the only preconceived notion i had about moby dick by herman melville was that it was my mom's white whale. a well-read lady with a master's degree in english, she had never finished the book—she had never even breached 200 pages of the ~700 page tome. "it's so boring," she always said. "i can't make myself read it."
to be fair to her, i have two qualities that my mom does not: 1) when i was a kid, i wanted to be jacques cousteau; 2) relatedly, i'm...pretty queer. those two qualities alone might have determined the extremely wide gap between how we both felt about this book. or maybe my mom has no taste!!!
if you love whales and the ocean; if you love campy, shakespearean soliloquoies about everything and nothing; if you love dudes who have never even seen a real whale trying to describe what they look like, then moby dick is for you. i became obsessed with this book, with its roiling language, with its epic characters, with its representation of american literature at its absolute fucking peak—with its many, many descriptors of sperm.
i knew i'd want to reread it immediately after finishing, and then i had a crazy thought: what if i wrote this entire thing out like an illuminated manuscript? thus, the project was born.