In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Matt Kish’s Moby-Dick in Pictures brilliantly shares an illustration for each page of Melville’s classic n0vel, and this new edition celebrates Moby-Dick’s 175th anniversary next month.
The Atlantic wrote of the book:
“Woven of equal parts visual mastery and creative bravery, Moby-Dick in Pictures is a treasure in and of itself, one that not only pays homage to Melville, but also reimagines what it means to embark on a modern-day epic voyage of creative restlessness.”
In his own words, here is Matt Kish’s Book Notes music playlist for his book Moby-Dick in Pictures:
Over the course of 543 days, from August 2009 to January 2011, I created 552 illustrations for Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick. What led me to this endeavor is long and rather complicated, but the short version is that I had recently turned 40 years old and was consumed by the fact that despite two decades of work as a self-taught artist, I had never experienced any kind of measurable success. I was very close to quitting art permanently but decided to attempt one final idiotically ambitious project before putting the brushes down for good.
Moby-Dick was one of my favorite novels and had fascinated me for most of my life through multiple readings. I had always been a visual reader, vividly picturing the events of whatever story I was reading in a kind of internal, cerebral movie theater. Intuitively and perhaps rashly, I decided my final chapter as an artist would be to create one illustration for each of the 552 pages of the Signet Classics paperback edition of Moby-Dick.
At that time, my partner and I were living in one room of my in-laws’ house, so my “studio” was a small walk-in closet with no windows and barely enough room for a drawing table and a shelf for art supplies. I painted the interior a bright turquoise blue to remind me of the warm seas I had loved as a child, and began.
I used found paper like pages cut from old books, charts, maps, and things of that sort. The illustrations would function as a kind of visual parallel of the novel in that my ink and paint would float over the lines and words already on the paper allowing the viewer to see multiple images and connections at once, similar to the way that Moby-Dick can be read as an adventurous whaling novel, an allegory, a history, a myth, and so much more.
The project became a journey I never expected, and changed my life forever. I began with hope, excitement, and a laugh, but over time fought against self-doubt, isolation, and despair. Illustrating the final chapters felt almost hallucinatory because I had inhabited the novel for so long, and so intimately, that at times the world of the Pequod felt more real to me than my life.
Working in solitude, alone in a tiny closet, would have been maddening without music. I listened to a lot over those 543 days, but the tone and content changed as I moved through the novel. This playlist is a rough approximation of my emotional state from the first “Call me Ishmael” through the final “another orphan.”
“Electric Counterpoint III: Fast” by Steve Reich
I mentioned the warm seas I had loved as a child, and in my memories, these shores have become someplace almost magical and fantastic. Time has almost certainly distorted reality, but in my mind, I can effortlessly relive the feeling of warm sun on my skin, hot sand between my toes, the diamond-gleam of the cresting waves, and the deep blue of the ocean. Reich’s piece, with the bright guitar notes, brings me back to those childhood days wondering about the endless possibilities hidden beneath and beyond the waves.
“Jason and the Argonauts” by XTC
Even though I began the illustration project as a 40-year-old, at the time I still thought of Moby-Dick as a kind of American myth, complete with heroes, monsters, and a sea-journey quest. I could easily imagine the Pequod and the Argo in the same milieu, and Ahab was Jason and Zeus, hero and villain. This sense of wonder was essential in giving me the drive and the resolve to live in Melville’s book artistically and emotionally. This song, with the constantly swelling and ebbing guitar and hints at strange places beyond the horizon embodies my state of mind at the beginning.
“Do It Again” by the Kinks
I settled into a daily rhythm fairly quickly, and that was fine, for a while. Each morning, before my day job, I would read and re-read and re-re-read the page of the novel that I was to illustrate that day. All day, I would think about that page, what it suggested to me, what it provoked in me, and how I saw it. Over the hours, an image would develop and I would slowly but continually refine it. By evening, with the image fixed in my mind, I would enter the closet studio and work furiously with the few hours I had before nightfall, trying my best to record the image from my mind to the paper. And this would repeat, day after day, week after week, month after month. Each morning brought a new page, a new beginning, and the same task, the same process. Do it again.
“Ship of Fools” by World Party
I began to feel like something was wrong. In my real life, I had no time to do anything beyond sleep, eat, work at my library job, and make art in the evenings. I saw my friends less and less. I saw my spouse less and less. I saw the sun, and the sky, and the outside less and less. I began to feel more and more like I was a member of the crew of the Pequod, walking the decks with the sailors, mates, and harpooneers. And I knew what was coming. I knew the end of the story. What had I gotten myself into? And where would this take me?
“Drunk on Salt Water” by Xela
About halfway through the project, my grasp on reality became tenuous at times. I thought about ships, white whales, oceans and blood as often as, if not more than, eating dinner, mowing the lawn, or talking to my spouse. The feeling was new, and strange, not yet uncomfortable, but not pleasant. Xela’s bizarre, hypnotic instrumental, with its dry as a bone percussive loops and ghostly tones epitomizes the shifting fever dream of my reality.
“Good Morning Captain” by Slint
For the first time, I began to resent the project, its demands, and what it was robbing me of. Just as this song is about a losing one’s childhood, innocence, and happiness, I could feel myself slipping away and being forced by circumstances to become something I never imagined or wanted. When the singer whispers “I’m trying to find my way home. I’m sorry. And I miss you…I swear, I’ll make it up to you” leading into his agonizing, repeated howl of “I miss you” all I could think about was my spouse, how much I longed to be with them instead of alone in a closet chasing monsters.
“Vaulted” by Reigns
A simple, quiet, piano-centered instrumental piece, accompanied, appropriately enough, by the soft dripping of water and the distant sounds of glacial ice rumbling and cracking. I was alone. That was it. It didn’t feel good, but it had taken root in my heart. There was only one way out, and that was to finish the work. I was resigned to this. It didn’t bring peace, but maybe it brought clarity.
“Is There Anybody Out There?” by Pink Floyd
By December 2010, I had hit the bottom. The Ohio winter was closing in, ice and darkness were far too present, and even though I was nearing the end of the novel, it still seemed so far off and I knew it was filled with nihilistic fury, destruction, and death. And while I was still resigned to finishing the work, a cold black depression took root. I understood that everything I was feeling and everything I was fighting was the result of my own choices and actions. My isolation was nearly total, and yet I was the one who had put up those walls, closed the doors, and hidden away.
“Never Going Home” by Xela
Another haunting, isolated instrumental. I was in the final stages of the project. The end was near. Strangely though, over the previous 500+ days, as my perceptions of reality flickered between my waking life and the Pequod, I had come to see the characters that I had been thinking about and drawing as not only real people but also companions. And I knew that very soon, I would be drawing their deaths, by drowning or by violence, and saying goodbye. I think that as my isolation increased, the constant presence of Queequeg, Starbuck, Ishmael and the rest became a comfort. And I knew that the journey had changed me, revealing parts of myself and aspects of reality I may have been happier not realizing. I was never going home again.
“Peaceful Repose” by Vincent Diamante (from the “Flower” game soundtrack)
The ending came quietly. There was guilt. I had willingly accompanied the men of the Pequod to their deaths, and had been callous enough to make a permanent visual record of it. And all with the undeniable comfort of knowing that I could and would safely step away, back into life. But, much more painfully, I had walled myself off from my friends, my life, and my spouse for more than a year. And for what? Was it worth it? I still think about that, to this day. But, in spite of this, I did feel some unexpected peace. The work was complete. The story was over. When I finished the final illustration, I put the brush down and cried. I was finally free.
Matt Kish is the illustrator of the recent reissued Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page (Tin House/Zando).