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
Recently fell in love with the characters in this wonderful novel by Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding. Set in a fictional “Westish college” and focusing on the members of their baseball team, “Harpooners”.
I’m decidedly not linking to any further information sources, for should you be curious, it is always recommendable to go in totally unaware.
If/when you’ve read the book, you probably recognize this scene, which was the igniting moment for this inspiration. I was absolutely floored by the structure and conclusion of this particular chapter; what a way to get you invested.
Pins, sweater, lamp and glasses all appear in the book.
This shirt! Moby Dick themed “Westish college” gear, as described in the book. I loved how the novel tied a fictional college with a fictional team convincingly to a real life figure and their legacy (Herman Melville).
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This serves also as my tribute to a personal long time favorite from the legendary master, Norman Rockwell: “The Dugout”.
“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.
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.
@ 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
“Boredom is a dialectical emotion. It is in the first place a perception of meaninglessness around one and within one. To be bored is literally to be hollowed out, and to experience hollowness. In Ishmael’s case there is nothing particular to do because there is everything to do, but nothing offers itself as worth doing. Because the world is empty, its very freedom is experienced as constriction.”
- Paul Brodtkorb, Jr., Ishmael’s White World(1965)
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.
One week left in our book giveaway contest! If you’ve ever left a review of the show or feel led to do so, message me your username and that will get you entered for a chance to win.
No iTunes? No problem! Just share the podcast with a friend and let me know you did so. That will get you entered too!
More details are available on the website or on older posts from the Tumblr page. Don’t miss your chance to be a part of the drawing!
The basic rules for entry to the book giveaway contest are:
1. Contest began on May 30 and runs until the end of the day on June 13, 2015, EST.
2. Entry limited to residents of U.S. and Canada w/a mailing address therein. (Sorry everyone else! Int'l shipping is just more than I can currently afford)
3. Method of Entry - Either leave a review of the podcast on iTunes or your pod catcher of choice, or tell a friend about the podcast.
4. Notification - Message me on Facebook or Twitter, or email me at [email protected] with the username you used to leave a review or how you told a friend about the podcast.
5. Drawing - I will verify review entries and enter all participants in a random drawing that will be conducted during the week of June 13.
6. Winner - I will notify the winner via the method they entered within a day of drawing. The winner has one week to accept the prize. If it is not accepted by initial winner, I’ll conduct a second drawing with the remaining entrants.
7. Prize - The prize is one (1) copy of the ‘Wreck of the Whale Ship Essex: The Complete Illustrated Edition: The Extraordinary and Distressing Memoir That Inspired Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.’ More info about the book can be found at http://www.amazon.com/Wreck-Whale-Ship-Essex-Extraordinary/dp/076034812X. The Maritime History Podcast will pay for shipping costs involved in getting the prize to the mailing address provided by the contest winner.
Today marks the 200th birthday of Herman Melville. His epic novel, Moby-Dick, is one of the most important and enduring masterworks of the 19th century.
Did you know? Harper & Brothers—champions of the author’s unique American voice—published Moby-Dick; or, the whale in 1851. However, Melville didn’t earn the critical acclaim he sought in his lifetime. It wasn’t until the centennial of his birth in 1919 that brought newfound appreciation for his work. The previously unpublished Billy Budd emerged in 1924 and sold quickly along with the rest of his canon, and Moby-Dick took its rightful place as a cornerstone of American literature.
