Swallowed by a whale

I could have been anyone, I was anyone. It was Sunday afternoon in Los Angeles, and I was reading Chapter 80 of Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” into a microphone on Venice Beach. How I got there is not a great story. I’m just saying I heard they were reading “Moby-Dick” on the beach, I was curious, and so I went, and not 10 minutes after arriving I found myself sitting in a chair, speaking Chapter 80 (titled “The Nut,” which pleased me) into a microphone.

Let me set the scene: a chair, a microphone, an amplifier. Deck chairs in the sand for the audience. A clear cold windblown day. Not a lot of people on the beach.

This public reading of “Moby-Dick” is held every year at the same time -- the weekend before Thanksgiving. It is organized by the father of some friends, a man named Tim Rednick. The reading takes place from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, by the breakwater rocks at the end of Windward Avenue on Venice Beach.

People come and go, because apparently it takes about 30 hours to read the whole book aloud. I got there around 3 on Sunday afternoon. There were four people present. You could hear the wind in the microphone. A guy was reading Chapter 79 into the mike. There was also a sign-up sheet flapping in the wind.

I have never read “Moby-Dick,” nor do I want to now. But I have read Chapter 80, aloud and on the beach, and I am glad for this. It begins: “If the Sperm Whale be physiognomically a Sphinx, to the phrenologist his brain seems that geometrical circle which it is impossible to square.”

It took a few paragraphs to forget that my voice was being amplified on a beach, to begin to hear Melville’s words and to understand how much he was writing about this whale. “In a full-grown creature the skull will measure at least twenty feet in length,” I read. “Unhinge the lower jaw, and the side view of this skull is as the side of a moderately inclined plane resting throughout on a level base. But in life -- as we have elsewhere seen -- this inclined plane is angularly filled up, and almost squared by the enormous superincumbent mass of the junk and sperm.”

Sometimes it seems to me that this is what the weekend is, in its ideal state -- an escape from our own story into other people’s stories. A break from the chatter in our heads, the endless internal narration of our own sagas (and don’t get me wrong, they’re epic sagas, about work, relationships, family. Sagas full of our own “junk and sperm,” even).

But you need a break from this story. An intermission. If the weekend is for not working, it is also for not thinking -- or at least not thinking about your own story. All last weekend I did this. I don’t even think I was aware of it, I was just doing stuff.

And so on Friday night I saw three comedians in concert. On Saturday I watched the UCLA-USC football game. On Saturday night I saw “Shattered Glass,” about the fabricating former New Republic writer Stephen Glass. On Sunday I read “Moby-Dick” on the beach and later that night saw “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” a documentary about the coup attempt in Venezuela last year.

They all involved somebody else’s story, not my own. The comedians, the football players, the fabricating writer. The classic American author with an epic tale of a whaling expedition.

Granted, the escaping occurred in my head -- in mind more than body (in fact, I did nothing in body, except play tennis). And this, if I understand Melville correctly, leaves something to be desired. “For I believe that much of a man’s character will be found betokened in his backbone. I would rather feel your spine than your skull, whoever you are. A thin joist of a spine never yet upheld a full and noble soul. I rejoice in my spine, as in the firm audacious staff of that flag which I fling half out to the world.”

Come to think of it, my sciatica’s been acting up lately.

Yeah, I did a lot of fun things, but I didn’t bag a whale. So don’t call me Ishmael.

Paul Brownfield can be contacted at paul.brownfield@latimes.com.