{"id":211,"date":"2004-09-05T10:46:18","date_gmt":"2004-09-05T18:46:18","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=211"},"modified":"2004-09-05T10:46:18","modified_gmt":"2004-09-05T18:46:18","slug":"209-harpoon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/?p=211","title":{"rendered":"#209 :: Harpoon"},"content":{"rendered":"

approved<\/a> treat<\/a> ‘popup’, viagra buy<\/a> ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”><\/a>Squatting on its cast-iron haunches, its steel tail coiled with ready staples, this artifact of turn-of-the-last-century industrial design awaits a punch on the head. It is about eight inches long, and five high. Though it looks like a prop from an Edward Gorey book<\/a>, its origins are a complete mystery, lost in that fathomless bog of pre-digital cultural ephemera where even Google cannot tread. My parents received it as a gift decades ago from a dear family friend, the late novelist and Pulitzer-winning historian Paul Horgan<\/a>, who found it in the house he moved into in Middletown, CT. Horgan always reckoned it was American in manufacture, but nothing else is known. It works – something I determined at about age 9, almost breaking my hand and earning a good scolding in the process. The chain of bent-metal staples used to be a good inch and a half longer.
\nmore about<\/a> ‘popup’, information pills<\/a> ‘width=500, order<\/a> height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”><\/a>You can take the hard route as I did, and slog through Melville’s brilliant, infuriatingly turgid and ultimately genius Moby-Dick<\/a> twice, (once in college, and once during the go-go days of the dotcom era entirely in airport lounges on a PDA). Or you can understand man’s conquest and slaughter of whales by hefting this harpoon in your hand. The coating of rust adds a rasping edge to its lone great fang, undulled by time or use or neglect. The shaft and binding are gone, but the tip remains – about three and a half pounds of hard, dense iron, with a spring-metal barb meant to slip past bone, flip open and lodge until the great beast could be brought alongside. My home state<\/a> was built on the blood and bones of leviathans<\/a>, the craft of Yankee smiths<\/a> who turned out cold, hard tools like this. Read the book. It’s worth your time to get knee-deep in blood and blubber and histrionic prose, to understand how hard people once lived.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You can take the hard route as I did, and slog through Melville’s brilliant, infuriatingly turgid and ultimately genius Moby-Dick twice, (once in college, and once during the go-go days of the dotcom era entirely in airport lounges on a PDA). Or you can understand man’s conquest and slaughter of whales by hefting this harpoon […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tool"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=211"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}