David Markson - Reader's Block

Protagonist has set up the first of his unpacked books on some of the steps.

What you get married for if you don’t want children?

Georges Braque came extremely close to losing his sight from a head wound in World War I.

Or perhaps not a novel?

Is he in some peculiar way thinking of an autobiography?

Reader and his mind full of clutter?

No one can steal my words. These are the words of Theognis.

Should Reader bring in the most recent woman in Protagonist’s life?

From how long ago?

Does the end of that relationship have anything to do with the declension into now?

Charlotte Perkins Gilman committed suicide.

Sparafucile.

Assuming sufficient time, why will Protagonist have become involved with no one since?

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

Shut up, he explained.

Byron was only thirty-six when he died, yet had already grown overweight and flaccid, with thinning hair and abominable teeth.

Nonetheless every second town in Greece would name a public square after him.

Moses Maimonides wrote in Arabic.

Lullaby. One Autumn Night.

Blessed Mary went a-walking.

At thirty-nine, Cezanne had a mistress and an infant son he was forced to keep hidden from his banker father.

Who was still sending him an allowance.

Knowing not grieving remembers a thousand savage and lonely streets.

Antonin Artaud spent most of his last decade in insane asylums.

Botticelli, who never married, once dreamed he had.

And walked the streets of Florence until dawn, to keep from dreaming it again.

Somerset Maugham was a British secret agent in Russia in World War I and again in France at the start of World War II.

Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger.

Sholom Aleichem never submitted a manuscript containing a page numbered thirteen.

The mountains look on Marathon,

And Marathon looks on the sea.

Mary Lamb stabbed her mother to death. She was in and out of an institution all her life.

When a new fit of madness seemed imminent, Charles calmly led her back into custody.

Would the stairway climb to a permanently locked door or in some way simply end abruptly at a reconstructed ceiling?

Wide plank steps, Reader sees.

The law is a ass.

Yehuda Amichai fought with the British army in World War II, with the Haganah in Israel’s War of Independence, and with the Israeli army in both the Sinai Campaign and the Yom Kip-pur War. By the fourth time, younger Israeli soldiers were said to be carrying his poems in their gear.

There is no god, and Mary is his mother.

Mithridates. Who as Housman says took poison in small doses, to build an immunity.

And was run through by a sword.

When Arturo Toscanini had an affair with Geraldine Farrar, would he have known that her father had been a major league baseball player in the 1880s?

John Stuart Mill read Alexander Pope’s translation of the Iliad thirty times.

E. E. Cummings was an anti-Semite.

Poor Tom’s a-cold.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau suffered a constant need to urinate.

Heinrich von Kleist shot himself.

Reading romance into the relatively early death, speeding, of Jackson Pollock.

Ignoring that he killed a terrified young woman passenger in the process.

Oriane, what have you been thinking of, you wretch! You’ve kept on your black shoes! With a red dress!

Has Reader decided that Protagonist has definitely been in hospitals?

Should the problems be named?

Major?

Archaeologists found Praxiteles’ Hermes under centuries of rubble at Olympia in 1877.

Exactly where Pausanias had told them to look for it in his Description of Greece almost two thousand years before.

Come Back to the RaftAg’in, Huck Honey!

Bertrand Russell, re having contemplated suicide at sixteen:

I did not, however, commit suicide, because I wished to know more about mathematics.

I want to wash when I meet a poet.

During his interlude with George Sand, Alfred de Musset more than once woke up not long after exhausting sex to find her gone from bed.

Intently at work on a novel.

Et Verbum caro factum est.

Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus was damningly abused by reviewers. Once he became famous he had it reissued. And included the reviews as an appendix.

A very pretty poem, Mr. Pope. But you must not call it Homer.

Protagonist wrote a few books once. It is some years since he has seen a copy of any of them.

Fra Angelico wept while painting certain of his Christs. Giovanni Bellini once did so while painting a Pieta.

Plato founded his academy in Athens in approximately 387 B.C. and taught there for forty years. Aristotle studied and taught there for nineteen years as well.

Ferruccio Tagliavini.

Lorca was murdered by fascists at the start of the Spanish Civil War. His body was flung into an unmarked grave and never found.

Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.

Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin.

A roundup of Denmark’s eight thousand Jews was ordered by the Nazis in 1943. The Danes smuggled virtually every one of them to Sweden on fishing boats instead.

¡Que no quiero verla!

Holderlin was insane, if harmlessly so, for more than thirty-five years. Frequently he improvised odd tunes at the piano for hours, or sang in what seemed an indecipherable combination of Latin, Greek, and German simultaneously.

Nietzsche played the piano endlessly in his own eleven years of madness. Once, at least, with his elbows.

Robert Lowell was an anti-Semite.

Milton once visited Galileo.

Shakespeare died in Stratford on April 23, 1616, a Tuesday.

Cervantes died in Madrid on April 23, 1616, a Saturday.

The difference being between the Julian calendar and the Gregorian. Cervantes died ten days earlier.

Thackeray had to pay to publish Vanity Fair. Sterne had to pay to publish Tristram Shandy. Defoe had to pay to publish Moll Flanders.

Our life is but a warfare and a stranger’s sojourn.

Said Marcus Aurelius.

A year before his death, already ill and with his recent work finding rejection, Baudelaire was shown essays eulogizing him by two poets in their early twenties. Neither of them had yet produced a book of his own, making their names meaningless.

Paul Verlaine. Stephane Mallarme.

Chaucer’s father was a vitner.

Pasternak’s popularity was such that if he stumbled over a line while reciting, most of his Moscow audience was generally able to prompt him from memory.

Franz Sussmayr. The D Minor Requiem.

Michelangelo finished The Last Judgment in 1541. Fourteen years later Pope Paul IV ordered Daniele da Volterra to drape forty of the naked figures.

Which Salvator Rosa would subsequently suggest made the whole wall look like a public bath.

Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.

Charles Boyer committed suicide with an overdose of barbiturates.

7 Eccles Street.

The Carmina Burana. Any and all names of the original vagabond thirteenth-century poets long forgotten.

The soprano arias in the Cour d’Amour section can fill Reader with heartache.

The soprano arias in the Cour d*Amour section can fill Protagonist with heartache?

Poised abstractedly amid a kind of transitory disarray. Cartons heaped and piled.

Pausing among the graves.

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

Boccaccio was illegitimate. And had five illegitimate children of his own by several mistresses.

Repentant in later life, regretting even having written The Decameron, he contemplated taking Holy Orders.