#moby dick
girl in class is talking about how ishmael’s reasons for going to sea are “not relatable” bro what could be more relatable. he’s sad and he gets on a boat about it
“no homo” children’s adaptations of the quishmael marriage scene always manage to be the funniest things I’ve ever read
All things considered, pretty fair youth adaption, for work that was coded/self-censored by the writer. It retains the key line of dialog for instance.
Also, what a world we’re in, where we casually described fict couples, ships if you will, with smoshed up versions of their names.
Melville would spin with mixed emotions. I think he’d cry with joy at the openness and acceptance. But he’d possibly hate what he’d perceive as a real degradation to the english language.
Just thoughts
by Herman Melville
What’s it about?
A captain obsessed with hunting down the white whale that bit off his leg.
Surely there’s more to it than that?
You’d like to think so. But you’d be wrong.
My copy is like 500 pages long…
Right. Let’s say you’re a writer, and you want to write a book about whaling. So you research whales and whaling and maybe some history of the areas around the whaling and so on until you pretty much know more than anyone about whaling. Then you take that knowledge and you use it as the background for your whaling story.
What you do not do is put every tiny detail of what you learned about whaling into your book. Or, if you can’t shoehorn it into the main plot, write a preface about it or stop the story to make space for some irrelevant whale-gibberish.
Despite the length of this book, it seems to be a lost opportunity. Think of the things Melville could have done with all that space which he instead uses to talk about whales. No effort, for instance, is made to explore the seemingly obvious sexual symbolism (legs have been substituted for penises in literature since the dawn of time), although the sex life of whales is described in a relatively straight-forward manner. However, he couldn’t find the time to develop the characters.
What should I say to make people think I’ve read it?
“I donate to Greenpeace and this book made me hate whales.”
What should I avoid saying when trying to convince people I’ve read it?
“Hey, I just met you, and this is crazy
But here’s my number, so call me Ishmael.”
Should I actually read it?
Unless you’re interested in a comprehensive guide to whaling in the 1800s, no. It’s a great idea for a book, and you can see where he was going with it, but it’s like Melville forgot that real people are going to have to actually sit down and read the thing. Nevertheless, if you’ve read Game of Thrones and you think the problem with Moby Dick is that it’s too long, you should probably present yourself to the relevant authorities at first light.
just saw a “only one bed” fic with the major character death warning
“This bed ain’t big enough for the both of us.”
dying-suffering-french-stalkers:
dracula daily for moby dick but it takes three years bc that’s how long they were on the pequod
y’all got so excited about 3-year moby dick that uhhh… i made it happen
I went to screencap this because uh. I feel seen,
but then had a very sensible and mature chuckle at how my phone cut off the header:
everyone this is your sign to subscribe
HEY KEN @gayvictorians
dying-suffering-french-stalkers:
dracula daily for moby dick but it takes three years bc that’s how long they were on the pequod
y’all got so excited about 3-year moby dick that uhhh… i made it happen
I went to screencap this because uh. I feel seen,
but then had a very sensible and mature chuckle at how my phone cut off the header:
everyone this is your sign to subscribe
@ everyone saying “we should do a 20k Leagues Daily next” in the tags of that meme i drew: no we should not. i love that book as much as the next guy but i ask you, my fellow captain nemo stans, to consider how many times aronnax just goes “didn’t see the captain for two weeks. no further notes!” and then imagine that in email form. complete radio silence for the better part of a month…… and then out of nowhere you’re rewarded for your saintly patience by being blasted with five thousand words of aronnax listing sea creatures like yakko naming countries in animaniacs
honest to god i would subscribe to The Daily Dick just to confuse and disgust people when i tell them i’m subscribed to The Daily Dick before clarifying it’s about the whale book
dying-suffering-french-stalkers:
dracula daily for moby dick but it takes three years bc that’s how long they were on the pequod
y’all got so excited about 3-year moby dick that uhhh… i made it happen
I went to screencap this because uh. I feel seen,
but then had a very sensible and mature chuckle at how my phone cut off the header:
everyone this is your sign to subscribe
dracula daily for moby dick but it takes three years bc that’s how long they were on the pequod
y’all got so excited about 3-year moby dick that uhhh… i made it happen
this is the funniest fucking thing to me
I leave my desk for five minutes…
The overview.
Zen construction.
The Third Doctor on top once again.
Cassidy gets a… staff?
Have yourself a Grendel litle Christmas, now.
And now we know what Prisoner Zero was in for.
Spider, no.
This is like a while miniseries of ideas here.
My actual favorite. Bat under Glass.
Never let artists near your things, honey. That’s all I know.
- Paul Brodtkorb, Jr., Ishmael’s White World(1965)
Posters by Zakuro Aoyama
Julia Armfield, Herman Melville, and the Epigraph as Critical Practice
When Melville writes of the ‘subtleness of the sea,’ its ‘remorseless tribes,’ its ‘universal cannibalism’ and ‘eternal war,’ when he writes of the ‘most docile earth’ couched within ‘all the horrors of the half-known life,’ he writes of an ordered space precariously balanced atop a far greater body of disorder and distortion, but when we limit our understanding of this passage – and indeed, of Moby Dick as a whole – to a somewhat mystified intimation of the sea as conceptually unknowable to the point of being beyond any real-world discursive touchstones, we elide not only a complex engagement with a long tradition of Western maritime literature, but a reading of the novel as wholly embroiled in the question of (American) imperialism. Melville’s body of water, his subtleness of the sea, is a force of destabilisation not because Moby Dick is some eldritch unknowable horror, but because Moby Dick represents at once the dream of the American empire couched in the fetishism of whiteness and the relentless, obsessive process of production and plunder and slaughter axiomatic to its existence; the novel is a horror story that moors its horrors in a discourse centred on nineteenth-century colonialism.
Let’s talk about water a little.HELLO at long last, the promised substack piece, on moby dick and water and what it actually means to put an epigraph at the beginning of your novel. please enjoy in all its 6.5k monstrosity. thanks everyone.
dying-suffering-french-stalkers:
dracula daily for moby dick but it takes three years bc that’s how long they were on the pequod
y’all got so excited about 3-year moby dick that uhhh… i made it happen
I went to screencap this because uh. I feel seen,
but then had a very sensible and mature chuckle at how my phone cut off the header:
everyone this is your sign to subscribe
Zdzisław Beksiński
Girldick this, boydick that, I’m hunting MOBY Dick
Ahab be like “I was assigned harpoon at birth”
Tumblr Book Club Master Post
Updated as new projects are announced
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The Classics:
Dracula Daily: Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the one that started it all. Began May 3rd 2022, running through November 6th 2022
Edgar Allan Poe Daily: Various Poe stories sent on days there is no Dracula. Began May 13th 2022, runs through at least the end of Dracula
Whale Weekly: Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Begins December 2022, runs through 2025
Letters From Watson: Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, the short stories. Begins January 1st 2023, runs through December 2023
Frankenstein Weekly: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Begins February 1st 2023, runs for several months
The Penny Dreadful: the original Penny Dreadful stories. TBA
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The New:
What Manner of Man: original queer Vampire novel by @stjohnstarling. Begins January 2023
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See anything missing? Send an ask or DM and it’ll be added asap
only just realizing that i’ve had a moby dick quote in my bio this whole time so like. this is not actually a surprise