Fionnuala > Recent Status Updates

"...A sudden foreboding
told my fighting spirit I'd soon come up against
some giant in power like armor-plate—
a savage deaf to justice, blind to law"

He went to bed and slept and dreamt, I may as well make it clear at once that his story did not turn out to be a dream in the last paragraph. The division between sleeping and waking was abrupt although the feeling of both was the same.They were both in the same sphere of horrible absurdity though in the former he was asleep and in the latter almost terribly awake.He tried to be asleep several times
THE TROLL THWhite

"Five sparrows rose aloft and flew away amidst shrieks. Only five half-empty beer bottles, several chewed-on slices of bread and butter, and the fallen mandolin (a still life that left me slightly dismayed) testified that young lives had been in full flower here just a few seconds earlier."
Wolfgang Hildesheimer, 'Why I Changed into a Nightingale'

"Mr Dombey, the zombie, took the 8.10 train every morning of the working week. On the way to London he read a newspaper, carefully digesting the spate of words so that its essence might be spewed up again later..."

Geoffrey Drayton, 'Mr Dombey, the Zombie'

Mimi began to watch for the dawn. Their home was across the road from The Manulife Centre. Mimi's first sight of daylight always revealed the high white shape of its terraced storeys. Their own building was of modest height and colour—20 floors of smoky glass and polished brick. The shadow of the Manulife would crawl across the bedroom floor and climb the wall behind her, grey with fatigue and cold.
T Findley, Dreams

What was the matter with Charles? What was he afraid of? And why should I be feeling in the most extraordinary way that life was a crust upon which we all moved perilously? The barman, a placid crust walker, set a new drink down in front of me and said something about the weather. I answered him eagerly, diving into the sunny sanctuary of platitude. It did me good—until Charles came back.
P McDonald, Private—Keep Out

"In answer to my advertisement, a motionless young man one morning stood upon my office threshold, the door being open, for it was summer. I can see that figure now—pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurable forlorn. After a few words touching his qualifications, I engaged him, glad to have among my corps of copyists a man of so singuarly sedate an aspect..."
Herman Melville

"No one appreciates the mystery of life more than I do; but when the mystery involves such a doubt of oneself, I find it pleasanter to forget. Naturally, I do not want to believe the story. If I did I should know myself to be some kind of human horror. And the terror of it all lies in the fact that I may never know precisely what kind…"

J.D. Beresford, The Misanthrope

"The window was open so the skinny bird flew in. Flappity-flap with its wings. That's how it goes. It's open, you're in. Closed, you're out and that's your fate. The window was in Harry Cohen's apartment near the East River. On a rod on the wall hung an escaped canary cage, its door wide open, but this skinny bird landed if not smack on Cohen's lamb chop, at least on the table close by."
Bernard Malamud, The Jewbird

"But who gives it? And to whom is it given?...For months he has helped her with the breathing exercises, pressing on her knee as recommended by the book, and he will be present at the delivery. Perhaps it's to him that the birth will be given, in the same sense that one gives a performance..."

Margaret Atwood, 'Giving Birth'

PARIS Pourquoi don’t you mettez some savon in your bedchambers? Est-ce que vous pensez I will steal it? La nuit passee you charged me pour deux chandelles when I only had one; hier vous avez charged me avec glace when I had none at all; tout les jours you are coming some fresh game or other on me, mais vous ne pouvez pas play this savon dodge on me twice. Savon is a necessary de la vie to any body but a Frenchman…

We were approaching the Pillars of Hercules, already the African one was in sight, the Rock of Gibraltar was yet to come. The ancients considered the Pillars of Hercules the head of navigation and the end of the world. The information the ancients didn’t have was very voluminous. Even the prophets never once hinted at the existence of a great continent on our side of the water yet they must have known it was there...

one moment the bowsprit was taking deadly aim at the sun and the next it was trying to harpoon a shark in the bottom of the ocean. What a weird sensation to feel the stem of a ship sinking swiftly from under you and the bow climbing high among the clouds! I was not seasick. If there is one thing that will make a man insufferably self-conceited it is to have his stomach behave itself when all his comrades are seasick

The Old Testament gives us a picture of these people's Deity as he was before he got religion, the New one gives us a picture of him as he appeared afterward. The Old Testament is interested mainly in blood and sensuality The New in Salvation. The first time the Deity came down to earth, he brought life and death; when he came the second time, he brought hell. A way to pursue the dead beyond [the freedom of] the tomb

The Creator devised a special affliction-agent for each and every detail of man's structure, overlooking not a single one...I will remark in passing that he always has his eye on the poor. Nine-tenths of his disease-inventions were intended for the poor, and they get them. The well-to-do get only what is left over. And one of the pulpit's finest and commonest names for the Creator is "The Friend of the Poor" ...

He saved Noah, and his family, and arranged to exterminate the rest. He planned an Ark, and Noah built it. Neither of them had ever built an Ark before nor knew anything about Arks; and so something out of the common was to be expected. It happened. Noah was a farmer...
[continued below]

This is a strange place. There is nothing resembling it at home. The people are all insane, the animals are all insane, the earth is insane, Nature itself is insane. Man is a marvelous curiosity. When he is at his very best he is a sort of low grade nickel-plated angel; at his worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable, first and last a sarcasm. Yet he blandly and in all sincerity calls himself the "noblest work of God".

"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

Mark Twain, writing in 1880, tells us: "When I was born [1830], St. Paul had a population of three persons, Minneapolis had just a third as many. The then population of Minneapolis died two years ago; and when he died he had seen himself undergo an increase, in forty years, of fifty-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine persons. He had a frog’s fertility."

The educated Southerner has no use for an r, except at the beginning of a word. He says ‘honah,’ and ‘dinnah,’ and ‘Gove’nuh,’ and ‘befo’ the waw,’ and so on. The words may lack charm to the eye, in print, but they have it to the ear. When did the r disappear from Southern speech, and how did it come to disappear? The custom of dropping it was not borrowed from the North, nor inherited from England [continued below]

WHERE the river in the Vicksburg region used to be corkscrewed, it is now comparatively straight—made so by cut-off; a former distance of seventy miles reduced to thirty-five. It is a change which threw Vicksburg’s neighbor Delta out into the country. Its whole river-frontage is now occupied by a vast sand-bar, thickly covered with young trees—a growth which will [become] a forest and completely hide the exiled town.

The loneliness of this solemn stupendous flood is impressive—and depressing. League after league it pours its chocolate tide along between its forest walls, its almost untenanted shores, with seldom a sail or a moving object of any kind to disturb the surface and break the monotony of the watery solitude; and so the day goes the night comes and again the day—and still the same majestic unchanging sameness of serenity

Mississippi steamboating was born about 1812 At the end of thirty years it had grown to mighty proportions and in less than thirty more it was dead! A strangely short life for so majestic a creature. Of course it is not absolutely dead neither is a crippled octogenarian who could once jump twenty-two feet on level ground but as contrasted with what it was in its prime vigor Mississippi steamboating may be called dead

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

"The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book—a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.…[continued below]

When De Soto took his first glimpse of the Mississippi [1542], Ignatius Loyola was an obscure name; the order of the Jesuits was not yet a year old; Michael Angelo’s paint was not yet dry on the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel; Mary Queen of Scots was not yet born, but would be before the year closed. Catherine de Medici was a child; Elizabeth of England was not yet in her teens…[continued below]

"'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'