My son is reading it right now, and he loves it. He’s just reading it on his own, no class or anything. He’s been moving steadily through the classics in the last few years.
I thought Dickheads were those who followed Phillip K. Dick and all things Dickian.
Well it beats being a Dickens fan/associate, or Dickensass as we call ourselves
na, dumb book
Dicks out for Moby!
For a while my friends had a band called the tricky dicks.
The logo was Nixon riding a white sperm whale.
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-laborers’ 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-humor 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.
My baby gay ass reading this at 10: 🤔
Legs out for Captain Ahab.
My favorite part of Moby Dick is the chapter titled The Prairie.
In it, Melville basically attributes the size/wrinkles in a forehead to the wisdom/greatness of that being. He goes on to describe the foreheads of various lesser species, and then lists influential men with big, wrinkled foreheads (Shakespeare, as an example), comparing the undulations in these splendid wise men’s foreheads to the undulations of a prairie and their splendor. Then, he asks the reader to consider the gravitas of a Sperm Whale’s forehead.
It’s literally the best fucking thing I’ve ever read and it’s crazy that nobody else lauds this passage as I do.
Somewhere on a dark corner of the internet, someone is writing Moby Dick erotica right now.
Where 👀👀👀
(Asking for a friend)
I would assume ao3, or failing that wattpad
There’s some freaky shit on ao3.
Writing? Queequeg-Ishmael yaoi shows up on Google Images, this stuff is way beyond just dark corners.
Well, I had to check. All I can say is good fucking lord man.
"Fuck me Ismael… " Etc etc
I’m about 200 pages in, it’s really good. But I wish there was a primer I could read about the themes, symbols, and historical context of the book. Just so I know what I’m looking out for. Searching for things on the Internet has gotten frustrating though. I did find the website that has notes about what all the words mean though.
Here’s a History Channel special about the story that inspired Moby Dick. I’ve never read Moby Dick, but there were things discovered in a journal well after the book came out that are pretty wild.
This sort of advice would be more useful 200 pages ago… but anyway it’s always good to search for an annotated edition. I read Norton critical edition,* it was really good, had diagrams showing what the different parts of the boat are called, a glossary, supplementary essays, and throughout the text all sorts of footnotes (some of them maybe too explicitly interpretative, but oh well). But I believe even the slightly more modest but still seriously prepared editions such as Oxford World Classics would do the job.
* a critical edition means the editors didn’t just reproduce an existing text, but worked off the most “original” materials available, such as the first edition or the author’s own manuscripts
There are also a few, more recent companion books that give a lot of historical context to both Melville and whaling, etc
Why Read Moby Dick? By Nathaniel Philbrick
Ahab’s Rolling Sea, by Richard J King
Cheers dickhead, online resources are key when youre reading those old nautical tales!
Unironically a great novel. If you can understand Moby Dick, you can understand the first 200 years of American history.
I had to quit at like 50 pages in man. It’s just a tough read, and I powered through war and peace.
I’ve had it on my reading list for over a decade… One day I’ll get to it. Does it still hold up?
After 170 years? A story about the young working class seeking simple comforts through ruthless ecological exploitation? And for this humble crew to be swept up in a prideful crusade towards wealth and glory lead by a charismatic madman intent on killing God? And this crusade culminates in a calamity that destroys everything their exploitative labors sought to build?
I can’t think of any modern parallels. But if one were to arise, I could see a certain sympathetic appeal.
Shout out to the free Librivox recording read by Stewart Wills, it is how I listened to the book and I recommend it.
aaaaah shiit I’m gonna be listening to this baby for MONTHS!
Has anyone here actually read the book?
It’s not exactly a page-turner.
It’s one of the very small number of books to defeat me. The narrative part was okay but every other chapter was full of wildly inaccurate “natural history” descriptions of whales and their lives and I just couldn’t take it.
wildly inaccurate “natural history”
If you consider the fact it was written in 1850 it is surprisingly accurate, like it was talking about whales eating giant squids a century before the scientific community accepted that.
Also the whale descriptions are the point, the book is about the enlightenment drive to understand and therefore master nature with Moby dick standing in as a refutation of that idea, being unconquerable no matter how much knowledge you have. Without the descriptions you could write off Ishmael and the crew as a bunch of idiots who just didn’t have the know how to take down Moby dick.
wildly inaccurate “natural history” descriptions of whales
ngl I think I might find that interesting…
It is the book that completely changed the way I view literature. My favorite book of all time. It is beautiful, funny, bizarre, and tragic.
I was all aboard the Moby Dick train when I tried reading it, and yeah hundreds of pages about whale phlegm really did take the piss out of my vinegar
You need to get on board for what is, at its heart, a blog about being a whaler in the 19th century. The story isn’t gripping in the sense of a two minute movie trailer, but it does draw you in and lead you to care about a bunch of the crew as it drags on. It is the quintessential “slow burn” novel.
But it isn’t even the worst on that front. Any Brian Sanderson novel is going to have a similar “omg, is this going anywhere? And why won’t they just kiss already? Damn, now I know entirely too much about an obscure
magic systemmethodology of turning whale cum into lighter fluid” element.One book I could argue genuinely reads better on audiobook when you’re stuck in traffic for two hours a day.
It is a page-turner; in fact it’s a banger. It’s an incredible book
Is there any way you can describe the appeal more specifically? I hated it but I’m trying to understand what people see in it.
Yes. It’s probably my favourite book ever. No need for it to be a page-turner if each page is interesting by itself.
It was written & read back in the days when people’s favorite pastime was literature. Ain’t nobody got time for that now.
I’m more a “crop your screenshots for posts” dickhead.
dickheads come in many shapes and forms
Only the truly literate are dickheads round these parts that’s why they call me Ishmael.
@Godric alt text
“The Moby Dick Fandom is dying”
moby dick pictured about to wreck a dinghy
"reblog if youre still a true dickhead 🐳 "Thanks, dickhead :)
I will upvote this if anybody who is using a screen reader upvotes it.
@tomiant its not there for you, silly goat, it was so i could reblog this where i know blind fraggle hangs out
silly goat
alright then, I will upvote it. But now if they read the caption they’ll have to read this stuff too!
This dick is out. I like philip k dick
Flow My Tears, the Dickman Said 😭
