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Hieronymous Alloy
Jan 30, 2009


Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!




Morbid Hound

anilEhilated posted:

Right, I guess the reader-capable versions you still have to pay for even though the book is public domain. Thanks anyway.

Well, there's this : http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2701 but it won't have annotations.

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dogcrash truther
Nov 2, 2013

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

OK, this thread inspired me to reattempt this book and it really is just hilarious once you get your ear used to the narrator's humor.

Moby Dick is a very funny book and Stubb, in particular, is funny as hell. I've never understood why people complain it's a slog. Even the philosophical and scientific sections are as much a satire of scholarship as anything else.

blue squares
Sep 28, 2007

I bought beer and it leaked badly in my backpack and now my copy of Moby Dick is full of beer. When it dries I may enjoy the aesthetic. Sort of fitting.

Crack
Apr 10, 2009

anilEhilated posted:

Right, I guess the reader-capable versions you still have to pay for even though the book is public domain. Thanks anyway.

There's even ones on amazon for free (at least in the UK) but the book itself is public domain, if someone went to the trouble of annotating they want royalties though.

I was going to start reading on my kindle (after a failed attempt at reading it a few years ago) but now I want the illustrated one because those drawings do look really cool. Annotations would be nice but I'd rather pictures honestly.

swamp waste
Nov 4, 2009

There is some very sensual touching going on in the cutscene there. i don't actually think it means anything sexual but it's cool how it contrasts with modern ideas of what bad ass stuff should be like. It even seems authentic to some kind of chivalric masculine touching from a tyme longe gone
This is a book of tremendous power. It's really bizarre and funny. I like it. I think the exact passage where I was sold on it was when he talks about his childhood memory of trying to sleep in the middle of the day because he was grounded and bored, and feeling a phantom hand grasp his hand hanging off the side of the bed. Man that's good

MeatwadIsGod
Sep 30, 2004

Foretold by Gyromancy
I listened to the Frank Muller audiobook recently because Moby Dick was one of those classics I missed, and I wanted familiarity with it before Metal Gear Solid V. It was really something special. I always assumed it was going to be a tightly constructed narrative on the destructive nature of revenge. I was really surprised by the diversions on cetology, whiteness, oils, etc. But those chapters were really interesting in themselves. Most of the dialog is incredibly memorable, and it was way funnier than I expected. Muller's narration is theatrical as hell, too.

MeatwadIsGod fucked around with this message at 17:06 on Mar 5, 2015

vegetables
Mar 10, 2012

Is there very much fiction inspired by Moby Dick? I remember thinking while reading it how utterly unlike other novels it was, with its endless tangents and relaxed approach to narrative. I would love to read a good sci-fi or fantasy novel that followed a similar structure, as the novel seemed based around the knowledge of something inhuman and unknown in a way that could only really translate to those genres today. Something about reading chapter after chapter of whale biology would appeal to me even more if I knew the author was just making all of it up, as well.

No Wave
Sep 18, 2005

HA! HA! NICE! WHAT A TOOL!

vegetables posted:

Is there very much fiction inspired by Moby Dick? I remember thinking while reading it how utterly unlike other novels it was, with its endless tangents and relaxed approach to narrative. I would love to read a good sci-fi or fantasy novel that followed a similar structure, as the novel seemed based around the knowledge of something inhuman and unknown in a way that could only really translate to those genres today. Something about reading chapter after chapter of whale biology would appeal to me even more if I knew the author was just making all of it up, as well.
American Psycho!

Juaguocio
Jun 5, 2005

Oh, David...
I'm reading Blood Meridian right now, and while it doesn't digress like Moby-Dick, McCarthy's prose reminds me of Melville's due to its strong Biblical and Shakespearian influences.

military cervix
Dec 24, 2006

Hey guys
Just got started on this, looking forward to a simple tale about a man that hates an animal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pl4Z7F0Cl24

Nroo
Dec 31, 2007

vegetables posted:

Is there very much fiction inspired by Moby Dick? I remember thinking while reading it how utterly unlike other novels it was, with its endless tangents and relaxed approach to narrative. I would love to read a good sci-fi or fantasy novel that followed a similar structure, as the novel seemed based around the knowledge of something inhuman and unknown in a way that could only really translate to those genres today. Something about reading chapter after chapter of whale biology would appeal to me even more if I knew the author was just making all of it up, as well.

