Squeeze! Squeeze! Squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me, and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-labourers' hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally, as much as to say,—Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill humour or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.
I was never sure if Herman Melville was being naughty in this Chapter 94: A Squeeze of the Hand or winking his eye at all of us, or if this was his homo-eroticism being blatantly out there.
My high school honors teacher never went into this.
I bought a new recommended edition and the intro really gets into this.
I think I need to reread Moby-Dick as an adult in 2022.
And what about the chapter about a whale’s penis? Did we just skip over all this in class? Chapter 95 “The Cassock” is just a page long but it’s all about the big penis of a sperm whale.
They killed a whale in a previous chapter and now Melville details the size, shape and removal of the whale’s “grandissimus” and its dissection.
And why “The Cassock?” which is the name for a clergyman’s robe?
When the penis is being stripped apart, thesailor called the “mincer” of the whale removes its dick skin whole, cuts himself a couple of arm holes and wears the giant penis skin like a priest’s robe, or a cassock.
3 notes
·
View notes
I still think about the time months ago I was advertised a book that was being marketed as a “queer horror retelling of Moby Dick” like. Girl. I don’t think you have any business “retelling” a story if you clearly don’t even know what the original story was about.
3K notes
·
View notes
at the request of @fierifreak, here is a chart i originally posted on twitter that inexplicably did numbers (credit to OP of the blank graph in the corner!)
12K notes
·
View notes
Merry whales in the log of the ship Susan, kept by Reuben Russell. Nantucket Historical AssociationPublic Domain
2K notes
·
View notes
I can't be the first person to make this observation, but it's just struck me that Captain Ahab from Moby-Dick and Thomas Blanky from The Terror represent the opposite ends of a spectrum—"How well do you cope with losing your leg to a huge white beast that destroys hubristic seafaring men?"
1K notes
·
View notes
rip herman melville you would've loved adding several chapters about whale falls to moby dick
2K notes
·
View notes
I was roleplaying Moby Dick with a stranger in a hotel swimming pool. I have not read Moby Dick. I asked her who was going to be the whale and she said, “Oh, it’s okay, we don’t need the whale.”
1K notes
·
View notes
“...a silvery silence, not a solitude...”
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale
4 notes
·
View notes
We really don’t talk enough about the spleen these days. People used to talk about the spleen like it was the king of organs, Shakespeare wrote it verse, these days you’re lucky if someone even knows they have one. Moby Dick opens with Ishmael going to sea to drive off the spleen, what have you done for your spleen lately? I want to be complemented on the splendour of my spleen, just once. I want to taste splenetic delights.
2K notes
·
View notes
The thing you have to keep in mind about Moby Dick is that it’s an explicitly anti-racist text written by a white guy in the 1850s. So you end up with stuff like Ishmael spending an entire paragraph complimenting a Polynesian guy on his skull shape.
5K notes
·
View notes
This is (I think) a beautiful read about the experience of reading great literature -- specifically Moby Dick, and that specificity does matter -- in community.
To recite the whole novel in one unbroken sequence only intensifies Moby-Dick’s legendary obstinance. We are all trapped here, in the belly of the beast, one page at a time.
633 notes
·
View notes