Last weekend on PBS, Bill Moyers spent a very interesting hour in conversation with writer Junot Diaz. The entire interview can now be viewed online here. (There's also a transcript link on the same page below the video.) Diaz's take on contemporary America is fascinating and seems spot-on, as does his description of Moby Dick:
[It's] kind of a crazy, postmodern book. It's not like an 1800 novel. You know? You put another novel from the time period next to it. And those two books don't even seem alike. I mean, the dude interrupts the flow of his novel to have a play, to have characters talking like a play. He interrupts his novel to suddenly have a disquisition on whales, as told through the size and shapes of books...
This is the first time I've ever heard an academic (Diaz teaches at MIT) refer to Herman Melville as "the dude." It's refreshing.
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