S4E14.5: Moby Dick (1956)

"Upon waking next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg's arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife." Moby Dick the book. I’d call it gay coded but I’m not sure if this qualifies as code.

I think Peter Coffin is named after one of the victims of the whaling disaster that inspired the book. Irl Coffin survived the sinking but he later drew the shortest straw and was shot and eaten by other survivors

I like to think that, if he were alive today, Orson Welles would take his cornucopia of Kaufman Stars as the honour that it is intended. EDIT: This is the book that invented shiny hunting.

All Harpooners Are Bastards

In the spirit of Moby dick and the art of Haterism, I think Amadeus 1984 would make a good addition to religion season

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.

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.

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/

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

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

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.

Catching up on the patreon episodes and I loved the hilarity over the name Peter Coffin...but for unusual reasons. Peter Coffin was a real person who helped found the Nantucket whaling industry (along with a Starbuck or two). One of Peter's descendants, Owen Coffin, was one of the sailors who died after the Essex was attacked. And I know this because both Peter Coffin and Edward Starbuck are ancestors of mine. :) Anyway, great episode, keep up the good work!

Maybe it doesn't matter whether moby dick is an embodiment of chaos, god, or just a big whale, because it comes out to the exact same thing

whales ARE fish. Since "fish" isn't a genetic category (eg. lungfish are closer related to humans than many other fish. they breathe air) there's no reason a whale doesn't count. Lungfish breath air!

23:20 The Quakers (at least the UK and US ones) actually got the Nobel Peace Prize in 1947 "for their pioneering work in the international peace movement and compassionate effort to relieve human suffering, thereby promoting the fraternity between nations.".

(re-listening, and I have to thank Abi because "It can twat you with its fin, which will brain yer" is possibly the Britishest sentence ever uttered by man, or indeed woman.)

Is Peter Coffin the name of a nonce in the UK? Asking as an ignorant yank.

“Call me cis male” deserved better.

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)

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

Great one! I'm still going to go out to try to kill that whale though

Starbuck is aboard in case of Cylons

"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.

If they can do a great Star Trek movie out of Moby Dick, then they can definitely do a mech movie, and I would watch it

This unlocked my memories of this film as my little brother was obsessed with this movie and watched it constantly. He was so obsessed my mom carved a whale out of a watermelon and we harpooned it with fondue forks for one of his birthday parties.

Hey all, love the podcast, new patreon subscriber, catching up on the early episodes (with actual Bond movies). I noticed one film you haven't covered yet which stands out to me as a parody of the genre but wildly weird in its own right. The 1994 Schwarzenegger film, True Lies. It's probably a bad film by today's standards but I loved it at the time! (I noticed you also haven't done Spy Hard, but I can't recommend anything about that film except for the opening Bond theme pastiche by Weird Al.)

Excellent episode, loving it! I'd also like to announce that you can get a game called "Dick" that's basically CAH except all the cards are cited passages from Moby Dick. It's easily the best Apples To Apples variant I've ever played.

He moby on my dick till I whale

I'm hoping for Speed Racer at some point

Great to hear you talk about the classics.

I have just now realized there might be a connection between the ship’s name and the Pequot massacre which was one of the first straight up genocides of the colonial era and I’m sure there’s a lot of academic writing about that connection but I went to school for art not reading

"Ahab, identifiable in his introductory scene by his ungainly gait..."

The Peter coffin jokes are killing me

Liam, Ahab. People with four letter names don't respect fish

me out hunting for milfs (mammals id like to flence)

So, in case anyone needed to know, the purpose of holystoning the decks (which in the British Navy occured twice a day, once at 8 AM and once at 8 PM, for 4 hours each ; although maybe the merchants were more slack in this regard) is that it's hard, repetitive, annoying work that keeps the men busy much like modern navies paint, repaint, re-repaint their ships on an ongoing basis. Wouldn't do to have people lollygaging about, would it ? A deck polished within an inch of its life also happens to look snazzy I suppose, which is Keen and thus suitable for the various toffs in Big Hats.

Was half expecting Talia Lavin or Beyond the Breakers to guest on this one.

I would highly recommend getting an annotated version of Moby Dick if you are going to read it. There are a fair number of idioms and such that you just aren't going to understand without a pop up video note on the page

Of course, ahab: all harpoonists are bastards

Thanks for the content warning. Might have to skip this one

A fun paratext; China Mieiville’s “Railsea” has the novum “what if no sea, but functionally infinite train tracks?” and does Moby Dick on that. I found the novum-breaking question “why did someone build all this?” slightly meta-fatal. Great pod.

If there were a film/tv adaptation of Moby Dick that captured more of the humorous tone of the book, who would you want to direct it? And if it were a Muppet movie, what character would be the one human actor, and who would play them?

On the topic of this episode, support Sea Shepherd!!!

