OFFICIAL HERMAN MELVILLE FANBOY THREAD

Get in here, girls

Reading Moby Dick for the first time. Halfway through. Holy shit this is literally the best thing ever created, my mind is ejaculates after every chapter.

My mind* ejaculates

>

give me one good reason to read that shit

bought typee recently, is it any good?

I would prefer not to.

There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!


my favorite part of the book :)

I'd prefer not to

I've read the Piazza Tales in January this year, it was outstanding. I didn't expect much honestly, because I thought it wouldn't be as good as Moby Dick, but it was, only in its own way. Benito Cereno is probably my favorite story of all time, but isn't it ruined if you already knew of the original event it was based on? I didn't, so the last ten or so pages which explain what exactly happened in the previous ones, blew my mind.
Also the prose is fucking fantastic. What else should I check out by Melville?

Yes I just finished. Immensely challenging, immensely rewarding.

Try to be familiar with the Bible, the Greeks (Herodotus, most importantly), and you'll get a lot out of it.

oh boy! Just wait till you reach the end. You'll be swimming in neural sperm.

I unironically envy people's first exposure to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and then Moby Dick's ending.

Who /Benito Cereno/ here?

It's a good adventure novel and entertaining. But it certainly doesn't contain the level of prose or philosophy of Moby Dick if you bought it wanting more of that. It was his first novel, and it shows.

It reminds me a lot of Stevenson, really.

Typee is good, but I prefer Mardi

About halfway through Moby Dick. What to read afterwards?

The three Bs, lad
Bartleby
Billy Budd
Benito Cereno

bump

find your own reason, you pissant.

God he's good

Moby dick is such a very long book, but I liked it.

short stories

that's the same feeling I had first time around. By far the best book ever

What's some essential Mellvile?

moby dick is actually homosexual erotica.

This

I find the ending quite strange user, it felt quite fast-paced compared to the rest of the novel, personally I think I would have preferred if he had explored the opinions on the ship from the different characters a bit more during the chase, rather than the sudden constant action. although still the book is a fucking beauty

Where do I go after I finishing Moby Dick if it's my favorite book I've ever read?

Read Billy Budd
And then Pierre

read the books that inspired Melville's style
1. Tristram Shandy by Sterne
2. The Anatomy of Melancholy by Burton
3. All of Thomas Browne's works

And then read Blood Meridian because it was very inspired by Moby Dick

>tfw reading anatomy ot melancholy and thought of melville
>dismissed it as general influence from that century

Who /theconfidenceman/ here? I had to read it for a class this past semester, it was fucking awesome. Totally different from Moby-Dick, but in its own way still great.

I think I'm homo for Herman lads

Bell Tower

Hated lol
t. hawthorne

>leaving out carlyle

I'm with you, it's great. Still underappreciated I think.

>Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon

fuck off with that pleb shit

not even Floyd's best album

>Chapters entirely dedicated to fun little whale facts

I unironically enjoy a lot of these chapters to be honest though. Was Moby Dick supposed to be some strange fusion of novel and encyclopedia?

gravitys rainbow

I liked reading those encyclopedia parts and comparing them to modern cetology. We still don't know shit about whales, but what we did know was laughable. Can't blame Melville for it though.

The Confidence Man

James Wood on Melville:

“When it comes to language, all writers want to be billionaires. All long to possess so many words that using them is a fat charity. To be utterly free in language, to be absolute commander of what you do not own—this is the greatest desire of any writer. Even the deliberate paupers of style—Hemingway, Pavese, late Beckett—have secret longings for riches, and strive to make their reductions seem like bankruptcy after wealth rather than fraud before it: Pavese translated Moby-Dick into Italian. Realists may protest that it is life, not words, that draws them as writers; yet language at rush hour is like a busy city. Language is infinite, but it is also a system, and so it tempts us with the fantasy that it is closed, like a currency or an orchestra. What writer does not dream of touching every word in the lexicon once?”

“In Moby-Dick, Herman Melville nearly touched every word once, or so it seems. Language is pressed and consoled in that book with Shakespearean agility. No other nineteenth-century novelist writing in English lived in the city of words in which Melville lived; they were suburbanites by comparison. No other novelist of that age could swim in the poetry of “the warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, redundant days ... .” And so, despite the usual biographical lamentations, despite our knowledge that Moby-Dick went largely unappreciated, that in 1876 only two copies of the novel were bought in the United States, that in 1887 it went out of print with a total sale of 3,180 copies, that these and other neglects narrowed Melville into bitterness and savage daily obedience as a New York customs inspector—despite all this, one says lucky Melville, not poor Melville. For, in writing Moby-Dick, he wrote the novel that is every novelist’s dream of freedom. It is as if he painted a patch of sky for the imprisoned.”

...

cute

What does Pavese' translation have to do with it?

I've never read Pavese but apparently his style is spare and restrained, so by translating Moby-dick into Italian it demonstrated his secret longing for Melville's prose or something idk.