David Markson - Reader's Block

In Germany not much earlier Novalis had been engaged to a girl of twelve. Who died, however.

David Gascoyne spent two decades in mental hospitals.

We have too many things and not enough forms, Flaubert said.

H. G. Wells was an anti-Semite.

Manitas de Plata.

Dante situates Mohammed in the ninth chasm of the Malebolge for having sown division in the Church. He is seen slashed open from his chin to his anus and with his innards spilling out.

In retaliation, Muslim fundamentalists in the early 1990s threatened to blow up Dante’s tomb in Ravenna.

Seven hundred years after the fact.

Rosso Fiorentino committed suicide.

Benedetto Croce’s parents were killed in an earthquake.

Will Reader make anything out of that notion of Protagonist having seen the woman from the grave on the street?

Contrive something with more immediacy than that?

Bertrand Russell and Basil Bunting were conscientious objectors in World War I.

Robert Lowell and Kenneth Rexroth were conscientious objectors in World War II.

Here. This isn’t a musical peepshow. And don’t you smash that piano. Who’s paying here?

The first books printed in England, roughly four decades after Gutenberg, were a history of the Trojan War and a volume on chess. Both set by Caxton.

Raoul le Fevre. Guido della Colonne. Benoit de Sainte-Maure.

Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli.

The Mona Lisa has no eyebrows.

If Protagonist has in fact taught, it will have been only briefly. And/or part-time. Possibly in writing programs.

That and his few other past employments leaving him with no kind of retirement benefits.

And no more than minimal Social Security.

Caxton me fieri fecit.

The primary aim of this book is to explain the remarkable rule which regulated the succession to the priesthood of Diana at Aricia.

Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul

When hot for certainties in this our life!

Not one of the violent moments in Greek tragedy occurs on stage. Medea murdering her sons, for instance. Or Orestes bloodying Clytemnestra.

Does Reader yet know how long Protagonist has now been alone?

Who, when, the last woman in his life will have been?

Treat nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone.

Pio Baroja was an anti-Semite.

Magdalena Abakanowicz.

Melville. A little heterodox in the matter of clean linen.

Said Hawthorne.

Coleridge. Considerably more so.

Said several.

Sara Teasdale committed suicide with sleeping pills.

Could the woman who appears at the grave be the woman with one leg?

What belated queer obsession of Reader’s is this?

Jacqueline du Pre’s cello was a Stradivarius.

And was later Yo-Yo Ma’s.

Balzac called Ann Radcliffe a better novelist than Stendhal.

God is dead, everything is permitted.

Preoccupied, Beethoven was known to lather his face and then forget to shave.

He also possessed an unstrung piano, adequate in his deafness.

Ernst Toller hanged himself.

Mr. Earbrass.

Jim Thorpe is buried in Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania.

Isaac Newton’s father was illiterate.

Curiously, there is no refrigeration in that part of Kingston as Reader sees it, instead there are old-fashioned iceboxes. Meaning deliveries by truck of blocks of ice.

Does Reader now have some notion of setting his novel back practically a lifetime ago?

Or is memory merely getting in the way of imagination for a minute?

Pouring out liquor is like burning books.

Said Faulkner.

Probably it will not be Kingston in any case.

Frank Plumpton Ramsey was dead at twenty-six.

Robert Frost had exactly five poems accepted in the first seventeen years in which he was submitting.

Heinrich Schliemann. Sir Arthur Evans. Carl Blegen.

Saint Augustine was an anti-Semite.

Why is this night different from all other nights?

From Rabelais’s will:

I have nothing. I owe much. The rest I leave to the poor.

Shelley once insisted he had seen the devil leaning against a tree on his lawn.

And eyes staring at him from Mary’s breasts.

Hippo is now a town in Algeria called Bone.

Willard Hershberger slashed his throat with a straight razor in a Boston hotel room.

The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

Which would have been virtually the day before yesterday, in the period Reader is thinking of.

Thales of Miletus was believed to have predicted an eclipse of the sun for May 28, 585 B.C.

Evident as it is, why is Reader surprised to so rarely make the connection between aphrodisiac and Aphrodite?

Mathilde Wesendonck.

Nadezhda von Meek.

A miniature American flag, fixed beside one of the graves.

A completely unabridged performance of Les Troy ens was not given until 1969, exactly one hundred years after Berlioz died.

It had taken almost that long for Bach’s Mass in B Minor to be done completely also.

For Protagonist’s past. The girl named Fern Winters, lovely though fragile, who tolerated baseball games? Was she twenty-two when Reader last saw her?

Also Kate Winter then, strikingly handsome. And some few years more than twice Fern’s age, meaning a good deal nearer to Protagonist’s present.

Plus fictionalized names for each, if only provisionally?

Sonia Marmeladov. Catherine Earnshaw.

Matisse called Les Demoiselles d’Avignon a hoax.

Thales might have been a Hebrew, Herodotus thought.

I do not believe in God, though I believe in Picasso, said Diego Rivera.

Gerard Manley Hopkins died of typhoid fever in 1889. One of his brothers would live into the 1950s.

A verray, parfit gentil knyght.

And as for Protagonist’s former wife?

Reader has decided to let her look like Simonetta Vespucci.

Who may have been painted by Botticelli as well as by Piero di Cosimo.

Christina Rossetti almost certainly died a virgin.

The undeniable sexual attraction that Dorothy Wordsworth felt for William.

What is all this about Irish wit and humor? Have we any book in the house with any of it in? I’d like to read a page or two.

Are any of the books Protagonist is packing inscribed by their authors?

Or are those the ones he is more likely selling, for their added value?

Sapere aude.

Nerval once tried to lead a lobster by a ribbon through a public garden in Paris.

Tristan Corbiere did the same with a pig in Rome. In evening clothes.

Thy necessity is greater than mine.

Said Philip Sidney, in passing a drink to a dying soldier while dying himself.

Gottlob Frege.

The saloon that Protagonist now and again stops in at is an Edward Hopper.

Its name in semicircular lettering on the windows, Reader sees, viewed backwards from at the bar against wintry late afternoon sunlight.

Hilaire Belloc was an anti-Semite.

John Clare spent his last twenty-three years in an asylum. Not recognizing his own wife. At times claiming to be Byron. Or Nelson at Trafalgar.

No needle marks on your Annunciation’s arm, now.

We do not come to thoughts. They come to us.

Thought Heidegger.

The first translation of major length for purely literary purposes was a Latin Iliad, ca. 250 B.C., by Livius Andronicus.

Sheri Martinelli.

Diane Arbus committed suicide by opening her wrists in a bathtub.

Clare’s parents had been illiterate. He himself never revised a line.

I am! yet what I am who cares, or knows?

My friends forsake me like a memory lost.

I am the self-consumer of my woes.

In Joseph Conrad’s view there is not a single sincere line, unquote, in Moby Dick.

Boris Christoff and Tito Gobbi were brothers-in-law.