Moby Dick: Bibliotheca Webinar 

Agreed!!💯%

Yes agreed. Just an observation; there is the early Sugrue we see here on RU-vid and now we are blessed with the current Sugrue. I’d like to know more about the Sugrue that occupied these two eras…his teachings, his life, his family…I’m sure that’s a story in itself! Peace!✌🏼

Lord Sugrue

I was shocked at his reading , and began to wonder if my instincts to see those elements as jest and platonic bonding/working together as basically non sexual/erotic. Reminds me of when I went to Ethiopia where same sex friends hold hands in public while married couples never do… and multiple people opine unprompted that they could never comprehend why a man would or could marry a man the way they learned they do in my country. One can only read in repressed homosexuality if you don’t understand the culture and times are all.

@@grocefamilyfarm3062 Exactly, and it's worth noting that "Leaves of Grass" was written in the same time period. It was blatantly homoerotic and the author gained immense popularity despite this fact. So this time-period in America was not as repressed as we like to think it was. If Melville wanted to write homoerotic references into his text, he could have freely done so.

all this to say you're not gay bruh

and i finished reading it right away, few hours ago.

Why not just read it?

100% cash money

I have no recollection of watching this lecture before lol

Did the use of the Camera Lucida in Renaissance painting anticipate Gaussian geometry in the 19th century? Did Gutenberg, "intend" to, "literize" Europe? I think if we consider Hegel-- History and philosophy happen; Literature is a feed-forward time machine-- like Wittgenstein said, "where words fail we must be silent...;" Literature is silence as sound is temporal and thereby subjugated by history and rationality and reason (Hegel again). It's like Dr. Sugrue mentions in a, "recent" upload on Sartre and Heidegger-- the limits of existential philosophy are the beginnings of what is in many ways more valuable as a, "literary'" philosophy than a, "rational" philosophy or a system of self-validating symbols or quoting Wittgenstein again, "word-games" playing themselves out. Beyond word games there is the timeless place where silence is dynaminated as anti-historical Being. In books We are become Gods.

Why does this comment only have two likes?

/lit/-annotated? Links to this?

Yea where do you find that version? Sounds based

He got cancer a long time ago, and after a 40 year + academic career, he's got the wise old man look going now.

