Moby Dick

“um moby dick”

“What was the book? Moby dick”

“I mean, like we tried this; we had a book club and the book club was, you know, we’d read like great works of literature, so we read Moby Dick. Yeah, you were on a deck of a ship, right? Exactly, so we did one with Moby Dick and it’s like I love that stuff, right?”

“it's the the hero or the protagonist doesn't learn from his mistakes and and and holds on Moby Dick is a tragedy because Ahab will not give up on this [ __ ] white”

“but Moby Dick barely sold in Herman Melville's Lifetime and only became this iconic work of literature over you know a century”

“The sinking of this ship inspired Herman Melville to write Moby Dick, and what happened was, in I think it was 1821, the whaling industry in Nantucket was so fascinating.”

“You know, I did a course on Moby Dick, Heart of Darkness, Notes from Underground, Death in Venice, and The Plague—all one course. Oh yeah, that's fun.”

“I've always been fascinated by that story; of course, Melville makes a lot of it in Moby Dick. There's a moment in that story that I find particularly compelling, and one of the things I like about the Bible is it will have these little moments of very powerful humanity in the midst of wrestling with the numinous.”

“He is a Moby Dick afficionado and collects copies and versions of that and he said that is the best book of all time.”

“He started reciting Moby Dick; the opening to Moby Dick was really striking.”

“If you've ever read Moby Dick, you know about the whale that sinks the ship. Yes, there's actually a true story behind it. So Nantucket originally was for Quakers, yeah, were whale men.”

“so there's definitely that there's you know i circle back to moby dick a lot um because we read it in a uh a really great english class i had in high school and i came in with an oppositional stance because i thought that the teacher was going to try to talk me into having all kinds of highfalutin”

“I remember when we did the Mandela Pavilion, we read 'Moby Dick,' the whiteness of the whale, the albino, the different, the other. And that got us to work on melanin.”

“and at this great quote in Herman Melville's moby-dick that says you know Noah's Flood is still happening we are the majority of the earth is still flooded in water these we are connected to these events”

“I'm getting there. I wrote an academic paper actually about the mathematics in Moby Dick, and that came out in 2021.”

“one of many failings is i've never gotten through moby dick or or any of melville's works so maybe can you comment on before we talk about dave or david foster wallace who i have gotten through”

“so and and melville does the same thing in moby dick where he he thinks about will there ever come a time where we run out of whales”

“did you go read moby-dick see how many mahi-mahi they got in that sucker zilch ezel”

“that's moby dick right ruby dick was it was a was a book about energy consumption and like harvesting energy”

“How many times have you read Moby Dick? I’m 50 years old.”

“I read Moby Dick for the first time at the age of 17. What was your impression on your first reading at 17 years old?”

“I could not believe the book; if it were not for Moby Dick, whaling would be one of a series of interests, but because Moby Dick has loomed so large, I went all in on whaling then, huh?”

“In 1851, he published a novel called The Whale, later retitled Moby Dick or The Whale. At some point, you may have read Moby Dick or pretended to.”

“But as much as I’d like to say that Moby Dick is a book about whaling, I mean, we have been doing this three-part series on the history and economics of whaling, Moby Dick isn't really about whaling.”

“And how about the crew in Moby Dick? The book you love more than anything describes for me the diversity of the crew on the Pequod.”

“The book you love more than anything describes for me the diversity of the crew on the Pequod. The crew of Moby Dick is probably more diverse than any historic whaling ship was.”

“I'm laughing, especially because one of the very funny discourses on Twitter about Moby Dick is that there's a whole kind of subset of Moby Dick-obsessed Twitter, and one of the jokes is about what it means to hate a specific animal.”

“Part of what makes Moby Dick funny in some ways is that there’s a hatred for a specific animal. Can you describe in just a few words what Moby Dick Twitter is like?”

“Well, a lot of it is taking lines from Moby Dick and translating them into popular memes, and so that’s always amusing. Do you have a favorite or two?”

“The distracted boyfriend meme is a common one where the original girlfriend is something like the plot of the novel, and the girl that is distracting the boyfriend—the boyfriend is Melville, and the girl distracting him can be something like minute details about whaling taxonomy. So that kind of meme.”

“It's an outlier only in the sense that it remains widely read today, in part because by naming the whale Moby Dick, I mean, there are so many ways. Melville is like a deeply queer writer; all of his texts have scenes of mutual masturbation or various other queer subtexts.”

“The challenge of reading Moby Dick is having a comfort in not knowing, being someone who can sit with dissatisfaction, or sit with inconclusiveness, sit with discomfort, sit with the idea that things will not be resolved necessarily in the timeframe or the way that you want them to. I don't think everybody's comfortable with that.”

“So if you could go back to your 17-year-old self, and maybe when you first read it and fell in love with it, but then tack onto your 17-year-old self your current self with your deeper understanding of the book, how would you describe to your classmates who were not interested in reading Moby Dick, or maybe to the millions”

“Moby Dick is deeply weird and funny, and what it especially does for me, both the 17-year-old me and the 18- or 20-year-olds to whom I teach it now, and to my 50-year-old self who still reads it at least once a year, is that Moby Dick takes any sense that you might have that there is some transcendent, great,”

“The idea that things can be messy is part of the form of Moby Dick's own messiness.”

“But the odds are you will have to seek it out, as Melville writes in Moby Dick: it is not down in any map; true places never are.”

“Also, why is it still a good idea to read Moby Dick? There's a headline early in the novel that says bloody battle in Afghanistan, grand contested election for the presidency of the United States—and is a 19th-century whaling crew more ethnically diverse than your 21st-century office?”