Do You Even Lit?

Tell me if you've heard this one: A mentally unstable old man abuses his position of power to pursue his own personal agenda. He alternates between smooth talking—tremendous moxie, the best speeches—and threatening the LOSERS and HATERS who stand in his way. He runs roughshod over checks and balances, ignores the norms of civil society, and whips his followers into a fervour against an imagined enemy. In his egotistical mania, he takes down everyone else with him.

We are talking of course about Herman Melville's MOBY DICK (chapters 81-135).

Rich gets political: On Melville's egalitarian dream, the milk and sperm of human kindness, Ahab as demagogue, why the crew don't mutiny, parallels to the current political moment, and Latin America as a cautionary tale. Does Rich have a point here, or has he fallen victim to Ahab Derangement Syndrome?

Benny is all symbolism-ed out: Bad omen after bad omen, we get it. We can see the ending coming a mile away. Has Melville created too rich of a feast for us? Does the explicit fatalism make Ahab a more or less interesting character? Did any of us feel any narrative tension in this last third of the book? What is with the pacing?

What's it all about: Cam proposes the 'interpretation interpretation'. We talk about the limitations of Ahab's approach to meaning-making, vs Ishmael's more pluralistic approach.

And our final thoughts on tackling this behemoth of a book. 

CHAPTERS:

(00:00:00) don’t cry for me argentina
(00:07:30) what did we think of the final section?
(00:16:02) What does it all mean?
(00:20:30) Ahab vs Ishmael meaning-making project
(00:28:23) overdosing on omens and symbolism
(00:37:40) Pip the cabin boy
(00:44:07) The milk and sperm of human kindness
(00:47:48) Ahab the demagogue
(00:59:18) Next book announcement

 

WRITE US:

We love listener feedback. Send us a note at [email protected] to correct our hot takes, add your own, or ask a question.

 

NEXT ON THE READING LIST:

The Royal Game — Stefan Zweig

Atomised — Michel Houellebecq

Quick film review before we get back to the final part of Moby Dick.

Guillermo del Toro's long-awaited Frankenstein adaptation is absolutely cleaning up in the Oscar nominations, including a nod for Best Picture.

Benny and Rich make the comparison with Mary Shelley's source material and find it to be sadly wanting (altho we do have some nice things to say).

On the dumbing-down of nuanced morality stories, and the ubiquity of daddy issues/therapy speak in modern media. Can't a guy just be a crazy hubristic scientist anymore?? 

Plus: a brief detour through the horror of quantum immortality.

WRITE US:

We love listener feedback. Send us a note at [email protected] to correct our hot takes, add your own, or ask a question.

NEXT ON THE READING LIST:

The final third of Moby Dick

The Royal Game — Stefan Zweig

Atomised — Michel Houellebecq

We continue our voyage with chapters 40-80 of Herman Melville's leviathan MOBY DICK.

Talking nihilism and meaning-making, the deeper significance of making the whale white (seriously), the terrifying vastness of the ocean, animal welfare and charismatic megafauna, and whether we're OK with reading an abridged edition of the book. 

In short: we're having a whale of a time. Tune in next week for our third and final instalment. 

CHAPTERS:

(00:00:00) They should make some kind of 'abridged' version of this book
(00:12:21) BULKINGTON
(00:19:18) Whiteness conceptual analysis
(00:32:10) First whale encounter
(00:41:51) The bloody, brutal business of the sperm whale fishery
(00:52:32) Charismatic megafauna / animal ethics
(01:00:48) Tashtego falls into a vat of sperm
(01:10:02) Listener mail: Is it OK to use another man's Anki deck?

 

WRITE US:

We love listener feedback. Send us a note at [email protected] to correct our hot takes, add your own, or ask a question.

 

NEXT ON THE READING LIST:

The final third of Moby Dick

??

Starting the year off right by signing on for an epic voyage with Herman Melville's MOBY DICK; OR, THE WHALE, published in 1851, and widely considered to be the great American novel.

It's quite the beast so we're dividing it into three parts, with this first convo covering chapters 1-40.

Call me Ishmael: Dissecting the iconic opening line, why we love Ishmael as a narrator, on the optimal strategy for getting snuggly in bed, the precise nature of his relationship with (we claim) our fellow New Zealand native Queequeg, and the question of race and class politics onboard a whaling ship.

The mysterious Captain Ahab: various ominous warnings, initial thoughts on Ahab's motivations, punching through the pasteboard mask, and a climactic ritual atop the Quarter-deck.

Infamous infodumps: Benny's eyes glazed over at times, Cam skimmed the Cetology chapter, but Rich makes the case for soldiering through. Plus we look at some of the interesting formal choices Melville makes, the early seeds of modernism, and can't help but make some comparisons to Blood Meridian and Butcher's Crossing.

 

CHAPTERS:

(00:00:00) Ahoy shipmates
(00:03:20) Call me Ishmael analysis
(00:11:33) NEW ZEALAND MENTIONED!!!
(00:17:32) Race politics in international waters
(00:23:51) Perilous adventures for young men
(00:29:29) The infamous cetology chapter
(00:34:44) Jonah and the whale/biblical allusions
(00:42:20) We need to talk about Ahab
(00:54:48) Infodumps, genre mashups and the roots of modernism
(01:01:10) Listener mail: Adam G in NYC 

 

WRITE US:

We love listener feedback. Send us a note at [email protected] to correct our hot takes, add your own, or ask a question.

 

NEXT ON THE READING LIST:

??

Yeah fuck this book. After much blood, sweat, tears, and other unspeakable bodily excretions, we've had enough.

This is our first ever DNF after 50+ titles, so we thought we should do a postmortem of what went wrong.

Did we not try hard enough? Is Pynchon basically an asshole? Do we have a problem with postmodernism as a tradition? Or the maximalist writing style? How is that we (mostly) love David Foster Wallace, who copied so much of his schtick from Pynchon, but not the master himself?

And several other theories for why this book ultimately defeated us:

(00:00:00) Theory 1: we chose the wrong Pynchon to start out with
(00:06:45) Theory 2: we are straight-up too dumb for this book
(00:11:35) Theory 3: GR is intended for literary masochists
(00:19:34) Theory 4: Postmodernist disorientation spiral
(00:30:30) Theory 5: Pynchon is painfully unfunny
(00:38:10) Theory 6: Maximalism is just too much, man
(00:49:20) comparison vs DFW, the New Sincerity, and irony poisoning
(00:56:50) Listener mail: In defence of Woolf and the modernists
(01:01:51) Next book announcement

 

WRITE US:

We love listener feedback. Send us a note at [email protected] to correct our hot takes, add your own, or ask a question. We would especially love to hear from any Pynchon heads out there (or haters).

 

NEXT ON THE READING LIST:

Moby Dick — Herman Melville