The Golden One - October 26, 2019


Book Review： Moby Dick

Topics
whaling and whale attacks
Hosted by
Marcus Follin
Mentioned
Moby Dick Dante Bronze Age Pervert Bronze Age Mindset Herman Melville Chris Hemsworth Connie Gilden Legio Gloria Eckermann Besides Angelo Pyro
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Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

154.85

Word count

1,835

Sentence count

129

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

6

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I discuss Moby Dick by Herman Melville, a classic work of literature written during the early 1800s and written about a whaling ship being attacked by a whale. I also discuss the history of whaling and the event that inspired the book.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Greetings, Balkingtons. Today I want to talk a bit about a book that I have read, Moby Dick. 0.96
00:00:08.000 And first and foremost, when I greet you as Balkingtons, it's because it's a character in this book that is called Balkington.
00:00:16.000 So I thought it was a fun way to introduce this video.
00:00:21.000 So basically, before I begin to talk about this particular book, I know that this isn't the most click-baity or relevant topic there is.
00:00:31.000 But then again, I have a lot of subscribers, you who are watching this, who are into books, you like reading, you like literature, Western culture as well.
00:00:42.000 Which is, yeah, this is very much a part of especially American culture, I would say. It is an important work.
00:00:50.000 So I decided to read it.
00:00:52.000 And also, before I begin, a shameless plug from me since we're talking about books.
00:00:57.000 If you haven't already read my own glorious book, Dauntless, 200 pages of self-improvement and philosophy.
00:01:05.000 I will link it, first link in the description box below.
00:01:08.000 Definitely recommend everyone to read it.
00:01:11.000 So, that being said, let's get into the book itself.
00:01:15.000 And I will be very honest with everyone watching.
00:01:19.000 I don't want to be pretentious.
00:01:21.000 I don't want to pretend that I do like stuff that I don't really like just for the sake of coming across as cultured.
00:01:28.000 I will always be honest with what I like and what I do not like.
00:01:32.000 So this book, did I enjoy reading it?
00:01:34.000 Was it a good book?
00:01:36.000 No, not really.
00:01:38.000 I did not enjoy reading it particularly much, to be honest.
00:01:42.000 And that can be for a few different reasons.
00:01:45.000 It can be for the fact that it is written 150 years ago.
00:01:49.000 So it's a bit hard with the language.
00:01:51.000 But I think more of it has to do with the fact that it's not a particularly immersive book.
00:01:58.000 It's more written as a whaler's experience in whaling.
00:02:03.000 And that is also one of the strong points of the book.
00:02:06.000 That it's based upon an extremely epic incident or tragic incident depending on how you want to view it.
00:02:14.000 So basically during the heyday of whaling when the Atlantic powers ventured out into the ocean in search for whale oil because you needed it for lamps.
00:02:25.000 Not these kind of lamps but the lamps you had during the early 1800s or to mid 1800s.
00:02:34.000 So whale oil was a treasured commodity.
00:02:37.000 And this book is written by Herman Melville who had a past in the American whaling fleet.
00:02:46.000 So he had plenty of experience to draw upon.
00:02:49.000 And that is one of the things that makes the book, in my view at least, worthwhile to read.
00:02:55.000 It's a great time document.
00:02:57.000 So even though it's not an immersive book that makes you want to hit the gym.
00:03:02.000 It's a great piece of history, especially American history.
00:03:06.000 So if you ask, should I read this book?
00:03:08.000 It depends a bit.
00:03:09.000 If you are interested in 19th century Western world culture and history.
00:03:15.000 Yeah, it is an important work.
00:03:18.000 And after all, it's been a classic for such a long time.
00:03:21.000 And it is that for a reason.
00:03:24.000 And also the event that I mentioned that it's based upon is actually a whaling ship called Essex was sunk by a sperm whale.
00:03:36.000 It got rammed and sunk by a whale.
00:03:39.000 And this is something that really, really captures the imagination.
00:03:43.000 It's like something out of a legend or a myth or some, yeah, some strange fiction.
00:03:48.000 But it happened and the book is based on that.
00:03:52.000 And the sheer feel of that, if you just hear this for the first time, there was a ship that got sunk by a whale.
00:04:00.000 So you have this great beast from the deeps of the ocean coming up to attack humans.
00:04:07.000 It is interesting.
00:04:08.000 It is epic.
00:04:09.000 It is something that really catches your imagination.
00:04:12.000 So that was basically why I thought it was a cool read, even though I didn't enjoy it.
00:04:18.000 So it's a bit of a not enjoyable, but enjoyable at the same time, if it makes any sense at all.
00:04:25.000 So it's not immersive as a book by Connie Gilden, for example, or the Horace Heresy.
00:04:31.000 But it's also a book that is based on something real.
00:04:34.000 And you get to see from an actual whaler how things were back in the day.
00:04:40.000 So as a time document, as a historic document, it's very valuable to have.
00:04:48.000 And also a note on the author.
00:04:51.000 I have saved a few quotes from it and it's very clear that he is first and foremost very proud of having been a whaler.
00:04:59.000 He thinks it's a noble pursuit and perhaps it was.
00:05:02.000 It was during the time 1850s when Western man at least really conquered the planet. 0.95
00:05:11.000 Went out into the ocean, went out into the world, explored, found new species, and you didn't really have that same sense of knowledge that we have today.
00:05:23.000 Now we know exactly every species there are, or almost at least, and we know every spot on the map basically.
00:05:31.000 This was a time of exploration.
00:05:33.000 And there is something really appealing in that feel of it.
