he quit writing prose for decades before starting Billy Budd a few years before his death. By that time, Moby was out-of-print ... it wasn't a 'work of genius' or a 'great American classic' for decades longer.
- It goes from less-something to more-something as frequency but more-something to less-something as wavelength. "colour" is a mix of power at each frequency, and everyone has different retinas, different optical cortices, and different cultural contexts.
That this causes them such confusion makes it difficult for me to empathize with muggles.
"Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity." -- Herman Melville, Billy Budd
What I love about this quote is that violet and orange are so far apart in the rainbow.
- If you can't pull at lease a 75th percentile on your subject GRE, you probably shouldn't be trying to get a PhD in it.
Depends on your subject. The subject GRE for English lit, for example, is an incredible crapshoot: Much of it concerns passage identification, and if you happen to recognize that this one is from Billy Budd and this one is from Gulliver's Travels, great. If not, you can lose a lot of points in ways that are unlikely to reflect what lit profs are really judged by in the academic market: their ability to write peer-reviewed articles and books.
