killjamesbond patreon

S4E14.5: Moby Dick (1956)

🕑 Added 2025-05-23 17:29:14 +0000 UTC

Comments

Jonnie

Look up Porphyrios! Basically the Byzantine Moby Dick. Fucked shit up and suck ships for 50 years, Justinian I wanted it captured but couldn't figure out how. Unfortunately it beached and got cut to pieces by a mob.

James Vacca

Random fact: I believe holystones (used for holystoning the deck) are called that because they were the shape and size of Bibles at the time.

Finn Ross

This is an interesting queer/trans take on Moby Dick - not super easy to see but very interesting: https://www.hauserwirth.com/events/wu-tsangs-moby-dick-or-the-whale/

a

Wow, I went back and checked and the book has much more racism than I remember

Alma Blue

In case anyone else is obsessed with the Assigned Hater At Birth joke: https://www.bonfire.com/ahab/

Joysweeper

fun fact the name of the real albino whale was Mocha Dick and he was a bro. he'd swim peacefully alongside ships until they attacked him and *then* he'd go you know what FUCK YOU. he was killed coming to help a mother whale after her calf was killed. they found twenty harpoons in him. anyway, after listening to the episode of Wizards Vs Lesbians that was weirdly dismissive about people who might not want to read animal cruelty and were so enchanted by the shipping potential that they tried to claim it wasn't *really* racist, Ishmael puts Queequeg on a pedestal!, it was good to listen to this.

Gil the Gilded Dragon

Also whale is not fish. Whale is dragon. Xaosxamp

Gil the Gilded Dragon

On Jonah, there is a more salient & explicit lesson in it: That of divine mercy. Jonah expresses incredulity over if it will be of any good for him to preach to the Ninevenians & is told "son, you defied him & he allowed you to make better with him. Go. Preach." Which is juxtaposed to the fruitless preaching but fierce advocating for humanity that Job does (for all his troubles of "if there is 100 good men, 50? 10? 5!" He cannot find them, but god was up for negotiating his wroth)

Cam

(Liberal theologically, not political. Quite a lot of Quaker anarchists out there)

Cam

Someone else has probably said it, but as a liberal Quaker myself, it's perfectly acceptable to be a non theist.

-Kris-

"whales are fishes." Have we considered that Melville could have been very early in staking out his position in the cladistics and paraphyly debate? If you can say that all the vertebrates were fish, and then some stopped being fish, why not also say that some of those went back to being fish? It's like trees. Trees aren't a taxonomic group, it's a botanical term. "Tree" is something that some species *do,* irrespective of taxonomy.