Comsplutterment: Sam Watkin's "Company Aytch: or, a Side Show of the Big Show"

"Comsplutterment" neatly encapsulates most of the qualities of Sam Watkin's memoir-cum-proto-creative-nonfiction Company Aytch: or, A Side Show of the Big Show. Watkins uses the word to describe the effect of "minnie balls" on a line of Federal troops at Rocky Face Ridge.  "Comsplutterment," of course, perfectly conveys the notion, but lends it a creepily humorous, light-hearted tone that makes the reader stop short and cringe at his own chuckle. This is the entire book (at least up to page 118 where I currently am) in an nutshell.

A Whale of a Book

Rereading Moby Dick for the first time in years. I had forgotten both the bizarreness (contrary to its reputation as highschool death-by-boredom, Doby Mick is hee-lair-ee-us), as well as the beauty in certain passages. Ahab's soliloquy to the whale's head in Chapter 70 is a particularly fine example of this mixture of madness and beauty, i.e. "where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home," and "O head! thou has seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!" Diva.

The cook Fleece's sermon to his "congregation," a swarm of sharks which he addresses as "belubed fellow-critters, concludes with the benediction "Cussed fellow-critters! Kick up de damndest row as ever you can; fill your dam' bellies 'till dey bust -- and den die."

Chapter 55 features a rant on "Monstrous Pictures of Whales," lamenting the woefully inaccurate representations of whales in art. Depicted Science compiled most of Melville's references here.

Also mentions the memoirs of Grigory Heinrich von Langsdorff (1774-1852), a naturalist who participated in the Russian circumnavigation expedition of Adam Johann Ritter von Krusenstern (Ива́н Фёдорович Крузенште́рн). Von Krusenstern wrote a detailed Reise um die Welt... (Erster Theil, Zweiter, Dritter), while von Langsdorff wrote his own Voyages and travels in various parts of the world... (here).