So I was about to start this post by announcing that I'm all caught up! Except then I looked at the schedule and realized that I'm more than a full week behind. Rats!
This section that I'm in the middle of (I just finished Cistern and Buckets) contains some of my favorite parts of the whole novel. I just love all these weird chapters about whale anatomy, not to mention Cistern and Buckets, which ranks among my top favorite chapters of Moby Dick.
First we have Queequeg birthing Tashtego out of the Sperm whale's head--a Greek myth (Athena + Zeus!) crossed with a rallying cry for midwifery. Then the chapter ends with this gem of a paragraph:

Now, had Tashtego perished in that head, it had been a very precious perishing; smothered in the very whitest and dantiest of fragrant spermaceti; coffined, hearsed, and tombed in the secret inner chamber and sanctum sanctorum of the whale. Only one sweeter end can readily be recalled--the delicious death of an Ohio honey-hunter, who seeking honey in the crotch of a hollow tree, found such exceeding store of it, that leaning too far over, it sucked him in, so that he died embalmed. How many, think ye, have likewise falled into Plato's honey head, and sweetly perished there?

There's a paragraph after my own heart.
All the whale anatomy stuff I like because it seems to tie in with some ideas from earlier in the book--namely, themes of covering/obscuring (see:  The Blanket, and also The Quarter-Deck) and an interest in appearances that I can't quite figure out. I'm thinking, in this section, of chapters 74 and 75--about the  heads of the Sperm and Right whales. What do you guys think is going on there? Do you agree that the book is obsessed with the way whales look?