SPEAKER_03 0:00

Finally, I stated at the outset that this system would not be here and at once perfected. You cannot but plainly see that I have kept my word. But I now leave my cytological system standing thus unfinished, even as the great cathedral of Cologne was left, with the crane still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower. For small erections may be finished by their first architects, the grand ones, true ones, ever leave the coastone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draft, nay, but the draft of a draft. Owe time, strength, cash, and patience.

SPEAKER_02 0:58

We're very excited to have Dr. Hester Blum with us here today to talk about the fiction sensation that's sweeping multiple nations, uh, heated rivalry, uh, and its intersection with Moby Dick. Now, um, just to introduce our uh fabulous guest, uh so Dr. Hester Blum is uh the Lynn Cooper Harvey Distinguished Professor of English and Professor of Environmental Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, uh, and has previously taught at Penn State University uh for 20 years before that, and is a leading Melville scholar. And so it's a very we're we're very honored to have her on the show uh today. Uh and on this uh eve of uh our our favorite author's uh birthday as well. Did you have any big uh Herman Melville uh uh anniversary plans for tomorrow?

SPEAKER_03 1:47

I actually do. Um one, two events, in fact, tomorrow, which I'm very excited about. Um one is I live in St. Louis now, and there's a wonderful independent bookstore that's called Leviathan Bookstore, named for the novel as well as for the um heavy metal album by the band Mastodon, which is a thematic album about Moby Dick, which hopefully your listeners will know is terrific. Um, and so at Leviathan Bookstore, we're having a celebration of Melville's birthday, a little grog in conversation, which I'll be co-hosting with my fellow Melville scholar and fellow St. Louis resident Brian Yuthers, who teaches at St. Louis University and edited the Melville Society journal Leviathan for years. So that should be a fun time. Um but I'm also tomorrow getting uh another Melville tattoo, um, which happened to just work out for Melville's birthday. And that will be um a version of the round robin that appears in Omu, which is the mechanism by which sailors sign a mutiny document without implicating anyone as the ringleader. Um, and so the sketch that shows up in Omu is a version of a sketch that Melville himself made that says all hands and shows a bunch of manicules directed around the round robin. So that is those are my uh two Melville birthday celebratory acts. What a weekend.

SPEAKER_05 3:10

Yeah, it's very exciting. What a packed diary. That sounds awesome.

SPEAKER_03 3:13

I'm pretty pumped.

SPEAKER_02 3:14

So do you have uh uh a number of these Melville themed tattoos?

SPEAKER_03 3:18

I have a few tattoos. I've I came to it kind of later in life and uh now have all you know the zeal of a convert. Um I have a I have an albatross, um, which is you know partly Melville related, partly uh Antarctic travel. Um, and I also have a Temple Toggle harpoon. Um which is uh a design that um Lewis Temple, a black blacksmith out of New Bedford, had designed, um, was used on would have been used on the akushnet, also derived from an Inuit design in part, um, an Inuit harpoon design, which is another interest of mine. So there there are there are several other million tattoos.

SPEAKER_02 3:59

That's a good one though that you that you're getting uh tomorrow. That's a a nice uh yeah.

SPEAKER_03 4:05

I like that.

SPEAKER_02 4:06

Yeah, that's killer.

SPEAKER_03 4:07

That's killer.

SPEAKER_02 4:08

Good and esoteric.

SPEAKER_03 4:09

Thank you. Yeah, no, I I I don't know that many people will have encountered Omu necessarily, but what I love about the the words all hands there is that they echo the wonderful line in in Loomings in chapter one of Moby Dick, where um Ishmael is talking about the universal thump that gets passed around and that all hands shall rub each other's shoulder blades and be content. And so the I like the echo of the all hands there. Nice. Yeah, that's great.

SPEAKER_05 4:34

That's great. I think a really good tattoo needs an explanation that would sound really good if you were delivering it when you're a little drunk. Like you're not too crazy, but like you're just in the middle there where they're like, What is that? You're like, have you read Omu? And they're like, the what? And you're like, strap in for four great minutes, and then that's a good tattoo.

SPEAKER_03 4:52

See, I appreciate you saying that because uh between like the pedantry and the enthusiasm, um, you know, one always has to gauge just how much appetite someone has to actually hear what you're talking about here. Do you do either of you have uh any Melville themed tattoos?

SPEAKER_05 5:08

No, but I'd love to get a picture of a whale where it's like kind of you can't tell what it is, and people are like, what is that? Like, come closer.

SPEAKER_01 5:15

You want a boggy, soggy, squishy tattoo. Yeah, but it's just a kind of a mess.

SPEAKER_05 5:19

And you're like, it's pastel, it's watercolors. That's perfect. Perfect.

SPEAKER_02 5:24

Yes. Wonderful. Um, so getting a little bit into so you had a great article, I thought, uh, a very interesting article. Um on uh so the the article uh for our listeners is Heated Rivalry is the Moby Dick of Canadian gay hockey shows. Um and I thought it was very interesting, and specifically um maybe to like unpack this. So we've got like a pretty broad audience. I think there's gonna be a lot of people in our audience who are gonna be super thrilled about this episode and know exactly what we're talking about. But for the part of our audience that maybe hasn't encountered uh heated rivalry or MM romance, could you give us like a little bit of like what heated rivalry is and like what uh the genre of MM romance is, and like maybe a bit about like some of the interesting conventions in such a that genre?

SPEAKER_03 6:11

Yes, with pleasure. Um with the caveat that I'm relatively new to this genre myself, um, it is a uh has a robust reading and fan and scholarly history that again I've only come to in the last seven or eight months. Um The Heated Rivalry is a show that was made in Canada that got picked up by HBO, that is based on a series of novels by Rachel Reed, which um the series called The Game Changers Books. Heated Rivalry is one of those books that deal with queer players in a fictional version of the NHL. Um Rachel Reed herself was a hockey fan who was trying to uh call out um the homophobia and misogyny of the NHL, um, which is, I think, a loan of the major sports leagues that has never had an outplayer, um, whether currently playing or otherwise. Um, and so she wrote, from what I understand, she wrote these series of books in part to kind of explore how that league could uh could could make some changes and to deal with the inevitable fact that there would there are and have been queer hockey players. Um and so He did a rivalry is the story of two hockey players, one a Canadian named Shane Hollander and a Russian player named Ilya Rozanov, um, who are engaged in a secret multi-year situationship. Um, they're both the best players in the league and have a rivalry that uh is very heated both by um hockey standards and also um they hook up for many, many, many years. Secretly, um, the Russian Ilya Rosanov is bisexual, Shane is gay. Um, they think their relationship can never come out, both because of the league and because in part of the Russian's national identity, in which homosexuality, bisexuality is criminalized and would create a problem for him. Um, and also, you know, the many other factors that might keep professional athletes at the top of their game closeted. And then in the series, their um their many years of hooking up evolves into a more serious relationship, and the books document um both their coming to that, those declarations of love and understanding, and then the aftermath. Um, and so the books have been very popular for years among readers of MM romance or male male romance, which is a genre that I have come to learn, has a again a very wide readership, um, many of whom include female readers, um, queer, straight, all over the spectrum. Um, and the television show, after getting picked up by HBO, became a sensational hit. It started airing in November and took relatively unknown actors with almost no career resume into the superstardom they now found themselves.

