David Markson - Reader's Block

Barthelme: Talk. And then I’ll tell you about my throat cancer.

Gondal. Angria.

Andrea del Sarto was sometimes hired to paint the equivalent of wanted posters on the walls of Florentine buildings.

As were Andrea del Castagno and Botticelli.

Dust hath closed Helen’s eye.

Virgil died in 19 B.C. Augustine is but one of many who appear to have sincerely believed that his fourth eclogue, which talks of the birth of a divine child, prophesied the coming of Christ.

Medieval legend would add that Saint Paul wept at his tomb for not having had an opportunity to convert him.

Caligula and his sister.

The line Les lauriers sont coupes is from a verse by Theodore de Banville.

Who filched it from an old nursery rhyme.

John Marston complained mockingly about the excessive scholarly allusions in the work of his Elizabethan contemporaries. Though proving readily able to refer to the most common current sources himself while doing so, including Vencenzo Cartari, Natale Conti, and Jean Tixier de Ravisi.

Has Reader sometimes felt he has spent his entire life as if preparing for doctoral orals?

In 1985, in 653 at bats, Wade Boggs swung and missed at a first pitch exactly once.

One of Gottfried Benn’s wives committed suicide.

So did one of his mistresses.

Schopenhauer once pushed an elderly seamstress down a flight of stairs because she had been talking loudly outside the door to his flat.

And was forced to pay her an annuity for the twenty years until her death.

Unlike the case with the Metaphysics, the title of the Nicomachean Ethics came from either its editor’s name, or its dedicatee’s. One or both having been Aristotle’s son. Nicomachus.

Brundisium.

Dear Sir, — I am in a Madhouse & quite forget your Name or who you are. You must excuse me for I have nothing to communicate or tell you of & why I am shut up I don’t know I have nothing to say so I conclude

Yours respectfully

John Clare

Cato the Younger committed suicide with a dagger. He spent the night before contemplating Socrates’ death in the Phaedo.

Protagonist has had surgery for cancer twice?

Protagonist has prostate cancer still, but it is for the moment under control?

Nothing odd will do long; Tristram Shandy did not last.

Said Johnson.

Who also determined that time was too precious to be wasted on such as Fielding.

All of Heinrich Heine was banned by the Nazis. When something like Die Lorelei refused to go quietly, it miraculously became the work of Author Unknown.

Joyce died of a perforated ulcer.

Herrenvolk.

Naphtali Herz Imber.

The foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses. Thus Mark Twain on Titian’s Venus of Urbino.

Whose fingertips rest almost unwittingly at her groin.

For whatever aesthete’s reasons, Rilke could not be troubled to attend his own daughter’s wedding.

As a boy, Dmitri Shostakovich played the piano in theaters showing silent movies.

As did Protagonist’s mother, at approximately the same date in time.

In Kingston, New York.

Catherine Tekakwitha.

Richard Tucker was once a cantor in Brooklyn.

The greatest music critic who ever lived, Auden called Shaw.

Galgenlieder.

Jean Genet was an anti-Semite.

Elpenor. Whom Odysseus forgot to bury.

Palinurus. Whom Aeneas remembered to.

Drusilla.

Would Reader look at the skull beside his desk differently if he decided it was a woman’s?

Protagonist has it. On a windowsill. On the windowsill of the window that looks out onto the graves.

Et in Arcadia ego.

King Saul committed suicide.

Every Man desires to live long; but no Man would be old. Said Swift.

Isaac Newton was idiosyncratic enough to say no when Voltaire wanted to meet him. And again with Benjamin Franklin.

How Beautiful with Shoes.

Akhmatova, in Leningrad, her son in prison, waiting in line daily, in the hope of at least being allowed to pass in a parcel. Can you put this into words? And I said: I can.

John Berryman:

Rilke was a jerk.

Margo Adams.

Concerning whom I may truly say, that of all the men of his time whom I have known, he was the wisest and justest and best.

I guess maybe there are two kinds of writers, writers who write stories and writers who write writing.

Said Raymond Chandler.

Garbo with no eyebrows?

Cal Lowell.

One fine morning in May a slim young horsewoman might have been seen riding a handsome sorrel mare along the flowery avenues of the Bois de Boulogne.

John Davidson drowned himself.

Simeon Solomon died in a workhouse.

Did ever a woman, since the creation of the world, interrupt a man with such a silly question?

Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.

Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work.

Protagonist has also had cataract surgery?

Gretcben am Spinnrade.

Picasso had two children in his late sixties.

It is patently more sensible, in this workaday world, to be a James Jones than a James Joyce. Said Protagonist’s father.

Mussorgsky was an anti-Semite.

The Sallynoggin Archive.

Norma Jean Baker committed suicide.

The cemetery framed beyond the window in January light. The skull, lower left foreground, a redundant nearer memento mori.

The eschatology of the still white stones in snow.

Is there a woman again after all?

Price of Admission Your Mind. Not for Everybody.

Alborak.

A man should never face the sun when urinating, Hesiod says.

Not to offend the sun god Helios, presumably being why.

Madame de La Fayette. Madame de Sévigné. Madame de Staël.

The Rev. G. A. Studdert Kennedy.

For forty-some years, Valéry awoke at 5 A.M. to make notes on what he thought of as the dawning of consciousness.

A big book, a big evil.

Said Callimachus.

During a literary dispute about epic poetry with Apollonius of Rhodes.

Who had once been his pupil.

At Alexandria.

The reason for your complaint lies, it seems to me, in the constraint your intellect imposes on your imagination. Said Schiller to a friend who had difficulty writing.

Sappho with white hair?

Sculpture is what you bump into when you back up to look at a painting.

Said Barnett Newman.

What moved thee, or how couldst thou take such journeys into the fanatic Arabia?

Dora Carrington committed suicide with a borrowed revolver.

Leonora Carrington was a better painter.

Ma in Ispagna son già milk e tre!

Capodistria.

The Laura whom Petrarch saw in a church at Avignon at twenty-three, and spent the rest of his life writing poems about, may very likely have never given him a thought.

Not only having been married, but already in progress toward eleven children.

Though Dante claims to have seen Beatrice no more than twice himself. While immortalizing her even more extraordinarily.

Boadicea committed suicide with poison.

Athenaeus. Seven volumes in the Loeb Classical Library.

Also in part a distant cousin innumerable times removed of the Tibetan Book of the Dead?

Of the cataloguing of the Cairo Geniza?

Reader and this notion of his.

Or does the absence of narrative progression plus that cross-circuited schematism possibly render it even a poem of sorts?

Not to add avec exactly 333 interspersed unattributed quotations awaiting annotation?

For a time, Beaumont and Fletcher actually lived together. Evidently so intimate that they indiscriminately wore each other’s clothing.