David Markson - Reader's Block

Principia Mathematica. Logic and Knowledge. The Analysis of Mind. The Analysis of Matter.

And over this loathsome and grotesque mask of death, the hair, the beautiful hair, still blazed like sunlight and flowed downwards in rippling gold.

Tolstoy thought King Lear so bad a play as to be not worth discussion.

Vachel Lindsay committed suicide by drinking Lysol.

Is it evident to Reader that he has lost interest in the idea of doing anything with the women upstairs?

Do you know that the king had not even heard of Wittgenstein!

Brahms died of cancer of the liver.

Why do you always wear black?

I am in mourning for my life.

There was once an actual portrait of Petrarch’s Laura, by Simone Martini. However it is long lost.

Within two years of Stephen Crane’s death in the Black Forest, Cora had returned to Jacksonville and opened a brothel.

Beyond the dunes. Flotsam. Odds and ends.

William the Conqueror came before Richard III. Announced Shakespeare through a dark window to Burbage.

Carlos Arruza died in a car crash.

In one of Protagonist’s own unread books, perhaps? Why does Reader think of him sensing he should remember something about someone else who often walked along a beach?

Teresa Stich-Randall.

Regine Olsen.

Ezra Pound was an anti-Semite.

All the Jew part of the Bible is black evil, an Ezra nicety.

Protagonist the Penniless. Protagonist the Hermit.

Deus vult?

Bachelard. Baudrillard. Blanchot. Barthes. Bataille.

Sorting, packing.

Toward what final bleak contemplation amid the disarray?

I have read Mr. Scott’s book fourteen times; and it is a rather tiresome book.

Said someone of The Architecture of Humanism.

Condorcet probably committed suicide.

The first writer known to condemn slavery is Euripides.

We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow.

If forced to choose, Reader assumes, he would rescue a cat from a burning building before a Giacometti.

September 28, 1891, 12:30 A.M. 104 East 26th Street, New York. Cardiac dilatation, mitral regurgitation, contributing asthenia.

Melville.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Va, pensiero, sull’ ali dorate.

Why is virtually all landscape in Andrea Mantegna comprised of rock?

How many times had Reader heard the Smetana before he discovered that the Moldau was a river?

Among the Ouses and the Ebros in Anna Livia Plurabelle.

One has the right to expect ordinary decency even of a poet.

Allegheny, Pennsylvania, Gertrude Stein was born in.

Among the Meuses and the Marnes.

Allen Mandelbaum’s Aeneid. Mackail’s.

La Pasionaria.

Photographs of Protagonist with?

Jane Austen. Anne Bradstreet. Cervantes.

Pierre Menard.

Or actually some few with certain other writers at that? In antique five-and-ten-cent store frames?

And everyone young?

Cicero was an anti-Semite.

Certain legends would insist that Pontius Pilate committed suicide.

In last year’s nests there are no birds this year.

The beach, or the cemetery?

What follows for Protagonist in either case?

Patron saint of desperate causes?

In a dramatic and not narrative form; with incidents arousing pity and terror.

Still, for all slips of hers,

One of Eve’s family—

Wipe those poor lips of hers

Oozing so clammily.

Dorothy Dandridge committed suicide.

Hearing of acquaintances who have died, alone, to be found by strangers.

According to indictments of the time, on May 23, 1450, Sir Thomas Malory raped the wife, Joan, of one Hugh Smyth, in Warwickshire.

On August 6, Malory raped said Joan again.

Joyce called How Much Land Does a Man Need? the greatest of all short stories.

Gaspara Stampa. Mihri Hatun. Louise Labé.

I think you’re more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.

Quelqu’un vit sur cetteplage.

Alguien vive en este play a.

The end of his life in a shabby furnished room across the street from the railroad station in Frankfurt. Oskar Schindler.

Bernard Berenson was an anti-Semite.

Bernard Berenson was born a Jew.

Character! What is character! It’s tone that matters!

How shall we sing the Lord’s song

In a strange land?

One minute she was standing in the door.

Passchendaele.

The Tunning of Elynour Rumming.

When Leonardo died in France, in 1519, it was in the arms of the king, Francis I, who had come to his bedside. Insists Vasari.

Ipse dixit.

February 2nd. Joyce’s birthday.

And Protagonist’s daughter’s.

October 25th. Picasso’s.

And Protagonist’s son’s.

The first edition of Thus Spake Zarathustra sold forty copies. Nietzsche had had to pay for publication.

I count religion but a childish toy,

And hold there is no sin but ignorance.

Once more before he dies Protagonist will read Aristophanes.

Delacroix, on Ingres:

His art is the complete expression of an incomplete intelligence.

Demosthenes committed suicide with poison.

In the same year that Aristotle may have done so.

Grieg wrote his piano concerto at twenty-five.

And would produce nothing else of significance on a large scale in almost forty more years of composing.

Arnold Toynbee was an anti-Semite.

Orde Wingate.

I had been only a mediocre caretaker of most of the things left in my hands, even of my talent, Scott Fitzgerald said.

Capt. Wilfred Owen was an acting company commander, attempting to cross an enemy-held canal, when he was machine-gunned.

Wilhelm Furtwangler. Herbert von Karajan. Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. Alfred Cortot. Kirsten Flagstad. Walter Gieseking. Inextricably bedfellowed with the Nazis.

As was Gigli with the Italian fascists.

That nearby, Protagonist awakening mornings to the wash of the surf?

Mitigating, will it, the morning’s recollection of the emptiness of the day before?

Its anticipation of the emptiness of the day to come?

Thesmophoriazusae.

Anne Sexton sometimes allowed a recording of the Bachianas Brasileiras to replay itself endlessly when she was writing.

But now they that are younger than I have me

in derision,

Whose fathers I disdained to set with the dogs

of my flock.

The Virgin for those who have nobody them with.

André Malraux flew sixty-five missions as the commander of the Loyalist air force. And in World War II was captured twice by the Germans while a leader of the Resistance, and twice escaped.

Was Moses murdered in the wilderness?

Was willst du yfremder Mensch?

Bidú Sayão.

Freud and Frazer were immediate contemporaries. Freud read a good deal of Frazer. Frazer did not read one word of Freud.

Kurt Tucholsky committed suicide.

Henry Miller was an anti-Semite.

Les Nuits d’Été. The poems Gautier’s.

Whittier threw Leaves of Grass into a fire.

Suffering Alzheimer’s disease, de Kooning once had to be prevented from eating a cigarette.

With kings and counsellors, murmured I.

Xanthus.

Why does it sadden Reader to realize he will almost certainly never know what book will turn out to be the last he ever read?

What piece of music, the last he ever heard?

Matthew 27:3–5 says that Judas hanged himself.

I am old, and can no longer work, and am without means of livelihood, and my wife is ill.

Said Paolo Uccello on a tax declaration in Florence in 1469.

Un grand peut-être.