SPEAKER_02 9:13

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 9:14

Um I'm very bat.

SPEAKER_05 9:16

We thought TV was done. I was like, I'll, you know, and then they were like, can't Canada was like, leave that door open, just leave it ajar. And then our lives, I'm I'll never be the same.

SPEAKER_03 9:27

No, I I have consumed heated rivalry content one way or the other daily since first watching the show. Amazing.

unknown 9:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 9:34

Yeah. Uh my wife's the same way. I'm very excited uh because there's gonna finally gonna be a Pequod Pod episode that she's gonna be excited to listen to.

SPEAKER_03 9:42

So it's funny, the crossover since since publishing this article, I've I've heard from a lot of fans of the show who are like, wait, Moby Dick is queer? What has happened? Why did nobody ever tell me this? So I hopefully, hopefully uh fans of Mailville will have uh occasion to explore some some a modest Canadian streamer that we're weak, you know, you can always reach across the aisle.

SPEAKER_05 10:05

I admit that when I read just the title of your article, I thought it was gonna be about how heated rivalry is like the archetypal literature of Canada. And I said, well, of course. And it turned out you were being more specific. But you know, in a way, it's uh sort of all translatable.

SPEAKER_03 10:25

But yeah, you know, I can't I can't speak for Canada, but uh from what I understand of Jacob Tierney's work, he's the show creator and the showrunner. Um and I've started watching Letterkenny, some of his earlier work too, which is amazing. Isn't that great? Yeah, it's hilarious. Um, so uh you know, getting a bit of a glimpse into it's this, it's that, and then I think do south.

SPEAKER_05 10:45

And then that's a really good sucker pack.

SPEAKER_03 10:48

Sure, sure.

SPEAKER_02 10:50

No, I love that. Um so uh you getting into your article a bit, um, you you mentioned how like uh Moby Dick is very famously very genre porous. Um, and in your essay, you choose to analyze Moby Dick from the genre perspectives of MM romance. Uh, what about the genre conventions of MM romance do you think is insightful um when applying that to uh to Moby Dick?

SPEAKER_03 11:11

Part of what um, and again, I I'm learning from uh friends and colleagues who know more about the genre of MM romance. I I read a bit beyond the heated rivalry uh universe, but um again, still very much a novice. But um, and so some of what I have learned is um I've learned from uh a friend who teaches at the University of Sussex named Rachel O'Connell, um, who uh works on the genre of romance. Um and a lot of MM romance uh has to do as as any forms of romance do, with thinking about the capacity that social structures have for enabling connection. Um, not every MM romance, and probably I imagine most do not deal with um the perils and necessities of the closet or a fear. I don't think that that's necessarily inherent to the genre, um, although again, um I'll say for the tenth time I'm no expert. Um but what it struck me about Moby Dick and Heated Robbery especially was that in its genre porousness, Moby Dick is very interested in thinking about worlds of possibility that exist beyond the structures that we currently have. And in Rachel Reed's novels, the MM romance of those novels is imagining a structure in which a professional hockey league could both um find multiple queer players. It's a universe of books where there are multiple queer players within professional hockey and who face challenges and threats of violence, um, but who ultimately are able to build a world in which the fullest expressions of their lives and love and and hockey greatness can be achieved. And so that that to me seemed to be the biggest beyond the specificities of the characters, which I became fully obsessed with. But the idea that um as a genre, male-male romance is imagining new and different kinds of worlds, which I think is something that Moby Dick is deeply invested in doing on multiple levels.

SPEAKER_02 13:14

Yeah, the I I'm I'm sure I'm not coining this, but like there's this term that like has popped into my head and has been bouncing about my head uh all day thinking about your article, which is uh queer eschatologies. I love that. That's a great term. So uh what about Moby Dick do you think like has this sort of like queer aesthetics or this uh like these sorts of uh parallels to like the MM uh romance genre?

SPEAKER_03 13:41

So in the the specific case of the Heated Rivalry Universe, um the first thing that struck me was how aligned um Ishmael is with Shane Hollander, um who is the Canadian player who is stereotyped within the hockey world as someone who has a kind of obsessive hockey machine focus, that he he does all of this kind of info dumping, deep dive. He thinks only about hockey and bears with Ishmael a kind of restlessness and curiosity that doesn't necessarily translate to a social fluency. Neither of them are understood. They're both thought to have a very kind of high IQ for the things that they're interested in, um, but are loners and are lonely, like deeply, both deeply lonely characters. Um and Ishmael, who very quickly hooks up with and and marries Kui Queg, um, who is represented as this like exotic extranational other with many tattoos. Um the character of Ilya Rosanov, like Kui Queg, um, shows a lot of emotions. They're both physically very striking. Um the TV series doesn't replicate what the book does in having um the character of Ilya be tattooed and being much larger than Shane. Um the actors Connor Story and Hudson Williams, who play the two characters, are both equally tall and buff. Um the discrepancy is not there. And they don't know. God bless them. No, they're fabulous. They're the best. My boys. Um the but but Ishmael also, or rather, Kuiqueg and Ilya both um they both smoke in bed. Um, they both um kind of are playful and pestering in ways that um it seems that a lot of straight passing white men can't get away with in the same way. They can both be flirtatious in ways that seems exotic and othered, uh, or exotic and and turned exotic and turned into um something that represents a kind of foreign swagger. Yeah. Yeah. I think so. Yeah. Yeah, go ahead. No, please go ahead.

SPEAKER_05 15:48

Oh, I was just gonna say, ex what you're saying, um, I think um the sort of like Ilya slash Kuiqueg character, in from the point of view of our Shane slash Ishmael character, seems like, oh, um, he doesn't understand the customs, therefore I'm going to allow him some movement that I wouldn't have allowed from like the guy next to me over here who is more like me. But it turns out, or we come to know that that other guy is perfectly aware of sort of the social mores, but is also using that difference to his advantage. Exactly. So it becomes sort of part of the journey of like the fun of the interiority of all of all these men, is um sort of coming to realize where my culture ends and yours begins, and where does that porousness start, and how saturated is it, and where can we move between them and create sort of what you're talking about, I think in in your article, an a new culture, like a supra culture or like an err culture where we can tap into where I couldn't have before, because I didn't know how to communicate. And um, I think that's a lot of the pleasures of it is the reader slash viewers like, we're gonna get there, but I don't know how, and some of the, you know, the fun of their like um the youthfulness of them and that sort of lack of communication inherent to many, many gay stories. I don't know, but you, but I've been reading gay fan fiction since like 2008. So like I'm so totally tapped in. But part of the part of the pleasures of that, and even the expectations of someone tuning into a show like this, is the miscommunications are eventually going to become this ultimate, beautiful communication. And then that's the cathartic fulfillment of the romance wouldn't get there unless we could realize that we could move sort of in that space between us as this this new world we created, like you were saying.

