#moby-dick

[prokopetz]

"Ending explained" video for Herman Melville's Moby-Dick that initially appears to be doing something with the luciferan symbolism surrounding Captain Ahab, but by the two-thirds mark it's clear it's gradually circling in on an argument that Ishmael's improbable survival of the penultimate chapter proves he was secretly working for the whale.

[elwenyere]

"Ultimately what kills me about Heated Rivalry is not just its dazzling, galvanic love story, nor its commitment to both narrative and erotic caretaking, but how it makes me feel about the not [yet] here of Melville’s imaginaries. I recently talked about the show and the novel with Rachel O’Connell, a literature scholar and new friend. She cracked open what I’ve been scrabbling at in my HR/MD monomania: the literary genre of contemporary MM romance provides one structural realization of an imagined world that Melville was trying to write into being in Moby-Dick. The messy, unfinished architecture of the novel cannot, as Ishmael confesses, 'be here, and at once, perfected.'

And not just in the novel: After all, Melville had asked Nathaniel Hawthorne to his cottage. In 1851, while composing Moby-Dick, he wrote Hawthorne a series of letters as heated by mid-19th-century standards as any scene in Heated Rivalry. In inviting his own possible situationship to come to his home—in his first known letter to Hawthorne—Melville, like a doped-up, concussed Shane, affects a lightness that doesn’t disguise its own feverishness: 'I am not to be charmed out of my promised pleasure […]. Your bed is already made, & the wood marked for your fire. […] I keep the word ‘Welcome’ all the time in my mouth, so as to be ready on the instant when you cross the threshold.' This 'welcome,' pleasurably effervescent on the tongue but freighted with the unsaid, is Melville’s version of the Canada Dry ginger ale and Coca-Cola that Ilya and Shane stock for each other."

-- Hester Blum in Public Books

“Heated Rivalry” Is the “Moby-Dick” of Canadian Gay Hockey Shows - Public Books

The literary genre of contemporary MM romance realizes an imagined world that Melville was trying to write into being.

[sunshineonashelf]

inspired by that one post

[need-him-pregnant-poll]

NEED👏THAT👏MAN👏PREGNANT *SEASON TWO* ROUND 1 POLL 65

TUMBLR! Who's getting pregnant?

Jack Harkness (Doctor Who/Torchwood)

Ishmael (Moby-Dick)

Voting ended onFeb 8

PROPAGANDA:

[Jack]

"He canonically has been, but I need to see it fully explored."

"He's so much of a whore that the litmus test on whether or not you can fuck it was based on him, he has a wide selection of possible baby daddies/mommies/parents."

Jack propaganda from last season

[Ishmael]

"He’s a schoolteacher most of the time. Good with children.

Queequeg declared him his wife and would be an excellent father to their baby tbh.

He gets suicidal and goes to sea every few years but that’s off the table bc of the whole Whale Trauma so I think it would be good to give him something to live for.

There’s not nearly enough mpreg of the classics out there."

[yepthatsacowalright]

“Reading parts of ‘Moby-Dick’ is like watching a fireworks in which Virgilian Roman candles, Old Testament sparklers, and Shakespearean bottle rockets pop off all at once, hissing and whistling; you get the feeling the stage manager is about to blow a finger off. If there’s a showiness to Melville’s pyrotechnics, his erudition was hard-won. But this was among the qualities of his ‘Moby-Dick’ that reviewers found bonkers: ‘The style is maniacal—mad as a March hare.’”

- Jill Lepore, Herman Melville at Home in The New Yorker 6/22/19

[panthalassicpoet]

Ishmael and Queequeg for Valentine's Day. Chapter 10 of Moby-Dick is just really cute.

And as a bonus, Ahab's valentine for the white whale himself:

[lucybellwood]

I drew 24 speakers at the International Melville Society Conference so you, too, could feel like you spent three days getting your brain melted out your ears by a bunch of rad academics.

(Also on my blog, if you want additional context.)