Gravity's Rainbow, there's lots of digressions and the central symbol of the V-2 rocket is a lot like how Moby-Dick uses the whale.

Seldom Posts
Jul 4, 2010

Grimey Drawer

vegetables posted:

Is there very much fiction inspired by Moby Dick? I remember thinking while reading it how utterly unlike other novels it was, with its endless tangents and relaxed approach to narrative. I would love to read a good sci-fi or fantasy novel that followed a similar structure, as the novel seemed based around the knowledge of something inhuman and unknown in a way that could only really translate to those genres today. Something about reading chapter after chapter of whale biology would appeal to me even more if I knew the author was just making all of it up, as well.

A good sci fi novel like this i(i.e. somewhat aimless but literary, featuring unknowable aliens and hella religious symbolism) is The Book of the New Sun series by Gene Wolf.

Juaguocio
Jun 5, 2005

Oh, David...

Juaguocio posted:

I'm reading Blood Meridian right now, and while it doesn't digress like Moby-Dick, McCarthy's prose reminds me of Melville's due to its strong Biblical and Shakespearian influences.

Now that I've gotten further into Blood Meridian, the connection to Moby-Dick is becoming much more obvious. McCarthy makes frequent use of "warp and weft" in his metaphors, which could be a reference to MD chapter 47, "The Mat-Maker," where Ishmael watches Queequeg weave a "sword-mat," and considers the motion of the shuttle in relation to fate and chance.

Here's another connection: in MD chapter 113, "The Forge," Ahab convinces his harpooners to quench his new weapon in their own blood, then baptizes it in the name of the devil. There's a similar scene in BM, where the judge uses the collective piss of the other characters to finish making his jury-rigged gunpowder.

There is an awful lot of Ahab in the judge.

Rieux
Jan 15, 2010

vegetables posted:

Is there very much fiction inspired by Moby Dick? I remember thinking while reading it how utterly unlike other novels it was, with its endless tangents and relaxed approach to narrative. I would love to read a good sci-fi or fantasy novel that followed a similar structure, as the novel seemed based around the knowledge of something inhuman and unknown in a way that could only really translate to those genres today. Something about reading chapter after chapter of whale biology would appeal to me even more if I knew the author was just making all of it up, as well.

This made me think of His Master's Voice, by Stanislaw Lem. I'll just copy/paste the wikipedia article because I'm tired, but I love it, it's my favorite Lem book:

wikipedia posted:

The novel is written as a first-person narrative, the memoir of a mathematician named Peter Hogarth, who becomes involved in a Pentagon-directed project (code-named "His Master's Voice", or HMV for short[2]) in the Nevada desert, where scientists are working to decode what seems to be a message from outer space (specifically, a neutrino signal from the Canis Minor constellation). Throughout the book Hogarth—or rather, Lem himself—exposes the reader to many debates merging cosmology and philosophy: from discussions of epistemology, systems theory, information theory and probability, through the idea of evolutionary biology and the possible form and motives of extraterrestrial intelligence, with digressions about ethics in military-sponsored research, to the limitations of human science constrained by the human nature subconsciously projecting itself into the analysis of any unknown subject. At some point one of the involved scientists (Rappaport), desperate for new ideas, even begins to read and discuss popular science-fiction stories, and Lem uses this opportunity to criticize the science fiction genre, as Rappaport soon becomes bored and disillusioned by monotonous plots and the unimaginative stories of pulp magazines.

gey muckle mowser
Aug 5, 2003

Do you know anything about...
witches?