"Never before had there been such a complete massacre of noncombatants" Res ipsa loquitur. I blame your teachers. Bing is no substitute for historical knowledge. Montezuma's inauguration as Aztec leader involved about 14,000 human sacrifices during the festivities. The largest North American Indian massacre was in South Dakota around 1350 AD. I blame your teachers, but the real culprit is the Disneyification of our historical narrative by technofascist hacks who are eroding social cohesion and political legitimation with agitprop about the unique evils of European colonizers. From my book: There was no imaginary Golden Age anywhere. The spectacular bloodlettings of Aztec ritual often obscures the more prosaic terror of smaller groups The French Jesuits in the Great Lakes and Mississippi valley of New France in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reported a Hobbesian warfare among the various tribes reinforced by torture, terror, and genocide. When the French voyageurs paddled canoes from the Saint Lawrence river to the Great Lakes to the Mississippi in the late 1500 and early 1600s, warfare among tribes was so ubiquitous that, rather than avoiding these French traders, they sought them out because they were desperate to trade for iron weapons like knives and hatchets but also firearms. One of the priests recalled a Cormac McCarthyesque nightmare: … during the Iroquois wars, four or five hundred Miami warriors marched against their southern enemies. In their absence, a band of Senecas destroyed their village. Only one old woman, left for dead, survived. She told the returning Miamis that the Senecas had marched the women and children east. Every night as the Senecas traveled home, they killed and ate a Miami child. And every morning, they took a small child, thrust a stick through its head and sat it up on the path with its face toward the Miami town they had left. Behind the Senecas came the pursuing Miamis, and at every Seneca campsite, brokenhearted parents recognized their child. When the Senecas were within a day’s march of their own village, they sent their people a message telling them to prepare a great kettle and spoon to enjoy the good broth they were bringing them. It was at this last campsite that the pursuing Miami warriors at last caught the Senecas. But the Senecas had guns and the Miamis did not, and so the Miamis decided to set an ambush rather than attack the camp directly. Two Miami spies watched the Seneca camp. And that night, as usual, for the evening meal one of the Senecas decapitated a child and prepared its body for the kettle. Hearing a noise outside the camp, the cook tossed the head into the bushes and told the wolf he imagined lurking there that he was giving it the head of a Miami for its supper. The Miami spies carried the head back to their companions who sorrowfully recognized it. When the heavily laden Senecas reached the Miami ambuscade, they were overwhelmed. The Miamis killed all but six. Two escaped. Four were taken prisoners. The Miamis killed two of their captives and beheaded them. They ran a string through the ears of the heads and hung the heads around the necks of the remaining two prisoners whose hands, noses and lips they cut off. They then sent them home to tell of the vengeance of the Miamis. At the Seneca village all was horror and confusion. The Miamis returned home with those of their relatives whom the Senecas had spared. The account above could have come from anywhere, anytime, although leaving the head of a murdered child with a stick through it, facing their pursuing parents, was an embrace of terror worthy of Hannibal or Cortez or Ashoka’s early years. This conduct was not imposed on American Indians from the outside by rapacious Europeans, nor was it ceremonial and bloodless. The inhabitants of the Americas were neither more nor less moral or savage and cruel that those of the Old World. The early Jesuit records from New France are telling. The main differences between the Europeans and the Indians were technological, not moral. The Jesuit priests that evangelized wrote extensively of the ferocious warfare among tribes. Once they got access to weaponized iron and gunpowder, except for disease, they were as lethal as the Europeans. In either case, we must not succumb to the jejune and mawkish Nietzschean “Critical History”, announcing only an indictment. This hackneyed genre is as sophomoric and superficial as the earlier apologists for Western hegemony who were unable to be self critical. This Big History is “monumental” history but chastened by pessimism about human nature. Augustine goes too far in calling human nature evil, but Mencius seems to hit the right chord by describing human nature as bad, not good intrinsically but teachable. Ashoka is the greatest example of an emperor who changed his conduct radically after a religious transformation. Every society, like every individual, is Janus-faced. In the West, Augustine and Calvin and Milton, with their obsessive focus on human evil were contested by Rousseau and Condorcet and Wilson with their seductive optimism. Yet the new DNA data reveals that the genetic replacement of one human group by another, which has repeatedly punctuated the last hundred plus centuries of history makes for an uneasy optimism at best. All the cultural achievements of our history, vast as they might cumulatively be, will be hard pressed to atone for our sins of commission and omission. But the same is true of the critics of the West, regardless of their Juvenalian preening. Our observations are inevitably theory laden. Their objections and hatreds are themselves the products of the tainted Western civilization they distain. If one were to propose in imperial China or in Abbasid Baghdad or in Mughal India, that all cultures are equally valuable, you would simply be laughed out of the room and thought a very great fool, left to figure out on your own how provincial, ephemeral and uniquely Western cultural relativism really is. If you told them that moral virtue required the critical dismantling of these civilizations by their own intellectuals, who should adopt an oppositional posture toward the society that makes them possible, they would have thought you had gone from silly to mad. The civilizations of Mesoamerica were quite as gory as those of the Old World. The Aztec religion demanded human sacrifice so they terrorized neighboring peoples, killing many in the process of taking captives who were marched back to Teotihuacan to have their hearts cut out by a priest with an obsidian knife. Cruelty is ubiquitous, both before and after the Aztecs. It is important to note that Cortez and Pizarro and dozens of other aspiring Conquistadors were aided by local tribes who gave them guides and information about roads and cities. Crucially, they formed 95% of Cortez’s army, which could only be the product of fixed hatred toward the Aztecs. These outlying tribes were terrorized by the large civilizations, which did not need walls as in the Old World. Terror radiated out from Teotihuacan, for example, and the raids on the Aztec hinterlands must have been as destructive of human life as slave raids on the west African coast, four or five killed for every live captive. They were hated and feared by any who survived such an encounter. Pure predator parasitism worked the same in Aztec Mexico as it did in ancient Mesopotamia and as Machiavelli said, it is important not to be hated. This was an unanticipated advantage for the Conquistadors, piled on top of biology and technology. The Conquistadors were just as brutal, but their cruelty was amplified by technological advantages like gunpowder and iron and magnified by accidents like mosquitoes and disease. The Aztecs were ruthless and warlike but the peoples they supplanted and conquered were generally the product of still earlier genocidal violence. The Iroquois destruction of the Huron or the near annihilation of the Apache by the Comanche, the nameless displacement of population Y are nothing unique.

@@dr.michaelsugrue I thought it was interesting as the name of the whaling ship in Moby Dick. Blessings.

Dr. Sugrue is characteristically generous here in his choice of ambassadors...

I’d be happy just hearing him talk for over an hour without any disruptions

I'm sorry, are you denying that there is an astonishingly blatant expression of homosexuality that runs throughout the novel?

Sorry you’re so triggered. Maybe just stick to Bible study.

@danasheys9300 - Chapter ten of Moby Dick 10: “He pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married.” Which "heterosexual" man would speak to another in 1850 like this?

Hell no. It is a maximally comfortable black leather reading chair I got as a gift from my sister 20+ years ago.

@@dr.michaelsugrue haha ok.