As a foreigner never gave much thought until I learned Ahab is a quaker AND what is a quaker and why Ahab should not be doing any of that. The modern equivalent would be a reverend with a shotgun. Yeah I want to read that now.
@@Mordecrox If you find the concept of an American religious leader toting a shotgun incongruous, you are, indeed, a “foreigner,” as you put it. Most American evangelicals are certain that if they just looked hard enough, they would find our Second Amendment somewhere in the Bible.
Ok tell us what happened. I have to know. Was it pretty gay? Or just gay through modern eyes? Like the two broguys have to share a bed because there was only one bed and bedsharing was more common back then??
It’s not seamen, it’s spermaceti. It’s a waxy substance found in the head of the spermicide whale. It was used to make ointments, textiles, candles etc.
@@navnnavn1226 It means “sperm of the whale” or “whale sperm” which is whale oil from sperm whales. The etymology of the word spam comes from the Greeks (to sow) and then to Latin (seed). The passage is talking about the waxy substance from a pilot whales head which had industrial and commercial uses. He wasn’t milking his wang. He was gathering spermaceti from a piloted whales head and getting giddy about it, perhaps similar to how a miner would after mining gold and playing with gold nuggets.
At this point I'm convinced that if Oscar Wilde never went to jail people would still be doing the most insane mental gymnastics to explain how Dorian Grey is completely, 100% straight because they do it to with Moby Dick
There are still people trying to argue that relationships deliberately written with classic BL tropes are Just Guys Being Pals, so it doesn`t surprise me. But it does disappoint me
Melville's review of a Nathaniel Hawthorne novel, to whom Moby Dick is dedicated: "Already I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul. He expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him; and further, and further, shoots his strong New England roots into the hot soil of my Southern soul.”
For context, people used to think the fluid in a sperm whale's head was sperm, which is where it got it's name. In that scene, they were sqeezing the fluid out of a sperm whales head after they had killed it
Melville being like "The reader won't understand and be able to empathise with Captain Ahab's obsession without a COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE TO MID 1800s WHALING TECHNIQUES DANGIT!!"
@@thompkins6796 whales are warm blooded, have lungs, breath air, produce milk and and have mammal bone structure? nah man thas bs, they live in the water i seen it
@@willirazl5526 Moby Dick is basically Melville sublimating his crush on Nathaniel Hawthorne. Yes, THAT Nathaniel Hawthorne, the author of The Scarlet Letter, who is said to have been "handsomer than Lord Byron". Just read his letters.
@@Tempusverum “But already I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul. He expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him; and further, and further, shoots his strong New-England roots into the hot soil of my Southern soul.” Melville, in Hawthorne and his Mosses. Yes, definitely, nothing gay here
"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. Indeed, partly lying on it as the arm did when I first awoke, I could hardly tell it from the quilt, they so blended their hues together; and it was only by the sense of weight and pressure that I could tell that Queequeg was hugging me."
"How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts' honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg--a cosy, loving pair."
There’s nothing wrong with it. People are so over saturated with s3x, they read it into what used to be normal human behavior. Now we’re all segregated and touch deprived out of fear of being labeled
My favorite part of Moby Dick is the 3 and a half page monologue by the author/narrator about what he thinks is and isn't a whale, and whether whales are fish or not. I wonder if Melville even had an editor lol
The way this isn't even the first gay thing to happen in this book. Are we just suppose to ignore Queequeg and Ishmael getting married after rolling around in their shared bed??
as someone who has actually read the book: - it is explicitly stated how marriage in Queequeg's culture meant friendship and brotherhood - they never literally got married, it was a single metaphorical line - sharing beds was common, especially for the poor in overbooked hotels - nobody at the time the book was published interpeted anything Melville wrote as gay - this is all modern day sensibilities being read into the text which was not actually there
@@contestofnerds The thing about literature is that it's not stuck in a time or place. Readers will change over time and their interpretations will change over time. While we should, as readers, be aware of historical contexts for older works we read, we're also allowed to bring our modern sensibilities to the table and add whatever we can to the conversation with the text in mind. You couldn't just baselessly claim that Moby Dick is queer, but modern readers interpret queerness in the text, and (presumably) academics have argued in favor of that interpretation before and been published. It doesn't reject the past to do so; it just adds another voice. Also, it's very possible Melville's contemporaries didn't refer to it as "gay" or "homosexual" because the term homosexual hadn't even been coined or made its way into common language yet. Queerness as we understand it today (as an identity as opposed to an action) wasn't even a thing yet, was only just becoming part of popular thought (and very slowly at that). Note that I don't argue for any specific point myself as I haven't read Melville's novel, but this is something I've read up on now and then as an English major and felt like I needed to point out.
@@contestofnerdsbeing gay is not a modern day sensibility. Nobody at the time interpreted it that way because homosexuality was taboo. And there’s substantial evidence in Melville’s letters of repressed homosexuality. Not enough to prove anything, obviously, but more than enough to make it a worthwhile avenue of interpretation for his writing. Thinly veiled homosexuality is like a main theme of the literary canon as a whole lol. Those kinds of things obviously couldn’t be explicitly stated, but they seep in.
It’s not semen, it’s spermaceti. It’s a waxy substance found in the head of the spermicide whale. It was used to make ointments, textiles, candles etc.