SPEAKER_03 17:35

That's beautifully said. I I love everything about uh what you said there and the the kind of freedom that seems to be represented um in figures like Ilya or Kuiqueg. Yeah, where for Ishmael or Shane, um that only looks like freedom. And from the perspective of Ilya and Kuiqueg, there are so many constraints and pressures around that reformist that they just don't recognize. Um that they're both seeking in each other a kind of peace and freedom that they're not recognizing as structurally available to them, um, thinking they can't get away with it themselves. Um and and you know, the those parallels don't hold up throughout every chapter of Moby Dick, obviously, because the Ishmael Quickraig relationship ebbs and flows. But we do see the return um come in those moments too of the sense of connection and the sense of possibility um and the tether that that binds them both.

SPEAKER_02 18:33

Yeah, to go back a few steps. So uh it's entirely possible that um a lot of people are listening to this as their first Pequad Pot episode uh because it has heated rivalry in its name.

SPEAKER_05 18:44

Now I have also secured um a product placement deal with HBOs, and they're gonna reblog our Instagram post.

SPEAKER_02 18:54

So don't worry about it.

SPEAKER_05 18:54

We're about to blow up, it's gonna go crazy.

SPEAKER_02 18:57

Oh, that that's that thanks for doing that. That's great. Um, Hester, you said uh that uh uh Kui Queg and Ishmael are uh married and like have slept together. Um what do you can you unpack that a bit in in case we have people who aren't familiar with this?

SPEAKER_03 19:12

So this is something I encounter all the time in teaching the novel. Um and when my students are reading Nightgown and Counterpain and the opening chapters in which um Ishmael and Quequeg are first sharing a bed, um, the same bed where the innkeepers had spent their first marital night as well. Um and there's a moment where students were always always asking and and I think many readers would think that they're either reading too much into it, um and the which is you know, I think the whole goal of any reading whatsoever in life always is to read as much into it as possible. And if get in there, up to your elbows. And if uh if the discourse about the Odyssey right now um is uh any indication, um there the possibilities of of reading too much and too broadly are as gloriously available to everybody. Um and is, I think, you know, the whole reason to be a person in the world anyway. Um but if we if we take the novel on its terms, it that says that Ishmael feels connected to Kuiqueg, Kuiqueg proclaims them married. Um we see scenes of them post-coidally smoking, throwing their legs over one another in intimate embraces. Um, that is more explicit in embrace than you would see between any putatively straight couple in most 19th-century literary contexts. Um, we do not have scenes of men and women in bed together throwing their legs over each other and cuddling. Um, that is rare in 19th century fiction. Um and so uh because of that, students have often asked, you know, doesn't that mean that we shouldn't understand this as sexualized? Um and, you know, there's certainly cases that could be made for that, but but my sense is always that what Melville is doing throughout his body of work, always, is recognizing in that genre convention that the possibility of reaching a kind of reader who could represent or could understand or um identify with the relational structures and structures of feeling, intimacies that he's describing, um, and anyone else might think it couldn't possibly mean that. In the same way that Kuiqueg couldn't possibly mean this because he doesn't understand American heterosexual conventions. Um that there are possibilities that the novel can open up because they are unexpected. Um, in the same way that Melville is receives occasional kind of public discipline for his criticism of missionaries or his representation, like in Taipei, of the female faiaways, nakedness. But People are not calling out in the same way the scene of like mutual masturbation with the male Corey Corey and Tomo and Typey. So I I think that Melville is always trying to stretch those genre boundaries. Again, I think we see this throughout his writing. And recognizing that the very overtness of describing something is a challenge to a reader who is then forced to imagine something that convention might otherwise disallow them to see.

SPEAKER_02 22:34

To me, this is like a like a kind of a constant itch that Melville feels the need to scratch in his uh like basically like kind of throughout his works. Um earlier today I was uh going through the like all all my Melville's trying to um find in each of them like some of the like the the most like um either homoerotic or like most uh in lending themselves to like an MM romance uh like uh perspective. And almost like it pretty much all of them have something that like jumps out at you. Um one of the ones that I think is very interesting, and I think also would like benefit from like a similar treatment is Pierre, right? So like the relationship between uh Pierre Glenn Denning and Glenn Denning Stanley. Yes.

SPEAKER_03 23:12

Um and like the the heat that's spicy spicy boy love as it's described.

SPEAKER_02 23:16

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um but are there other uh Melville's that you like think like where it jumps out to you that like you you see the same like sort of uh need on Melville's part to like to write about like um romantic relationships between uh between men?

SPEAKER_03 23:32

Yes, um I mean certainly erotic relationships. The romance part uh I think it can ebb and flow depending on the text. But um, I mean, one moment in in Redburn, late in Redburn, where there's a beautiful Italian boy named Carlo who has this marvelous organ. Um, and he's a he's a musician. And there's a scene in which he's surrounded in a circle by men on the ship while he is pulling the knobs of his organ and making beautiful music that ends up sousing them with spray. And a lot of the language is echoing Whitman's language of being soused with spray and leaves of grass. Um, and the everyone is being told to behold Carlo's organ. Um, and it's a very cheeky scene in which that that seems to be describing a circle jerk that is ostensibly literally about this Italian boy playing his organ for a group of men, but um I think that other reading is abundantly available to us. Um you can see that in White Jacket when um in the in the chapter The Massacre of the Beards, uh Mel's Pretty into Beards, um, there's a there was a wonderful list back in the day in a much earlier social media platform. Um, there's an incredible list of all of the descriptors of the beards in uh White Jacket. I'm gonna try to pull it up very quickly because it's very uh worth uh lingering with. Okay, so here's here's this is the line. I believe this was a this this was initially um um I think posted by uh an account named Towering Irreverence, which um this may have been, I can't remember what platform this was. It's a long time ago. Um and a towering, yeah, towering irrelevance, um, which was a Tumblr account um from back in the day. Um so this is going back at least 15 years or so. Um so these are 25 different words that Melville uses to describe beards in just a chapter or two of Moby Dick. Um I won't read all 25, but I'll I'll give you some of them, um which include, which range from funny to erotic. Um, and they include the suburbs of the chin, long trailing moss hanging from the bow of some aged oak. There's another Whitmanian reference there, love curls, carity bunches, thrice noble beards, plantations of hair, whiskerondos, viny locks, the fleece sacred things, manhood, muzzle lashings, uh Admiral's pennant sacred things. And so again, this is a funny list, but it's also an erotic list of all of the ways that um uh there's a sailor named Jack Chase, who's the captain of the main top in white jacket, who's the kind of eroticized handsome sailor in white jacket, um, and he's described as having this glorious nut brown beard repeatedly. That's another example. You've mentioned Pierre already, not just Pierre with his cousin Glenn, but Pierre with his mother and his sister. Um, all kinds of queer relations that um are ones that um are testing the limits. In the case of Pierre, for example, um uh in 19th century American fiction, it's a very conventional thing to have coming-of-age stories, domestic novels, in which uh a young girl eventually marries a boy that has either been raised like a brother with her or is actually a cousin. Um, the marriage structures were less about romantic love, although that was changing over the course of the century, but more about solidifying family relations. And so the idea of marrying someone who has been in a kind of familiar relationship with you was conventional and was the source of a lot of domestic fiction. And much like with Corey Corey and Tamu in Taipei, I see Pierre as doing something similar and saying, like, okay, you want to imagine what it's like to marry a relation or to be in a sexual relationship with a relation or a near relation. What if we stretch that as far as possible with everyone other than um the actual heterosexual fiance that the character of Pierre has, who he eventually pretends is his cousin. Like he imagines having a familiar relationship with.

