38Talk:

I am just now returning from a semester-long Fulbright fellowship at the University of Rome, teaching The American Renaissance in English to Italian PhD students.  I will be home next week, but I wanted to sign on now to 38Talk.  I am also writing a full, critical biography of Melville and hope that my experience on board the Morgan (on the last leg into Boston) will give me some inkling of Melville's years at sea.  (I think I will be the only Melville biographer to have sailed on a whaling vessel.)  My original project was to use a digital mapping and annotation tool called Locast to record my experiences at sea.  But in Rome, I tried using it using it to record my tracking of Melville's 30-day tour of the city in 1857, and the tool proved cumbersome. Instead, for the Rome project, I set up a blog called Melville in Rome (www.engjlb.wordpress.com), which seemed much easier to manage.  So, my new plan is to blog on my experiences on the Morgan: pre-, during, and post-.  I will send you the URL for the Morgan blog as soon as it's launched.  But right now, my wife Ginny and I are in Copenhagen, in transit to New York City, where we hope to reunite with daughter, dog, and home after a four-month absence.