David Markson - Reader's Block

Why this solitude now?

Where the Catherine Earnshaw or the Maggie Tulliver or the Sara Monday for these denatured days?

Rabbi Akiba was flayed alive.

Valéry, to Gide: Do you know anything more boring than the Iliad?

William Sidney Porter became O. Henry while sitting out three years in jail for embezzlement.

Muschg.

Skoonj.

El Caballero de la Triste Figura.

Gerard Manley Hopkins is buried in Prospect Cemetery, Glasnevin. As is Maud Gonne.

As is Paddy Dignam.

Mrs. Maj. John MacBride.

Remembering a Rachel and an Anne and a Lisa and an Irene.

And an Andrea and a Judith.

And a second Susan.

Among more.

Kay Sage committed suicide.

Andre Chénier died on the guillotine.

Come un bel dì di maggio.

Walafrid Strabo drowned in the Loire.

Siger of Brabant was stabbed to death by a deranged scribe.

Either it is raining or it is not raining.

Habitually, Protagonist brings a newspaper or a book when he eats at the restaurant. Although he is no more intruded upon here than at the saloon.

There being only a lunch counter and several booths in any case. Normally an indifferent short-order cook and one graying waitress. Protagonist will puzzle at how they remain in business.

The mirror crack’d from side to side;

The curse is come upon me, cried

The Lady of Shalott.

Saint John Chrysostom was an anti-Semite.

And insisted that Jesus had never laughed.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Nine volumes in the Loeb Classical Library.

Philip Freneau died after becoming lost in a snowstorm. On his way home from a tavern.

Milton was paid five pounds for Paradise Lost.

Yeats once asked Hardy how he coped with the endless copies of his books sent to him with requests for inscriptions.

Hardy led Yeats to a back closet. Piled from floor to ceiling.

Even with the idea of feeble stolen electricity at the gatehouse dismissed, Reader remains locked in on a nighttime image of only the faintest glow from a single bulb beyond one shaded downstairs window.

Protagonist squinting beneath the dimmest of reading lamps.

The restaurant in the same Hopper wintry-sun mode as the saloon, however.

Isabel Rawsthorne.

According to Kenneth Tynan, a corrida with Antonio Ordonez was more stirring than any other performance by any other sort of artist he might name.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner committed suicide.

Los Pasos Perdidos.

Rosalba Camera was blind in the last years of her life. Mary Cassatt was blind in the last years of her life.

Chidiock Tichborne. Who may have been as young as eighteen when he was executed at the Tower for plotting against Elizabeth in 1586.

And was disemboweled before he was extinct, as the Tower’s report had it.

Jean Francois Champollion.

Hayim Lenski died of starvation in a Soviet labor camp. Sent there for having written poems in Hebrew.

Die Zauberflöte.

Der Zauberberg.

For a certain period in his mid-twenties Vincent Van Gogh could not pass a church without breaking into tears.

And went unbathed, which he construed as sanctifying.

I want to be buried with this novel clasped to my heart.

The day is past, and yet I saw no sun,

And now I live, and now my life is done.

Jerzy Kosinski committed suicide by asphyxiating himself with a plastic bag.

Giuseppe Berto was a prisoner of war in Texas at the end of World War II.

Wyndham Lewis was an anti-Semite.

An audience of fully three thousand gave Akhmatova a standing ovation after a reading in Moscow in 1944.

About which Stalin, hearing of it: Who organized this response?

Nobody comes. Nobody calls.

Giuseppina Strepponi. Busseto.

Poe was probably impotent.

Byron, Scott, Shelley, and Wordsworth all particularly admired the poetry of Felicia Dorothea Hemans.

Felicia Dorothea Hemans wrote The boy stood on the burning deck.

We had roast pig to eat before Pickett’s charge.

Samuel Johnson’s acquaintance Oliver Edwards, who might have been a philosopher.

But that cheerfulness was always breaking in.

Jacob Epstein, to a niece: Call me Epstein. Would you have called him Uncle Donatello?

Enrico Fermi: Where are they?

The books Shelley had with him when he drowned were a Keats and a Sophocles.

The Marquis de Sade died in a lunatic asylum.

Otherwise well-informed readers who would be surprised to learn that the site of ancient Troy is in Turkey.

Where Nazim Hikmet’s work was banned through virtually all of his writing life.

While being translated into more languages than probably any other twentieth-century poet’s.

Hilda Doolittle was once a patient of Freud’s.

Was Sir Thomas Wyatt one of Anne Boleyn’s lovers? Is it certain she had lovers?

Dollars damn me.

Fata morgana.

Some few friends, at least, from that earlier existence, with whom Reader should have Protagonist correspond?

Other writers?

She has no wit, but enough sound human sense to be able to fulfill her duties as a wife and mother.

Said Mozart of Constanze.

At Walden, Thoreau was borrowing land owned by Emerson.

And was no more than a ten-minute stroll from Concord.

Paul Celan drowned himself in the Seine.

I. G. Farben.

Delacroix was almost surely the illegitimate son of Talleyrand.

A gone shipmate, like any other man, is gone forever; and I never met one of them again.

Dear Cicero. Regards, Protagonist.

Philip Larkin: Who’s Jorge Luis Borges?

Are Protagonist’s few books known at all? Ever read?

Paul Ancel. Or Antschel.

They do not move.

Cervantes is buried at a convent in Madrid, though exactly where in its cemetery is not known. Nor is there a known portrait of him.

And she came through the mist and the rain to me

From the soft warm lights of the town.

Ingeborg Bachmann died at forty-seven after setting fire to a mattress with a cigarette.

Giacomo Casabianca.

Mystified by the ear of a poet who would call a volume Where Water Comes Together with Other Water.

La Vida Breve.

Roy Campbell was an anti-Semite.

And was one of the few writers or artists aligned with the fascists during the Spanish Civil War.

Like Dali.

Why is Reader always momentarily startled to recall that Keats was a fully licensed surgeon?

Does Protagonist even have a telephone?

Medieval legend says that Aquinas’s corpse was boiled and his bones preserved as relics. In actuality he was buried in Toulouse.

Ed Delehanty may have committed suicide. Having either jumped or fallen from a bridge at Niagara Falls.

El Greco would appear to have been almost impoverished at his death, though he left behind 147 canvases. Whether because he could not sell them, or would not, remains moot.

That man writes really too sloppily, said Joyce of D. H. Lawrence.

Sue Bridehead.

Hugo van der Goes died insane.

Haydn and Beethoven each nominated Handel as the greatest of composers.

Berlioz called him a tub of pork and beer.

Solomon Ibn Gabirol.

Wittgenstein had a close friend named Eccles.

Arnold Bennett died of typhoid fever after drinking Paris tap water. Deliberately drinking it, to prove to someone it was safe.

I’m Captain Jinks of the horse marines.

Yasnaya Polyana. Max Gate. Rowan Oak. Thoor Ballylee. I Tatti.

New Place.

Isaac Rosenberg was killed in France in World War I.

Charlotte Mew committed suicide by drinking creosote.

Alma Mahler was an anti-Semite.

Two of Alma Mahler’s three husbands, Mahler and Franz Werfel, were Jews.