SPEAKER_02 27:46

Yeah, yeah, you're right. Okay, yeah, he does do that. Yep. Yeah. Um it's uh and and going back to the. Pierre's got a lot going on.

SPEAKER_03 27:54

Yeah. Pierre does. Pierre is nuts. I love it so much.

SPEAKER_02 27:58

Yeah, no, Pierre is great. Uh, going back for a second to White Jack and too, I think so. Uh a couple chapters after the one that you were referencing, uh, the social state in a man of war, I think is where we sometimes like get like kind of one of the clearest references to like uh male uh gay sexual activity in kind of an interesting way, because you do get like you're absolutely right, you get like so much, like so much gay imagery throughout like uh uh Irma Melville's oeuvre. Um but in like this one, like he he he has to like kind of allude to it referencing instead of like uh gay sex, uh like incest, like as like uh you know, as like this is it's something even worse than these books about incest. Uh what do you think is going on there?

SPEAKER_03 28:40

So I think that you anything that is considered like a non-normative or non-heterosexual form of sexuality, incest like cannibalism, is understood as an unnatural appetite. Um, part of the whole presence of Kuiqueg in Um in Moby Dick and Ishmael's initial fear of him, um, and the the jokes and lines about him being a cannibal is part of a 19th century and earlier, this goes back to the early modern period, a sense of cannibalism as an unnatural appetite, of um enjoying human flesh in a way that is not appropriate. Um there have been shifting definitions of what that means. Um, but and not all representations of cannibalism are representations of queerness, but many are, um, as again uh an appetite for human flesh that is not thought to be normative or natural. Um so that that seems to be part of the idea of what gets marked on the flesh through tattooing. Um we've already talked about tattoos here. Um, but the idea, you know, and in in Moby Dick and your listeners are are reading along chapter by chapter, but um, it'll be interesting to see um the evolution for first-time readers of the novel of understanding Ishmael's initial fear of Kuiquake's tattoos into learning what we learn about Ishmael's own tattoos late in the novel, um, which can come as a real shock, I think. Yeah, yeah.

unknown 30:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 30:09

Would you elaborate on that? So I think this is something that I've not picked up on in my readings of uh Moby Dick. So, like um, can you uh where in uh do we get the reference to Ishmael's later tattoos?

SPEAKER_03 30:20

So in the chapter of Bower and the Arsachides or the Bower and the Arsacedes, I'm not quite sure how to pronounce that island chain, um, where Ishmael describes seeing um a skeleton of a sperm whale that he can take measurements of. Oh, yeah, okay. And he says at one point that he has transcribed the dimensions of the whale um as a tattoo on his arm, that he put in feet but not inches, um, and that he he says that he doesn't put the inches because he's saving the space that remains on his arm for a poem that he's writing, which suggests that at that point he Ishmael has at minimum full sleeve tattoos. So he only has the room to put the feet of the skin, which is amazing. It's truly amazing. So that in those, like in his years of, as he describes as his wild wanderings later, Ishmael's gone from someone who has zero tattoos and is afraid of them to someone who at minimum has full sleeves. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 31:16

That's a great, um, a really delicious way um to show invisible character development in like the void years between storytelling Ishmael and the Ishmael that story is happening to. In the meantime, he has gotten tattoos. And then the reader's job is to go, why are tattoos significant to him because of this relationship? But we don't know why that relationship is tragic until later. So that would be a great way that you could talk about like multi-fix could do that really well in novels, obviously, but that's something that you can almost really only achieve in long-form storytelling that is devoted to developing the relationships in these crazy ways. I think that's yeah, I think that's really lovely. Yeah. And and it's you can only do that something in when it's something about time.

SPEAKER_03 32:00

And and the time part also brings me back to heated rivalry, not to you know force us away from the male vote. Oh, yeah, yeah. But but the thing, but the thing that's so beautiful to me about heated rivalry um is um for those who've watched it, it jumps around in time and it can be kind of staccato and unsettling at first. And the the novels like the TV show are kind of jumping back and forth and sometimes jumping by like six months or a year or two. Um, and you're only basically seeing the characters in heated rivalry um be having their lives narrated in the moments when they're hooking up. Um and that's where the time jumps happen, um, that they're only basically alive or existing for the benefit of narrative in their hookups. Um and the time jumps around. And so, in the first, you know, two episodes, there's a third episode that's about two other characters that have plot implications but are not key to the main storyline, um jump around over the course of many, many years. Um, but then the last two episodes slow down and have this incredible attenuation um of a real lingering in time. Um, and in Moby Dick, too, jumps around in time. It's the narrative of a whaling voyage, but it's a retrospective narrative that's happening many years later. Um, it's narrated as if it's Ishmael's first encounter, but we are reminded occasionally, and sometimes it can be kind of startling because it it's coming out of the blue, you get immersed in other aspects of the narrative, and remembering that, like, oh, Ishmael's done a lot of other things subsequent to in the years since. Yeah. Yeah. And he's also tried to process this story in many other ways. That's the whole point of the town host story chapter. Um, there are so many multiple retellings of his experience with the Pequod. Um, and we don't have a sense. I mean, the opening line, some years, the second line, some years ago, never mind how many. Um, that attenuation and that jumping around in time is present, but doesn't settle in any way, it doesn't come to a resolution. And so, which is part of my interest in heated rivalry as one way of trying to find the space and time that Moby Dick imagined could be possible, um, especially and I think most hauntingly and achingly and beautifully and most MMly in Squeeze of the Hand chapter, is imagining a possibility, but recognizing that that world does not exist in this time, um, or does not yet exist or doesn't exist within the world of the novel. Not that it doesn't at all, because it certainly does, but it's not the world that Melbourne could write into being with without consequence.

