David Markson: Reader's Block

François Marie Arouet.

Well, I am completely alone here now.

Georg Trakl died from an overdose of cocaine, presumed deliberate. Trakl’s sister Margarete committed suicide also.

There seems evidence of incest.

Modigliani died of tuberculosis in a pauper’s ward.

Whistler was convinced that Bret Harte was a better writer than Dickens or Thackeray.

According to legend, Sappho threw herself into the Aegean after being spurned by a lover. Nothing is known about her age. Though in fact her hair had begun to turn white.

R. is completely alone here now?

Yesterday at eight o’clock Madame Berenge, the concierge, died.

One of James Joyce’s patrons offered to pay for analysis for him under Jung. Joyce waved away the thought of it.

Later on, unsuccessfully, Jung would work with Joyce’s disturbed daughter Lucia, however.

Aristotle presumed that women have fewer teeth than men.

Now and again: Protagonist seen pausing distractedly among the graves. Few of the stones are at all elaborate. Weeds abound. Leaves accumulate.

Names have already become familiar.

Very many of the dates of death are extremely distant.

A scattering, not.

Surprisingly, Protagonist comes upon a miniature American flag fixed beside one of the latter one afternoon. No one has come or gone who might have put it there that he saw.

Once I loved thee, Atthis, long ago.

Discovering that his wife had a lover, Carlo Gesualdo had the man murdered, then killed his wife himself.

And then their youngest son, on the chance that the boy was not his.

While writing madrigals still sung.

Throughout the desert campaigns, T. E. Lawrence carried an Aeschylus and an Aristophanes in his kitbag, both in Greek. Also a Morte d?Arthur and the Quiller-Couch Oxford Book of English Verse.

He was able to read while riding camelback.

Dante refers to it as his Commedia only. It was Boccaccio who would call it Divina.

Will Protagonist ever speak to the woman?

Is there a woman?

All of us have come out from under The Overcoat.

Chi il bel sogno di Doretta.

Caravaggio incorporated several unappetizing self-portraits into his canvases. The grotesquely glazed-eyed face on the dissevered head of his Goliath is one.

Harriet Shelley drowned herself.

Can Grande della Scala.

G. K. Chesterton was an anti-Semite.

There are 107,000 rhymed couplets in the Mahabharata. In sum it is almost fifteen times as long as the Iliad.

For a woman to study the Vedas is a signal of confusion in the realm. It says.

Swellfoot the Tyrant.

Short blocks away in that same deteriorating cemetery neighborhood, a lone ill-lit small grocery. There is one drab restaurant also, with few patrons.

Protagonist eats mainly out of cans.

Meaning the gatehouse will need gas as well as electricity.

Thomas Chatterton was seventeen when he bought arsenic, on credit, to commit suicide. He was buried in a potter’s field.

A bracelet of bright haire about the bone.

Wallace Stevens told Robert Frost his poems were too often about things.

Frost told Stevens his were about bric-a-brac.

Tolstoy and Gandhi corresponded.

Tchaikovsky died of cholera, in St. Petersburg, after drinking tap water that had not been boiled.

Among Protagonist’s cartons, several containing phonograph records rather than books.

Lorine Niedecker spent years of her adult life scrubbing floors in a Wisconsin hospital.

Names of the dead.

A lifelong rumor insisted that Guillaume Apollinaire was the son of a cardinal, or even of the Pope. His mother’s father had been a ranking officer in the Papal Guard.

The Second Commandment was taken so literally in the Lithuanian ghetto when Chaim Soutine was a boy that he was physically beaten when he tried to draw.

The graves of strangers.

Martin Heidegger was an anti-Semite.

Who kept a portrait of Pascal in his study. While signing his letters Heil Hitler.

Maya Lin.

John Berryman committed suicide at fifty-seven by jumping from a bridge. Forty-five years earlier his father had shot himself outside Berryman’s window.

Horace dictated that a writer should set aside a finished poem for nine years. And only then decide if it is worth publishing.

A block or two past the grocery, where the neighborhood declines into even more evident abandonment, is a dingy saloon frequented only by a remnant of elderly men. The television, if on, is tuned only to sports events. No one intrudes if Protagonist sits wordlessly with a single drink. He does not go often in any case.

Soutine was in fact once beaten so badly for sketching someone’s portrait that he was able to collect damages.

And used the money to leave his village and attend art school.

Catherine Blake: I have very little of Mr. Blake’s company. He is always in Paradise.

Exit, pursued by a bear.

Berryman’s name was originally John Smith. He adopted his stepfather’s name when his mother remarried.

Walt Whitman more than once wrote anonymous favorable reviews of his own work.

Unquestionably it would have been Mary Magdalen who did the dishes at the Last Supper.

Concluded Marguerite Yourcenar.

Meursault is fairly sure it was no one from the saloon or the restaurant who nodded hello to him on the street yesterday.

Toynbee finds more than twice as many civilizations in history than Spengler did.

Mina Loy.

Thomas Hobbes was born prematurely when his mother became hysterical at the approach of the Spanish Armada.

Legend says Virgil was born in a ditch.

Protagonist has not quite enough money to get by on. Or rather he has just enough, now. Even with extreme frugality he is eating into it, however.

So that it diminishes steadily.

Toward a logical inevitability that he does his best not to think about.

Jean-Baptiste Lully died from gangrene after stabbing himself with a baton while conducting.

Mantua me genuit.

Picasso, when told that Gertrude Stein did not look like her portrait:

Never mind. She will.

Except for fragments quoted by others, everything of Menander’s disappeared utterly in the Dark Ages. A first complete play was not discovered until excavations in Egypt during Reader’s own lifetime.

Eliot was a virgin until his marriage at twenty-six. And possibly thereafter.

Erasmus was illegitimate.

Will Protagonist have sold any of his books before moving? Could he be selling some of them now, piecemeal, as it were for pocket money?

Would Reader?

H. L. Mencken called Lizette Woodworth Reese the finest American poet of his time.

Sergei Esenin committed suicide in a Moscow hotel by hanging himself with a strap from a suitcase.

John Everett Millais once painted advertisements for Pears Soap.

Why does Reader rarely remember that the Septuagint is so called because seventy scholars allegedly translated it from Hebrew into Greek in seventy-two days?

Geoffrey of Monmouth. Wace. Layamon. Marie de France. Chretien de Troyes. Malory.

Nora Barnacle was a hotel chambermaid when Joyce met her.

Eva Hesse was dead of a brain tumor at thirty-four.

When Rembrandt’s possessions were sold at bankruptcy in 1656, they included paintings by Raphael, Giorgione, and van Eyck. And seventy-five Rembrandts.

And did not bring in enough to discharge the bankruptcy.

Theodore Dreiser was an anti-Semite.

Bathsheba Everdene.

Lidice.

The tyranny of the ignoramuses is insurmountable and assured for all time.

Said Einstein.

Inside the basement section of the house at the dunes, a stairway climbs to the floor above. Because of the subdivision, the entrance at the top of the stairs has been sealed. In effect, the stairs now mount to nowhere.