David Markson - Reader's Block

It was the first Ptolemy, Ptolemy Soter, who was told by Euclid that there was no royal road to geometry.

Rilke never read a daily newspaper.

The man who is tired of London is tired of life.

Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi.

Pons asinorum.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

One of Sergei Esenin’s wives was Isadora Duncan. Another later married Meyerhold. The third was a granddaughter of Tolstoy.

Cithaeron.

Sappho’s poetry was burned at least three times by the Church. Fewer than seven hundred lines remain out of probably twelve thousand, with most of those forming only fragments.

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters coming from one of such.

In the basement of the house on the beach, an old-style wood stove?

A fireplace, presumably part of the renovation?

Wood corded near the base of the dune outside?

Dieu me pardonnera. C’est son metier.

Ludwig Boltzmann committed suicide.

Wilkie Collins maintained two households simultaneously. Both with mistresses.

Lunar caustic.

Zbigniew Herbert.

Degas was an anti-Semite.

Protagonist also recalling sweltering recent summers when imprisoned in the city? Surely the beach, but even the gatehouse, a significant reprieve?

He has licked dust from the floor of every third-rate hostess in England.

Said Harold Frederic of Henry James.

Stendhal was an officer with Napoleon’s armies in the retreat from Moscow in 1812.

Sebastian Dangerfield.

Jack London was illegitimate.

In Act II of Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare allows Hector to mention Aristotle. Who will not be born until some nine hundred years after the fact.

dein goldenes Haar Margarete

dein aschenes Haar Sulamith

According to legend, Li Po drowned when he fell out of a boat, drunk, leaning to kiss a reflection of the moon.

If a picture of the Virgin is to be any good, I must paint it from a drawing of a woman I sleep with. Said Stanley Spencer.

Mythologies and Me.

Che farò senza Euridice?

Eduard Marxsen.

Anselm Kiefer.

Only the Americans didn’t give me a visa.

Standing a little apart, Wilhelm began to cry.

Milton suffered from constipation.

Kathleen Ferrier. Dame Janet Baker. General Jackie Home.

Jack Kerouac lived with his mother for most of the last twenty years of his life.

Samuel Pepys attended a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the King’s Theater in 1662.

The most ridiculous, insipid play I ever saw in my life.

Paul Christman. Jack Crain. Bill Dudley. John Kimbrough.

That’s not writing, that’s typing.

She is older than the rocks among which she sits.

From Michelangelo:

Messer Giorgio Vasari — Many days ago I received a letter from you; I did not reply at once in order not to behave like a merchant.

César Vallejo wrote more than half of the Poemas Humanos during four months very near his death.

Renan, at the unveiling of a statue of Spinoza:

Woe to him who in passing should hurl an insult at this gentle and pensive head.

And my poor fool is hang’d!

Sir John Suckling committed suicide.

Babi Yar.

Gabriel Spencer.

Fifteen years after Moby Dick, Melville had to pay to publish Clarel With borrowed money.

Fichte was an anti-Semite.

Stravinsky studied composition under Rimsky-Korsakov. As did Glazunov. As did Respighi.

Eliot wore a truss.

Robert Greene died after overindulging on pickled herring and Rhenish wine.

Kuznetsov.

Yevtushenko. The Shostakovich Thirteenth.

Edgar Lee Masters was once the law partner of Clarence Darrow.

Mathis Neithardt-Gothardt.

Frank Frisch’s name was misspelled in the first edition of The Sun Also Rises in 1926 and not corrected in any later edition Reader ever glanced into.

E avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma!

Alys Smith.

Dora Black.

Patricia Spence.

Edith Finch.

Suppose the woman should cease to come to the grave?

What happens in regard to the woman in any event?

Or is Reader again envisioning some sort of similar situation at the ocean?

Protagonist walking the beach, at water’s edge, perhaps at a certain hour each day? Here a woman who does the same?

Vereda de Santa Fe.

Piazza San Francesco di Paola.

Leonardo’s notebooks indicate familiarity with at least five different works by Aristotle.

Lenin wrote a foreword for Ten Days that Shook the World,

Sing at noon? Madame, at noon I am happy to be able to spit.

Said Chaliapin.

Obviously, a nod. Fairly soon an innocuous comment in passing?

John Ringo committed suicide.

Were Jesus and Mary Magdalen lovers? In the Gnostic Gospels, the specific word for her relationship with him translates from the Greek as consort.

Lady Ottoline Morrell.

Juan de Yepes.

Louise Colet’s affair with Flaubert. Louise Colet’s affair with Musset. Louise Colet’s affair with Cousin. Louise Colet’s affair with Vigny.

And cetera.

the year is full of unforseen happenings

and the time of earthquakes is at hand

An upstart crow, beautified with our feathers.

Rousseau was an anti-Semite.

And/or in harsh weather? Huddled against winds? Snow in patches, Reader again sees.

Max Beckmann died of a heart attack while strolling in Central Park in Manhattan.

Praxiteles’ mistress/model Phryne was once on the verge of being convicted of impiety. It appears factual that the orator Hyperides, defending her, signaled for her to bare her bosom.

And won acquittal.

At Amherst, ca. 1880:

Emily, you wretch! None of this nonsense! I’ve traveled all the way from Springfield to see you. Come down at once.

Mai Zetterling.

Ypres.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hanged by the Gestapo.

In his Beheading of John the Baptist, Caravaggio spells out his name in some of the Baptist’s spilled blood at the lower edge of the canvas. Otherwise he signed no paintings.

All ages are contemporaneous.

Dante married a woman named Gemma Donati at eighteen or twenty after a formal family betrothal of years earlier. For all his repeated use of autobiography, he makes no single reference to her anywhere.

Gaudeamus igitur.

Are there two women upstairs, or more?

Even without seeing them come and go, conscious instantly of the first footfalls.

If to no other end, surely accentuating the isolation?

P

ier Paolo Pasolini was murdered.

Dino Campana died mad.

Paul Feyerabend was crippled from a wound as a German officer on the Russian front in World War II.

Narciso Yepes.

Protagonist kept company by chipmunks? By field mice? By the gulls?

Isocrates committed suicide by starving himself.

Living in slums, literally pawning clothes to buy food, at times Karl Marx could not afford paper to write on. Between 1850 and 1855 three of his children died. For one he had to beg a loan for a coffin.

H. L. Mencken was an anti-Semite.

Qumran.

Samuel Beckett was the best man at the wedding of Joyce’s grandson Stephen.

I think I shall be among the English poets after my death.

The same Antony who covered Brutus’s body with his own robe at Philippi had had Cicero’s head and right hand nailed up in the Forum only a year before.

Michelangelo Merisi.

Is there such a word as grue if Nelson Goodman invented it to illustrate a philosophic point but it has no other application beyond that classroom context whatsoever?

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

Panem et circenses.