David Markson - Reader's Block

Seven centuries afterward.

Karl Barth was an anti-Semite.

Là ci darem la mano.

How is Protagonist’s eyesight?

Apparently no one has ever believed Vasari’s story that Filippo Lippi was once held prisoner by Barbary pirates but released when he astonished their leader by drawing his portrait.

Has Reader at least made a decision about giving Protagonist some sort of literary past?

Even if only from a good number of years back?

The leprosy of letters, Flaubert called critics.

Man shall be trained for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior. All else is folly.

Arshile Gorky hanged himself.

Initially, the word metaphysics meant only that which came behind the Physics in the Aristotle canon. An early editor made use of it for lack of better.

Tertullian has it that Democritus deliberately blinded himself in old age by staring into the sun. So as not to suffer the sight of beautiful women he could no longer possess.

But O that I were young again

And held her in my arms!

Two years after that condemnation of Hobbes, Samuel Pepys would find Leviathan selling, secondhand, for four times its original price:

It being a book the Bishops will not let be printed again.

Gidon Kremer.

For Protagonist’s literary past:

Protagonist: Isn’t it awfully long since Caitlin went to the ladies’ room?

Dylan Thomas: She’s probably in that other saloon across the street. Go buy her a drink and tell her I apologize for ignoring her, will you? She’ll let off less steam if it’s you instead of me.

William Ernest Henley lost a leg to bone disease.

Mikhail Bakhtin lost a leg to bone disease.

Melville’s older son Malcolm committed suicide at eighteen.

Sarah Gamp was William Faulkner’s favorite fictional character.

Dirty stinking Degenerate Bobs was here from Boston, North End, Mass. Warp son of a bitch.

The Duchess of Medina Sidonia. Whom Reader once saw at zparador on the Costa del Sol, being escorted to jail after political protest.

Young Lochinvar.

Frank O’Hara died after being hit by a jeep on the beach at Fire Island.

Unquestionably, Protagonist will have spent time in Spain.

Wolf Solent.

La Duquesa Roja.

Claude Lorrain was very nearly illiterate.

John Greenleaf Whittier to the contrary, the woman in Frederick, Maryland, who displayed a Union flag when Stonewall Jackson entered the town was a Mrs. Mary Quantrell.

Pushkin’s dramatic poem in which an envious Salieri poisons Mozart.

Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera based on same.

Dan Pagis. Nathan Zach.

Frank Stella: What you see is what you see.

Georg Buchner died of typhus in 1837, at twenty-three. Woyzeck would not be published until forty-two years later.

Who touches a hair of yon grey head

Dies like a dog! March on! he said.

Malcolm Melville had played on a local baseball team. This when Melville himself was already in the customs sheds, and with virtually all of his fiction ten and fifteen years behind him.

No image arises of the somber, disregarded author rooting on the sidelines at a game.

Michael Ventris died in a car crash.

Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother.

Did the woman herself ever see the photograph?

Yeats died in southern France in 1939. His body was returned to Ireland on an Irish destroyer after World War II.

Pier Angeli committed suicide.

Joe Orton was murdered.

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.

Bernal Diaz del Castillo.

Agnes von Kurowsky.

Now I know you. No field, no home, no wife, no woman — no friends, no love.

Jacques Louis David was repeatedly drawn to sketch prisoners being led to the guillotine.

Isadora Duncan was strangled when her long scarf became caught in a wheel of her open Bugatti.

God, children know something they can’t tell; they like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed!

Linear B.

Dear me, I am about to become a god.

Karl Marx was an anti-Semite.

Karl Marx was descended on both sides from long lines of rabbis and Talmudic scholars.

Zyklon B.

Charles Martel.

Benjamin Robert Haydon committed suicide.

On the evidence, Shakespeare’s small Latin was plainly more than that.

Oft did I weary of wrestling with thee.

Carved an unknown galley slave into an oar.

And Rudyard Kipling into his desk.

At the house on the beach, what becomes of Protagonist’s path to the highway when the snows are heavier than those Reader has visualized?

What is the winter really like, precisely at ocean’s edge?

He stank so badly, though we were great chums

I had to leave him; then rats ate his thumbs.

Watching abstractedly before the dunes as the entire shore commences to disappear?

Roger van der Weyden signed none of his paintings.

Either as Roger van der Weyden or Rogier de la Pasture.

J

oyce was influential enough to be able to aid at least a dozen Jews in escaping from Nazi Germany. Hermann Broch among them.

Tekiah. Shevarim. Teruah. Tekiab.

It remains a scandal to philosophy that there is as yet no satisfactory proof of an external world, Kant said.

Does Protagonist continue to walk the beach at his usual hour now also?

But surely not at this time of year a woman who does the same?

Robert Lowell died of a heart attack in a taxi.

After his cremation, Gandhi’s ashes were scattered into the Ganges, considered sacred. At Allahabad.

Where it and the Jumna conjoin.

Ruth Kligman, who was thrown clear in the crash that killed Jackson Pollock and a friend of hers, later had an affair with Willem de Kooning.

And later had an affair with Franz Kline.

Caponegro. Latiolais.

Darling Jill.

Robert Louis Stevenson died of a cerebral hemorrhage at forty-four, but had been emaciated by tuberculosis before that. A bundle of sticks in a bag, Henry Adams said he looked like.

Doch das Sein — was ist das Sein?

Isaac Babel disappeared in one of Stalin’s purges. Nothing whatsoever is known about his death.

Conversely, orders allegedly given by Stalin in regard to Pasternak: Don’t touch the cloud-dweller.

Women have, in general, no love of any art; they have no proper knowledge of any; and they have no genius.

Said Rousseau.

When Stalin himself was found dead, a recording of Mozart’s twenty-third piano concerto lay on his turntable.

Kipling was an anti-Semite.

At thirty-five, Antonio Machado married a fifteen-year-old. Who died when Machado was thirty-eight.

Or possibly now someone he will never see closely at all, not coming toward him but moving in his same direction? And always a fair distance ahead?

Continuing on to become a kind of actualized vanishing point when Protagonist himself halts?

Stefan Zweig committed suicide.

Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here.

John Masefield was fourteen when he first went to sea.

David Alfaro Siqueiros once attempted to assassinate Trotsky.

Whoso pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvil, is right-wise king born of all England.

Verse deemed unsuitable to the state.

Is Noah’s drunkenness the earliest anywhere taken note of?

Avalokiteshvara.

Vanishing point.

She?

Marcel Proust collected signatures for petitions in protest against the conviction of Dreyfus.

Hugh Casey shot himself.

Saint John of Capistrano was an anti-Semite.

Fly’s Photograph Gallery.

Arthur Symons on Mallarme:

He made neither intrusion upon nor concession to those who, after all, were not obliged to read him.