David Markson - Reader's Block

Not to call. Not to go. Not to do.

Or was he not even that fully aware of the process until he found it to be a fait accompli?

The sound of a door shutting is heard from below.

Cosimo Tura died in a poorhouse.

Discordia concors.

Anne Hathaway was twenty-six when she told Shakespeare she was pregnant.

Shakespeare was eighteen.

Casta diva.

Aristotle was born in the first year of the ninety-ninth Olympiad and died in the third year of the hundred and fourteenth.

Ergo having been either sixty-two or sixty-three.

He may also have died a suicide. Diogenes Laertius says he drank wolfsbane. Though most other sources blame chronic indigestion.

The Poems of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell sold two copies.

Guido Reni.

Who was once as widely admired as Ronsard.

The reign of the shopwindow, Ortega called it as long ago as in 1930.

Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels — bring home.

It cost Baudelaire five years of letters and poems to coax Madame Sabatier into bed. Once. Whatever calamity occurred, the affair was terminated on the same night.

Cold in the earth, and fifteen wild Decembers

From those brown hills have melted into spring.

Arnold Schoenberg was once turned down for a Guggenheim fellowship.

Pier della Vigna committed suicide after Frederick II had him blinded. Dante confronts him with much sympathy in the Inferno.

Raymond Radiguet wrote Devil in the Flesh at seventeen. And was dead at twenty.

Henry James was bored by Crime and Punishment.

Wagner was an anti-Semite.

Mariano Azuela, as a physician, rode with Pancho Villa.

Dies Irae.

Kafka laughed repeatedly when he was reading his own work.

Milena Jesenska died at Ravensbriick.

The one describes what has happened, the other what might. Hence poetry is something more philosophical and serious than history.

Dasjudentum in derMusik.

Humphrey Cobb was wounded, and gassed twice, in World War I. Paths of Glory was his only book.

At the gatehouse, the window near which Protagonist generally chooses to sit looks out on the graves rather than on the street.

With snow, the ranks of still white stone can assume an almost occult unreality.

Frequently he will walk the nearby deserted streets in snow.

Ignis fatuus.

Moses spoke with a stutter. As did Virgil.

And Somerset Maugham. And Philip Larkin.

Raphael’s birth and death both occurred on Good Friday.

I hope you are getting some exercise and listening to music, dear Salman.

Early in the Iliad, on the battlements above the Scaean Gate, Helen points out the several Greek chieftains for the benefit of King Priam.

After the siege has ostensibly been in effect for a decade.

Bartlebooth.

Zelda Fitzgerald died in a fire in a mental hospital in Ashe-ville, North Carolina.

Our lives are haunted by a Georgia slattern, because a London cutpurse went unhung.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko was once married to Bella Akhmadulina.

Does one know today with whom Columbus sailed when he discovered America?

Said Freud after his break with Jung.

The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines.

Beatrice Silverman.

Adele Morales.

Lady Jean Campbell.

Beverly Bentley.

Carol Stevens.

Norris Church.

Romain Roiland, on Kathe KoUwitz: the voice of the silence of the sacrificed.

Leave the bum be. He’s just drunk.

October 12, 1492. At 2 A.M., the lookout on the Pinta.

Named Rodrigo de Triana.

No light; but rather darkness visible.

Leonard Warren collapsed and died, on stage, during a performance of La Forza del Destino at the Metropolitan Opera.

Even in the worst of snows, Protagonist is hatless.

Elizabeth Shaw Melville:

Herman has taken to writing poetry. You need not tell anyone, for you know how such things get around.

Watching abstractedly among the ancient oaks as the entire cemetery commences to disappear.

Bertha Mason. Thornfield Hall.

Semper incumbebat libris. Spoken of Abelard.

Not realizing that one’s future is already one’s present even as that too is dissolving into past.

This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. Two years after the book’s appearance Borowski committed suicide.

Via gas.

Raymond Chandler was so obsessive about typo-free manuscripts that to cut down on the amount of his retyping he finally worked on half pages.

Edmund Wilson once proposed marriage to Djuna Barnes.

How often does the woman come to the grave?

What sort of regularity is there in the visits?

Does she sometimes fail to come?

Roald Dahl was an anti-Semite.

The 1941 Concise Cambridge History of English Literature said that no one would ever read Ulysses even if copies were given away.

Protagonist shoveling some of the snow? Into and along the pathways?

Hers?

Gitanjalu

Soutine died in Paris in 1943. As a Jew under the German occupation he could be given only the most unobtrusive of funerals. Picasso and Cocteau followed his coffin, however.

Simonides concluded it was better to be rich than wise.

Since I notice that the wise spend most of their time at the doorsteps of the rich.

Paula Modersohn-Becker was dead at thirty-one.

Set ye Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle, and retire ye from him, so that he may be smitten, and die.

Beniamino Gigli was once an apprentice in a tailor shop.

Benjamin Jowett said he read Pickwick Papers at least twice every year.

Not one of the philosophic essays of Charles Sanders Peirce appeared in book form in his lifetime.

Fatwa.

Myles na Gopaleen.

The opening sentence of Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford.

Proust and Henri Bergson were cousins by marriage.

Kant knew no music. And said that reading novels diluted the mind.

Though I never saw him, or had any personal communication with him, now that he is suddenly dead I realize that he was nearer, dearer, and more important to me than anyone else.

Said Tolstoy of Dostoievsky.

No greater man ever walked the earth than he.

Said Michelangelo of Dante.

Can Reader do anything unusual with the name he puts on the stone at which the woman kneels?

How recent will he make its dates?

Has he even yet determined the age of the woman herself?

Or whether Protagonist does in fact catch sight of her elsewhere?

Counterfactual conditionals.

Beckett’s Murphy was rejected by forty-two publishers.

Gilles Deleuze committed suicide.

Factoryville, Pennsylvania. Donora, Pennsylvania. Gretna, Louisiana. Van Meter, Iowa.

Quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante.

Gabriele D’Annunzio lost an eye in combat with the Italian air force in World War I.

Thrushcross Grange.

Lautréamont was born in Montevideo. Jules Laforgue was born in Montevideo. Jules Supervielie was born in Montevideo.

Once more before I die I will read Don Quixote, said Gissing.

Graham Greene was an anti-Semite.

I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me.

O yes! I am poison’d; mother, make my bed soon,

For I’m sick at the heart, and I fain wald lie down.

Born with the gift of laughter and the sense that the world was mad, and that was his only patrimony.

Has Reader made note of enough women for Protagonist’s background? Considering all the years involved?

Remembering any number of others who could readily be appropriated.

Though leaving the critical question for Protagonist’s situation still.