@@jenniturtleburger3708yes, but it is named that, because it was originally thought to be the sperm of the whale (lat. cetus), hence the name "sperm whale". Later when it was discovered that the substance was not actually whale semen the name "spermaceti" had already stuck
“It was now about nine o'clock, and the room seeming almost supernaturally quiet after these orgies, I began to congratulate myself upon a little plan that had occurred to me just previous to the entrance of the seamen. “No man prefers to sleep two in a bed...”
“How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts’ honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg-a cosy, loving pair.”
Probably because the parents that would ban books wouldn't ban something based off the details in a book, they'd ban it based off subject matters that are mentioned in blurbs about books. I doubt many of the people that ban most books usually read them themselves (or they do, and still ban them due to cognitive dissonance and the assumption that everyone else's experience reading a book "should" be like there's). 0_0
That's because they'd need to read the book to see this passage in it and we all know those fools don't read, they just base their assumptions on the title and category of the book! 😅
My friend didn't believe me when I told him that this book had a literal child nearly drown and come back insane. Or that the first chapter is about the MC sleeping with a cannibal. He said the same fucking, "Why haven't I read this book?" It's the GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL FOR A REASON
"The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God."
@@Obama_OReillyPip also becomes something of a sage later on, foretelling events and interpreting signs. He’s partially GRRM’s inspiration for Patchface in GOT
Moby Dick was one of the biggest literary surprises I ever had. Sure, most people know vaguely that it was about a guy named Ayana chasing a whale. But it surprised me in that, not only was the prose so poetical, but it was surprisingly funny as well. Stuff like Stubb making the cook preach a sermon to sharks were genuinely funny. Plus, you learn quite a lot about whaling.
It's been a while since I read it but close to the end, a crewmate falls off the boat while fastened to a rope and gets attacked by the whale I believe. I still remember one of his other crewmates yelling: "Get him out! Jerk him! Jerk him off!" Yeah not sure that's gonna help buddy
@@foolishmint9618 To jerk someone meant (and I think still means) to rapidly pull someone. Since he was attacked by the whale at that time, the crew tried to rapidly pull him off of it, or in other terms, jerk him off.
I started Billy Budd today and the way he describes Billy 😅 - "this man, he was just so hot. No you don't get it, sooo hot. And everyone loved him. They thought he was hot too, it wasn't just me" 👀
Ironically, Moby Dick is the book they used when I was a kid to teach me "not to judge a book by its cover" but they never actually went into detail about the book itself... I was just told it's about whaling, and "the funny name" is actually "serious, and should be taken seriously."
you wont regret it, some parts are tough, but stick to it and finish the book.. it's genius, beautiful, hilarious, and at some times kinda gay. Highly recommend it
I thought for sure this was taken out of context and maybe "sperm" was just short for "sperm whale" and they were just swimming with the whale and hugging its blubbery flesh or something. Until I read the original context and was entirely shocked when it seemed to be exactly what it sounded like. Then I was significantly less weirded-out when I did further research and found out what spermaceti actually is. Still a very weird scene though.
I thought that the sperm being spermaceti and spermaceti not being literally sperm was pretty clear when I read it, without any prior knowledge of whaling or whales (at least not related prior knowledge when it comes to whales, though even then what I did know was only very basic stuff)
It’s not semen, it’s spermaceti. It’s a waxy substance found in the head of the spermicide whale. It was used to make ointments, textiles, candles etc.
Reading Moby Dick was such a thrill the first read through. The whole section that is basically a text book on whales really kept me wondering wtf was going to happen next in the story. Lol
"Anyhow, while it is surely instructive to watch Queequeg and I rassle nobly amongst each other's strong dark bodies, let us now admire how super nice and chic different types of knot are for several chapters. Could ye not just die for these knots."
fun (depressing) fact: Herman Melville was deeply in (unrequited) love with Nathaniel Hawthorne (and lived most of his life with a broken heart because of it)
fun fact my arse... Melville was married with 4 children; Hawthorne was married with 3 children. according to alphabet people, everyone in history is like them.
His prose and writing is cumbersome and to us contemporaries very old-timey, but I liked it. Long sentences that stretch on forever, but the prose is a joy to read. I would say that it might even come off as flamboyant at times, but I dont know whether its because people back then wrote poetry that way or if it truly was due to some authors own bent, but based on that, his being gay is perhaps the last thing I would have guessed. The book is about about men in the company of other men on a lonely ship, but to me that seemed like low-hanging fruit. There are a myriad things you could poke fun at in the book, and there are some truly good bits of dark humor in it as well that surprised me with their bluntness, but Melville doesnt seem to be a person that could keep things like that hidden for long. His humor is too fast and loose, his writing is rambling yet laser focused, which tells me of a man who is at ease with himself and who is always ready to express himself, and I cant imagine him being able to conform to such societal pressures that would make him lead a secretive life. Still, there isnt a lot of mention or details about women. The two cant be compared because of the culture and time gap, but Steinbeck for example gladly takes a moment to explain and appreciate a womans beatiful face, flowing hair, swaying hips, full bodied frame and bosom, but with Melville there arent such details. Melville is the type where no detail goes undiscussed, but there is no mention of longing to be beside a wife or to go chasing after women except in passing or as an afterthought, which is curious because in his story you could be stuck on a ship for years at a time, and even then no one seems to lend much thought to women. In the background there is platonic appreciation most definetly, but if you look at the patterns of male homosexuality in history, their bonds are always a little too familiar, always a little convoluted and close which to the onlooker seems like a very good friendship, yet it seems to stop just short of some *thing*, but what?
Just finished chapter 10, this is the craziest book I've ever read. It makes you tear up, then laugh to tears in the very same paragraph. It really is beautiful. It's very difficult, but we'll worth doing the googling.