Buglord

Rieux posted:

This made me think of His Master's Voice, by Stanislaw Lem. I'll just copy/paste the wikipedia article because I'm tired, but I love it, it's my favorite Lem book:

That sounds great, and thanks for reminding me I need to read more Stanislaw Lem.

Oh Mister B
Feb 28, 2008

i could not get thru september w/o a battle
I just finished this one a few weeks ago and really dug it- http://goo.gl/RdmIOW Dan Beachy-Quick wrote a book of very short essays pertaining to different themes and images from Moby-Dick. They're not all winners (you can only compare a book to a whale so many times before saying "Okay dude I get it"), but if anyone is hungry for more dissection of MD that's somewhat playful and lighter on actual textual analysis, it might not hurt to take a peek.

kanonvandekempen
Mar 14, 2009

Juaguocio posted:

I'm reading Blood Meridian right now, and while it doesn't digress like Moby-Dick, McCarthy's prose reminds me of Melville's due to its strong Biblical and Shakespearian influences.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgyZ4ia25gg

Here's a 1 hour lecture where the professor discusses the links between Blood Meridian and (among others) Moby Dick.

Nanomashoes
Aug 18, 2012

Nroo posted:

Gravity's Rainbow, there's lots of digressions and the central symbol of the V-2 rocket is a lot like how Moby-Dick uses the whale.

You got the author right but the book wrong. V. is even more similar to Moby Dick.

Mr. Grumpybones
Apr 18, 2002
"We're falling out of the sky! We're going down! We're a silver gleaming death machine!"

MeatwadIsGod posted:

I listened to the Frank Muller audiobook recently because Moby Dick was one of those classics I missed, and I wanted familiarity with it before Metal Gear Solid V. It was really something special. I always assumed it was going to be a tightly constructed narrative on the destructive nature of revenge. I was really surprised by the diversions on cetology, whiteness, oils, etc. But those chapters were really interesting in themselves. Most of the dialog is incredibly memorable, and it was way funnier than I expected. Muller's narration is theatrical as hell, too.

Frank Muller's narration is really fantastic - probably the best audio book narration I've heard. However, it helps to have a print or digital copy of the book as well as some of the references didn't register when spoken (e.g. "permacetty").

Toph Bei Fong
Feb 29, 2008



Nanomashoes posted:

You got the author right but the book wrong. V. is even more similar to Moby Dick.

Moby Dick might be the only book Pynchon loves as much as Oakley Hall's Warlock and Orwell's 1984.

Ravos
Jul 28, 2012

Wealth beyond measure, outlander.
Just read this for the first time a few months ago. I liked it so much, I've since bought and started reading two related books: Why Read Moby-Dick? by Nathaniel Philbrick and Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America by Eric Dolin.

The final encounter with Moby-Dick is the part that has stuck with me. The picture that formed in my mind's eye when I read that Fedellah had become lashed to Moby-Dick's back will never leave my brain. And I'll probably think about Ahab's final fate every time I swim in the ocean from now on.

dogcrash truther
Nov 2, 2013

swamp waste posted:

This is a book of tremendous power. It's really bizarre and funny. I like it. I think the exact passage where I was sold on it was when he talks about his childhood memory of trying to sleep in the middle of the day because he was grounded and bored, and feeling a phantom hand grasp his hand hanging off the side of the bed. Man that's good

That's the scene that clinched it for me, too. I wonder why that is.

dogcrash truther
Nov 2, 2013
If you want to read a really insane and wonderful bit of Melville criticism, Charles Olson's Call Me Ishmael is as nutty as they come, but also fascinating and in some ways it's almost as good as the book it's talking about, which is a pretty big feat when you're talking about Moby Dick.

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Juaguocio
Jun 5, 2005

Oh, David...
Hey, speaking of nutty Moby-Dick related things- I just remembered that the professor who taught my MD class showed us this weird mash-up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_3-gEm6O_g

Just in case any of y'all haven't seen John Henry Bonham's Moby-Dick, here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_nU_VFvIZs

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