Assistant Editor Lily Davenport: Daniel Uncapher’s playful collage story takes the reader on a whirlwind journey through time and tone, drawing on an enormous range of sources for its text fragments. The attributional footnotes create an additional layer of reader experience, inviting us to examine the potential relationships between the texts at hand and the figure of the whale.
Listen to Daniel read “Curious and Entertaining Facts about Whales”:
Curious and Entertaining Facts about Whales[1]
In regard to whales and their peculiarities, you can make almost any assertion without fear of successful contradiction.[2] We can speculate about anything.[3]
Experiments prove that sperm[4] whales sleep holding their heads[5] upright, standing erect[6] underwater like a[7] ship settling down[8] or a skyscraper going up.[9] They sleep in the opposite[10] position they work in,[11] the same as we do![12]
California gray whales[13] mate in threes,[14] the companionship of the second male only[15] serving to brace the[16] female and prevent her from[17] floating away into the ocean.[18]
The sound of shipping[19] traffic at all times of the day[20] is like a constant nightmare upon[21] the ear of a whale,[22] who goes mad with the unending tread of thousands of[23] intruders in their country.[24]
The Great Lakes have no whales,[25] nor the Great Salt Lake of Utah.[26] We know, however, that whales used to[27] swim in the Mississippi.[28]
Sometimes a whale will turn[29] on its back and[30] urinate upright; it is projecting, circular, and[31] fashioned like a column.[32] Then, by watching with a spyglass, the columns could be seen to diverge and fall in all manner of shapes, like a beautiful fountain.[33]
Whales are descended from ancestors which had[34] quitted the sea for the earth[35] and then quit the land[36] for the sea again. You may wonder at that, but it’s a fact.[37] They looked like pigs.[38]
Humpback whales, blackfish, devilfish, and other species of whales sing [39] daylong songs by silvery moonlit rays,[40] songs that go singing like the wind through[41] thousands of miles of water[42] with a crash as loud as the quick-following thunder.[43]
They do not exhale underwater, and yet they are continually noisy;[44] this is because they are at all times and in all places greedy of emotion.[45]
[1] “Early English Explorers,” The National Review 2 (1856).
[2] Irvin S. Cobb, “Speaking of Operations—” (1915).
[3] J. J. Butler, Successful Stock Speculation (1922).
[4] W. C. Young, “On Standard Sperm Candles,” Journal of the Society of Chemical Industry (1891).
[5] Glover Morrill Allen, The Whalebone Whales of New England (1915).
[6] Henry George Liddell, A Lexicon (1846).
[7] Will Nathaniel Harben, The Inner Law: A Novel (1915).
[8] Archibald Sinclair and William Henry, Swimming (1901).
[9] “Cement Workers of Nature Land,” Rock Products 7 (1906).
[10] R. F. B., “The Graves of the Irish Patriots,” The New Casket: Containing Gems of Amusement and General Instruction, vol. 2 (1833).
[11] “Co-operation at Oldham,” The Spectator 58 (1885).
[12] George Putnam, Remarks upon “A Discourse Delivered at the Installation of Rev. David Fosdick, Pastor of the Hollis Street Church” (1846).
[13] George Brown Goode, The Fisheries and Fishery Industries of the United States (1887).
[14] Amos William Butler, Birds of Indiana (1898).
[15] N. Tinbergen, “‘Functionless’ Courtship and Supposed Polyandry,” Field Observations of East Greenland Birds (1935).
[16] “New Patents,” The American Stationer 32 (1892).
[17] Alvah Peterson, “Experiment Station Report,” Annual Report of the New Jersey State Agricultural Experiment, vol. 38 (1918).
[18] William Johnston, Nightshade: A Novel (1857).
[19] Anna Bowman Dodd, On the Broads (1896).
[20] J. Rowland Bibbins, “Statement on Traffic Conditions in the District of Columbia,” Traffic Conditions in the District of Columbia (1923).
[21] “A Story of a Haunted House,” The Living Age, vol. 54 (1857).
[22] Carl Gustav Carus, An Introduction to the Comparative Anatomy of Animals (1827).
[23] Leonard K. Hirshberg, “Hands! Hands! Hands! Interesting Facts for Teachers and Pupils about the Pianist’s Tools,” The Etude 36 (1918).
[24] Terrien de Lacouperie, The Languages of China before the Chinese (1887).
[25] “Sharks and Leviathans of the Great Lakes,” The Continent 4 (1884).
[26] Frederick Spencer Oliver, A Dweller on Two Planets: or, The Dividing of the Way (1920).
[27] Arthur Mee and Hollan Thompson, “Wonderful Things That Animals Do,” The Everyday Library for Young People, vol. 1 (1916).
[28] “Notitia of Incidents at New Orleans in 1804 and 1805,” The American Pioneer: A Monthly Periodical 2 (1843).
[29] Lewis Holmes, The Arctic Whaleman: or, Winter in the Arctic Ocean (1861).
[30] “The Elephant-Tamer,” Chamber’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Arts (1885).
[31] Jacobus X, “Anomalies of the Urinary Meatus,” The Ethnology of the Sixth Sense (1899).
[32] Isaac Kaufman Funk, A Standard Dictionary of the English Language (1894).
[33] “Historical Sketch of Eruptions of the Volcano of Mauna Loa, Hawaii,” The Nautical Magazine and Naval Chronicle (1859).
[34] James Richard Ainsworth Davis, The Natural History of Animals: The Animal Life of the World (1903).
[35] James Mason, The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments (1879).
[36] Sir William Francis Butler, From Naboth’s Vineyard (1907).
[37] William McFee, Aliens (1918).
[38] H. G. Wells, Joan and Peter: The Story of an Education (1918).
[39] John Randolph Spears, The Story of the New England Whalers (1908).
[40] George Henry Peters, Impressions of a Journey Round the World (1897).
[41] Helen Keller, The Song of the Stone Wall (1910).
[42] Bemer S. Pague, The Mild Temperature of the Pacific Northwest and the Influence of the “Kuro Siwo” (1899).
[43] Dante Alighieri, The Vision of Purgatory, Part 3, trans. Rev. H. F. Cary (1809).
[44] Theodore J. Walker, Whale Primer (1962).
[45] Marie Henry Beyle, On Love (1915).
Daniel Uncapher is a PhD candidate at the University of Utah with an MFA from Notre Dame, where he was a Nicholas Sparks fellow. A queer and disabled Mississippian, his work has appeared/is forthcoming in The Sun, Georgia Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Tin House, and others.
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