Jessica Mae Stover > Status Update

I love Moby Dick. I think it is hilarious! Those whale chapters that dont have the actual sailing story are so funny when you realize he is using metaphors and whatever other means to basically tell dirty jokes. It’s so great.

There is a chapter early on wherein a crew member is upset that he was insulted and kicked by the captain and so dreams about it but also the whole chapter is just him rationalizing that it was good he was kicked actually like a compliment because the captain kicked him with his ivory leg.

Also Melville just be ending descriptive paragraphs in sum, like, “Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.”

Reading it with Dayswork is bringing it much more into the present with better rep. So far I do recommend the duo. Dayswork is about a character (a woman) who becomes obsessed with Melville facts during the pandemic. Reading it with Fortunate Fall at the same time was by accident I got to a couple of pages that are all Moby Dick spoilers and I was like oops better pause this and read it alongside Moby Dick and Dayswork. 🐳 In terms of the IRL stuff I am doing I am hoping to walk down to the docks and go whale watching soon given my newish location and once the whale appears in the novel (which should be soon, I think!).

…Every short chapter of Moby Dick is a surprise. You really do not know what you’re going to get. A sailing/whale-themed sermon inside of a sailing/whale themed church inside of a sailing/whale-themed town wherein the doorways are the arches of a giant whalebone? A one-act play of dialogue from the ship’s crew at work? A rhetorical argument that whalers should be respected like military officers? I would not be surprised to turn the page and find Ishmael offering an inventory of every object on the ship and the chapter is… just the ledger. And then there is the chapter on the many gleaming meanings and subversions/subversive horrors of “whiteness.”