David Markson - Reader's Block

Marie-Therese Walter hanged herself in a garage.

Women at the time of Troy wore only a single garment. Which is to say, no underclothing.

And did not bathe with any frequency.

John Bunyan wrote the better part of Pilgrim’s Progress while in jail for illegal preaching.

One kid, one kid, that father bought for two zuzim.

Should it be at least three years since Protagonist has been involved with a woman? Longer?

Why would he have become involved with no one since?

Or does the withdrawal obviously feed on itself and increasingly preclude even the chance of meeting someone to start with?

Helen unwashed? Andromache?

Moritz Schlick was shot and killed on the steps of the university library in Vienna by a student whose thesis he had failed.

Conchita Supervia died in childbirth.

Etienne Joseph Theophile Thore.

Who resurrected Vermeer after two full centuries of disregard.

Jules Bastien-Lepage.

For whom Reader can still sometimes be the fool.

Mill was reading Plato at seven. In Greek.

Heraclitus once had himself buried in cow dung when ill. For purposes of drawing out the fluids of dropsy, Diogenes Laertius says.

Grace Moore died in a plane crash.

Niels Lyhne. Which Joyce, Ibsen, Hesse, Mann, Strindberg, Rilke, Freud, were all profound admirers of. Rilke calling all of Jacobsen’s work as indispensable to him as the Bible.

Kilgore, Texas.

If indeed three or four years, will Protagonist have at least begun to become accustomed to the solitude?

Accustomed, or wearily acquiescent, does Reader mean?

I hope the bourgeoisie as long as they exist will have cause to remember my carbuncles.

Handel, born in central Germany, is buried in Westminster Abbey.

Henry Fielding is buried in Portugal.

Sophocles and Herodotus were intimate friends.

Solange Raytchine.

Attorney General: So then it is for the labour of two days that you ask a fee of two hundred guineas?

Whistler: No. I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime.

When Queen Christina of Sweden hired Descartes as a personal philosophy tutor in 1649, she dispatched a warship under a full admiral to convey him to Stockholm.

But then demanded daily instruction at 5 A.M. in the Scandinavian winter. Descartes caught pneumonia and died.

Renoir, Manet, Gauguin, and Edvard Munch all did portraits of Mallarmé.

Gurre-Lieder.

Frederick Delius was paralyzed and blinded by syphilis.

Tradition says that Saint Paul was decapitated.

John D. MacDonald is by any standards a better writer than Saul Bellow.

Sir James Frazer spent as many as fifteen hours a day, seven days a week, at his desk at Cambridge. Throughout his life. It eventually cost him his eyesight.

What sort of bargain can Reader turn Protagonist into if he does allow him to meet someone?

How little money does he in fact live on?

Would he even be able to pick up a dinner check for two people at a respectable restaurant?

Emanuel de Witte drowned himself.

Gertrude Stein had to pay to publish Three Lives,

And if I, Fern, would remember Lee Suffridge Priest for so long as I lived, who when I too was dead would remember me?

Oskar Kokoschka and Siegfried Sassoon were both wounded twice in World War I.

Fighting on opposite sides.

Dante and Duns Scotus were born in the same year.

There is no mystery in human creation. Will performs this miracle.

Said Camus.

Salvador de Madariaga propounds strongly suggestive evidence that Cervantes may have been a Sephardic Jew.

And how is Protagonist’s health, what with hospitalizations being mentioned?

Does Reader see any point in perhaps contriving current medical difficulties for him?

Major?

Protagonist has come to this place because he was told he has a limited time to live?

Doctor Subtilis.

To me it was only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life; it is just a piece of rhythmical grumbling.

Valéry said he could never write a novel for one insurmountable reason. He would have to include sentences like The Marquise went out at five.

Protagonist has cancer, but it is for the moment in remission?

Anaximander did or did not invent the gnomon.

Saint Ambrose was an anti-Semite.

Stranger, go tell the Spartans that we lie here in obedience to their bidding.

Pushkin and Lermontov were killed in duels less than five years apart.

Stephen Crane was the catcher on his Syracuse University baseball team.

Marsilio Ficino.

Leonidas. 480 B.C.

Arthur Koestler committed suicide with an overdose of barbiturates. His wife joined him.

St. Martin’s Churchyard, Laugharne, Carmarthenshire, Wales.

Mozart composed his last three symphonies in six weeks.

Plutarch: When the candles are out, all women are fair.

One of the titles on an extant bookseller’s bill to Joyce from Trieste, dated 1914, is Pinocchio.

Nirvana means without wind, or blown out. In the sense that desire no longer exists.

A railroad siding, the Astapovo station. November 7, 1910.

Ombra maifu.

Abstract Expressionism was invented by New York drunks.

Bitburg.

George Eastman committed suicide.

Djuna Barnes spent her last forty years as a near recluse in a one-room mews apartment in Greenwich Village. She died there at ninety.

Since Cassius first did whet me against Caesar,

I have not slept.

Conrad Aiken’s gravestone is a stone bench. With its inscription on the seat.

Incitatus.

The duel in which Pushkin was killed took place in 1837. The man who killed him, a French officer named Georges d’Anthes, lived another fifty-eight years.

Rupert Brooke was an anti-Semite.

R. B. Kitaj.

Protagonist went out at five?

Constance Mayer committed suicide by slashing her throat with Pierre Paul Prud’hon’s razor.

They are losing the Battle of the Ebro.

Psychic distance. Synesthetic equilibrium.

The Divine Comedy contains 14,230 lines.

Most of which Goethe described as repulsive.

Thucydides Mythistoricus.

Renoir’s father was a tailor.

There is no there there.

Why has Reader decided that Protagonist once worked as a logger? In prehistory. And near a town called Molalla, Oregon?

Tzeitl. Hodel. Chava.

A curator, showing Rodin certain of Blake’s drawings: He actually saw those things.

Rodin: He should have seen them three or four times.

Tennyson was reading Cymbeline when he died. His copy of the play was put into his coffin.

Was Freud sleeping with his wife’s sister?

Eulalia of Merida.

Hey, Djuna, are you still alive over there?

That great solemn ass Goethe, Claudel called him.

And can any of them, with whom he has mostly long now lost touch, be even now dead?

Becky Sharp? Sonia Marmeladov? Daisy Buchanan?

Whistle, and she’ll come to you, wrote John Fletcher, of Beaumont and Fletcher, three hundred years before Lauren Bacall.

Golden lads and girls all must,

As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

Two of Thomas Mann’s sons committed suicide.

As did two of Marx’s daughters.

T. E. Lawrence was illegitimate.

Louis Aragon won the Croix de Guerre in World War I and again in World War II.

Delacroix’s Journals. Berlioz’s Memoirs.

Thomas Gray was one of twelve children. All eleven others died as infants.

El Greco had to sue the Toledo Cathedral to be paid for his Disrobing of Christ. Which the Cathedral had commissioned.

Ljuba Welitsch was married to a traffic policeman.

Denis Diderot was an anti-Semite.