David Markson - This is Not a Novel

In a book without characters.

As noted, not being a character but the author, here.

We are and we are not. Said Heraclitus.

Even with innumerable obvious likes and/or dislikes and certain self-evident preoccupations.

How frequently was Anon, a woman?

Marcel Duchamp died of prostate cancer.

Already condemned by lung cancer, Duke Ellington died of pneumonia.

The word ghetto originally meant f oundry. Until the Jews of Venice were forced to live on an island that had previously been the site of one.

Knowledge is not intelligence. Heraclitus additionally said.

Thales, solving the height of the pyramids: Simply by measuring their shadows precisely when his own shadow matched his height.

The legend that as a young man Leonardo was so strong he could straighten a horseshoe with his bare hands.

Robert Capa was killed by a land mine in Vietnam.

Fray Luis de Leon, returning to his Salamanca classroom after five years of imprisonment by the Inquisition: As I was saying…

Hey, Dad, hot this for me, please?

A tavern chair is the throne of human felicity, Johnson said.

Disgusting eating habits, there or elsewhere, Boswell says Johnson had.

Roald Dahl died of leukemia.

There can be no doubt that there is something peculiar in the condition of the English retina.

Said Taine, viewing a first exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite art.

I hear a white horse on the way.

G. K. Chesterton died of heart failure.

Hilaire Belloc died, senile, at eighty-three, when he set his clothing on fire by spilling coal from a grate.

Hardy’s father was a stonemason.

Turner’s mother died mad.

Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.

On radio, the opening lines of Verlaine’s Chanson d’automne:

Being the signal to the European underground that the D-Day invasion was underway.

Jane! Jane! Jane!

Filippo Lippi died of quinsy.

Account for Joan of Arc.

According to Vasari, ordinary citizens in Florence were so impressed by a Madonna of Cimabue’s that it was actually carried in a procession from his workshop to Santa Trinita.

Heralded by trumpets.

It is an aspect of probability that many improbable things will happen.

Aristotle says Agathon said.

A likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility.

Aristotle himself added, re tragedy.

Wittgenstein had nephews fighting on both sides in World Warn.

Meyerhold was executed by the Soviets.

He dug a grave of the same length as Pakhom’s form from head to heels — three Russian ells — and buried him.

Ruben Dario died of cirrhosis of the liver.

Diderot died of coronary thrombosis while sitting at dinner.

I used to say to them, Go boldly in among the English, and then I used to go boldly in myself. Said Joan.

He could not get rid of the idea that he was damned, and he would have drowned himself if he had not been prevented by force.

Says a chronicle from the monastery where Hugo van der Goes was a lay brother.

He was known to drink, which made things worse. Says the same.

This is even a disquisition on the maladies of the life of art, if Writer says so.

Wanhope.

John Reed died of typhus.

Louise Bryant died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Not even to a philosopher could old age be easy in the depths of poverty, Cicero said.

Nor could a fool find it anything but burdensome even amid ample wealth.

Maria Jeritza was the first Tosca to sing Vissi d’arte while lying on the floor.

Only because she had been elbowed off a couch by accident.

It was from God, Puccini decided.

Though with Jeritza also flaunting far too much obvious posterior, put in Geraldine Farrar.

Venus Callipyge.

Louise O’Murphy.

Tiepolo and Francesco Guardi were brothers-in-law.

Richard Wright died of a heart attack.

The question of Mikhail Sholokhov’s authorship of The Quiet Don.

The question of Dmitri Shostakovich’s authorship of his Memoirs.

St. Teresa of Lisieux knew The Imitation of Christ by heart.

John Masefield died of gangrene at eighty-eight when he refused to have an injured leg amputated.

Schopenhauer played the flute.

He has no insight into character. And no dramatic talent. His dialogue hardens to wood and stone.

Said Emerson about its author after reading Oliver Twist.

Camille Saint-Saens talked with a lisp.

Mahler, discovering that Alma was having an affair with Walter Gropius.

And spending an entire day discussing it with Freud.

Is Macbeth impotent?

Hans Memling. That very model of a major minor master, as Erwin Panofsky had it.

The legend that as an impoverished, wounded soldier, Memling had begun to paint in gratitude to monks who sheltered him.

Edward Arlington Robinson died of pancreatic cancer.

Warren’s Blacking. 30, Strand.

Carl Maria von Weber died of tuberculosis.

Ambrose Bierce fought at Shiloh, Stones River, and Chickamauga. And was wounded at Kenesaw Mountain.

The History of Rome Hanks and Kindred Matters.

Leonidas and the Three Hundred, who would perish at Thermopylae.

Only men who had already fathered sons to leave behind had been permitted to join the command.

Said of George Washington, at the height of the war with the British:

He sometimes throws and catches a ball for whole hours with his aides-de-camp.

Nabokov appears to have died of an infection caught in a hospital where he was being treated for the flu.

Paul Bowles died of a heart attack.

Jane Bowles died after a stroke.

Friday is on their island with Robinson Crusoe for thirteen out of Crusoe’s twenty-eight years.

Why does Defoe not let him ever learn to speak more than pidgin English?

Why does Stephen Crane never actually state that the battle in The Red Badge of Courage is Chancellorsville?

La Scala was severely bombed in World War II.

The Vienna Staatsoper was severely bombed in World War II.

There are so few people who know how to make art. — Julian Schnabel.

One less than he thinks. — Robert Hughes.

In Coriolanus, Shakespeare allows someone to mention Cato.

Three centuries ahead of time.

And I will come out to meet you

As far as Cho-fu-Sa.

Pericles died of plague.

Stefan Lochner purchased a house in Cologne in 1442. Konrad Witz purchased a house in Basel in 1443. Martin Schongauer purchased a house in Colmar in 1477.

Hans Baldung Grien purchased a house in Strasbourg in 1527.

Paganini died of what was evidently cancer of the larynx.

Walter Pater died of gout.

It is written in a careless and humble style, in the vulgar tongue, which even housewives speak. Said Dante of the Comedy.

William Etty.

The Axion Esti.

All through the night Rome went burning. Put that in the noontide and it loses some of its age-old significance, does it not?

Archaeological evidence for the historical reality of Gilgamesh.

Pergolesi died of consumption at twenty-six.

Laborare est Orare. Work is Worship. Said the old monks.

Benedetto Croce died of a stroke.

Robert Schumann died mad, probably from syphilis.

Behold, this dreamer cometh.

Sophocles’ father manufactured swords.

John Dos Passos died of congestive heart failure.

Tyndale was permitted the indulgence of being strangled at the stake before they set fire to him.

A Farewell to Aims:

1590, George Peele’s version dating from.

Trying to imagine the shape of the modern world if Charles Martel had been defeated at Tours.