Oceanic Feelings with Lapham's Quarterly

Isolated yet cosmopolitan, Civil War-era San Francisco was the cultural crucible in which Mark Twain and other writers helped reinvent American literature. The Pacific Ocean, meanwhile, was the natural crucible that helped transform a whaler named Herman Melville into the author of Moby-Dick, a novel that as much as any other delivers to readers what Sigmund Freud called “the oceanic feeling,” an awareness of the cosmos and our place in it. Lapham’s Quarterly has devoted the summer to readings and conversations about the history of California and the sea. Acting editor Donovan Hohn and fellow San Franciscan Greil Marcus bring that conversation to Clio’s Books. Along with Moby-Dick, San Francisco, and the sea, Hohn will talk with Marcus, a contributor to the Music issue of Lapham’s Quarterly and a member of the editorial board, about the revered cultural critic’s latest book, What Nails It, which begins with an autobiographical essay haunted by Marcus’ father, who perished in the South Pacific in 1944 while serving as an officer aboard the American destroyer the USS Hull.

Born in San Francisco in 1972, Donovan Hohn is the author of Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea (2011) and The Inner Coast: Essays (2020). Recipient of a Whiting Award for nonfiction, a former editor of Harper’s and features editor of GQ, Hohn is now director of creative writing at Wayne State University and acting editor of Lapham’s Quarterly.

Born in San Francisco in 1945, Greil Marcus began writing for Rolling Stone because he was “thrilled by rock and roll and bored to death by graduate school.” He left in 1970 and began writing for Creem, “a magazine that seemed like a place of freedom and was,” he later said. Marcus is the author of many books, from Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music in 1975 to Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs in 2022. With Werner Sollors, he is the editor of A New Literary History of America (2009).

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