Words and phrases that Moby Dick taught me today are older than I realized: “tread-mill” and “in a pickle” 🐋

🐋 Struck by the fact that Ishmael devotes an entire chapter to defending Stubb’s taste for whale steak under whale-oil light, but describes Stubb’s racist humiliation of Fleece the cook without comment. Does his silence invite judgement? Or does he not think this behavior needs defending?

Today in complex comforts, we’re discussing Chapter One of Mary Shelley’s THE LAST MAN (1826). I suggest we begin with the concept of mutability, a clear nod to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s famous poem. www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54563/... #LastMan200

🐋 rough approximation of my face as Ishmael in “The Brit” moved me from imagining right whales grazing on the Brit to contemplating the eternal horror that is the ocean depths… 🥰😥😐😓😱🫠🤯💀💀💀💀💀

Ishmael’s YouTube channel: “…so that’s how you run your rope through the boat safely. Er, that’s how you do it as safely as possible. No one on a whaleboat could be said to be truly safe. But, if you think about it, is anybody, anywhere, truly safe? Remember to like, review, and subscribe!” 🐋🐋🐋

🐋 It’s been *0* days since Ishmael invoked phrenology to praise a character. 🐋

🐋 “The Gam” as a recurring SNL fake talk show sketch.

I’m with Ishmael: daydreaming on the mast-head is much preferable to pulling towards a watery grave in the small boats! 🐋

🐋 Ishmael: “And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?” Also Ishmael: don’t you dare “scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory.”

Ishmael in “The Mast-head” reveals that he probably needed a Well for Boys when he was a kid. 🐋 youtu.be/BONhk-hbiXk?...

Good morning, friends. It is such a complex comfort, discussing Mary Shelley’s deeply political, eerily prescient climate/pandemic apocalypse novel with you at this time. #LastMan200 Today, we’ll be discussing Shelley’s fascinating Introduction.

“however it was, Flask, alas! was a butterless man!” 🧈🐋

🐋🐋🐋

Moby Dick was assigned to me as summer reading before 11th grade. My parents flat out refused to buy me the abridged version. Read every word. First thing the teacher said on day one: “I hope none of you read the version with that long chapter about whales in it!” 🐋

🐋 regarding chapter 25: I acknowledge that some of us may be wondering if there’s ever gonna be any whaling in this famous book about whaling. But I am once again asking for 5-10 more pages of Ishmael riffing on hair oil and annointing practices.

🐋 chapter 24–is Ish here the first modern example of “inventing a guy to get mad at”?

Lolling at Bildad and Aunt Charity distributing copies of Watts’s Psalms and Hymns to discourage “profane songs” like the “chorus about the girls in Booble Alley.” 🐋📖

🐋 *starts chapter 23* wait, Bulkington is on board!? He’s *allergic to land*? It “seemed scorching to his feet”!? Oh, you just know he’s gonna do something epic! Lets go!! *keeps reading* uhh, y’all? I’m kinda worried about Bulkington!

🐋 The way Ishmael invokes the “crowd of old annuitants; widows, fatherless children, and chancery wards” as part of the catalog of death that make up whaling towns only for Peleg and Bildad throw them in his face to preempt any protest of his measly 300th share. 🐋

🐋 y’all, I bought the makings for cod chowder later this week (when the highs drop below the 60s again).

🐋 my 2-year-old’s review of the penguin deluxe edition? “big eye!”

🐋 75 pages in, I get that some people might be wondering if we are ever gonna get to a whaling ship. But I’d like 5-10 more pages of clam/cod/pot jokes from Ish please!

Can’t help but hear “faster and more varied” in the robot voice from Radiohead’s “fitter happier.”

Today’s chunk of #md is so rich that I’m not sure what to post, so I’ll just say that I love this burn of the Vermont / New Hampshire hay-seed: “a fellow that, in the dog-days, will mow his two acres in buckskin gloves for fear of tanning his hands.” 🐋

My morning’s 🐋 wormhole? The Seaman’s Bethel, a real New Bedford church without a ship-shaped pulpit until 1961, when complaints from tourists drawn to New Bedford by the Huston film inspired the construction of a mock-pulpit to match the one Huston filmed in Ireland. www.nps.gov/nebe/planyou...

"We used a freakishly advanced language model built on trillions of pages of text and crazy linear algebra engines powered by cubic meters of natural gas to achieve a task that could have been done with some dice and a look up table" is like 80% of popular AI applications

“Why are Americans mistrustful of AI?” asks the morning briefing thing I’m skimming while I “no” through literally a dozen questions being asked to me by a robot who stands between me and the person I need to talk to to schedule the x-ray that I really, really need

Seeking investors and at least one trained bartender named Jonah to explore this exciting new restaurant concept. 🐋

🐋 #md

Anybody up for a bicentennial read-along of Mary Shelley’s THE LAST MAN?

Reading 🐋 for the first time since it was required summer reading in high school. I’ve always known I probably read it pretty carelessly, but I was not prepared for how this thing starts!

Nick Jonas once cut me in line at a Mediterranean Grill.

I wasn’t sure they were going to publish this. So good for them.

That is one of the hardest parts for me as an educator, to see how much it has affected students' confidence in their own skills and abilities. So many don't believe they can produce something as good as the LLMs.

Worth noting that “instructors have infinite time and energy to reimagine entirely their pedagogy with every new tech innovation” is at least as naive an assumption as “gen ai will go away.”

And Tiny Tim, who did NOT die, got a guitar and he’s learning how to make it talk. His car’s out back if you’re ready to take that long walk from the front porch to his front seat. The door’s open, but the ride ain’t free.

If summaries are useful to your process, you don’t need Gen AI to get them. Vetted summaries exist in book reviews, on Wikipedia, on the back of the book, on the publisher’s website, etc., etc., etc. Gen AI continues to be a solution in search of a problem.

I feel like "academic hiring" discourse is always kind of downstream of the fact that in the 50s we started building a giant public system to make a college education almost universally available and in the 80s and 90s we started taking it apart to go back to the only-the-rich model

This is a great joke but ,actually, I think their worldview would lead, long term, to a massive buildout of public transportation options.

every time i read about one of these college presidents promising to reinvent the liberal arts education i think of "marge v. the monorail"

Finally watched the GDT Frankenstein. What’s the consensus out there on it?

I didn’t get the wording down precisely, so I won’t quote it, but one of the things that hit hard in the room: Reactionaries waging culture wars against the humanities have a more accurate account of our power than we do. And our humility is not admirable, but an abdication of responsibility.

If I could offer students one bit of…advice: be brutally traditional about what is printed on your degree. If you are first-gen or in any way non traditional, this goes double. Let rich kids get degrees in AI. You get something called “English”.

Darkly humorous that I had to click through an ad for the LA Times’s collaboration with Perplexity’s AI browser to read this review.

Today I'm doing a talk about Women and the (early) Gothic and it might be time for a list! So here are ten early women writers of the Gothic to give an idea of the range of things that women were creating in the period!

wowwww this is incredibly beautiful. tagging some friends who will love this: @ladyofsardines.bsky.social @heymrsbond.com @marcusluther.bsky.social therumpus.net/2025/10/02/h...