I love that of all your videos, THIS is the one that people will see after the shoutout in the Jacksfilms “Actually Good TH-camrs” iceberg 😂 I’ve been following you for a while, so it was awesome seeing you appear there!
Moby Dick is so odd, Melville just pauses the story to argue for like a whole chapter about how whaling is actually a prestigious thing to do against people who looked down on it back in the day which is admittedly... erm a bit hard to take in with our modern views on whaling, but it's awesome though.
Don't forget the whole section where he makes up his own categorization system for whales because he thinks the standard one sucks. And then bases his whole system on just vibes I guess
you have to remember that whale oil is what fueled all the lights at night. It was a very important job, even if it was grueling and environmentally devastating
Herman Melville, the hipster. The weirdness just grows and grows, don't it? But yeah, I'm glad that whaling is obsolete. I hope that fuel derived from petroleum will be obsolete within my lifetime as well.
I enjoyed The Outsiders, but I guess it's due to feeling like an outcast most of my life. Would've been fun to have replaced a few other books with Mobey Dick, though... I could have probably traded it out with Of Mice and Men, given the option, since I broke down crying at the end of that. 💀
There are also a couple of paragraphs where he talks about which crew members bottom for which other crew members, but he uses some strange euphemism for it that I can't remember. Something about wind, I think.
@@RavagersPrey Uhhuh. Did I also make up the part where the crew member wears a whale's foreskin, or the many times Ishmael and Queequeg cuddle in bed?
I love that you just. Opened it at random as if the FIRST 50 FUCKING PAGES weren't a love story about him and his tattooed husband whom he watches undress before they go to bed together
It's definitely worth reading. It can be a bit of a slog at some points, but it's still quite a lot of fun for a book that's become short-hand for "bloated boring classic no one but literature professors likes." It's a classic for a reason and I highly recommend it.
For reasons, I went and looked up the history of the word "dick" and surprise surprise "dick" was a euphemism for penis in the early to mid 19th century. So the title of the book sounded just as dirty to 1880s readers as it does to us.
It's also a I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but the true origin is: Dick is a nickname most often for Richard, which likely originated in the Middle Ages as rhyming slang for "Rick", as did William → Will → Bill and Robert → Rob → Bob. The association with "penis" is more recent, arising from Dick becoming a cliché name for any man, as in Tom, Dick and Harry
@@Chris.Pontius He didn't claim that the penis euphemism predated the abbreviation of Richard? He just claimed that the penis euphemism was around in the mid 19th century.
How well do you know history? Dick used to be used all the time as a name, a nickname for Richard. How many Dicks do you meet nowadays? There's some big changes with today and the past
@@30-06Lover see above. Obviously dick was a nickname for Richard. It also was a euphemism for penis. Just like John means hooker customer and jack off means masturbate, regardless of what thise words mean to someone named Jonathan
it's like when I did the same thing to some Umberto Eco book "all man like the smell of their own shit" as I did this while on the toilet (before the era of smartphone) randomly finding that passage really impressed me
You're telling me it is pure coincidence Man Carrying Thing released this the same week a video game released it's chapter that's all about Moby Dick. He is clearly trying to comunicate with us, what do you need master? How many virgins should we sacrifice in your name this time?
I have a funny story about Moby Dick. During highschool I had a literature teacher allow the class to vote on books that we could choose from. From 25 books down to the top 5, and we could then choose from the top 5 to read from for a book report due at the end of the semester. "Moby Dick" was one of them, yet my teacher never called it by that name and instead referred it to as "The Boring Whale" because he didn't want a classroom with guys to get stuck with the book and mislead about it. By the end of the semester, he congratulated my class for not having it crack the top 10, because the other class he taught later in the day had the most amount of students read it than ever before, and he didn't have to listen to anyone groan or complain about the book from my class.
I’m probably going to wonder later how the heck this got in my “it’s *my* depressive episode, *I* get to choose the music” playlist It was an accident but I don’t feel like undoing that action
I'm going to be honest: the full, unabridged Moby Dick is the most insanely dry read you'll ever have. Like, shockingly dry for a story that mostly takes place at sea. The book is 70% history or whaling, stories about whaling, types of whales, parts of the whale and what they're used for, types of whaling vessels, types of harpoons, etc, etc; all written with the exuberance of a transcript of an episode of "How It's Made" about paperclips. About 23% is the actual story, and 7% is gay stuff (aka, the interesting parts)
I had no idea Moby Dick possessed such poetry.
same like WHAT!?! this cant be
_gentle globules_
@@nloc1929 ao3 author language
As a foreigner never gave much thought until I learned Ahab is a quaker AND what is a quaker and why Ahab should not be doing any of that.
The modern equivalent would be a reverend with a shotgun.
Yeah I want to read that now.
@@Mordecrox If you find the concept of an American religious leader toting a shotgun incongruous, you are, indeed, a “foreigner,” as you put it. Most American evangelicals are certain that if they just looked hard enough, they would find our Second Amendment somewhere in the Bible.
I read Moby Dick for a class, during which I said some gay shit, and the professor was like "just you wait" in reference to that part. 10/10 book btw.
1k and no comments is wild
I am currently being held hostage in Porto Alegre, my captors said i have 5 days until they suck the soul out of me. SEND HELP
@@Dzaimon8562Is it?
@@johnmartinez7440 highest I've seen is 125 before this
@@CrumfortScroop
Goddamn, dude, thanks for the invite.
Ah, and we were all expecting the bed sharing scene - well played sir, well played.
