Moby Dick

reading the chapter called "the cassock" for the first time and just never stopping saying WTF ever since

Yeah yeah, I think the fact that so much of the ~whale science~ is wrong and/or presumptive is a large part of what makes those sections interesting. Deepens the sense of UNKNOWABLE that permeates the book. Also it’s just kinda neat.

post-mortemizing

otm all around, i loved the whale facts chapters (whiteness of the whale otoh...), especially the part where he bids adieu to the sulphur bottom whale lol

Read it for a third time last year, the only book I’ve re-read in 20 or more years, gets more fun every time. The wrong science in the whale chapters never bothers me bc it always just ends up being in the service of teeing up some philosophical point in the last couple paragraphs anyhow, it’s never about actually teaching u about whales.

It was a good companion getting me through the dark weeks after USA Election Day 2016, I picked it up the morning after, thought it might be good to get a refresher on how to exist in a world filled with random disasters & unknowable evils

this time of year I always think about the passage early in the book where he talks about the special joy of looking out at cold winter night from a warm cozy indoor perch: it maketh a marvellous difference, whether thou lookest out at it from a glass window where the frost is all on the outside, or whether thou observest it from that sashless window, where the frost is on both sides... What a fine frosty night; how Orion glitters; what northern lights! Let them talk of their oriental summer climes of everlasting conservatories; give me the privilege of making my own summer with my own coals.

Also the part slightly later where he talks about how you cant fully enjoy being under a warm blanket in a cold room unless some part of you is sticking out to feel the cold & remind you how good you have it.

Love the whole book, but I miss Ishmael’s narration/asides when the book becomes more plot/Ahab/Starbuck focused towards the end.

i listened to e1 of talia levin's BIG MOBY DICK ENERGY podcast on stitcher: my conclusion is that the title and music have already palled but the discussion is engaging enough, bcz very enthusiastic (1st guest = ex-deadspin writer david roth) if not particularly deep so far*

*(viz they were both oddly stumped by what happens in the tale of lazarus and dives, possibly partly bcz this was a call forward to the next chapter which they hadn't reread with a view to discussing it, but still decided to discuss it anyway lol) (i mean i get not knowing much abt the new testament if you didn't grew up with it as an adjunct in yr education but it is probably going to be kind of an important element?)

anyway:

let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness

— Moby Dick (@MobyDickatSea) January 25, 2020

I found critical biography among the most illuminating I've read about any novelist/poet in recent years.

Is Ishmael a reference beyond the name? Not very familiar with lesser biblical figures.

He was Abraham's son with his wife's handmaid Hagar.

Ishmael was the child of Abraham and his wife’s servant Hagar, who was cast out from the family after Abraham and Sarah’s son Isaac was born. God promised to make Ishmael a great nation as well, separate from the line of Abraham that became the tribes of the Hebrews. So Ishmael might be a name implying wanderings, being an outsider, heterodoxy…

patriach of Islam too

There is a big picture of Melville in the cafe at the South Street Seaport location of McNally-Jackson bookstore which is quite appropriate.

It has that quality of the eyes seeming to follow you about, like the portrait or a certain patriarch of the family Flintstone.

god this is the best book ever. the way the "whale facts" chapters either explained things that had just happened or foreshadowed things to come was intoxicating, i always felt i was like running through these alleyways of lowkey narrative that inextricably bound the "actual" narrative

i have a moby-dick tattoo that i'm not embarrassed about, that is how much i love it

Sick

I found Melville's poems harder going than Moby-Dick.

I tried to read Confidence Man, wasn't happening

that's my least favorite of the novels I've read

god this is the best book ever

literally true

i only know about lazarus+dives because they're a recurring symbol in MLK sermons

I started trying to read Confidence Man cos Nick Cave was said to be a fan. Think I got a couple of chapters in. Must give it another go. This 30+years later.

i picked his book of civil war poems recently and it was really a chore, tough going indeed

christ, this revive scared me, i thought maybe melville had died or something

No, but 🚨 SPOILER/TRIGGER ALERT 🚨 I believe Billy Budd, Sailor is now in the public domain.

Confidence Man is great, you guys mad.

It was a popular choice when I was in high school, don’t know if that’s a relevant data point.

Confidence is really good. Better than his poems, surely.