00:05:38.000 The feel of exploration, the feel of not knowing the unknown.
00:05:41.000 There could have been more, even more horrendous monsters lurking in the deeps.
00:05:45.000 Who knows?
00:05:46.000 But you have that sensation at least, and that is also what makes it interesting.
00:05:50.000 And also seeing how he, the author, viewed the world back then.
00:05:55.000 And yeah, the book is full of references to mythology and culture and history, and it's clear that the author is very well read.
00:06:04.000 So I will take a few examples which I thought were cool.
00:06:08.000 And this is one quote, it actually reminded me of Bronze Age Pervert on Twitter.
00:06:13.000 Or yeah, Bronze Age Mindset, you might know the book, in its epicness, in the feel of the text.
00:06:21.000 So here goes the quote.
00:06:23.000 Especially the Oriental Isles to the east of the continent, those insulated, immemorial, unalterable countries, 1.00
00:06:30.000 which even in these modern days still preserve much of the ghostly aboriginalness of Earth's primal generations. 1.00
00:06:38.000 When the memory of the first man was a distinct recollection, and all men his descendants.
00:06:44.000 So you have that sort of feel that there are still unexplored territories.
00:06:51.000 And yeah, that is appealing.
00:06:54.000 Getting that sense through a book is quite attractive in terms of a reading experience.
00:07:00.000 And then also in terms of having it as an historic document.
00:07:04.000 You can see the relationship between the British whalers and the American whalers.
00:07:10.000 So he says,
00:07:12.000 Besides, the English whalers sometimes affect a kind of a metropolitan superiority over the American whalers,
00:07:20.000 regarding the long, lean Nantucketer with his nondescript provincialism as a sort of sea peasant. 0.99
00:07:27.000 So it's also interesting, again, to, when you read the sort of older books, you get a historic window to look through.
00:07:34.000 So this is what the British seamen thought of Americans during that time.
00:07:40.000 And another quote, something I've mentioned briefly, especially if you follow me on Twitter, is physionomy.
00:07:47.000 And he mentions it briefly.
00:07:49.000 Physionomically regarded, the sperm whale is an anomalous creature.
00:07:53.000 Physionomy is basically, you can look upon a person's features and see what kind of man he is.
00:07:59.000 I used to believe this was the most ridiculous of bro science, but it actually has quite a bit of truth to it. 1.00
00:08:07.000 And during the 19th century, it was even more regarded as something legit.
00:08:12.000 And this is, if you look upon bug men, for example, or new males, etc.
00:08:16.000 You know, with their soy faces.
00:08:18.000 They look, you can see that they don't have good, healthy, moral views.
00:08:24.000 And people kind of knew it back in the day, too.
00:08:27.000 So just thought to mention that it was fun.
00:08:30.000 And another note on the sperm whale.
00:08:33.000 He definitely admires the sperm whale as a king monster of the oceans, I suppose.
00:08:40.000 And this is also something that highlights his knowledge of the world, of Western culture.
00:08:48.000 So I thought it was a fun quote.
00:08:50.000 And I am convinced that from the heads of all ponderous, profound beings, such as Plato, Pyro, the devil, Jupiter, Dante, and so on,
00:09:01.000 there always goes up a certain semi-visible steam while in the act of thinking deep thoughts.
00:09:07.000 So he just, you know, throws out some random beings there, such as Plato, Pyro.
00:09:14.000 I think he means Pyro, Pyrrhus, the Greek general who fought the Romans.
00:09:20.000 Then the devil, because why not?
00:09:22.000 And then Jupiter, and then Dante, the Italian author.
00:09:27.000 So yeah, in good company, you can say the sperm whale is.
00:09:31.000 And then another quote, which I put up on my page, thegoldenone.se, I also shared it to Legi Gloria's Instagram, is the following.
00:09:41.000 Real strength never impairs beauty or harmony, but it often bestows it.
00:09:46.000 And in everything impossibly beautiful, strength has much to do with the magic.
00:09:50.000 Take away the tied tendons that all over seem bursting from the marble in the carved Hercules, and its charms would be gone.
00:09:58.000 As devout Eckermann lifted the linen sheets from the naked corpse of Goethe,
00:10:03.000 he was overwhelmed with the massive chest of the man that seemed as a Roman triumphal arch.
00:10:10.000 When Angelo paints even God the Father in human form, mark what robustness is there.
00:10:16.000 And that was the absolutely most epic quote from Moby Dick, so I had to share it.
00:10:21.000 So basically, you have a lot of cool references and quotes, etc., in the book.
00:10:27.000 And again, it is a valuable time document, historic document, and it is based upon the most epic incident indeed.
00:10:37.000 There is also a film with Chris Hemsworth that is being made out of this particular incident that I saw a year ago.
00:10:46.000 I can highly recommend that as well, just to get that epic 1800s feel.
00:10:51.000 So that was just me rambling a bit on the book I have just read.
00:10:56.000 So the final verdict is, yeah, if you're interested in that time period, if you're interested in Wailing,
00:11:03.000 because it is a very lengthy book about Wailing after all, and I don't regret reading it.
00:11:09.000 Some cool passages, it feels nice to read a classic like this, but if you're starting out to read books, I would not recommend it.
00:11:20.000 And I don't think you should have this sort of literature in schools either, because it might turn people off from reading.
00:11:26.000 Because as I said, it's not a good book, it's not an immersive book in that regard, it's not something that you want to continue reading.
00:11:34.000 Unless, of course, you're interested in the time period, but I suppose most people are not.
00:11:39.000 So in terms of just an enjoyable reading experience, perhaps not.
00:11:43.000 But for those of you who are interested in the time period, I can definitely recommend it.
00:11:49.000 XOXO, boom! 0.84