SPEAKER_05 34:51

Um, and it seems like um like a thrust of your article is that the cottage in the heated rivalry universe, or which is the end of the first season of the show, um is a sort of present-day iteration of what Ishmael starts to allow himself to imagine in that chapter, but can't quite get there. And I think also it's useful to remind ourselves um, like if we were in a classroom, that Ishmael is not real, he is a storytelling tool from Melville. So why does Melville not have Ishmael be like, you know, maybe one day Kuiqueg and I could hang out, right? Go shop and hang. Because for whatever reason, that would disrupt what he wanted to be sort of that melancholic tone of that chapter. That chapter, if you look at it too close, it gets kind of goofy. And I think maybe in some places it's kind of supposed to be, maybe make fun of sort of some of the romanticalness, which is fine. But also, I mean, it is what it is, and let's not forget, you know, that's they're covered in sperm. It's everywhere. And sometimes rooms are just like that. So kind of we can be like, um, what is what is one of the points of this scene? If I hold the whole thing in my hand, is that he's trying to imagine a world where, again, kind of that porous boundary breaks down, and you can just be with someone with whatever that verb, the simplicity or sort of almost the sublimity of just like what is it to be in a room with someone or to connect or be in love? And because they're in the setting that they're in, it's a man and they've been immersed in this homosocial environment, this insane place for so long. And then in um the show, the cottage is really like an Eden. Yes, like this, it's suspended, they're not in like a real place, and plot eventually comes back because you know we have to move forward. But um, you know, when they're just like grilling eight hamburgers or whatever, it's like we're in, we're in a non-space, we're in a non-time. We have left hockey. We have we aren't even really in like Canada anymore. We're in an imaginary, we're in, you know, the land of Oz or whatever.

SPEAKER_02 37:03

We've uh emanatized the esquaton.

SPEAKER_05 37:10

So I think um something I really liked about um your article. I wonder if you could sort of just elaborate on sort of like what is most delicious about that to you, that this book, because of its genre, allows us to go to the cottage. Yes. But because of the project of Moby Dick, we are not quite allowed even to articulate that. But we are allowed to articulate so many other things.

SPEAKER_03 37:32

I love that, especially because the the fantasy of the cottage, too, is that yes, they've declared their love. Yes, time has slowed down. Um, yes, they finally, for the first time, hold hands and sleep through the night together, even though they've been fucking for 10 years at this point. Um and that is all beautiful, but they're not out. They haven't been able to declare their relationship publicly. Like it it remains like the Pequod or like certain situations for sailors at sea. It's situational. It's still something that doesn't yet exist back in the real world. And that's you know, the project of the second book in the Shane and Ilya series, and then the third, um, which will be coming out, I guess, next summer within that series. Um, The Long Game is the second one, and then Unrivaled is the third one that is forthcoming. Um so presumably eventually, um, we I mean, we know from the second book um that they are come out publicly, but not on their own terms. Um and their futurity in the league is again something that is unstable. So the series offers a certain kind of fantasy of that realization, but even then it's still, as you say, it's unreal. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 38:44

Because it's not a book about hockey. It's a romance. And the setting she has decided is hockey. Um, I was thinking about it, I was like, is this really a hockey romance, or is it just the setting is hockey? And I'm inclined to think it's the latter. Yeah. The setting is hockey, yeah. Yes, yeah. I think there are a lot of like wonderful um sort of quasi the athletic world shows that have the romance in it, but you all it's also about the thing. I think about Yuri on Ice in a show in which I learned it's was a huge deal like eight years ago. Okay. It's about figure skating and it's about figure skating. Gotcha. Or even my beloved etile, which Amazon took behind a barn and shot uh last spring, was about love. It was also about ballet, and you had to learn about ballet. And this is like a hockey, but like hockey could also be like they work at Italian restaurants, it's whatever it is. Yes, but it's still um key to the romance of it is we must have a scene where they like cathartic can just hang out because that's what the reader wants. And that's part of my expectation of reading of reading that genre. And that's yes, yeah, go ahead.

SPEAKER_03 39:51

No, I I was just going to to to just footnote on that. Um, I am have also been coming to fandom in for the first time um in any substantive way, and have read a lot of fan fictions of heated rivalry that have been mind-blowing in many, many ways and are so interesting both for what they're doing with genre and for what they're doing with serial reading. Again, I'm a 19th-century Americanist, like serial reading is um is the genre of the of the period, and seeing that happen in the fan fictions and seeing what people are doing with the alternate universes is remarkable. And also with the idea of the kind of craft of profession, like whether it's a hockey world, some of them are very hockey centric, some of them are not in the hockey world at all. Um, but to to think about playing with the the boundaries of those genres um and seeing how that functions. And again, um anyone who's anyone who's not me probably is far more familiar with this than I am, but it's really blown my mind. And I don't think many of my academic colleagues have any idea just how um flexible and intuitive and and smart um and um just insightful um readers are about genre conventions in ways that I has been new to me and I'm like humbled by. Um and you you used the word porous before, and one of my favorite of the fan fictions is one that imagines um Shane not as a hockey player but as a Mormon missionary, um, and Ilya as someone whose door gets knocked on by the Mormon missionary. Oh, that's great. It's a fantastic one. Um it's called Heaven is a Bedroom, and I think the author's um name is Charlotte Stant, although most fandom names are pseudonyms. Um, but there's a line in it um where Shane, in one of his first sexual encounters with Ilya, says that he had not known that the boundaries of his body could be so salt marsh porous, which was just such like a beautiful, it was just a beautiful line in general. But it it's it's it's also a great description of the the genre, like the salt marsh porousness of the genre. Um and that porousness is not and like the salt marsh part of it is that it's it's messy and it can be kind of unappealing at times, that it's not just a kind of glorious porousness, that there's you know, it's title, it's um it's it it can be um yeah, there's bodies out there. There's bodies out there, exactly.

SPEAKER_05 42:14

So yeah, for sure. You were saying, yes. Yeah, I think that's I think that's really delicious. I want to, um I didn't want to pivot away before too quickly in that, but I had um this kind of a uh there's this big juicy like bullet point in my mind about um like age and power in these stories. Um you know, re-watching, I was thinking one of the most obvious ways to get hated rivalry more like Moby Dick, a sentence I can't believe I'm allowed to say would be if Shane were actually with Scott, Francois Arnault, or as I know him, Cesare Borgia, he's the older guy, maybe if you weren't so depressed. Um but one of the key points, um the one of the sweetnesses of of the series, and I've I've only seen the show, but one of the sweetnesses of it, we were talking about how how lovely the actors are, is that really they're the same age.

unknown 43:05

Right.

SPEAKER_05 43:05

And a lot of Ilya's appeal to Shane is that he seems so like swaggering and he's had gay sex and he's you know, he is sexy and he smokes and he's he doesn't follow the rules. And yes, but as I think um Jacob Tierney said in um one of his the mini interviews that he was doing is like really Ilya is also like 19. How much crazy gay sex has he had when he's 19? He's not, you know. Um, so part of the the sweetness of the series is that they can sort of be boys together and they are maturing together. Yes. But then one of the exciting things about Ishmael and Kuiqueg is that Kuiqueg is like what in his dare I say, in his 30s? And but um they do not really have a rivalry, but they do have a power imbalance. They do. Ishmael has been on a boat before, but not a whaling boat. Kuiqueg is like head to toe decked out in like This thing he's worn for many missions.

SPEAKER_03 44:02

He's got a he's got the better lay. Totally, yeah. Totally. He's much more skilled. He's much more skilled.

SPEAKER_05 44:08

Totally. So I was wondering if you could sort of speak to like what you think about there's a rivalry, but they're sort of ranked the same, or there's no rivalry, but Ishmael is one of the things he's entranced with is how much better at this Quequeg is, and sort of like that rank disparity, and how that is not a it's not a source of anxiety, but rather like part of the love and the the entrancement, not a word, but like part of the reason why that relationship is so delicious.

