David Markson - Reader's Block

Temple Drake. Constance Chatterley.

Though where now is Connie Chatterley too then?

Plato left behind seven different versions of the opening sentence of the Republic.

André Gide was an anti-Semite.

Vitelli.

Chick Stahl committed suicide by drinking carbolic acid.

In his mid-thirties, Edwin Arlington Robinson was working ten hours a day on the construction of a New York subway. Checking materials for twenty cents an hour.

Bishop Berkeley once lived in Rhode Island.

Franz Marc was killed by a grenade at Verdun.

Youth.

For Exmoor.

Could the entire town to all intents have become a depressed area? Any local industry extinct, stores or even certain private dwellings boarded up?

Surely then conveying a sense almost of recession into the past?

The robin chirps in the chinaberry tree.

I went down yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon the son of Ariston, that I might offer up my prayers to the goddess; and also because I wanted to see in what manner they would celebrate the festival, which was a new thing.

Jonathan Edwards was an anti-Semite.

While acknowledging he had never met one.

It strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.

The only twentieth-century novelist from whom he always learned something, Lionel Trilling called E. M. Forster.

E. M. Forster was thirty years old before he knew the facts of life.

Infinite riches in a little room.

Menander would drown at the Piraeus.

Virgil worked on the Aeneid for eleven years.

And said near his death that it was not finished and should be burned.

Joseph Michael Medwick.

Clover Adams committed suicide.

Basquiat.

Sinon. Who lied.

The Lover, which Reader little more than skimmed. Yet tones, images of light and shadow, loss. Abstractly lingering.

Gulley Jimson.

The sun don’t shine on the same dog’s ass all the time.

Quintus of Smyrna, the Posthomerica. Which is to say, what happened next. From the burial of Hector to the shipwreck of the Greeks en route home. Thought to be fourth century A.D.

There is no death and art can prove it.

Stanley Ketchel was twenty-four years old when he was fatally shot in the back by the common-law husband of the lady who was cooking his breakfast.

Protagonist has come to this place because he had no life back there at all.

I came to Comala because I was told that my father, a certain Pedro Paramo, was living here.

Irina Ratushinskaya. At twenty-eight, as late as in 1982, sentenced to seven years in the strictest of Russian prison camps.

For writing verse deemed unsuitable to the state.

Pseudodoxia Epidemica.

Some of the battle descriptions in the later books of the Aeneid do perhaps come off as perfunctory.

If that was what Virgil had in mind?

For reasons unknown, John Wycliffe escaped being burned as a heretic. Though forty years after his death his remains were dug up and dumped into the River Swift.

Which flows into the Avon.

Jimmy Whistler, he was naturally called.

Rubens often had the Latin classics read to him while he was working.

Canova later did the same.

Schopenhauer’s first published work was his dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason.

His novelist mother said it sounded like something for druggists.

George Santayana was an anti-Semite.

It is virtually certain that Lucrezia Borgia never poisoned anyone. Or committed incest. Victor Hugo and Gaetano Donizetti notwithstanding.

Why is the red wheelbarrow beside the white chickens rather than vice versa?

Enter Caesar, in his nightgown.

Hannah Wilke’s final exhibition.

Randall Jarrell is assumed a suicide. He would appear to have stepped quite deliberately into the path of the car that killed him.

Well he kept her there in a bath

With a gallon of lysol in a bath

Gerald died that afternoon.

Victor Hugo, hélas!

Utrillo once pawned Modigliani’s only decent clothes to buy wine.

Ernest L. Thayer majored in philosophy under William James at Harvard.

C. P. Cavafy lived with his mother until he was thirty-six.

No, no! said the Queen. Sentence first — verdict afterwards.

The man himself lay in the bed.

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was killed in an infantry charge in France in 1915.

T. S. Eliot’s father manufactured bricks.

William H. McGuffey.

William H. Bonney.

Levi-Strauss:

The invention of melody is the supreme mystery of man.

Jackson Pollock once held a job cleaning bird droppings from statues in New York parks.

Work out your own salvation with diligence.

For all his madness, it would turn out that Holderlin had furtively kept all of Suzette Gontard’s letters throughout the forty years between her death and his own. Eighty years after that they would come to be published.

And somewhere men are laughing, and

somewhere children shout.

Tennyson said that scissors was the one word in the English language he could not rhyme.

Raphael, Caravaggio, Watteau, Van Gogh, and Toulouse-Lautrec each died at thirty-seven.

Ronsard was so prodigally admired during his lifetime that both Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots sent him gifts. And then was unread for two centuries.

Boswell’s practice of scribbling down every other word Johnson said irritated any number of their acquaintances. Ill-bred, Hester Thrale called him.

W. H. Davies lost a foot while jumping a freight train.

Men never do evil so completely and so cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

Said Pascal.

Pythagoras claimed to remember visiting Hades between his several alleged reincarnations.

And having seen Homer hanging from a tree and Hesiod in chains because of their disrespect for the gods.

In Gargantua, Epistemon makes the same visit. Reporting that Achilles is a beggar, Hector supports himself by scraping pots in a kitchen, Helen is a madame, Alexander darns socks, Cleopatra sells onions, and King Arthur cleans grease out of hatbands.

According to Xenophanes, Pythagoras also once asked someone to stop striking a puppy because he recognized the voice of a dead friend in its yelping.

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

At least one more for Protagonist’s background?

Again then, not infinitely long past. A woman named Susan, who edited books. But also snapped some photographs of him that will presumably now remain the last he will ever have had taken.

Brett Ashley.

Anna Wickham committed suicide.

Stephen Foster died after a fall in a rooming house on the Bowery.

He owned thirty-eight cents.

Seneca was an anti-Semite.

Jacques Derrida. Roland Barthes. Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Roman Jakobson. Michel Leiris. Julia Kristeva. Phillipe Sollers. Louis Althusser. Paul Ricoeur.

All variously attended seminars of Jacques Lacan’s.

Yannis Ritsos. Iannis Xenakis.

Jeanne Hebuterne, with child, jumped from a window on the morning after Modigliani’s death.

I am growing older. I have been in hospitals. Are there things to be put down?

David Smith died in a car crash.

The sitter for the Mona Lisa was one Lisa Gherardini, wife of a Francesco del Giocondo.

Presumably her eyebrows were plucked.

James Russell Lowell was an anti-Semite.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.

Napoleon told Goethe he had read The Sorrows of Young Werther seven times.

Trying to articulate for himself precisely why or even when it was that he commenced to fall out of touch.