The Whale Pod

Fisherman's Friends, Emmanuel Macron, Michael Jackson, using the counterpane as a counterpoint, Brick Lane bagels, what skin is, the Ishmael voice, isinglass, Guinness, marked men, barrels, native petroglyphs, Piasa, reading signs, Rosetta Stones, Ishmael vs Melville, "it's cosmic, man", rugged individualism, good writing vs excellent writing, orthodoxy, tradition, do you believe in ghosts, gettin...

We learn how to cut into a whale. Health and safety gone mad, hoverboards, Melville's "libidinal charge", shark skin, eating your own entrails, a fabric of evil (x100000), the hierarchy of savagery, spiralising the whale, singing shanties, George Orwell, photos of whales being cut in. This episode is the discussion about chapters 66 and 67 of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick ; The Shark Massacre and Cu...

As the famous Vera Lynn song goes, "Whale meat again", or whatever she said. David Icke, The Rest is Whale Meat, swapping tenses mid-sentence, aesthetic pleasures, whale bum as a treat, "the universality of sharkiness", a "decent" burial, a sermon for a shark, whale steak, sea-beef, "esquimaux", guess the whale, The Temple of Doom, delicious brains, Romanian creier pane, Pete's disgusting palate,...

An entire podcast episode from just three pages of Moby-Dick ? You'd better believe it. How do you make killing a whale more efficient? Give the labourers the luxury of free time! Melville suggests efficiency improvements for the capitalist machine in a way that Marx himself would probably describe. The inherent conflict, the dialectic, oh my! Digressions, Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, me...

The best chapter ever, making ropes, flow state, critical ice, Mazeppa, MARXIST ANALYSIS, false consciousness, Charlie Chaplin, proto-Modernism, Andrew Marvell, the Terror surrounds us, Stubb kills a whale (spoilers), the slow considered surfacing of a whale, repetition, accretion, concept albums versus 7 inch singles, "cool as a cucumber", wetting the line, a horrible wallow, "Red men", the prima...

What do whales eat? Brit and squid, of course. Whales stranding in Northumberland after seeing naked Geordies, brit, seafaring Brits, baleen whales, Melville doing a Melville, dog-fish, Welsh animal names, the greatest long sentence in the book, fact-checking Melville, vengeful God, the carrot and stick of faith, Squid the cat (RIP), spoiler alert, a vast pulpy mass, the sociology of knowledge, fo...

It's part two of our look at Herman Melville's art history of whales. Thomas Beale's dwarf whales, Melville Marginalia, the whole internet loves Ambrose Louis Garneray, we regret to inform you Ambrose Louis Garneray is a slaver, prison hulks, the insignificance of harpoons, H. Durand, depictions of whaling, Melville enters the cosmos, famous beggars, the reproduction of reality, Joseph Johnson wit...

We ended up doing a two-parter on Herman Melville's dive into art history without planning it as a two-parter. This is the first part. Colourblindness, what's a whale, a whaling cat, Thomas Bewick, Guido Reni, gettin' yer waps out, leviathans, taxidermy, the Horniman walrus, platypus facts, Cuvier's squash, safer xenophobic ground (re: China), feed Pete's fetish, huge naturals, Ian Nairn. This epi...

GAM. Noun— A social meeting of two (or more) Whale-ships, generally on a cruising-ground; when, after exchanging hails, they exchange visits by boats' crews: the two captains remaining, for the time, on board of one ship, and the two chief mates on the other. Yer mum, gamming, Salisbury Plain, Noah Webster's Arc, captainly dignity, the whaling cinematic universe, forgetting Queequeg's name, postmo...

Charting the course of the Pequod, the mechanics of sailing, Melville's ableist alliteration, Pete's cats, Melville's anxiety dream, the skeleton ship, Pete's cats fight, Ahab's trance, subtext is for cowards, transformation, Ahab becomes a wankpuffin, the great mystery of reading, Melville the sicko, well, well, Welsh. This episode is the discussion about chapters 51 and 52 of Herman Melville's M...

There's a baby seagull squeaking in the background all the way through this episode, that's how good the microphones we use are these days, and it's not at all irritating, just adds to the nautical vibes. The great lost recording, "spark 'im oot", a fine joke worthy of music hall, the desperado philosophy, pissing on the Russian sun, breaking a woman's arm, the men's mental maelstrom, Melville's r...

A dog-eggs first sentence followed by a Melville masterclass, WHALE CHASE! Racism, WHALE CHASE! Reverie, WHALE CHASE! Plot twist! WHALE CHASE! Oh God, the racism, WHALE CHASE! This episode is the discussion about chapters 47 and 48 of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick ; The Mat-Maker and The First Lowering. Follow us on social media... Instagram: https://instagram.com/whale__pod Bluesky: https://bsky.ap...

