Justin Hocking contracted a disease in college: "I became obsessed with a book about obsession." In The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld, he writes about poet Charles Olson talking to a colleague about Herman Melville's Moby-Dick: "I see... THE WHTE DEATH... has descended... upon YOU... too." Like many others--including Laurie Anderson, Tony Kushner and David Foster Wallace--Hocking comes under its spell. (The title of this memoir comes from the masterpiece's pages.)
Hocking schleps Moby-Dick around with him, talking to anyone who will listen--a young mariner making his own journey. Passages from the novel serve as chapter epigraphs, leading to passages reminiscent of Melville's own digressions. These give Hocking's engaging story its structure, as his personal tale unfolds in short, episodic chapters that move back and forth in time.
But Moby-Dick is not Hocking's only obsession. He gets hooked on surfing while living in New York City, spending his free time in the waves off Rockaway Beach and Montauk. His lifelong passion is skateboarding; for him, it is freedom and excitement. He'd worked summers in Oregon as a skateboard coach and returned years later for an idyllic summer job. In a flashback of the return trip to Colorado with his girlfriend, Karissa, he read Raymond Carver's "Cathedral" aloud and experienced a religious epiphany: "I'd found a way," he writes, "out of the isolation chamber of my own ego."
Melville called Ishmael a "dreamy, meditative man." So is Justin Hocking. From his modern masthead, he sees a capacious and generous world, one he brings to life in this erudite and introspective memoir. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher