Kayse > Recent Status Updates

I have a slight beef already. Ishmael is being portrayed as a green boy who has never sailed before; however, in Moby-Dick, he explicitly starts that he’s sailed on merchant vessels before. The Pequod wasn’t his first ship, it was just his first whaling ship.

I do, however, appreciate that this author canonically made Queequeg homosexual. Now Ishmael needs to be bisexual AT THE VERY LEAST to satisfy me.

I mean, we’re off to a good start! The first page has an excerpt from my favorite chapter of Moby-Dick, Chapter 15: Chowder.”

Obviously I know how this ends. I think everybody knows how this ends. But my stomach is still churning and my heart is still racing as I read about the Pequod meeting its fate.

I didn’t even remember the character Pip from the first time I read this, and now I’m crying over this poor little cabin boy. 😭

I refused to stop reading tonight until I finally finished Chapter 100: Leg and Arm, where Captain Ahab meets Captain Boomer, his foil with whalebone prosthetic arm and a wooden mallet on the end, used to knock his sailors on the head 😭

Why is Starbuck the first mate? I don’t think he’s caught a single whale by this point, and Stubb, the second mate, is on like his third or fourth.

Thoroughly enjoying this bit where the second mate, Stubb, is insulting a French-speaking captain to his face, while the interpreter is pretending that Stubb is providing helpful whaling advice.

While expounding on the glories of whaling, Ishmael factchecks the story of St. George and the dragon, claiming that he actually slew a whale, and rather than the horse he’s portrayed as riding, St. George might have instead been riding “a large seal, or a sea-horse,” and, just, the visuals this conjures is nothing short of spectacular.

“A nose to the whale would have been impertinent.”

Definitely grosser at parts than I remember. I remember being fascinated by the description of harvesting the whale in high school; this time around I was more repulsed. I wonder when I got more squeamish?

So I’m on the chapter where Ishmael just describes all the different ways you can eat a whale, which is pretty fucking gross to read about. However, this one line had me rolling: “And that is the reason why a young buck with an intelligent looking calf’s head before him, is somehow one of the saddest sights you can see. The head looks a sort of reproachfully at him, with an ‘et tu Brute!’ expression.”

The most recent line that made me laugh out loud: “…Flask, alas! was a butterless man!”

I wouldn’t stop reading tonight until I finished Chapter 15: Chowder, because I remember how funny I found that chapter all those years ago.

I’m not sure why, but there’s something so droll in the manner in which this book is written (especially, as I recall, in the scenes prior to them sailing on the Pequod), and I keep finding myself laughing aloud, just as I did when I first read this in high school. 😂

Queequeg is an icon and I will brook no argument about it.

Another reread, and one I’ve been meaning to do since I first read it… (shudders)… TWENTY years ago. Yuck.

Anyway, I find again that I’m instantly charmed by this book, and I expect to enjoy it as much, if not more, than when I read it for 11th grade American Lit.

Jesus Christ. She solved the mystery, but has been keeping that knowledge to herself for that past two days for no obvious purpose. Like, another fire and another instance of vandalism has occurred since then. She supposed to be helping the sheriff, but now she’s concealing evidence for no discernible reason??

This book is fucking wack.

This literally might be the first chapter NOT to open with a shitty metaphor.

Rereading for the nth time. The King Arthur book I just read inspired me to revisit my other childhood love, Robin Hood.

Literally nothing happened in this chapter.