A couple of years ago Robert Wagner Jr., a well-known Houston energy banker, read the famous novel Moby Dick by Herman Melville, a former whaler. It’s a rambling and gritty tale about the 19th whaling industry and America’s first energy boom.

The narrative, which richly details the nature of an economic obsession, squarely harpooned Wagner, a good friend of the late energy critic, Matthew Simmons. “I was blown away by the synergies and the comparisons of whaling with the oil and gas industry, ” says Wagner.

For more than 40 years the 69-year-old banker financed Texas oil deals and had a front row seat to the world’s most volatile commodity while working for the likes of Bear Stearns and Arthur Andersen.

And so the maniacal pursuit of a white whale to illuminate North American homes haunted Wagner. It also reminded him how every age irrevocably passes into another whether people are prepared for change or not.

“The rampant obsessive exploration, production and consumption of hydrocarbons that saturates our society today can be read much like the situation for the men on the Pequod,” notes Wagner. The world of “There she blows” and “Give it to him” actually led, if not descended to “Drill, baby, drill.”

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I love the Internet. I really do. People are out there doing imaginative things, and coming up with wonderful stuff like Moby Map, an interactive map based on Moby Dick, which “compiles over 350 geographic locations from the novel (with a few mysteries still unsolved!) into an interactive flash based Google map of the world. Also included is the plotted course of the Pequod, accompanied by descriptions from throughout the novel and icons showing historic whaling grounds.” Brilliant.

Hat-tip to Power Moby Dick.

“…at a place in Yorkshire, England, Burton Constable by name, a certain Sir Clifford Constable has in his possession the skeleton of a Sperm Whale…Sir Clifford’s whale has been articulated throughout; so that like a great chest of drawers, you can open and shut him, in all his long cavities – spread out his ribs like a gigantic fan – and swing all day upon his lower jaw. Locks are to be put upon some of his trap doors and shutters; and a footman will show round future visitors with a bunch of keys at his side. Sir Clifford thinks of charging twopence for a peep at the whispering gallery in the spinal column; threepence to hear the echo in the hollow of his cerebellum; and sixpence for the unrivalled view from his forehead.”

Spymonkey’s Moby Dick is at the Liverpool Playhouse until Saturday October 24th.

I visited Arrowhead three times this summer. The view from the piazza is marvelous: a field of tall grass and wildflowers, a stand of maples and birches, and Mt. Greylock, surfacing in the distance. In an 1851 letter to Hawthorne, Melville wrote, “I have been ploughing & sowing & raising & printing & praying, and now begin to come out upon a less bristling time, and to enjoy the calm prospect of things from a fair piazza at the north of the old farmhouse here.” Melville lived at Arrowhead from 1850 to 1863; he wrote “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and the other Piazza Tales during his stay, along with Pierre, The Confidence Man, and the final draft of Moby-Dick — which he dedicated to Hawthorne, “in token of my admiration for his genius.” Facing financial difficulties, he sold half of the property in 1856, and then the remainder in 1863, to his brother Allan and moved his family back to New York, where he took a job as a customs inspector. The property stayed in his extended family until 1927; the Berkshire County Historical Society bought it from private owners in 1975.

[Link via Powermobydick]