I thought I was the only one😂
Same. Managed to find a part of moby dick that sounds gay but isnt
I was scrolling just to see if someone else mentioned it
And there was only one Bed!
Ok tell us what happened. I have to know. Was it pretty gay? Or just gay through modern eyes? Like the two broguys have to share a bed because there was only one bed and bedsharing was more common back then??
The only reason i read through whole of Moby Dick was because my professor said there are some gay subtext. After reading it I was like: "some?"
Subtext?
My Brother in Christ this text is *B O L D*
@@mauricioalvarezpino1818 "I know writers who use subtext, and they're all cowards." ~Herman Melville, probably
@@Nofixdahdress That does check out
Your disgusting
Judging by the book title itself, this is gonna be a fun journey.
Nominative determinism
@@woodside4life Usain BOLT happened to be the fastest person in the world.
Bro WHO TF ARE U ??? U R EVERYWHERE!!!!!
Is it multiple people running this account
Damn, first time I see Dong on MCT
That's why seamen and women don't mix
We know what you think.
Seamen and swallow
Well one is gay and the other doesn’t exist so it’s bound to not mix
semen?
They do if you get a strong grinder
watching Man Carrying Thing until something gay happens
*WARNING: IMPOSSIBLE
World Record Speedrun attained: .024 seconds.
This is the hardest speedrun ever
lost my butt virginity to this! 🙂👍
when you're watching him you're the gay thing thats gonna be happening
He’s so real for writing that
It’s not seamen, it’s spermaceti. It’s a waxy substance found in the head of the spermicide whale. It was used to make ointments, textiles, candles etc.
*semen
@@jenniturtleburger3708And what do you think spermaceti is named after?
@@navnnavn1226 It means “sperm of the whale” or “whale sperm” which is whale oil from sperm whales. The etymology of the word spam comes from the Greeks (to sow) and then to Latin (seed). The passage is talking about the waxy substance from a pilot whales head which had industrial and commercial uses. He wasn’t milking his wang. He was gathering spermaceti from a piloted whales head and getting giddy about it, perhaps similar to how a miner would after mining gold and playing with gold nuggets.
@@jenniturtleburger3708 the head🤨
At this point I'm convinced that if Oscar Wilde never went to jail people would still be doing the most insane mental gymnastics to explain how Dorian Grey is completely, 100% straight because they do it to with Moby Dick
There are still people trying to argue that relationships deliberately written with classic BL tropes are Just Guys Being Pals, so it doesn`t surprise me. But it does disappoint me
And they were roomates.
And they were roomates.
why is there moby dick lore about people going to jail more than william
Me owning the published uncensored version of Dorian Grey that includes explicitly homosexual content that was originally edited out for censorship
Melville's review of a Nathaniel Hawthorne novel, to whom Moby Dick is dedicated:
"Already I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul. He expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him; and further, and further, shoots his strong New England roots into the hot soil of my Southern soul.”
HELP ????
I had to double-check and YES THIS IS THE EXACT QUOTE.
PLSS this extremely gay i love it
MAN LITERALLY SAID "I can feel his writing skills coming inside me" !
No fucking way.
For context, people used to think the fluid in a sperm whale's head was sperm, which is where it got it's name. In that scene, they were sqeezing the fluid out of a sperm whales head after they had killed it
Thank you I was legit confused tbh
That's disgusting 🥴
@@fabricofdreams. Which part? Lol
The complete incompetence of past biology never ceases to amaze me
Ty for the context! (Whale Sperm: used for makeup and candles /jk)
Melville being like "The reader won't understand and be able to empathise with Captain Ahab's obsession without a COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE TO MID 1800s WHALING TECHNIQUES DANGIT!!"
Don't forget the wildly inaccurate 1800's cetology and handy whale recipes.
fucking based writing
@@thompkins6796 whales are warm blooded, have lungs, breath air, produce milk and and have mammal bone structure? nah man thas bs, they live in the water i seen it
"Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze!"
-Dumbledore, calmly
dumbledore calmly what?
“Harry, did you put your name into the bucket of spermaceti?”
"something something as he began bending over the cabinet."
@@todd8398The Cumlet of Fire
Fun yet popular fact: Dumbledore is canonically gay. 👉👌 🍑🥒
Moby Dick makes a lot more sense when you:
- Look up who it was dedicated to
- Look up the letters Melville wrote to this person
Can you elaborate ?
@@willirazl5526 Moby Dick is basically Melville sublimating his crush on Nathaniel Hawthorne. Yes, THAT Nathaniel Hawthorne, the author of The Scarlet Letter, who is said to have been "handsomer than Lord Byron".
Just read his letters.
@@willirazl5526Apparently Melville Had Fell In Love With Hawthorne
People freak out that ppl wrote letters. “Much love and affection on this gay occasion, - Melville” OMG 😱
@@Tempusverum “But already I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul. He expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him; and further, and further, shoots his strong New-England roots into the hot soil of my Southern soul.”
Melville, in Hawthorne and his Mosses.
Yes, definitely, nothing gay here
"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. Indeed, partly lying on it as the arm did when I first awoke, I could hardly tell it from the quilt, they so blended their hues together; and it was only by the sense of weight and pressure that I could tell that Queequeg was hugging me."
"How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts' honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg--a cosy, loving pair."
And they STILL call it subtext??? The closet's made of glass
This sounds like a really good Ao3 fic if it was written in 1st person
That's kinda cute
There’s nothing wrong with it. People are so over saturated with s3x, they read it into what used to be normal human behavior. Now we’re all segregated and touch deprived out of fear of being labeled
I once designed a book cover for Moby Dick as an art project for college. This page is clearly where I should have taken my inspiration from.
