Daniel > Recent Status Updates

slightly adjust my schedule and I lose all control of my time

I maybe need to reread #1 first? Having a hard time remembering which events happened to which TF characters...

Finished. (In part due to several internet outages yesterday.)

Particularly liked chapter 130, "The Hat". Every day lately I keep thinking I'll finish this and end up blowing my reading time on other things, but the last several chapters have been very good. Much as I've enjoyed this it will be nice to get back to stuff I can read at a more normal speed.

He's gone full Shakespeare now. Everybody soliloquizing left and right.

Less than 200 pages to go, I'm getting antsy to read something else.

Sorry, slacked off on updates & have barely been reading this week. Not cuz I don't like it though! One thought I haven't mentioned so far is, knowing how this ends (who doesn't), it's surreal when the narrative frame of some chapters makes clear that after surviving this book Ishmael continues his whaling adventures! Like wtf? You'd think he'd be like nope, never gettin' on a boat again.

Sorry, lazy. Lots of gross stuff about whale slaughter. In 71 they meet another crazy prophet, in case you forgot this was all a bad idea. 72 is a nice #queeshmael chapter. Ishy lets us know Queequeg looks fetching in his shirt and socks.
@_@ <.<
where his pants? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Thots: Over half done, yay! There are things Melville just sort of glides over that other (at least modern) writers would make a big set piece and I'm not always sure how I feel about it. It does feel more interested in being a sort of tour of the whaling life, and yet... Melville has set himself up a narrator/main char who is on his first whaling voyage but
--Cont' in comment --

53: "gam", and why its different when whalers meet at sea.
54: We interrupt this novel for a tangentially connected short story. A few sentences run aground, but as prior when "Ishmael" inserts one of these stories as if he's recounting it years later in another context, the bulk of it is more parsable than some of the main story. Good story about new chars on a different ship. Relatively long chapter at 26 pages.

Now, gentlemen, sweeping a ship’s deck at sea is a piece of household work which in all times but raging gales is regularly attended to every evening; it has been known to be done in the case of ships actually foundering at the time. Such, gentlemen, is the inflexibility of sea-usages and the instinctive love of neatness in seamen; some of whom would not willingly drown without first washing their faces.

48: Ishmael's first chase. Bit anticlimactic but a nice bit of action and change of pace.
49: Ishmael's emotional reaction to events of last
50: Ahab's boat & crew: far less about them than I'd have liked.
51: The Spirit-Spout: mostly atmosphere.
52: The Albatross (not the bird) weird, brief, comical, pointless? encounter with another ship.
- Still mostly enjoying this, though I get why people would be frustrated.

43: someone's got a secret
44: whale migration = pattern
45: Melville (pov? pffft) wants you to know whales will fuck you up if they feel like it. Historic whale attacks.
46: Why Ahab must keep up appearances.
47: Ishy & Queequeg, yay! The calm before "she blows"! And a shocking reveal. What's this? Stay tuned!
I enjoyed this batch of chapters, 44 was kind of dull, but no word salad. The rest leisurely but good.

42: Another snoozer. 12 pages trying to convince us that white is the scariest color. Includes a 1.5 page sentence. I'm here for twisted sentences full of parentheticals and whatnot, but that is way too much. Many sentences are already joyless due to the excess of unfamiliar words and references. My reading for beautiful language max exceeded. Best part of the chapter was Ishmael's footnote about the albatross.

37-39: Ahab, Starbuck & Stubb soliloquies, fine.
40: Melville has suddenly changed his mind and is now writing a musical. Amusing, but I couldn't help but wonder how this chapter advanced anything...
41: OMG Melville, WTF! Got excited cuz this started "I, Ishmael" and our gay sailor has been largely offstage since embarking. But the focus is 100% Moby & Ahab backstory in long oppressive paragraphs. Put me to sleep.

Still going good. Chp 33 went a bit incomprehensible at the end, but 34 & 35 were good, and 36 superb. Ahab at last reveals the plan. Like 28-31, 36 is in a sort of dramatic mode, though not in play form. (I think some later chapters are.) Top notch prose, wonderful cadences. :) I had not really expected to like Ahab at all, but so far his chapters have been wonderful.

ngl, I think you could skip "Cetology" (chp 32). I feel like it could've been massively improved just by better formatting tho. My nerd brain was highly distracted wondering what he had wrong. I get his insisting sperm whales are the biggest for dramatic purposes. (NCE notes claim he new better) Very disappointed in Norton ed. for not having detailed whale guide/notes w modern names & groupings, etc. for comparison.

Up next, the notorious "Cetology" chapter. Will I be bored? idk, cuz so far this has been fucking fantastic, despite the occasional rambling digression. In a way it feels like reading fanfic, if the fanfic writer were an 19th c. drop out that could nevertheless write rings around every 20 & 21st c. MFA graduate. I do not think this will be the only Melville novel I end up reading.

royalty is basically salad. seems fair

"ye sons of bachelors" heh. :) Meanwhile, Ishmael randomly lusting after Bulkington. Hush, Ishmael, we will not speak of this again.

Something I'm getting from the notes in the Norton edition that I wouldn't have known just reading the plain text is that a lot of the remarks on/about religion were quite provocative for the time, and according to this likely contributed to Moby-Dick's lack of success and his writing career tanking after it. Before this his publisher for Typee forced him to cut his criticism of the missionaries. Go Melville :)

There was a fishy flavor to the milk, too, which I could not at all account for, till one morning happening to take a stroll along the beach among some fishermen's boats, I saw Hosea's brindled cow feeding on fish remnants, and marching along the sand with each foot in a cod's decapitated head, looking very slip-shod, I assure ye. -- did you just slip in a pun, Herman, you did, didn't you.

"It's ominous, thinks I. A Coffin my Innkeeper upon landing in my first whaling port; tombstones staring at me in the whalemen's chapel; and here a gallows!" -- Melville checking you haven't missed the foreshadowing. I feel like there's a term for this, lampshading doesn't quite fit as it's nothing that's straining suspension of disbelief, but I can't recall.

Chpt 11, Ishmael is in wuv. #queeshmael
Chpt 14 brought to you by the Nantucket propaganda board.
Melville sure can write a purty sentence, but damn he really is all over the place.
Also this edition has Queequeg's home island as Kokovoko in chpt 12 and Rokovoko in 13, like good work Modern Library. (Norton has K in both.)

that's more like it, no more of that church going rot, time to get gay married to a guy you just met

ok, i could have done without those two chapters, 8 & 9

Quite good so far, though there have been two spots (end of Chapter 2 & 7) where he suddenly goes off on some weird rambling paragraph I can't make heads or tails of. Haven't needed to look up much so far, but I'm so used to missing chunks of auditory info that I'm comfortable not understanding every word. (This edition doesn't have notes, but I have the norton on hand also.)

oh noes! there's only one bed at the inn

here we go