Hester Blum

@hesterblum.bsky.social

3789 Followers 1760 Following

A patched professor in Queen Nature’s granite-founded College. Polar humanities, C19, oceanic studies. Ask me about Moby-Dick. I teach environmental and nineteenth-century American literature at WashU. Protect trans kids. She/her. hesterblum.com

Cover of a pulp book by Reynolds called 70,000 to one showing a hot seaman in a ripped shirt ecstatically arching backward on a beach

If you are reading this, sweaty with the worry that I am “normalizing” or “justifying” political violence, consider that I am only asking why you find so many forms of political violence so normal, so justifiable, so adequately met with well, it’s a shame, of course, while the specter of old radicals looms like a nightmare. Sometimes you must stand athwart history, yelling Are you fucking serious? Is it only that you get used to that stench of American life after a while? Is it worth it?

A page from a cloth baby book by Roger Priddy, author of the transcendent Squishy Turtle and Friends; We see Steggy the Stegosaurus smiling happily and blankly above the caption "His back and tail are very spiny, but Steggy's brain is really tiny." This may be in the Fuzzy Bee volume, can't remember

Promo image for Letterkenny Live featuring the hicks, the skids, and the hockey players.

Screenshot from Widows Bay: a notepad on which Patricia has written "are you mad at something I said." With this note she had been trying to communicate with a 300-year old island lord protector patriarch who had been laying undead in a coffin for centuries

Cover of a book by Garry McCafferty entitled "THEY HAD NO CHOICE: RACING PIGEONS AT WAR." two hands, one with bloodied palm, release a pigeon into a tempestuous sky above a plane crashed and burning in the sea. It's a little dramatic.

Bitterer too, are ye?

One would be unable to say bitter-er if not for the place-holding “too”, its ‘t’ operating like a piece of furniture when you needed a hand-hold.

Are ye – and this is my favorite part. Think of how ‘you’ is actually sonorous, dignified, even a little mournful, round like a small tub. How are you. Almost sexy, a kiss. ‘Ye’ on the other hand is glandular. You use the back of your throat, you use the sides of your mouth, it’s an animal sound, a calling to the human in a bridle, it restrains and squeaks through its restraint so the pain in ‘ye’ at the end of the poem, written at his desk and not at sea, sucks.

Excerpt from Melville's poem "Bridegroom Dick":

Now, now, sweetheart, you sidle away,
No, never you like that kind o’ gay ;
But sour if I get, giving truth her due,
Honey-sweet forever, wife, will Dick be to you !

Broadside Print in dark green ink in mixed wooden uppercase type: “THINK WITH YOUR GLORIOUS MESSY HUMAN BRAIN”

PUBLIC BOOKS PUBLICATION AGREEMENT
To: (“Author”) Hester Blum
Public Books Foundation, Inc., (“Public Books”), is pleased to accept for publication no later than one year from the execution of this agreement in Public Books your work provisionally titled, “Heated Rivalry” Is the “Moby-Dick” of Canadian Gay Hockey Shows."
(“The Work”).

a slide from a presentation on McTeague featuring a gigantic mouth and mustache and a quote from the text "fearful snorting sounds"

Bruce, with skin like leather and the diamond-hard look of a cobra

Hand-lettered cardboard No Kings sign that reads “yes it is scary but we are brave“ paraphrased from a fictional Russian hockey playing bisexual menace princess

Rob Delaney and me in front of Melville’s lodging spot in London

FB memory On this day
14 years ago
Hester Blum
...
March 10, 2012 .%;
"Mommy can you tell me a new story of Moby-Dick? Chapter One is called 'Hope Still,' and the first sentence is 'Years passed, with no sign of Queequeg.' Tell it."

Image of Arctic expedition leader listening to infrasound recordings of a glacier via Brian House's macrophone, with a Svalbard glacier and mountains in the background

The weirdest medical waiting room you’ve ever seen, with ornate theater seating, multiple framed late 19th century family portraits, and three giant teeth

A slide showing a commemorative newspaper printed on an icebound polar voyaging ship in Franz Josef Land, as well a menu for the New Year's meal in which a tooth is attached, presumably lost to scurvy

Two gentoo penguins I saw in Antarctica, seemingly holding flippers, with a guano-splashed foreground and a background of ice and snow

From NYT https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/11/magazine/operation-mincemeat-obsession-broadway.html?unlocked_article_code=1.JFA.02ZQ.WwS19a5DWevo&smid=url-share

On Halloween, I sat with my notebook open and tried to be a professional one more time. “B,” I said, “what is it? Why do we love this? Why are we still here?”

And B said again, with some annoyance at my badgering, “Because the songs are really good and exciting.” I asked for still more, and B said: “It makes me so happy. I love the quick changes. I just love the songs.”

I wrote it down again, but this time I wondered if maybe it really was that simple. Maybe the answer is that B is 8 and I am 50, and what B doesn’t know is that as they get older, there will be fewer things to love like this. That it will come along when it does, if it does, but it will feel more and more muted every time, so that by the time you find yourself feeling it again, by the time you realize that it is great to mellow with age but that before the process is complete you will panic, because you can feel what you’re missing and know that one day missing it won’t even bother you anymore. And right now I am in the gloaming of all that — in the perimenopause of all my passions, a time when I still remember what it is to want, but from the shoreline. This might never happen again to me, I want to tell B. It’s a surprise it happened at all. Hasn’t anyone told you yet, B? It becomes rarer and rarer to be struck in the heart by something that consumes you, and one day you forget that it used to happen at all.