Naaah bro 🤣🤣🤣
he never misses, the absolute legend! (Let me out)
no
@@ManCarryingThing Wow. People love British guy.
What is this
@@erikavaleries he never misses, the absolute legend!
the absolute legend, he never misses!
My favorite part of Moby Dick is the 3 and a half page monologue by the author/narrator about what he thinks is and isn't a whale, and whether whales are fish or not. I wonder if Melville even had an editor lol
Also the conclusion that they are fish, which obviously is incorrect
lmao yea i was gonna mention that @@mitchellwilson4873
@@mitchellwilson4873 *correct
@@mitchellwilson4873You know, phylogenetically speaking, whales are technically fish.
@@darthplagueis13Technically, all mammals, birds, amphibians and reptiles are fish. 🎣
Wait THIS is what that book is about? I'm with ya, gotta hop on peak fiction
I guess you can say you're about to hop on Moby Dick. No pause.
I'll see myself out.
You didn't think it was about actual Sperm whales, did you?
I mean... It IS called "Moby *DICK*"... Yeah, it kinda tracks 😂
@@doncomputer5931 I-It's not?
@@doncomputer5931it’s not? I always thought it was about whales, so I expected it to be boring 😅
I just read Moby Dick for the first time a few months ago. Why did nobody ever tell me before that it was gay as hell?
Try reading it again and you will be surprised
As hell? Hell has more bondage
Nobody ever told you? There is literally a dick in book's title, what did you expected
Honestly me reading Dorian Gray.
Just wait until you read Moby Dick 3 😏😏
The way this isn't even the first gay thing to happen in this book. Are we just suppose to ignore Queequeg and Ishmael getting married after rolling around in their shared bed??
They're not gay! They're roommates! Close friends
as someone who has actually read the book:
- it is explicitly stated how marriage in Queequeg's culture meant friendship and brotherhood
- they never literally got married, it was a single metaphorical line
- sharing beds was common, especially for the poor in overbooked hotels
- nobody at the time the book was published interpeted anything Melville wrote as gay
- this is all modern day sensibilities being read into the text which was not actually there
@@contestofnerds The thing about literature is that it's not stuck in a time or place. Readers will change over time and their interpretations will change over time. While we should, as readers, be aware of historical contexts for older works we read, we're also allowed to bring our modern sensibilities to the table and add whatever we can to the conversation with the text in mind. You couldn't just baselessly claim that Moby Dick is queer, but modern readers interpret queerness in the text, and (presumably) academics have argued in favor of that interpretation before and been published. It doesn't reject the past to do so; it just adds another voice.
Also, it's very possible Melville's contemporaries didn't refer to it as "gay" or "homosexual" because the term homosexual hadn't even been coined or made its way into common language yet. Queerness as we understand it today (as an identity as opposed to an action) wasn't even a thing yet, was only just becoming part of popular thought (and very slowly at that).
Note that I don't argue for any specific point myself as I haven't read Melville's novel, but this is something I've read up on now and then as an English major and felt like I needed to point out.
@@alexbaassler4098 people like you are why everything is bad
@@contestofnerdsbeing gay is not a modern day sensibility. Nobody at the time interpreted it that way because homosexuality was taboo. And there’s substantial evidence in Melville’s letters of repressed homosexuality. Not enough to prove anything, obviously, but more than enough to make it a worthwhile avenue of interpretation for his writing. Thinly veiled homosexuality is like a main theme of the literary canon as a whole lol. Those kinds of things obviously couldn’t be explicitly stated, but they seep in.
What are you talking about? It's a totally super heterosexual scene with absolutely no subtext whatsoever.
It’s not semen, it’s spermaceti. It’s a waxy substance found in the head of the spermicide whale. It was used to make ointments, textiles, candles etc.
@@jenniturtleburger3708 we're talking about the book named *Moby Dick,* what book are you talking about?
*sperm whale, not spermicide lol. Stupid auto correct.
@@jenniturtleburger3708yes, but it is named that, because it was originally thought to be the sperm of the whale (lat. cetus), hence the name "sperm whale".
Later when it was discovered that the substance was not actually whale semen the name "spermaceti" had already stuck
Moby Dick is wild everything and nothing happens at one point he roasts different zodiac signs for no reason it's the best
And they were shipmates
Oh my god they were shipmates
Best comments 😂🏆
I'll bet they were
Of course there's also the part near the beginning where he has to share a bed with Queequeg
nothing gay about sleeping with your best bud queequeg
“It was now about nine o'clock, and the room seeming almost supernaturally quiet after these orgies, I began to congratulate
myself upon a little plan that had occurred to me just previous to the entrance of the seamen.
“No man prefers to sleep two in a bed...”
@@ManCarryingThingsleeping with the homies
queerqueg
Dude was a harpooner. No subtext there.
“How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts’ honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg-a cosy, loving pair.”
There was a 4-hour Moby Dick musical in Boston, and they did a whole number to that passage. It was wild.
No way 😭😭😭😭😭
That sounds amazing
Surprised I haven't seen school board parents calling for it to get banned yet😵
Please it's just an innocent book called Moby Dick with a scene about sperm whales...right?
