Status Updates From Black Water 2: More Tales o...

Finished The Jewbird
Starting Dreams

Starting Giving Birth

on page 528
+63 already read
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591

also finished Philip MacDonald Private - Keep Out!

starting page 521, progress plus 63 pages for The Misanthrope and Bartleby

Starting Major Aranda's Hand

Starting The Dead Fish

Starting The Labrenas

Starting The White Rooster

Notes:
The Miracle of Ash Wednesday Yevgeny Zamyatin 10/7/2025 ***
Heartburn by Hortense Calisher 10/25/2025 **1/2
The Accident by Ann Bridge 10/25/2025 ***
Joyce Marshall The Old Woman 10/26/2025 ***1/2
A Short Trip Home 1927 by F. Scott Fitzgerald 2/4/2026 **1/2
The Brute 1906 by by Joseph Conrad, 2/5/2026 **
Mr Sleepwalker by Ethel Wilson, 2/6/2026 ***
A Self-Possessed Woman by Julian Barnes, 1975, 2/7/2026 ****

Starting The Woman Who Talked to Horses

Starting A Self-Possessed Woman by Julian Barnes

Starting Mr. Sleepwalker

"A delicate and powerful instrument, it possesses hinges, pincers, tongs, hooks...cushions, valleys, hillocks...It is a marvelous flower with five petals that open and close like a sensitive plant at the slightest provocation! Is five an essential number in the universal harmonies? Does it belong to the order of the dog rose, the forget-me-not, the scarlet pimpernel?"

Alfonso Reyes, Major Aranda's ( what?)

The carriage door stuck as usual; at the other end of the train the big hat chief leaned on the red button and the compressed air squirted in the tubes. A strained to force the two panels apart. Drops of grey sweat zigzagged across his face like flies. The train was about to start when the chief released the button. A almost lost his balance as the door suddenly gave way and he stumbled down
Boris Vian The Dead Fish

Labrenas—a boyhood friend from Venezuela called them and I sometimes call them that too. Actually they are no more than the common gecko, the one zoologists call Plattidattilo murailio: a sort of miniature crocodile that frequents and meanders along old walls and sometimes invades inhabited rooms where as is its habit it eyes and then sneaks up on various insects particularly butterflies
Tommaso Landolfi The Labrenas

The rooster came to the pansy bed so sereneWhat a joy he felt to be of the world of wordless creatures where crowing or whirring of wings or the brush of legs together said everything, said praise, we live. To be of the grassy world where things blow and bend and rustle; of the insect world so close to it that it was known when an ant hauled an imperceptible grain of sand from its tiny cave.
W Goyen The White Rooster

"'What's your fee?' I asked.
She looked at the horses then glanced at me, then worked one toe into the ground and looked at that. She was wearing blue cloth shoes with thick white laces—all very clean. Too clean. I didn't think she knew snot about horseflesh. I figured she was straight out phony.
'Your fee,' I said.
She scratched a little itch behind her ear..."
Leon Rooke, 'The Woman Who Talked to Horses'

"I cast my eye round the collection of books, instinctively noting whether they were for use or display. Here, they were not dressed by the right according to size; individual volumes of sets were occasionally misplaced; a few bookmarks protruded. Use, then; or extremely cunning display."
Julian Barnes, 'A Self-Possessed Woman'

"She looked idly about her, and the swaying of the streetcar so determined that her eyes fell on a small slim man sitting beside the entrance...Her whole attention was taken by this man, although no one else seemed to observe him, and as the body of someone swaying beside her interposed between her and the small man, she did not see him, and then she saw him again..."
Ethel Wilson, 'Mr Sleepwalker'

'The Brute' by Joseph Conrad begins as follows: "Dodging in from the rain-swept street, I exchanged a smile and a glance with Miss Blank in the bar of the Three Crows."
The story ends in a similar way: "On going out I exchanged a glance and a smile (strictly proper) with the respectable Miss Blank, barmaid of the Three Crows."
What happens in between is as mysteriously hilarious as those two sentences. I loved it!

"He was a hard thin-faced man with an air of being scarred. His eyes were a sort of taunt to the whole human family—the eyes of an animal sleepy and quiescent in the presence of another species. They were helpless yet brutal, unhopeful yet confident. It was as if they felt themselves powerless to originate activity but infinitely capable of profiting from the weakness of another"
FS Fitzgerald: A Short Trip Home

"'My old woman,' Toddy shouted, and she saw him pointing to the power-house below. In England his habit of personalizing an electric generating plant had charmed her, fitting her picturesque notions of the Canadian north. But now she felt uneasiness prod her. It was such a sinister-looking building, and the sound of falling water was so loud and engulfing..."
Joyce Marshall, The Old Woman

There were two new graves in the cemetery; the names on the small temporary wooden boards set up at the foot of each mound: James Bull; George Whitelegg. Poor chaps—no one would ever know why they had fallen; they were climbing guideless. Bull—well, he was a nasty bit of work. Poor Whitelegg was quite under his spell; Bull had that power of dominating another person, almost of possessing them
Ann Bridge: The Accident

She pulled open the door of the power-house and the thunder of the waterfall was suddenly replaced by a low even whine.For an instant she did not see Toddy. Then she saw him, leaning towards one of the turbines. As she looked, he moved, with a curious scuttling speed, to one of the indicators on the wall. She saw the side of his face then, its expression totally absorbed, gloating...
Joyce Marshall, The Old Woman

Starting A Short Trip Home