I have a friend who likes to loan me sad books, and when I finish one and say “OMG that was sad!”, she’ll say, “I know, but wasn’t it SO well written?” I have a feeling that my friend and KatSings would get along well. My Book Exchange buddy got me this lovely, sprawling book, which is beautifully written and has an air of pervasiveness melancholy about it. I adored it anyway, and I appreciate that KatSings got me to read something that would not […]
Checking an author who is “The Thiirrrrdd”
The vast tackles have now done their duty. The peeled white body of the beheaded whale flashes like a marble sepulchre; though changed in hue, it has not perceptibly lost anything in bulk. It is still colossal. Slowly it floats more and more away, the water round it torn and splashed by the insatiate sharks, and the air above vexed with rapacious flights of screaming fowls, whose beaks are like so many insulting poniards in the whale. The vast white headless phantom floats further and […]
Testing a JR
A word or two more concerning this matter of the skin or blubber of the whale. It has already been said, that it is stript from him in long pieces, called blanket-pieces. Like most sea-terms, this one is very happy and significant. For the whale is indeed wrapt up in his blubber as in a real blanket or counterpane; or, still better, an Indian poncho slipt over his head, and skirting his extremity. It is by reason of this cosy blanketing of his body, that […]
Far away and beyond the pale
It is not, perhaps, entirely because the whale is so excessively unctuous that landsmen seem to regard the eating of him with abhorrence; that appears to result, in some way, from the consideration before mentioned: i.e. that a man should eat a newly murdered thing of the sea, and eat it too by its own light. But no doubt the first man that ever murdered an ox was regarded as a murderer; perhaps he was hung; and if he had been put on his trial […]