Probably because if a student actually made it that far in the book they're already a lost cause anyway lmao
@@megamerp9315how, it's a good book
Probably because the parents that would ban books wouldn't ban something based off the details in a book, they'd ban it based off subject matters that are mentioned in blurbs about books. I doubt many of the people that ban most books usually read them themselves (or they do, and still ban them due to cognitive dissonance and the assumption that everyone else's experience reading a book "should" be like there's). 0_0
That's because they'd need to read the book to see this passage in it and we all know those fools don't read, they just base their assumptions on the title and category of the book! 😅
don't forget the start of the novel where two strangers just lie in bed, gazing at and touching each other
They got those Utena/Anthy vibes.
And thus the whole "there was only one bed in the room" cliche was born
I didn't expect to see an Utena reference, but I'm here for it@@MagusMirificus
That was literally the thing that hooked me in to the book, that opening was crazy
this channel being recently the one and only distraction I freely allow myself to immerse into without feeling bad I wasted my time
Each five seconds of laughter probably adds ten seconds to your life. Sketch comedy creates its own time.
@@rsh650 this is a comedy channel
@@rsh650two thirds youtube commenters don’t realize that truth is the heaviest of all elements discovered thus far.
My friend didn't believe me when I told him that this book had a literal child nearly drown and come back insane. Or that the first chapter is about the MC sleeping with a cannibal. He said the same fucking, "Why haven't I read this book?" It's the GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL FOR A REASON
i dont remember the child part, what was that again?
@@trxgreder Ch 93 Pip, the cabin-boy falls over board. Maybe not a child but very young?
"The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God."
@@Obama_OReillyPip also becomes something of a sage later on, foretelling events and interpreting signs. He’s partially GRRM’s inspiration for Patchface in GOT
i thought that was just a hallucination i had during the movie when i watched it when i was like 5.
That was *real*???
Moby Dick was one of the biggest literary surprises I ever had. Sure, most people know vaguely that it was about a guy named Ayana chasing a whale. But it surprised me in that, not only was the prose so poetical, but it was surprisingly funny as well. Stuff like Stubb making the cook preach a sermon to sharks were genuinely funny. Plus, you learn quite a lot about whaling.
It's been a while since I read it but close to the end, a crewmate falls off the boat while fastened to a rope and gets attacked by the whale I believe. I still remember one of his other crewmates yelling: "Get him out! Jerk him! Jerk him off!" Yeah not sure that's gonna help buddy
i sure hope this phrase had different meaning back then
@@foolishmint9618 To jerk someone meant (and I think still means) to rapidly pull someone. Since he was attacked by the whale at that time, the crew tried to rapidly pull him off of it, or in other terms, jerk him off.
I started Billy Budd today and the way he describes Billy 😅 - "this man, he was just so hot. No you don't get it, sooo hot. And everyone loved him. They thought he was hot too, it wasn't just me" 👀
God, that one. You know a book has some "subtext" when there's a Benjamin Britten opera based on it and the original is arguably even gayer.
Ironically, Moby Dick is the book they used when I was a kid to teach me "not to judge a book by its cover" but they never actually went into detail about the book itself... I was just told it's about whaling, and "the funny name" is actually "serious, and should be taken seriously."
This single handedly convinced me to get a copy of Moby Dick.
you wont regret it, some parts are tough, but stick to it and finish the book.. it's genius, beautiful, hilarious, and at some times kinda gay. Highly recommend it
That's great but I want to know what your other hand was doing at the time.
This single-handedly made me move to Jamaica and start an onion farm with my husbands
Love English literature. Gotta be one if my favorite gay porn genres.
edit: book nerds going bananas itt lmao imagine actually reading books
Ikr
Fr
Come on man, it’s literally the Great American Novel. Tf you mean *english*
@@ladnie9454 In the 1800s, Americans were pretty British.
@@Katya_Lastochka Gonna hard disagree on that one boss, maybe in 1800 (still a stretch) but not in 1851.
I thought for sure this was taken out of context and maybe "sperm" was just short for "sperm whale" and they were just swimming with the whale and hugging its blubbery flesh or something. Until I read the original context and was entirely shocked when it seemed to be exactly what it sounded like. Then I was significantly less weirded-out when I did further research and found out what spermaceti actually is. Still a very weird scene though.
The vibe I get is that Melville had a real sense of humor about a lot of this.
But even in the passage he puts on the screen, it looks like during the extraction the MC starts groping his coworker’s hands and is getting frisky 😅
I thought that the sperm being spermaceti and spermaceti not being literally sperm was pretty clear when I read it, without any prior knowledge of whaling or whales (at least not related prior knowledge when it comes to whales, though even then what I did know was only very basic stuff)
@@KnightoftheSorryFace Yeah, well I've never actually read the book, so maybe that's the difference here.
It’s not semen, it’s spermaceti. It’s a waxy substance found in the head of the spermicide whale. It was used to make ointments, textiles, candles etc.
It only took this long because he skipped the title
Reading Moby Dick was such a thrill the first read through. The whole section that is basically a text book on whales really kept me wondering wtf was going to happen next in the story. Lol
I do love Man Squeezing Thing reading Charles Dick. This is what an English degree gets you in life!
"Call me, Ishmael!" said Ahab making the phone gesture as he giggled then turned.
Hey I just met you, and this is crazyyyyy, but Here's my number, so call me Ishmael!
Nah. Ahab is obsessed with one kind of Dick and with that kind only.
"Anyhow, while it is surely instructive to watch Queequeg and I rassle nobly amongst each other's strong dark bodies, let us now admire how super nice and chic different types of knot are for several chapters. Could ye not just die for these knots."
fun (depressing) fact: Herman Melville was deeply in (unrequited) love with Nathaniel Hawthorne (and lived most of his life with a broken heart because of it)
Oh dear. Hawthorne had major issues and may have been attracted to his sister. Terrible choice to be in unrequited love with, all around.