SPEAKER_02 44:39

It might even be more like uh the the Scott Hunter and his boyfriend relationship in a sense.

SPEAKER_05 44:46

That power imbalance, yeah. That's a great question. He was like a professor at whatever school that was trying to get into. Yeah. They have a lot of people. And not an aspirational grad student.

SPEAKER_03 44:55

Yeah, yeah. That's a great, I hadn't thought about that. That's a great question. Um, you know, part of what seems to be set up at the beginning of Moby Dick is that Ishmael's putative whiteness. I mean, we don't know explicitly that he's white, but that's the presumption. Um, that Ishmael's putative whiteness is the counterbalance to Kuiqueg's superior skill and experience. Yeah. Um but the Pequod, like many whaling ships, is far more diverse than other workforces in the U.S. The Pequad is more diverse, probably, than many whaleships would be, but within the broader maritime industry, whaleships had the most racial, ethnic, and national diversity because it was such a dangerous and dirty and unappealing job that did not pay wage labor in modern ways, that was more feudal in nature. Um, anyone who could be on a safer and better paid merchant or naval vessel would do so, um, which is again why it's it has a larger degree of non-white sailors than than other trades. Um, so that what seems to be like the counterbalance of Ishmael's supposed whiteness kind of falls apart um on the Pequod, where again we have this Anacarsis Klutz deputation of all the sailors in the world in a kind of you know cartoonish Austin Powers UN way where everyone's like performing their national identity. Sure. It's very theatrical, yeah. Very theatrical. Um but yeah, the age difference thing is is interesting. The other than because uh we one of the things that um I know in teaching the book, students are always I ask them like how old they imagine Ahab is, um, because we learn Ahab's age eventually is 58, um which is both like very old, but also not. Um like they sometimes are like there's he's 75 years old. Um you know, I've got to be a little bit more than that.

SPEAKER_05 46:48

Yeah, and they have another 75-year-old who is also 75.

SPEAKER_03 46:51

Yeah, but it means novel. Yeah, it means or they're like, he's 40, like it's hard to, you know, he seems old. Um and 58 for a sailor, captain, is that old? He's already one leg down. Exactly. Um, and so like the sense of what age means on that ship, um, what Ishmael's age is when he sets sail, um, again, unclear, probably early 20s. Um, but but we don't know. And and and so the thinking about what what the experience means um in terms of whether it's chronological age or whether that kind of imbalance um registers on other levels, uh, I yeah, that's a that's a great question. I'll have to think a bit more about that. Um, like language fluency is a factor um in both the novel and in the show with that way, like depending on like how you sign your name, whether you can give interviews, um, whether you're talking to Peleg and Bill Dad or whether you're talking to like the NHL media um is going to be determined by you know your fluency and whether or not people think you're you have capacity, right? Yeah. Like part of um, you know, this is something that where uh like the Shane and Ilya relationship evolves in part over that kind of fluency, um, relatively speaking. Um, but the there's an echo of that in Kuiquag and Ishmael signing up for the Pequad as well.

SPEAKER_02 48:18

Yeah, I can definitely imagine uh Ilya giving a comparable response to like uh me sabi plenty.

SPEAKER_03 48:24

Yeah, basically, yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 48:28

So uh thinking about like so one of the fundamental aspects of uh Shane and Ilya's relationship is uh competition with one another and like uh competitiveness as like a factor for like uh sexual or sexuality, I guess, or like uh the sexual encounter. Uh uh Meg had pointed out like there's there seems to be like a lack of competition. Like I can't really think of any of the relationships, like the the male-male relationships across Melville's works that are like as like can kind of contingent on competition in the same way.

SPEAKER_05 48:59

Maybe you can maybe think when the whaling boats are actually trying to get whales.

SPEAKER_02 49:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 49:03

That that boat is trying to do better than that boat. And I think there's uh we haven't hit this, um, but like if the pequad and then that whole ass ship over there are in competition. So there are the intra-pequad boats that are competing, and then the pequad versus the other boats are competing. There are some scenes where they are talking like we have to do better than them. Yes.

SPEAKER_03 49:26

No, I think Meg, you're totally right about that. Um, you you have like the various gams, which you know are informational, but also half the time the Pequod is not trying necessarily to scam, although they do um with like the rosebud. Um and um so but they're definitely like an information gathering that can be um strategic. So you see that in the games. But also the uh in the first lowering and in subsequent scenes where Stubb is exhorting his crew, like it sounds like chirping. It's it like what the the hockey term for trash talking. Yeah, that you know, you're both uh yelling at the men to do better, um, but also sweet talking them.

SPEAKER_05 50:07

Um yeah, it's like I love you, you're my brother. Don't doesn't he say something like don't let the glass grow on the bottom of the boat or something? I think it's really lovely. I haven't read it in months, but yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_03 50:18

Why why don't you why don't you break your backs but softly and prettily? Like it's it's I mean it's Ilya, it's Ilya saying, you know, chirping someone about how much they love him, of how much he loves them, but also, you know, telling them that they're trash. Like it's that you know, there there's that element of of the the swagger of the craft talk there. Yeah. Um and it's something that, you know, again, both Ishmael and Shane don't feel comfortable doing. Like, and when they try to do it, it's very awkward. Um, that's not their natural. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, there's uh uh a suggestion, um, and this has been the heated rivalry world has been interested in the idea of Shane's potential autism or neurodivergence. Um, and the writer of the books, Rachel Reed, has said belatedly that she did imagine Shane as autistic. Um and the That's the machine part, I imagine. That's the machine, yeah, it's the hockey machine part. Um, and it's uh and Hudson Williams, the actor who plays Shane Hollander, has also said that he modeled his portrayal in part on his father, who has autism. Um, and again, that's something that a lot of I think readers and fans have really taken up in that uh in their enjoyment and reimagining of the series. Um, but it's also something that um for Ishmael's own sense, um, and there's been a lot of really interesting disability studies approaches to the novel, um mostly again filtered through Ahab or through Pip, um whose you know seeming madness um it doesn't register within like the world of the Pequad in the way that it does in some other theoretical worlds. Um, but I think there's there are arguments to be made, and I'm sure someone's probably made them about Ishmael's own um kind of neurodivergence um in the way that he processes information, right? What else could the Cetology chapters be? But you're at dinner with Ishmael and you're like, okay.

SPEAKER_05 52:15

Yeah, it's uh it's info dumping, right? Yeah, God bless him. Yeah, that's uh that's sweet. Yeah. I was in watching the first episode, and they you know, when they have like the hockey guys do the voiceover to like give us exposition, they call Shane not the most sociable. I really felt that inside. I was like, that's my guy, that's my Shayla. Yeah, God bless him. That's funny. And that's all Ishmael can talk about for like the first 20 pages of the book. He's like, I don't belong there, I don't like it there, I can't go in there. And you're like, well, you can exactly if you win and introduce yourself, you can that's how you make friends as a grown-up. But he has pre-excluded himself from that. And like you're saying, um, a lot of his um Shane's has to talk to his teammates, but it seems very robotic, and he's using a lot of like rote phrases, and you can tell like there's not a lot going behind the eyes emotionally, and then seeing that blossom is something really sweet.

