#moby-dick

[prokopetz]

Everything Tumblr has told you about Moby-Dick is absolute bullshit, and everything that Tumblr has told you about Moby-Dick is 100% true. It’s a travelogue fantasy. It’s proto-science fiction. It’s cosmic horror. It’s shockingly original and it’s shamelessly plagiaristic. It’s a misotheistic Christian parable in which the whale is the mask of a cruel, uncaring God and Ahab is Satan himself, not as trickster or as tempter, but as doomed hero. It’s the most gripping thing you’ll ever read. It’s boring as shit. But above all else – and I cannot emphasise this enough – it is filled with Facts About Whales.

[starbuck]

me analyzing media

[even-in-arcadia]

Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales

In my very informed opinion it is absolutely essential to read Chapter 55 with visual aids. Here are some highlights pulled from Ishmael's Most Hated depictions so we can all be on the same page about what whales definitely don't look like.

Guido Reni & William Hogarth get the benefit of the doubt on account of the fact that it never says Perseus's sea monster is a whale. We can all agree that these definitely are not:

2. Robert Sibbald was the first naturalist to officially describe a blue whale and I'll give him a pass on being first and blue whales being incomprehnsibly large even now, but this really is not accurate in pretty much any way.

See below the cut for more "monstrous" depictions!

4. Oliver Goldsmith's An History of the Earth and Animated Nature is truly a treasure. Per Ishmael "I do not wish to seem inelegant, but this unsightly whale looks much like an amputated sow". The illustration on the right isn't directly mentioned in here but honestly it's a treasure and I feel obliged to share it with you. There's too much going on there for me to possibly pick out highlights. They're so bad they're perfect. No notes.

5. Bernard Germain, defying the laws of physics here. "Not only incorrect" but also does "not to have its counterpart in nature"

6. Cuvier's Sperm whale is "not a sperm whale but a squash." Succinct and shady. Perhaps my favorite description in the entire chapter.

[weil-weil-lautre]

So far tens of millions of Americans can understand Ahab. They have worked under such men. A smaller but not insignificant number have gone through his experiences. The Diesel engine and now atomic energy face the vast majority with the same problem that he faced: the obvious, immense, the fearful mechanical power of an industrial civilization which is now advancing by incredible leaps and bringing at the same time the mechanization and destruction of human personality. Men who are thinking like that, classes of people in a nation who are thinking such thoughts, are being steadily prepared for desperate action. If now there descends upon them a violent catastrophe that ruins them and convinces them that the life they have been living is intolerable and the grave doubts that have previously tormented them are justifiable, then they are going to throw aside all the traditional restraints of civilization. They are going to seek a new theory of society and a program of action and, on the basis of this theory and this program, they are going to act.

CLR James, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In

[ashleybenlove]

“He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all the known nations of the world.”

Well, this sentence certainly aged differently. 

[jawbonejoe]

Fuck Titanic and the door, the only sea focused ‘they could’ve made it’ moment I’m on is Queequeg and Ishmael. Queequeg 100% could’ve jumped from the masthead of the Pequod and swam to Ishmael in the whaleboat, EVEN with the extraordinary force that a sinking ship creates in the water

[hartenlust]

and no one grew into anything new / we just became the worst of what we were

[snickerdoodlesandsausages]

Oh man y’all I thought the jokes about gay subtext in moby dick were exaggerating bc the internet likes to ship people but if anything the jokes were an understatement.

Chapter two sets up a “one bed” trope. It ends in pillow talk and cuddles explicitly compared to man and wife. Ishmael is unable to keep himself from watching this guy get dressed in the morning. The “In my culture, we’re literally married” trope happens in chapter ten. Nobody has gotten on a boat yet.

He spends pages and pages staring dreamily at this guy and talking about how much better he feels when this man is around and being distressed when he feels like senpai is ignoring him. It very much reads like a fanfiction about two characters in a classic novel, but it’s right at the beginning before any action starts.

I’m not even sure this is about whales, this might just be about the tragedy of Ishmael’s desperate refusal to acknowledge his own feelings and the fact that apparently his only reference to being cuddled is holding the hand of his childhood sleep-paralysis demon. No I am not making that up.