If you think 12 is young to be a sailor, you should listen to the dollop. They start much, much younger

So 2 things that are related to eachother. 1) There is a 5th Racial Steryotype in the book that is cut, Ahab's personal Muslim Soothsayer. Ahab actually gets his death in the adaptation you're doing. And 2) his last prediction is that He'll die before Ahab and Ahab will die by the rope. This gives Ahab Morbid confidence as he's sure this means that they'll be Court Marshalled ashore, meaning it's impossible for Ahab to be killed by the whale. He's wrong.

Split your Bonds with blood and Thunderball When you see the white whale! Break your jaws and odd your jobs, men, If you wish to live twice! This golden gun is what propels me Leiters thrust in the sky! Aim directly for his Blofeld And view to kill straight in the eye!

Not to gainsay anyone, everyone is going to come to a different conclusion on a given work, but "the book is super racist" is something that is technically correct but perhaps lacking in nuance. The novel is a first person narration whose narrator is a fucking idiot whalebro whose ramblings are intentionally funny as shit and variously directed at making fun of various other period authors and concepts. By way of example we don't know Queequegs island of origin because Ishmael never bothered to learn it, his dialect is the whalebro's reading of how he speaks, and every time Queequeg gives some horrific anecdote about eating people or whatever he is, to my mind, pretty clearly fucking with his dimwitted fuckbuddy who eats that shit up. Essentially all of Ish's rambling anecdotes are to support something that he believes his reader will find fantastic or incredulous at the end, and this includes Pip losing his goddamned mind after being left at sea for a long time which it turns out is exactly what happens to him at the end of the book. There is a real tone of colonial noble savage to the book, which is problematic, but the conclusion is more or less westernism in general and Christianity in the specific are fucked and toxic and thereby lays doom. It is the greatest queer American whaling novel that will ever be written, and gets bonus points from me because his letters seem to indicate he wrote it to get into Hawthorne's pants, something that is only ambiguous because Hawthorne ordered his portion of the letters burned. Huge rec, amazing book.

GREGORY PECK MOBY DICK GREGORY PECK MOBY DICK i have never spent 7 dollars so fast in my life

AHAB BREAK!

When you described polishing the decks with a holy stone (holy as in pious, or holey as in pumice?) I was reminded of my theatre job where they would regularly mop the stage floor with diet coke to make it tacky so the actors wouldn't slip and fall during a play. I briefly pictured a sailor swabbing the deck with a bucket full of whale blood before you mentioned the point of the holy stone polishing was to keep the deck clean and free of rot.

You can't frontload a banger like Mobile Suit Richard on me, but I will take the opportunity to beg for one of the old Gundam movies to turn up

Moby-Dick is my favorite novel ever and this entire episode had me digging my fingernails into the palms of my hands bc of all the details glossed over that are so rich with meaning and symbolism

ahab stands for assigned hater at birth

Last Dick note: I think the cartoon ass way Ahab dies in the book is actually very important, because practitioners of revenge who think it's cool to dig two graves must be made to understand that the most likely outcome of your roaring rampages is that you will die looking like an idiot, yanked off stage by God's giant hook

As a subject matter expert idk about "black metal about Moby Dick" but there is a doom metal band called Ahab who did a very good record called The Call Of The Wretched Sea about Moby Dick that came out pretty close to, and was totally overshadowed by, Mastodon's Leviathan despite it being way more their whole deal

Two fun facts: 1 (Most/All) whales can't eat you. Their esophagus can only pass things as big as an orange. They can still mess you up and several of them have teeth. 2: Idk where I have this from but there are some theories that Ishmael was in prison or is a criminal which is why he takes a different name and goes on a job that will either bring him back in years or not bring him back at all.

I just want November to know that while it died in the room, I laughed at Ahab Break EVERY time!

Since there was discussion of the incident that inspired Moby dick, might you cover "In the Heart of the Sea"?

Unclear who is the worse Quaker, Ahab or Nixon.

She sail on my whale until my Peter Coughin'

Not sure anyone cares or not, but at the moment Quakerism arose in the 17th c, "thou" was the second person singular in English and "you" was the second person plural. And just as in French, you used the second person plural in formal address, when speaking to your betters, etc. Quakers (among other things) don't use honorifics, or recognize social hierarchy, so everyone was "you" (informal), which was thee/thou. English went the other way and everyone became "you" regardless of their social position, but Quakers stuck with what they called "Plain speech" into the 20th c., at least in private and with other Quakers.

I’m an actual descendant of the Coffins and yeah I had the same reaction as a kid

anyone here who has not read moby dick: You Have Got To Read Moby Dick. i do not care what else you do with your life You Have To Read Moby Dick. i am assigning you this quest it is not optional the marker will NOT go away until you complete it

Okay but now I desperately need to see Abi adapt Moby Dick for either stage or screen

I actually know part of the reason you scrub the decks is so they don’t get too dry and the Timbers split

Come to coastal New England. In Gloucester, Mass we have a church with a big statue of the Virgin Mary cradling a ship in her arms. In Mystic, CT we have a whaling ship that still sweats oil from her timbers. And in New Bedford, you better believe we have one hell of a whaling museum.

