David Markson - Reader's Block

Photographs of Protagonist with?

Tiresias concluded that 90 percent of the pleasure in sex was woman’s.

For which presumption Hera blinded him. Though in compensation Zeus gave him second sight.

Someone else for Protagonist’s past?

Also from some time ago. A woman named Josie, who taught. And so reminded him of a certain Modigliani nude that he tacked up a reproduction of the painting as a kind of talisman.

Molly Bloom. Daisy Buchanan. Isabel Archer.

Euripides’ mother was a fruit seller.

For years, Defoe was a hosier.

Where was Jesus between the ages of twelve and twenty-nine?

The mobled queen.

Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman went to Dodger games at Ebbets Field together.

Kant was only five feet tall. Wagner was very little taller.

En ce bordeau ou tenons nostre estat.

Elfriede Heidegger would appear to have been a considerably better-looking woman than Hannah Arendt.

Quanah Parker.

Byron went into permanent exile from England in late April of 1816, near Passover. One of the last London friends he saw was the composer Isaac Nathan.

Who brought him a farewell gift of matzos.

Romain Gary committed suicide. As had his wife Jean Seberg a year earlier.

If there’s no God, how can I be a captain then?

Montcorbier.

Jussi Bjoerling’s D-flat in the Cuius animam of Rossini’s Stabat Mater,

October 7, 1849. At forty, in Baltimore. Filthy, starving, drunk and/or with delirium tremens, crying out at unseen creatures.

For the love of God, Montresor!

Valerie Solanis. Ruth Steinhagen.

Henry Adams was an anti-Semite.

Pound put his son Omar into other people’s care as an infant. He saw him once, for a few hours, when the boy was twelve. And not again until he was twenty.

Stalin was one of Maxim Gorky’s pallbearers.

Hegel died in a cholera epidemic.

Florence Margaret Smith.

Not squatter but caretaker? Guardian of the deceased?

Yad Vashem.

Mount Abora is in no atlas.

Once, at a formal Nobel Prize occasion, Knut Hamsun snapped Selma Lagerlof s garter.

Fragonard died completely forgotten.

Nicholas de Stael committed suicide.

The first time Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 was performed in London, in 1901, the audience literally stood up and cheered. The orchestra played it again and the same thing happened. It had to be played yet a third time before the program could go on.

Augusta Leigh. Incest consummated or not?

Demosthenes copied out Thucydides eight times, in determination to emulate the prose.

Damon Rutherford.

How long, O Catiline?

Could there for that matter be thefts in the cemetery? Intruders?

Of or in regard to what?

Reader’s mental wastebasket, a thought for.

Tanaquil Le Clercq. Performing major roles for Balanchine at seventeen.

And in a wheelchair from polio not ten years later.

Delmore Schwartz died of a heart attack in a seedy Times Square hotel. Three days passed before anyone could be found to claim his body.

James Baldwin was an anti-Semite.

Not sorting books and phonograph records merely, but the narrowing residue of an entire life? Papers, files of correspondence?

Are there manuscripts?

The Blotner biography says that although he was in New York, Faulkner did not attend the memorial service held after Dylan Thomas’s death. In fact he wore a gray tweed jacket, an emerald vest, and a Tyrolean hat. With a feather.

But how is Reader aware that like Tarquin, Tanaquil is an Etruscan name?

Like Lars Porsena.

An enormous dungheap, Voltaire dismissed the sum of Shakespeare as.

Pisistratus.

Involved with Madame Blavatsky, Yeats once burned a rose and seriously watched all night for its ghost to appear.

Was Brahms the father of Clara Schumann’s last child?

Vittoria Colonna. To whom Michelangelo wrote sonnets.

John Donne delivered George Herbert’s mother’s funeral sermon.

Malcolm Lowry probably died from an overdose of sodium amytal tablets. A coroner’s verdict read misadventure rather than suicide, however, because, drunk, he had also choked on his own vomit.

Robert Walser spent his last twenty-seven years in a mental institution.

Rousseau’s mistress, Therese Levasseur, was an illiterate hotel maid. She and Rousseau had five children, all of whom he left anonymously at orphanages.

She also went to bed with James Boswell. Exactly thirteen times, according to the latter’s compulsive journal-keeping.

Tout, au monde, existe pour aboutir à un livre.

As a writer, he chews more than he bites off. Said Whistler of Henry James.

Diva. Thea.

Brahma. Vishnu. Shiva.

Joyce, Hesse, Mann, and Rilke all died in Switzerland. Stefan George, Robert Musil, and Erich Maria Remarque all died in Switzerland.

Myth, Religion, and Mother Right.

Robert Burns’s wife not only made light of his interminable infidelities, and took in one of his illegitimate children, but ventured that he should have had at least two wives to begin with.

Thalatta, thalatta!

One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing, Wilde said.

When Hemingway committed suicide, it was by leaning to press his forehead against the barrels of a shotgun braced at the floor.

Thirty-odd years earlier his father had used a revolver.

Thomas Babington Macaulay and Horatius at that bridge to the contrary, Lars Porsena did conquer Rome.

By the nine gods he swore.

Has Reader made any sort of decision about how long Protagonist’s small money will last?

And?

Else Lasker-Schuler’s tombstone at the Mount of Olives was uprooted when that part of Jerusalem was taken by Arab forces in 1948. The grave was never again located.

In his mid-twenties, Verdi lost his wife and two infant children within a space of two years.

In the decade before his death, Ad Reinhardt painted nothing but black canvases.

Alessandro Stradella was murdered.

no symbols where none intended

Benvenuto Cellini was once released from prison, after having killed, because a Pope needed some engraving.

And was thrown back in after insulting the Pope’s taste.

Degas’s mother was born in New Orleans.

Thou sayest it.

Protagonist’s obsolescent phonograph. And scarred long-playing records, never surrendered for compact discs.

Nor will there be a VCR.

Can Protagonist think of a single film that interests him as much as the three-hundredth best book he ever read?

Ecole Normale Superieure.

May 30, 1431:

Rouen, Rouen, O thou, my last dwelling place!

The devious-cruising Rachel.

Pierre Reverdy spent thirty years as a lay brother in a Benedictine monastery.

Though with his Poems in Frank O’Hara’s pocket.

From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.

The Bay Psalm Book.

Keats wrote the four great odes in one month.

Taking details for the urn from a painting by Claude Lorrain.

Ernestine Schumann-Heink had sons fighting on both sides in World War I.

The son fighting for the Germans was killed.

We are lost. We have burned a saint.

Guido Cavalcanti died of malaria.

Kazantzakis’s sequel to the Odyssey contains 33,333 lines.

Clara Westhoff.

Emily Dickinson told Thomas Wentworth Higginson that she had not read Whitman. But had heard he was disgraceful.

Has Reader decided if Protagonist will have ever seen Becky Sharp in later life? When did he last see Daisy Buchanan?

Another, for him?

Here, from not that long ago. A woman named Liz, who sculpted. And with a face so finely boned that even past midlife the chiaroscuro in certain light could make his breath catch.