[dduane]

have you read moby dick in your life? my favorite "so you want to be a wizard" book is deep wizardry, and I find a lot of resonance with that book and moby dick

Like a lot of kids who did their early years in US schools, I had to read Moby Dick in either fifth or sixth grade (I forget which...); I'd have been either eleven or twelve. It bored me witless. But I came back to it in my early forties (some years after writing Deep Wizardry) and loved it to bits.

I can't imagine why so many of what are considered "American classics" are forced on audiences of young readers who're generally too early on in their development to appreciate them.

(shrug) It's a mystery to me. Anyway, HTH!

[amaliatheartist]

That recent twitter meme with the comfort characters

[lifblogs]

“‘…that is the captain’s work, not mine; he ordered the carpenter to make it; he had that club-hammer there put to the end, to knock some one’s brains out with, I suppose, as he tried mine once.’”

Something about how this crew talks with, and about, each other is making me like them a lot. I feel like we’re seeing more character with this English crew than Ahab’s somehow. I’m trying to think if this is something about Ishmael. Perhaps he’s hiding camaraderie like this because he would find that recollection too painful? Sorry for slightly going into spoiler territory there. Of course, every crew will behave differently to some extent.

[prokopetz]

The problem with Glitch is that you could play the actual, literary Captain Ahab as a player character with no changes whatsoever, and it would work fine by the rules-as-written, but you'd be up there trying to do a thing about the self-destructive nature of spite and everybody else would just be joking that your Affliction is "dying of whales".

[katenepveu]

Deeply amused to pop open the Whale Weekly tag and find it mostly about the incorrect etymologies in today's entry, as I am given to understand that confidently incorrect facts make up like 60% of this book by volume.

[even-in-arcadia]

Chapter 56, Some Less Erroneous and Also Some True Pictures of Whales

Now that we're all on board with what whales don't look like, it's time to learn about what they DO look like and who hasn't failed at showing us! I will once again put most of the art under the cut; but I think one of the most interesting things that these two chapters show us are

how bad 19th century artists and scientists were at depicting whales - and in compiling this post I saw so many terrible whale drawings Ishmael didn't even call out. Ishmael was right you guys, the whale art scene was absolute chaos back then

most of the art ishmael calls out as "monstrous" is of whales themselves, depicted in either a mythic or scientific perspective. however *all* of the depictions he deems "less erroneous" are actually not of whales of but of whaling which feels like a crucial distinction. Part of it is because none of these whales are depicted in whole, which gets back to Ishmael's contention that it is not actually possible to accurately portray them on paper. Only individual pieces can be correct, but by viewing them together you get an idea of the whole. But it's also that he says flat out that the only reliable source is in fact a whaler; and so necessarily the accurate depictions are of whales already dead or engaged with whaling ships.

Anyway! Just some prefacing thoughts for you. Now on to some less erroneous whales:

William John Huggins

2. Thomas Beale, The Natural History of the Sperm Whale (BEST)

3. William Scoresby, An Account of the Arctic Regions

Personally I think that calling this an accurate depiction is as hilarious as the empty boat flipped upside down in the air but I'm no whaler, what do I know

4. French Engravings (Peche du Cachalot) by Frederic Martens after Garneray

5. J H Durand-Brager, Balienier Francaise en Peche - The best versions of this I could find were in a German pdf (linked); I think these are what Ishmael was referring to.

Now if you're looking at these going "I don't see any whales???". . . . well, here they are. I feel like they're mostly less erroneous by virtue of being tiny.

Also it's important to me that you know that in my quest to find high quality versions of these, I found a site which claimed the painting on the left was called "Bringing In The Whale Whilst Others Look On Enviously" and while I don't know if that's correct (I don't think it is) it's a bitchin title and I will hold it as accurate in my heart.

And there you have it! Now we know what Whales Actually Look Like

[luckychinacat]

what if I post an old drawing of Ishmael and Queequeg from 3 years ago what then

[ashleybenlove]

"Perseus, St. George, Hercules, Jonah, and Vishnoo! there’s a member-roll for you! What club but the whaleman’s can head off like that?"

Ishmael's about to create his own team of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or something.