SPEAKER_03 53:10

Yeah, and it's something that's clearly like meant a lot in the fandom, too, which has done so much with Shane's like dietary habits and his sense of ritual. Um, and that really gets kind of played out um about like Ilya's enormous appetite um versus Shane's sense of control. And these can be like cartoonishly described, but um they're it it they're certainly available within uh within the novel as well. The thing that um has moved me always about Melville in general, um, and you know, if I if I think too much about it, it makes me weepy and always has, is um Melville's letters to Hawthorne. And you know, we don't know what Hawthorne's responses were. Um we don't have a full sense of how that friendship seemed to have kind of fallen apart a bit. Um but in the the series of letters that we do have that Melville wrote to Hawthorne in the around the period where he's composing and has finished Moby Dick, um, which again I find deeply beautiful and moving in there, the kind of love letters I think anyone would want to receive. Um, but there's an invitation to the cottage, to Melville's home in Arrowhead, um, and a sense of what it means to always be ready for the possibility that Hawthorne might come, um, might join him in whatever state is possible and for whatever period of time, however fleetingly, in whatever kind of magical world that may not be replicated otherwise. Um, and so the part that I had not expected in thinking about Moby Dick and Heated Rivalry, which you know I did from the very beginning, and I do admittedly think of everything through the lens of Moby Dick. Um, so that was not anything particularly new to those who tolerate me in my day-to-day life. Um, but the idea of thinking about um Melville's invitation to Hawthorne as a kind of invitation to the cottage, because within the world of heated rivalry, um it's a it's a it's a space that Shane has had for years and it's his private sanctuary, and he's always understood it to be a place that he wants to go and be alone, and there's a point where he no longer wants to be alone there. Um and the idea of whether or not Ilya will come or can come, is it safe to? Does he want to? Does he have the time? Like what structural impediments are there? Um, the Melville-Hawthorne relationship is more complicated than that. They both had spouses. Hawthorne had a seemingly happy marriage. Melville was a horrible spouse and father and deeply unhappy. Um, and so there, you know, there are a lot of complicating factors there, but the idea that there is a potential place, the place where Moby Dick is being composed and is being like driven through the press, um, and that there's a potential someone who sees and hails him and gets him. Um, and that that potential may have been realized briefly, but does not last for whatever reasons, um, was the thing that kind of most haunted me about those parallels. Um, and you know, left the page or the screen, as it were, and went into the realm of a kind of biographical speculation that normally I'm not as super interested in as some other scholars are. Um, there's only so much you can know or translate, but um, it was really tantalizing to me to imagine Hawthorne coming to the cottage. Yeah. Yeah. Well, now that's what fan fiction is for.

SPEAKER_02 56:41

Exactly, exactly. Um would you actually uh I I I can think in my mind the the passage you're talking about. Like if you have it uh available, um would you mind reading like the that that part um of the letter from Melville to Hawthorne?

SPEAKER_03 56:57

Yes. Um let me think you're absolutely right.

SPEAKER_02 57:00

I I I do love that parallel.

SPEAKER_03 57:03

Um he says to him, I am not to be charmed out of my promised pleasure. Your bed is already made and the wood mark for your fire. I keep the word welcome at all time in my mouth so as to be ready on the instant when you cross the threshold. And just the idea of like having the word welcome at all times in your mouth is such it's such a come on. Um the idea that you're you know, to say to someone not just, I'm ready for you, your bed's made, but that I'm holding in my mouth the welcome for you. Um there's again something just so just so beautifully erotic about that, um, and so embodied. Um and it's it's an unusual turn of phrase um to keep the word welcome at all times in your mouth, um, not just in your heart or your brain or your soul, in your mouth. Yeah. Um you know, and there's all kinds of addendums to this too, where he's always writing to him, like, don't think I'll always write you back, but I also wish there were an endless ribbon of fools cap between us so that I could write you a thousand billion letters. Um, but also I've paid the postage and Mrs. Hawthorne doesn't have to come. Um, and so there's all these like constant, like yeah. Um it's it's just so beautifully painful. That's yeah.

SPEAKER_02 58:21

Yeah. No, um so jumping a little bit uh to Pierre, actually, based on like and thinking about like what you were just uh reading and going back to the uh Pierre and uh Glenn relationship. Um like thinking about the timeline here too, uh like a notable part of like uh the the storyline in Pierre is that Pierre's expecting that kind of welcome from Glenn uh that he's been promised, and then he doesn't materialize. And then he's like stuck in the city without anywhere to go.

SPEAKER_03 58:53

No, precisely. I'm so glad you mentioned that too, because you you see that where Pierre's analyzing in the letters back and forth to Glenn that for a while Glenn's writing like, my very dearest Pierre, and then it like beats a retreat back to like dear Pierre, and then it's like, oh, and then it goes back to being like, Oh, my dearest Pierre, and then at the end it's just like, hey. Um, and so Pierre's tracking very closely. Like when you're reading the texts. Exactly. Exactly.

unknown 59:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 59:18

Is that why why no exclamation point here?

SPEAKER_05 59:20

Yeah, exactly. It's like okay, sure. Like what kind of responses are these? Yeah, it's like yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 59:26

It's me whenever I get a WhatsApp message from Meg.

SPEAKER_05 59:29

Yeah. It's a little bit hard to parse on the text.

SPEAKER_03 59:34

My kid, yeah. My kid is my I have a 20-year-old, um, and when they are responding to my texts, like the difference between a thumbs up and a heart is like oceanic. Yes. Yeah. That's true.

SPEAKER_01 59:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 59:46

True. Um, so I wanted to, because heated rivalry is so um wrapped up in the world of fanfiction, I think she used it to um get some sort of early comment system. Um, and so many of the watchers of the show and the books have turned immediately to that genre to like explore more. And it's so and that can be so fun. Um, since you have read Moby Dix so many times and it's so like internalized in your system, I was wondering if you were thinking about um, of course, Ishmael and Quequeg's first meeting uh takes place in one of the great tropes of all MM, of really of any sort of romance, which is there is only one bed. So I was wondering if you were reading or even writing your perfect um Moby Dick fan fiction. Are there any other beats or tropes that you would really love to see that you would consider essential to that really good story? Oh, that's great.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:36

See, I don't write the fanfiction, I read it. Um but you did that with a taste, yeah. No, no, no, for sure. Like, listen, the the the trope of forced proximity, the uh the that's a good one. The the forced proximity, which you know is also the kind of only one dead at the end um trope as well. So I do love a forced proximity. Um I think that works very well. Um, but I also like um, and this might be a cliche of being a middle-aged person myself too, is the the kind of second chance uh trope in a lot of these fictions, too, of the kind of later recognition of either maturing in or having enough experience to recognize that the things you thought were either impossible or that you were not ready for or didn't didn't know how to to to achieve um are that you can have a kind of second chance. Um that is something that, again, I don't think it might not have appealed to me when I was younger. Um it didn't it definitely does now. Um and it is it is interesting too because the from from what I understand, the the fandom who are writing heated rivalry fan fictions um is skews maybe a little older than some other fandoms, where a lot of writers are in their teens or 20s or 30s, and that you also have a lot of like I'm 53 years old, that there's a lot of like women in their 50s like me who again, I'm not doing the writing, but the I'm definitely doing the reading. And um professional women are the backbone of this yeah, for sure, for sure. Um from again, hard to say, everyone's anonymous. But the um but the a sense of again of having a chance to um to to reboot, to start anew, to rejuvenate, like that. Yeah. In addition to the forced proximity, um I think that that works very well.

