David Markson - Reader's Block

Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe.

Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein.

Three quarks for Muster Mark!

Even in the solemn moments of the mass, when prayer should be the purest… when I should groan for what I have done, I sigh for what I have lost.

Ramon Mercader.

Goethe, to Eckermann: Have all the nations of the world since Euripides produced one dramatist worthy to hand him his slippers?

Apollinaire came extremely close to being permanently paralyzed by a head wound in World War I.

Once more before he dies Protagonist will read Moll Flanders.

My father’s a judge.

My mother pleaded her belly.

Sir Richard Burton, of the Kama Sutra, spoke twenty-nine languages.

Tchaikovsky was an anti-Semite.

Thomas Mann’s definition of a writer. Someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Mrs. Hutchinson.

Harry Crosby shot himself in the head. After first shooting the young married woman with whom he was having an affair.

At sixteen, Montserrat Caballe was working in a handkerchief factory in Barcelona.

Plautus once worked in a flour mill.

Three years after Baudelaire’s death, the photographer Nadar glimpsed Jeanne Duval distantly, on crutches, on a Paris street.

There is no further word of her.

Protagonist obtusely hatless in these snows too?

Patterned after whom?

Faulkner died following a fall from a horse.

Like Keats’s father.

The Aeneid is rife with allusions to Homer, but also to Homeric criticism. It was Virgil’s assumption that his readers would recognize both.

Beiderbecke. Trumbauer.

The odd death of Emile Zola. From smoke inhalation, when a chimney in a bedroom fireplace backed up.

Dormir nonchalamment a V ombre de ses seins.

Hannibal committed suicide via poison.

Murray Gell-Mann.

The first person Dickens wanted to meet, on his first visit to America, was William Cullen Bryant.

Civilization and Its Distant Tents.

Cartons like an impermanent sculpture of found objects. On a stairway ending at a sealed-off door.

He had become a dirty bourgeois.

Lord, don’t help us. But don’t muck it up for us either.

Henry James most likely died a virgin. John Ruskin indisputably did.

Whistler was an anti-Semite.

Casals practiced Bach’s six suites for solo cello for twelve years before performing one in public.

Oh! do not add to my miseries by your constancy.

For Protagonist’s literary past:

Protagonist: Good Lord. Is that the same T-shirt of mine you put on when you were here six days ago?

Jack Kerouac: Oh, well. But I did have a shower.

Bhartrihari.

And money answereth all things.

Adrienne Rich’s husband committed suicide.

Elizabeth I did a translation of The Consolation of Philosophy.

As had Chaucer.

As had King Alfred.

Though in the latter’s instance into Anglo-Saxon.

Tending to forget that the account of the Good Samaritan, in Luke, is an anti-Semitic parable.

Tending to forget that Plato advocated totalitarianism.

La Noche Triste.

Aharon Appelfeld escaped from a Nazi labor camp at the age of eight. Eight. And spent three years hiding in the forests of Romania and the Ukraine.

Jerzy Kosinski did nothing of the kind.

Edith Metzger.

Anaxagoras committed suicide by starving himself.

In the first year of the eighty-eighth Olympiad.

And when asked near the end how he wished to be commemorated, said schoolchildren should be given a holiday.

In 1811 a huge Cimabue altarpiece of a Madonna and angels, which has been the Louvre’s finest thirteenth-century offering ever since, was bought in Tuscany for five francs.

0 lente, lente currite, noctis equi!

Was the diegetic diachrony of narration truly damaged by Flaubert, as Lyotard says?

Diegetic, dialogic, hegemonic. Privilege, as a verb. Foreground, as a verb. Valorize. Praxis. Simulacra. Metafiction. Logocentrism. Phallocentrism. Discourse. Signifier/signified. Aporia.

Late capitalism. Gynophobia.

Text.

None of the above.

Lang, Leaf, and Myers; Butcher and Lang. The King James Homer.

The Open Society and Its Enemies.

Protagonist has come to this place because he had no life back there at all.

Also tending to forget that character in The Plague, Joseph Grand? Who rewrites the same opening sentence for a novel eternally, with only minimal variations?

Justinian was an anti-Semite.

In 1959, in Mexico City, Reader happened upon a Shakespeare and Company Ulysses for pennies in a thieves’ market. Its front cover had faded and was detached, the spine and back cover were missing. Nor was it a first printing.

Nonetheless.

Clinamen. Tessera. Kenosis.

Abednego.

Coleman Dowell committed suicide in a leap from a balcony.

As of 1994, after its restoration, seventeen of the draped figures in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment remained so. Presumably this time for curatorial reasons only, however.

Raskolnikov has come to this place. Bloom has come to this place. Rieux has come to this place.

Long hence, perhaps, Diotima,

I shall see you here.

Esther Johnson. Esther Vanhomrigh.

Vanishing point.

Melville and Whitman were born within two months of each other and died within six. And were in close proximity in or near New York through much of their lives.

Never meeting.

Mycenae.

As a master at a boy’s school in London during World War I, Eliot tried to teach his pupils baseball. John Betjeman included.

Sergei Esenin was an anti-Semite.

Kierkegaard was probably impotent.

Miss J. Hunter Dunn.

Longfellow’s first wife died young. The second, mother of grave Alice, laughing Allegra, and Edith with the golden hair, was burned to death when her clothing caught fire while she was melting sealing wax.

The name Salome translates from the Hebrew as peaceful.

Robert Desnos, who had been tortured by the Gestapo for working with the French Resistance, survived periods in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. But died of typhus just as the camps were being liberated.

Gib mir den Kopf des Jokanaan!

James Leo Herlihy committed suicide with sleeping pills.

The Martello tower at Sandycove is near Dalkey. Which is adjacent to Sallynoggin.

Horse Badorties.

A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of thirty will never do so, Einstein said.

Confusing one’s mental picture of Marguerite Duras and Jeanne Moreau.

Don Bildow. At the Swiss end of the Simplon Tunnel.

Vico Road.

La Vestale was Napoleon’s favorite opera.

There is no such thing as literal meaning.

There is no such thing as intrinsic merit.

Fish and guests in three days are stale, says Lyly in Euphues.

El sueno de la razon produce monstruos.

Walter Slezak committed suicide.

One of Shelley’s grandfathers was born in New Jersey.

Tall but pot-bellied, Chaucer describes himself as.

Knut Hamsun was an anti-Semite.

And was so blatantly sympathetic with the Germans in both world wars that thousands of Norwegians mailed him back copies of his novels in contempt.

De Kooning: Some guy came into my studio for fifteen minutes and wrote something it took six hours to read.

Belmonte. Joselito. Manolete. Dominguin.

Ilse Koch.

Otto Weininger shot himself.

For Protagonist’s less distant literary past:

Donald Barthelme: Tell me what you’ve been up to.

Protagonist: You’ll be sorry you asked. Do you want to hear about the lung cancer surgery I just had, or the prostate cancer surgery I’m going to have?