Living near a DSNY garage and following @nycsanitation on Instagram has turned me into a Sanitation Dept Stan

Not Ahab demanding his harpoon barbs be tempered in fresh pagan blood 😭🐋

Queequeg, such a legend…saves himself from death by suddenly remembering he has unfinished business on shore…I wish this method worked for me 🐋

I fell behind with my reading and posting…in fairness to myself, knowing what comes next, I was loath to depart the peaceful verdure draped whale skelly in the arsacides 🐋

What if we kissed inside the whale skeleton draped all over with fresh verdure, where Life folded Death and Death trellised Life? 🐋

Ishmael full-body tattoo reveal (Queequeg’s influence?) 🐋

Ishmael slyly bragging that Tranquo, king of Tranque, invited him to stay for the holidays as a special guest and they went to see a whale skeleton together…sounds kinda romantic if you ask me 🐋

Partial list of silly names from Moby Dick: - the learned Fogo von Slack - Dr. Bunger, ships surgeon with a dent in his head - Fitz Swackhammer - Dr. Snodhead, prof of Low Dutch and High German - Tranquo, king of Tranque 🐋

“You Bunger! Was there ever such another Bunger in the watery world? Bunger, when you die, you ought to die in a pickle, you dog; you should be preserved to future ages, you rascal” Feels like I am reading Tom and Greg dialog from Succession and not Moby Dick 🐋

“Great pains, small gains for those who ask the world to solve them, it cannot solve itself.” 🐋

So many deep ponderings on the doubloon, but imo the Manxman has the biggest galaxy brain take with his assertion that the doubloon is the ship’s belly button 🐋

If you like me are loving the descriptions of how whaling work actually gets done (with accompanying metaphors on how it’s all a microcosm for life itself), may I recommend Emile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series 🐋

TFW you are a mariner going about suffused in unctuousness 🐋

Not Ishmael staring too long at beautiful Queequeg in the try-pot flames, going into a trance, and nearly capsizing the ship 🐋

WHY is Ishmael fantasizing about Louis Le Gros thigh tartare 😭 🐋

What if we kissed over the polished iron lips of the try-pots 🐋

I’m sorry, they do WHAT with the whale penis skin??? 🐋

Ishmael gazing moonily into various crewmembers’ eyes while gently squeezing their hands in a vat of unctuous spermaceti is beautiful…like a Whaler’s version of The Artist is Present 🐋

Ishmael saying Pip lost his mind but reached transcendence when abandoned in the ocean, then revealing that he himself met the same fate…does it mean this whole time we’ve been reading the ramblings of a madman who happens to have beheld the face of God? (The God being an aggro white whale, ofc) 🐋

The violence that brought the crew to this sight aside—the newborn whale, nursing, still crinkled from the womb, umbilical cord unspooling lazily in the clear seawater, protected by a seething pod, was absolute beauty 🐋

Ishmael really missed his calling as a marine biologist…he doesn’t really seem like a big fan of the violence of whale hunting (though he is a fan of athletic harpooneers) 🐋

Maybe Queequeg keeps Ishmael around bc he enjoys his discursive rambling as much as I do, they bonded over a book after all 🐋

A very long time ago, I did a project of illustrated quotes from various classics. This line always stuck with me 🐋

Sorry the image of St George riding a large seal to do epic battle w a beached whale is soooo funny? Melville never shy to exercise his powers of imagination 🐋

My brave Queequeg! Diving naked into the sea to perform a c-section on the leviathan’s head, rotating Tashtego from breech before delivering him from a sac of amniotic spermaceti…worst water birth ever…🐋

“O Nature, and O soul of man! How far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! Not the smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind.” Well there’s the whole MO of the book right there (and I can’t get enough) 🐋

The whale line! Reminded me of the zigs and zags of thread through a sewing machine…except the whale line is also low key a memento mori 🐋

That first successful whale chase is Mad Max-ian in its speed, action, and violence—all the shouting, long spears, unsavory eccentrics. Just missing a doof warrior 🐋

The encounters with the Goney and Jereboam both feature such compromised communication, like Zoom calls on terrible WiFi. Something very funny but also deeply melancholy and wistful about it 🐋

Ok I know we’re all focused on Queequeg clad in only a wet shirt but am I supposed to understand that he’s balancing on a rolling whale while dodging sharks and spears in sock feet?? 🐋

(I’m behind on my reading for various reasons one of which is my toddler trying to join in) 🐋

“However baby man may brag of his science and skill…yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him” Simply gorgeous writing 🐋

Ahab has clearly fully lost sight of his soul’s insular Tahiti…Queequeg on the other hand securely encamped in his 🐋

Ishmael, disparaging the fancy scientific/academic whale depictions while approving of the scrimshaw/wood carved folk art ones…a man of culture I see 🐋

Ishmael’s facility for grand and compelling lies reminds me of Ms Lyra Silvertongue…another book character who would def solemnly call a priest to swear fake oaths 🐋

Steelkilt: - Lakeman from Buffalo - beard like a fancy horse - Could have been Charlemagne if he had been born as Charlemagne - Strong as hell - Threats(?) so rancid his would-be floggers freak out and stay their hands - Revenge works out great for him - in fact accompliced by Moby dick himself 🐋

Reading about gamming captains balancing awkwardly on their crowded boats, hands in their pockets for nonchalant bravado, while doing that very same balancing act on the swaying NYC subway…I’m just like them for real… 🐋

Still in: Wacky characters, florid prose, portents of doom, action sequences, factual inaccuracy/exaggerations Out: Philosophical digressions, metaphysical musings, info dumping, Cetology (so like 70% of the book) 🐋

Whose management style would you respond best to? - Starbuck (fierce whispering) - Stubbs (mean and confusing jokes) - Flask (yelling) - Ahab (phrases so unholy they’d sully your gentle ears) 🐋

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Enjoyed the names of the legendary whales: Rinaldo Rinaldini Timor Tom New Zealand Jack Morquan (king of Japan w a cross shaped spout) Don Miguel (Chilean)

Unfortunately intensely relating to Ahab as he indulges in his obsessive nightly doomscroll of nautical charts 🐋

Love the indulgence of devoting a whole (long!) chapter to a single color, plot be damned. The popular modern day novel could never 🐋

Sure, you may not “get” why we all got swept up in Ahab’s crazed mania for Moby Dick, but have you considered: its whiteness “stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation?” 🐋

Moby Dick, his reputation precedes him… - he’s “ubiquitous” (can be in 2 places at once) - can teleport across the ocean - is immortal (aka ubiquitous in time as well as space) - studded with ineffective harpoons - will about-face while being chased and smash your ship to bits - horribly white 🐋

Look, you don’t read Moby Dick for the plot. You read it to discover what bizarre and unpredictable alleyways Melville’s mind will go down next…what phrases he’ll turn to perfection, what metaphors he’ll stretch to hell, what fanciful whaling lore he’ll drop, etc 🐋

Wish I had the sober competence of Starbuck, or at least the easy good humor of Stubbs, but unfortunately, of all the internal monologues, I relate most to the twisted and overblown fixation of Ahab’s 😔 🐋

Ishmael makes manning the masthead seem so dreamy. No thoughts, head empty, just watching the rolling sea that’s also kinda your soul and ignoring any whales that go by 🐋

I must’ve been paying less attention than I thought to Cetology because I don’t get why Captain Sleet felt the need to “pop off stray narwhals” from the crow’s nest, nor why he considered them “vagrant sea unicorns” 🐋

Flask’s sad dinnertime existence is a good illustration of why manager track can be fairly unappealing even in today’s corporate world 🐋