SPEAKER_05 1:02:28

Oh yeah. They meet um on the on the keys of New Bedford again many years later.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:34

Well, one of my one of my favorite fan, one of my favorite fan fictions is um where Shane and Ilya are uh rival literary authors um who are writing in.

SPEAKER_05 1:02:43

See, hockey can be anything.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:45

It is so good, it is so good and it's so smart. Whoever's writing this is clearly like works in contemporary literary publishing. It's so good, like they help run uh a writer's workshop together. Um, you know, it's and like the various other characters are writing in various kinds of genre fiction, like it's so good and so smart. Um, but so thinking about again the sense of of craft and skill and like what people are bringing to their fictions and to their fandoms of imagining what it means to be an expert at something, to be good at something. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, that's great.

SPEAKER_05 1:03:17

My only requirement is that the the harpoon is still there. Yes, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:23

Um I'm gonna reveal my uh ignorance of uh the like the fan fiction world, but like I believe like uh shipping is like a term, right? So like imagine. It's the term, yes. It's the term, yes. So yeah, shipmates have you shipped in that ship.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:38

Yeah, yes, that's uh yes. Um the the relationship and the shipping. Um I wrote like a three-page afterward about shipping at some point, um and thinking uh again about the it you know it doesn't come from ships, but the intimacy of the situational nature of shipboard life has been the cause of many relationships.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:02

What do you think Melville would think of something like Heated Rivalry? Like, do you what do you think of like because like uh to to me um if Melville is sort of grasping like to the extent that he can within the the 19th century for expressions of like kind of gay romance or like uh gay uh encounters, to have a book that is able to like not repress that, or to like to um like doesn't have to have the same kind of subtext, I guess, or like it doesn't have to hide it in the same sort of way. Like, do you think he'd find that like liberating, or do you think that it would be so to find new subtexts?

SPEAKER_03 1:04:38

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's yeah, there's not a lot of subtext in Heather Rivery, um, except for all the places where there is subtext. Um the it's it's hard to know. So I I recently finished writing an essay on John Maher and other sailors, which is Melville's very late, one of his last published um collections of poetry. I mean, published, it's published in an edition of 25 copies. Um and they're all these like elegiac, elegiac uh poems about sailors who an older sailor now misses. Um and is, you know, very lonely and missing that um sailor fraternity, the the homosocialism of the ship, um, in ways that are both again eroticized and also just social. Um and so I I wonder how much there would be of um a kind of sadness at um what might have been, um as well as it, you know, there's there's such a kind of deep pervasive sadness um in all of Melville's work, even as funny as it is, and as light as it is, and as gloriously crude as it is, there's a real kind of yearning for something else. Um so I I don't know what kind of mood of like finally it's happening. Like I it's it's kind of hard to imagine a Melville who'd be like fist pumping about that, but uh uh but it it's it's kind of glorious to imagine. I don't know.

SPEAKER_05 1:06:00

Yeah. I think a real yearner will always find distance. So even if he could have Ishmael and Kuiqueg like do it, there would be something else. Like Ishmael would be like, oh, I can't imagine like he would find something to be wistful about, even if it was real sperm. Yeah. You know, if you've got that bug in you, if you've got that in your bonnet, it's always gonna be like, oh, but I uh it's like there's something in the corner that he can't quite reach. He would find something else.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:30

And I think it's the case that like for many elders who struggled, like it's hard sometimes to see um younger generation not struggling, but having a different sense of the struggle. Like I think that that can be very hard for elders in any community. Um, I I I've certainly seen that in in some in some instances. So um there, you know, there it it's hard to do that kind of translation in my mind. Yeah.

unknown 1:06:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:56

It's fun to think about though. For sure, for sure. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:01

No, I've loved this. Um I'm very excited. I think I I hope my wife also loves this episode because I I I think she I think she might. It's been very interesting. I do want to give you the opportunity. So um, how could you, Hester? You're you're also starting a Moby Dick podcast.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:17

Yes, yes.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:18

Uh I I want to give you the opportunity to talk about it a bit.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:20

So uh Yeah, no, it's the timing is funny. Um, yes, so as of um uh we're recording this today on uh Friday, July 31st. And um, so as of today, uh I have launched with um the actor and writer Rob Delaney a podcast called Exploring Moby Dick, um, which will be between 21 and 25 episodes, depending on how we we it all gets kind of cut together, where we are talking about the novel. And um we have as many digressions as Mobile does. Um, and and Rob Delaney, who is um from the US but is now based in London, um, and is uh just a brilliant and superb reader of the novel. And the the best I can't imagine that there's anyone in Hollywood or in show business who's better read or smarter than he is. Um, and he's you know, he's also a comedian, and so he's fucking hilarious and brilliant. Um and so we talk about what it means to read Moby Dick now in a way that, again, your pod is doing so beautifully, and there's so much room in the world for all of us to be reading Moby Dick. Um so if people are interested in following that along, it's um it's at uh exploring the greats.com/slash Moby Dick. Um and we are we have a lot of fun with it. Um and you know, we learn all kinds of things like Rob once tried to join the French Foreign Legion, and we have a lot been drunk in France. We exactly exactly so you know uh there there's a there's a uh a text for for every reading and um you know many dick jokes, um, and uh it's it's a real delight. So I think uh anyone uh listening would would love hearing both sets of podcasts for sure. Let's try, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:08

Yeah, um we'll have to get uh uh him and Johnny together then if they're both in the same city. Uh Johnny, so Johnny's our uh third uh co-host, uh based in London. He's currently on tour um doing Twelfth Night. Oh, fabulous. He's a Shakespearean actor. Um so yeah, we should get it together.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:36

You've been listening to the Pequod Pod with Tristan Bavel Marquise, Meg Fansher, and Johnny Wiles. Our music is by Lost in the Loop with sound engineering by Lauren Aiton. The show's artwork is by Delaney Garrett, and Tristan is on The Synths. We want to say a big thank you to all of our supporters on Patreon. You can join them over at patreon.com forward slash pequod pod for bonus content and for opportunities to help us keep the show running in ship-shaped condition. Ratings and reviews also really help us out, so if you enjoy the show, please do express your thoughts and metaphysical yearnings in the review section wherever you're listening to the show. Tell your friends, tell your foes, tell the white whale on whom you're monomaniacally urged to be revenged. It all helps. Thanks for listening, and until next time, call us the Pequot Party.