Generative A.I.
This class helps you to be a better writer and thinker. Generative AI (ChatGPT, Copilot, and other platforms) is neither writing nor thinking. Any use of Al in this class (whether to write, brainstorm, outline, or summarize) will be considered a violation of academic integrity. It undermines your intellectual development, for one: AI content is often inaccurate or hallucinatory and is always boring, banal, and average. This is by design, as generative Al works by predicting the most obvious or basic sequencing of words. Good writingwriting that is persuasive, powerful, lively, funny, surprising, rousing, insightful, transformative, provocative-requires human work. Human creativity is weird and variable and uneven, but it holds the capacity for growth, revelation, empathy, and brilliance. We urge you not to abandon the glorious experiential potential of human messiness and transformation for the tedium of robot sentences.
One further reason to abjure generative Al, especially in a class on environmental literature: in addition to its counterproductivity to your work as a writer and thinker, Al is enormously environmentally destructive.

Wood type letter press proof print that reads Kalaallit Nunaat, Kalaallit pigaat 🇬🇱

A crowd in the rain in the Grove neighborhood of St. Louis, protesting 🧊

A publishing agreement between Columbia UP and Hester Blum for a book entitled LONESOME DOVE REREAD for Columbia's Rereadings series

Axl Rose on the Use Your Illusion tour in white spandex short shorts, high tops with AXL on the tongue, a white bandana, and a stars and stripes leather jacket

hideously grinning David Brooks in the Epstein files--my caption refers to hideous Brooks's infamous 2017 column that included the following fake story: "Recently I took a friend with only a high school degree to lunch. Insensitively, I led her into a gourmet sandwich shop. Suddenly I saw her face freeze up as she was confronted with sandwiches named “Padrino” and “Pomodoro” and ingredients like soppressata, capicollo and a striata baguette. I quickly asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else and she anxiously nodded yes and we ate Mexican."

creepy pedo-looking white man with combover and dahmer glasses spouting utter lies about gender

The cover of the St Louis post-dispatch: the top headline reads “Judge: Wig photos were private”

A pink purple aurora with a baseline of faint green visible in the middle of Chicago despite light pollution

STL NO KINGS in front of the Gateway Arch

Sarah Mesle’s brilliant new book Reasons & Feelings: writing for the humanities now, with a bright red-pink cover featuring a tattoo-style arrow, saying hello to my tattoo of a Temple toggle harpoon head

The fully-constructed Lego Endurance, elaborately packed by excellent movers and ungrammatically labeled

The wooden surface of a c19 commode, missing its marble topping, with joinery and screw visible.

Bananas paragraph from Herman Melville's Mardi: "And here, in this impenetrable retreat, centrally slumbered the universe-rounded, zodiac-belted, horizon-zoned, sea-girt, reef-sashed, mountain-locked, arbor-nested, royalty-girdled, arm-clasped, self-hugged, indivisible Donjalolo, absolute monarch of Juam:—the husk-inhusked meat in a nut; the innermost spark in a ruby; the juice-nested seed in a goldenrinded orange; the red royal stone in an effeminate peach; the insphered sphere of spheres."

A bus advertising “true girl” which promises to bring “moms and daughters closer to God and to each other,” in teal and pink lettering

Middle-age mom of a trans teen wearing a T-shirt that says “you will have to go through me“ in pink blue and white lettering

The Mystic River in heavy evening fog

Packed ornate gorgeous hall

A conference program on my lap along with an ocean-blue notebook embossed with a whale and the words OCEANIC MELVILLE

A No Kings protest sign that says “JD Vance puts his cast-iron skillet in the dishwasher“

Protest signs including “elect a rapist expect to get fucked”

Yr middle-aged correspondent in glasses wearing a black T-shirt with trans colored lettering that says “you will have to go through me”

OLO NEPTUNE, THE GREAT BLACK SEA LION,
THE MONARCH OF THE OCEAN
The only Animal of the kind ever captured alive.

BARNUM'S
MUSEUM, NEW YORK.

Four books on a wood table:
A wilder time by William Glassey, Theory of water by leann Betasamosake Simpson, orbital by Samantha Harvey, and Salamina by Rockwell Kent

Two black T-shirts recently purchased in Nuuk: 1 says “Greenland is not for sale!” In large block letters; the second, on the right, shows the outline of Greenland and a small Greenlandic flag atop a UPS barcode with the words “not for sale“ below the barcode

Fridtjof Nansen looking amazing

Iceberg washed ashore in Nuuk, Greenland, with holes and crevices resembling a distorted angry face

View from the Ilulissat Hotel overlooking Disko Bay, Greenland, in which dozens of icebergs have turned a deep, startling blue in the changing midnight sun. in the foreground are some buildings, including Zion's Church and the Ilulissat hospital. The mountains of Disko Island are faintly visible in the background.

I'm wearing a blue parka and looking smug while sipping coffee in front of a ragged iceberg several hundred feet high in the icefjord at Disko Bay, Greenland

A photo of S. A. Andree’s hot airballoon from his doomed North Pole expedition

Dan Dority and Al Swearengen from HBO‘s Deadwood, glowering murderously over the balcony of the gem saloon

Illustration of a worker in overalls carrying a scythe and balancing atop a huge stack of books, reading one of them. The colors are red and black throughout in a proletariat art style

Bad Times Bar sign

Horrifying molded by obbledheaded figurines with crazy eyes and outstretched hands with “I love you” at the base. Dozens of them

Lovers SNL skit with their bodies slick with goat meat

I am wearing a T-shirt that says “you will have to go through me“ in the colors of the trans flag. I’m a white woman with shortish hair wearing hoop earrings and composite glasses, standing in a bathroom with a strawberry thief window curtain, with an expression that attempts Steely resolution but mostly looks mad and tired