Happy birthday Melville, bronze whale bones, the whaling ports of Britain, the believability of The Salt Path , reading Marx, deconstructing fictional narrative, the gravitational mass of Moby-Dick , the whale ship Essex, George Pollard - an unlucky man, Melville's biography being more insane and fantastical than his writing, Captain DeWolf, an under-the-radar three-word Arnie quote, Lionel Wafer'...

Twentieth century theatre, "CARAMBA!", cholos, the curse of knowledge, the best curse from Romania, stowaways, flavours of autism, normies, how to find a specific whale in the ocean, and the internal torment to which we are beholden. This episode is the discussion about chapters 43 and 44 of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick ; Hark!, and The Chart. Follow us on social media... Instagram: https://instagr...

Herman Melville at his most subtle, 'Spooge', the magnificence and terror of Whiteness, Treaty of Paris, the Iroquois Confederacy, the creation of Whiteness, racial superstructures, the albatross, Iron Maiden, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lovecraft, albinism, annihilation, white light, semiotics, de Saussure, only geniuses take four years to do a three year course, men's mental health, The Confidence...

Dreaming of Dick, Garth Marenghi's 'Dickplace', "unbridled Melville going hogwild", whaling spirituality, the legend of Moby Dick, The Essex, Melville Marginalia, Thomas Beale, converging research, Mocha Dick, "Melville, or Ishmael, rather", bold assertations about how Melville wrote the book, the unconscious, Ahab's origin story, emo Melville's cry for help, penetration, Musée de Cluny, at the me...

The fallout from Ahab's declaration that their whaling mission, stage directions, Hamlet, the Iron Crown of Lombardy facts, Napoleon, Sex Pistols, men's mental health, everything is trains, plundering interiors, railway history, Dickens, freedom, "both choo-choo and the rails", Starbuck's passivity, editors, Stubb's soliloquy (aka Live, Laugh, Stubb), Macbeth's Porter, Stubb's a cuck, poetic pathe...

"Art not game for Moby Dick?!" One of the big Ahab chapters. The aul' fella fully exploding into the story. Recording in a heatwave, Shakespeare, philosophy rears its ugly head, paranoia, prophecies of fascism, an ounce of gold, blasphemy, killing whales for money not blood, grog, Elon Musk, Donald Trump and more. This episode is the discussion about chapter 36 of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick ; The...

Thirty-five chapters in, and we've seen no whales, but we're about to learn a lot about looking for whales. Also, the all-important question: plop or splat? This episode is the discussion about chapter 35 of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick ; The Mast-Head. Follow us on social media... Instagram: https://instagram.com/whale__pod Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/thewhale1851.bsky.social

Professional blunders, WhaleTok, the Dutch language is not real, discipline, Power, "who's the captain?", flattened hierarchies, the Titanic sinks, give us a break, becoming one with The Force, Manuel from Fawlty Towers, Shakespearean comedy, the sound of rain in the background, men's mental health, Charles Dickens was a racist. This episode is the discussion about chapters 33 and 34 of Herman Mel...

One of the most maligned chapters of Moby-Dick is the litany of whales and Ishmael's taxonomy thereof. Is it that bad? This episode is the discussion about chapter 32 of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick ; Cetology. Follow us on social media... Instagram: https://instagram.com/whale__pod Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/thewhale1851.bsky.social

Whale news, endorsing baleen whales, whale cocktails, David's crack, the Grand Tour, "...or Ishmael, rather...", finally clapping eyes on Ahab (who then does nothing), fighting the elements, modular man, warmer weather, Virgil's Georgics , Ahab speaks, Ahab threatens, Ahab hoys his pipe overboard, chewing your ear off with dream chat. This episode is the discussion about chapters 28, 29, 30 and 31...

The litany of sailors, rationing danger, enraged and mighty men, Columbo, Dick Van Dyke, Mission: Impossible, whale-based erotica, Protestantism (again), John Bunyan, Don Quixote, Andrew Jackson pioneering ethnic cleansing, euphemism, Lyndon's Johnson, Norman Rockwell, prison, NPCs, don't worry worry, short man syndrome, fate, the racialised exotic, adventure literature, Ahasuerus and Morgan McSwe...

The two Ishmaels, whale journalism, Simon "whaler" Bolivar, whale diplomacy, Wales (not whales), squirting jets of spunk, the university of life, Modernism (again), Melville's havin' a laff, Handel, George II, the Champions League, cruelty-free whale oil, the crown jewels, a theory of baldness, Pete's nana's lipstick, whale sandwiches, the Rain Man of guessing how many words are in a piece of copy...

It's Christmas Day, we're 111 pages in, and we're finally going on a whaling voyage. This episode includes 'Jeeves and Wooster go whaling', pilots, blood and thunder, Charles Dickens, Isaac Watts, Toy Story 3, inevitable doom, waxing and waning, a six-incher, Bulkington returns (played by Channing Tatum), the existentialist manifesto. The whale graveyard can be seen here... https://www.bbc.com/fut...