"our students would never identify with this XIX writer and ex-seaman"
the bungou stray dogs fans are gonna go wild
he is just like me
fun fact my arse... Melville was married with 4 children; Hawthorne was married with 3 children. according to alphabet people, everyone in history is like them.
His prose and writing is cumbersome and to us contemporaries very old-timey, but I liked it. Long sentences that stretch on forever, but the prose is a joy to read. I would say that it might even come off as flamboyant at times, but I dont know whether its because people back then wrote poetry that way or if it truly was due to some authors own bent, but based on that, his being gay is perhaps the last thing I would have guessed. The book is about about men in the company of other men on a lonely ship, but to me that seemed like low-hanging fruit.
There are a myriad things you could poke fun at in the book, and there are some truly good bits of dark humor in it as well that surprised me with their bluntness, but Melville doesnt seem to be a person that could keep things like that hidden for long. His humor is too fast and loose, his writing is rambling yet laser focused, which tells me of a man who is at ease with himself and who is always ready to express himself, and I cant imagine him being able to conform to such societal pressures that would make him lead a secretive life.
Still, there isnt a lot of mention or details about women. The two cant be compared because of the culture and time gap, but Steinbeck for example gladly takes a moment to explain and appreciate a womans beatiful face, flowing hair, swaying hips, full bodied frame and bosom, but with Melville there arent such details. Melville is the type where no detail goes undiscussed, but there is no mention of longing to be beside a wife or to go chasing after women except in passing or as an afterthought, which is curious because in his story you could be stuck on a ship for years at a time, and even then no one seems to lend much thought to women.
In the background there is platonic appreciation most definetly, but if you look at the patterns of male homosexuality in history, their bonds are always a little too familiar, always a little convoluted and close which to the onlooker seems like a very good friendship, yet it seems to stop just short of some *thing*, but what?
Love how that's not even the gayest part, then he keeps going about how much he loves holding his coworker's soft hands
I don't wanna judge a book by its title, nor do I want to have the humor of a middle schooler. But...
Was hoping this would be the true love between Queequeg and Ishmael
I did not enjoy any moment of reading Moby Dick but I look back on it fondly as one of the greatest books of all time
Just finished chapter 10, this is the craziest book I've ever read. It makes you tear up, then laugh to tears in the very same paragraph. It really is beautiful. It's very difficult, but we'll worth doing the googling.
I read this book on a camping trip when I was 8yo, couldn't sleep, and had a fever. if anyone asks, that's why I'm queer
I love that of all your videos, THIS is the one that people will see after the shoutout in the Jacksfilms “Actually Good TH-camrs” iceberg 😂 I’ve been following you for a while, so it was awesome seeing you appear there!
i remember rereading that sentence like 5 times not believing that i read it right
Moby Dick is so odd, Melville just pauses the story to argue for like a whole chapter about how whaling is actually a prestigious thing to do against people who looked down on it back in the day which is admittedly... erm a bit hard to take in with our modern views on whaling, but it's awesome though.
the book just becomes a text book about whales for a chapter like nbd
Don't forget the whole section where he makes up his own categorization system for whales because he thinks the standard one sucks. And then bases his whole system on just vibes I guess
you have to remember that whale oil is what fueled all the lights at night.
It was a very important job, even if it was grueling and environmentally devastating
it's a postmodernist novel made before postmodernism even existed. incredibly ahead of its time despite being so very antiquated
Herman Melville, the hipster. The weirdness just grows and grows, don't it? But yeah, I'm glad that whaling is obsolete. I hope that fuel derived from petroleum will be obsolete within my lifetime as well.
No wonder people think this is an instant classic, damn.
I am going to my library's website and borrowing this e-book RIGHT NOW!!!
Somehow this was AFTER Ishmael spent multiple nights cuddling another man
I feel that while reading the book, he got to that point and was like, "Welp, I know what my next video is going to be"
MY COMPASS WAS SWALLOWED BY THE SEEEAAAAAA
Once again, all the Project Moon sleeper agents are awakening
Awaken my sleeper agent
Moby Dick, proto-omegaverse fiction that was shuffled inside of a random guy's encyclopedia manuscript.
Why proto-omegaverse? 👀
I'M NOT GONNA SUGARCOAT IT
Next Turn: Order Queequeg to activate Assist Defense
Starbuck 2nd skill be like, *stagger *stagger *stagger *stagger
Ah, I was wondering where the PM sleeper agents were
CHA! MAGANERA!
OMUERA!!!
I do not have the ability to make a witty comment about your content but can you please give me a heart as that would be insanely gratifying for me.
ok
@@ManCarryingThing Good, thank you.
congrats my guy 👏
What a legend
@@snigdhasingh5682you’re just a simple man trying to make your way in the Galaxy
A heart warming tale of a man coming at odds with his seamen.
The book really lives up to its title
I mean it makes sense, Moby Dick is a sperm whale
now I know why they had the edited "junior classic" edition for me to read as a kid instead of the real book.
Good thing November just ended
Why the fuck did I have to read the outsiders in school when I could have read that?!?
cause it's possible to finish reading the outsiders
I enjoyed The Outsiders, but I guess it's due to feeling like an outcast most of my life. Would've been fun to have replaced a few other books with Mobey Dick, though... I could have probably traded it out with Of Mice and Men, given the option, since I broke down crying at the end of that. 💀
Hey don’t you dare diss the Outsiders! That book was awesome, and it had some thematic significance behind it in the case of class and discrimination
Because it's like nine hundred pages?