Moby Dick is such a classic that Khan had not one but two copies on the Botany Bay in Star Trek 2.

A sperm whale candle was the first "lumen" standard. The international lighting standard is derived from and referring to it's lighting emission.

I remember in the 90s and early 2000s whaling used to be talked about a lot in Australia because there's a migratory path into Antarcticic waters between Australia and New Zealand and the Japanese whaling ships would come in and Greenpeace would try to interdict them and there was a splinter group called the sea Shepard which wanted to go beyond passive resistance to, well let's just say that their logo was a pirate flag. The Australian Navy had to go out and be all "now then now then what's all this then?" I haven't heard much about it recently but I assume it still goes on to some extent.

I'm just here for the Dick jokes.

SOUTH EASTERN MASSACHUSETTS MENTIONED!!!! Anyways, the church in the novel that has a pulpit that's shaped like the bow of a ship is a real church that you can still go to today and you can sit in the same pew that Melville did. It's the Seamen's Bethel in New Bedford and there's a plaque there mentioning this specific film as well since the exterior shots of the church in the movie were filmed on location. It's across the street from the New Bedford Whaling Museum and a few blocks down from the Moby Dick Brewing Co. And yes, all of the craft beers they have on tap are inspired by the book, including the "Ishm-ale" Irish style amber ale and the "Profound Darkness" peanut butter porter.

Mobile suit Richard is basically a gundam.

OH FUCK YEAH! favourite childhood movie right here

Ishmael and Queequeg are textually married.

The other Quaker attribute is, of course, chocolate bars.

If we're really doing a deep dive into the book, Moby Dick is far more than just a pharmakos that Ahab is attaching his grievances to. Moby Dick IS God, literally. He is the vast incomprehensible totality of reality, the indistinguishable monistic whole. He is pure white, a color which is both the absence of all other colors as well as all colors in their purist form, symbolizing this oneness and lack of distinction. Moby Dick is often described as being more like a mass of whiteness rather than an actual animal. He is an unstoppable and unconquerable force of pure power and domination. He is nature, he is the world, he is God, he is everything. Ahab in his arrogance and hatred of The Whale is every human who fights reality, who sets themselves against the world rather than understands themselves as a part of that whole, and who will always be humbled and brought down. Ahab only meets his doom because he refuses to let his anger and pride go, he cannot accept living a life where he allows this perceived slight against him go, and so he drags himself into damnation. Did Moby Dick really target him in particular? Did it really purposefully cause him this pain and loss? Of course not. He is a whale, but Ahab can only see it as a personal insult, and he seeks revenge. If he had not pursued Moby Dick, if he had not defied God and Reality in egotistical arrogance, he and everyone else would have lived.

ahab locked in his harpoon cave

Taking psychic damage realising that following the literary lineage of normal man Starbuck leads to BSG Starbuck to Warhound Sartha Thrace

Left on Read- Moby Dick?

Aw yes let's fuck up that fish

By the way, holystoning the deck is basically just rubbing rough sandstone on the deck to sand off the top layer of the wood. It makes it look "bright and clean" because it exposes fresh wood, Abby is right that it's basically just "something to do". It was counseled against in the mid-1800s as meaningless busywork and eventually banned in both British and US navies as wearing down the wooden decks faster for no reason.

Listening to the intro I thought Abi was implying she was going to be in Star Trek, and then I parsed the sentence again and realized she meant she would be in a project that is in some way connected to Moby Dick. It was quite the emotional roller coaster.

Alright, can someone explain the Peter Coffin thing to me?

Common misconception about whaling ships is that they stayed at sea for the whole of the three years. They didn't at the time Moby Dick is set they sailed from the Atlantic ports the whaling grounds in Pacific. They would hunt and slaughter the whales, fill the hold with barrels and pull into port in Laihiana to offload the barrels of whale oil for shipment back to New Bedford, Nantucket etc. While in port the ships would take on new store and sailors to replace the ones who died at sea or jumped ship while in port. All these factors and ship suppliers were often the children of Yankee Christian missionaries. Big thanks for the Lahaina Whaling Museum for all this info.

Five minutes in and I heard: "New Bedford, Connecticut". Excuse me November while I remove the knife you just stabbed into my back (I live the town over from New Bedford, Massachusetts. Being even accidentally thought of as from Connecticut is a great insult)

Perfect timing, was just relistening to the book. The prose is SO AMAZING in that book, every sentence is a joy.

Moby Dick Energy.

From hell’s heart I podcast at thee!

I'm putting Who Did What Now on hold for the funniest damn podcast in the world.

Awesome, didn't expect a metal gear solid V episode so soon