I love that this is standard reading in many American high schools

[felis_ultharus]

Come; let us squeeze hands all around; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.

Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm forever!
------ Moby Dick by Herman Melville, Chapter 94

The "sperm" here is the spermaceti oil of the Sperm Whale. I'd say the mind-in-the-gutter interpretation was unintentional, but having read "Billy Budd" -- Melville's short story about homosexuality -- and since the guy speaking here describes himself as married to another man, I know Melville wasn't quite that naive.

On that note I am finally reading Moby Dick, whose second half I skimmed for my exam, but didn't read carefully.

Comments

[yumemisama.livejournal.com]

Oddly enough, we didn't read most of the 'standards' in my high school. This lead to some interesting scenes, such as the time my third-year English teacher wanted to talk to us about the symbolism in Moby Dick, discovered to her horror that we had not read any of it, gave us an excerpt, and very nearly had a stroke and died when we agreed, as a class, that the reason the whale was white was so that Ahab would have something easily-identifiable to obsess over. It turned out that she did her thesis on symbolism in Moby Dick, and we had to sit through 45 minutes of her trying to get us to say something else more meaningful (read: something that validated what was probably 100 pages of drivel that she wrote in her early 20s), which none of us did.

We did, on the other hand, read The Agony & The Ecstasy. I, and every other fifteen year old in that class, were sick and fucking tired of everything by that point in the year, and being a smart-ass, I flat-out asked where in the book the "controversial" parts were, so I could read those first. The humanities teacher obligingly told me what chapters those were, and the lot of us went home much happier knowing that we could skim about 75% of the book.

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

I thought the whale was white because it was God :/

Melville was against racism in big ways (he thought slavery and such were evil), but he definitely wasn't above the petty racisms of stereotyping portrayals, and had absolutely no problem with European colour prejudice (white = good, black = evil). If that thesis were true, Ishmael should identify with the whale, too, because our narrator does identify with his race pretty heavily.

And the best way to get kids to read something is to say that it was banned ^_^

[teecs.livejournal.com]

You are hilarious.
I haven't been around in awhile, hope all is well with you...

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

Everything's going great ^_^

I'm glad you're doing well, as well.