There are also a couple of paragraphs where he talks about which crew members bottom for which other crew members, but he uses some strange euphemism for it that I can't remember. Something about wind, I think.
You mean he ships shipmen on a ship?
I recall there was a slang that went something like «going up the wind chimney» or something like that used as an euphemism for gay sex
That's because you made it up.
@@RavagersPrey Uhhuh. Did I also make up the part where the crew member wears a whale's foreskin, or the many times Ishmael and Queequeg cuddle in bed?
@@RavagersPreyit's so funny seeing you people discover the world was never straight
damn I don't remember that bit lol, mainly remember the cool whales
As soon as the video started, I said "He's going to start in A Squeeze of the Hand, isn't he"
Thank you! I was in desperate need of laughter today.
I love that you just. Opened it at random as if the FIRST 50 FUCKING PAGES weren't a love story about him and his tattooed husband whom he watches undress before they go to bed together
Moby Dick is a book I really want to get around to reading. It's one of those books that seems like a classic for a reason.
It's definitely worth reading. It can be a bit of a slog at some points, but it's still quite a lot of fun for a book that's become short-hand for "bloated boring classic no one but literature professors likes." It's a classic for a reason and I highly recommend it.
the absolute legend, he never misses
For reasons, I went and looked up the history of the word "dick" and surprise surprise "dick" was a euphemism for penis in the early to mid 19th century. So the title of the book sounded just as dirty to 1880s readers as it does to us.
It's also a I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but the true origin is:
Dick is a nickname most often for Richard, which likely originated in the Middle Ages as rhyming slang for "Rick", as did William → Will → Bill and Robert → Rob → Bob. The association with "penis" is more recent, arising from Dick becoming a cliché name for any man, as in Tom, Dick and Harry
@@Chris.Pontius He didn't claim that the penis euphemism predated the abbreviation of Richard? He just claimed that the penis euphemism was around in the mid 19th century.
@@lukaro7074 Thanks for correcting me.
How well do you know history?
Dick used to be used all the time as a name, a nickname for Richard.
How many Dicks do you meet nowadays? There's some big changes with today and the past
@@30-06Lover see above. Obviously dick was a nickname for Richard. It also was a euphemism for penis.
Just like John means hooker customer and jack off means masturbate, regardless of what thise words mean to someone named Jonathan
saw the title, knew what chapter it was gonna be about immediately
it's like when I did the same thing to some Umberto Eco book
"all man like the smell of their own shit"
as I did this while on the toilet (before the era of smartphone) randomly finding that passage really impressed me
My guy Herman Melville knew what to name his book.
and they were ✨roommates✨
The closest of friends until the end of their days 😂
You're telling me it is pure coincidence Man Carrying Thing released this the same week a video game released it's chapter that's all about Moby Dick.
He is clearly trying to comunicate with us, what do you need master? How many virgins should we sacrifice in your name this time?
My compass was swallowed by the sea
Is this a motherfuckin' Limbus Company reference???
The only conclusion we can draw from this is that Man Carrying Thing is a PM fan
"Call me Ishmael." First name basis is gay af
I have a funny story about Moby Dick. During highschool I had a literature teacher allow the class to vote on books that we could choose from. From 25 books down to the top 5, and we could then choose from the top 5 to read from for a book report due at the end of the semester. "Moby Dick" was one of them, yet my teacher never called it by that name and instead referred it to as "The Boring Whale" because he didn't want a classroom with guys to get stuck with the book and mislead about it. By the end of the semester, he congratulated my class for not having it crack the top 10, because the other class he taught later in the day had the most amount of students read it than ever before, and he didn't have to listen to anyone groan or complain about the book from my class.
so thats why i could only find the abridged version in my school library
The deafening silence for a few solid seconds SENT ME 😂😂😂
(Also, it gets even better if you keep reading the clipping he shows 🤣)
I’m probably going to wonder later how the heck this got in my “it’s *my* depressive episode, *I* get to choose the music” playlist
It was an accident but I don’t feel like undoing that action
I thought Moby Dick would be more "Ahoy!" than "Ayo?"
The book starts out with two men sharing a bed in an inn
no wonder Matilda's dad ripped the pages out
omgg 😭
Out of all the beloved American classics Moby Dick has got to be the best.
You ever just wanna swab the poop deck with your first mate’s seamen?
I actually did not know about any of this, that is incredible. I really do need to read this book now.
That wasn't even the gay part, that's the whaling part.
The gay part is whatever tf Ishmael has going on with Queequeg
All seriousness, one of the best books ever written. Some "classics" are overrated, not Moby Dick.
Watching man carrying thing until something funny happens ( get it, it means I like your videos )
That explains why my parents said I was too young to read that book
This would make for a lovely sea shanty
I haven’t really cared about your content on books so far but now I’m interested
Just wait until you see what Ishmael and Queequeg get up to.
It's called the Great American Novel for a reason
I'm going to be honest: the full, unabridged Moby Dick is the most insanely dry read you'll ever have. Like, shockingly dry for a story that mostly takes place at sea.
The book is 70% history or whaling, stories about whaling, types of whales, parts of the whale and what they're used for, types of whaling vessels, types of harpoons, etc, etc; all written with the exuberance of a transcript of an episode of "How It's Made" about paperclips.
About 23% is the actual story, and 7% is gay stuff (aka, the interesting parts)