Alfred not liking Confidence Man, liking Ad Astra, world is mad.

my curvy cetacean wife

This excerpt from a rejection letter to Melville re Moby Dick is just amazing.

the more things change... pic.twitter.com/dRaelwdlaG

— Andrey (@andreyp_ap) January 21, 2021

i have a bookclub w my friend & we are currently reading “20,000 Leagues Under The Sea”. i had never read Verne til now & i think i may actively hate him. wtf at this goddamn book.

but, my point is thus:

i pitched to my friend that we absolutely HAVE to read Moby Dick next bc Melville is such an excellent & enjoyable writer (imo)

& she agreeeeeeeeeeed

~snoopy dance~

i have 7 chapters left of Verne & at this point i dont care if the “mystery” of Nemo is that he sneaks onto land at night to steal children to power the submarine with human babies

i really fucking hate it & cannot WAIT to read Moby Dick again. it’s been at least 25 years since i read it for American Lit class at Uni

Oh man you’re going to have so much fun. It holds up like crazy

🐳🐳🐳🐳🐳

oddly enough there is an old ray bradbury essay where he compares ahab and nemo, tho not to any particular purpose that i can recall beyond “they’re both captains.”

i like verne actually, at least his best work, but i remember 20,000 leagues being a bit of a slog. he is certainly a strange writer and “wtf” is a reasonable response. he’s most enjoyable when he’s writing about something completely mad — tunneling to the center of the earth, traveling round the solar system on the back of a comet. but moby dick is so good and so unique that it’s hard to compare anything else to it.

yeah 20,000 leagues feels more like a vehicle for verne to show off about fish taxonomy & the inner workings of an electric submarine (while characters consume as much exotic marine life as possible). definitely light on the adventure that its reputation seemed to promise.

i read in that 2019 new yorker article about melville that Moby Dick was inspired by his reading Mary Shelleys “Frankenstein” for the first time while traveling to England
i’d never heard that before!
which makes me like it more

i have just started reading moby dick for the first time! No spoilers!

Moby Dick is a whale.

also a fish

when i was small and my dad read me some (i guess very abridged/adapted) children's version of 2000 leagues i heard the name of nemo's sub as "the naughtiness"

this is the only thing i remember tbh (and it's wrong)

Moby Dick is people!

Sorry

*disappointedly flings book across the room*

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/06/science/math-gresham-sarah-hart.html

Moby Dick Restaurant; Northern Mariana Islands, Garapan Saipan PMB658 BOX10000 https://t.co/SWcke0ABbC pic.twitter.com/BWqf8A6BrI

— Random Restaurant (@_restaurant_bot) November 21, 2021

Nor is it at all prudent for the hunter to be overcurious touching the precise nature of the whale spout. It will not do for him to be peering into it, and putting his face into it. You cannot go with your pitcher to this fountain, and fill it, and bring it away. For even when coming into slight contact with the outer, vapory shreds of the jet, which will often happen, your skin will feverishly smart, from the acridness of the thing so touching it. And I know one, who coming into still closer contact with the spout, whether with some scientific object in view, or otherwise, I cannot say, the skin peeled off from his cheek and arm. Wherefore, among whalemen, the spout is deemed poisonous; they try to avoid it. Another thing; I have heard it said, and I do not much doubt it, that if the jet is fairly spouted into your eyes, it will blind you. The wisest thing the investigator can do then, it seems to me, is to let this deadly spout alone.

Still, we can hypothesize, even if we cannot prove and establish.... I am convinced that from the heads of all ponderous profound beings, such as Plato, Pyrrho, the Devil, Jupiter, Dante, and so on, there always goes up a certain semi-visible steam, while in the act of thinking deep thoughts. While composing a little treatise on Eternity, I had the curiosity to place a mirror before me; and ere long saw reflected there, a curious involved worming and undulation in the atmosphere over my head....

That mix of levity and casual profundity feels so modern to me.

where pynchon came from for sure:

We resumed business; and while plying our spoons in the bowl, thinks I to myself, I wonder now if this here has any effect on the head? What's that stultifying saying about chowder-headed people? "But look, Queequeg, ain't that a live eel in your bowl? Where's your harpoon?"

Fishiest of all fishy places was the Try Pots, which well deserved its name; for the pots there were always boiling chowders. Chowder for breakfast, and chowder for dinner, and chowder for supper, till you began to look for fish-bones coming through your clothes. The area before the house was paved with clamshells. Mrs. Hussey wore a polished necklace of codfish vertebra; and Hosea Hussey had his account books bound in superior old sharkskin. There was a fishy flavor to the milk, too, which I could not at all account for, till one morning happening to take a stroll along the beach among some fishermen's boats, I saw Hosea's brindled cow feeding on fish remnants, and marching along the sand with each foot in a cod's decapitated head, looking very slip-shod, I assure ye.