David Markson - This is Not a Novel

The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft.

Gilles de Rais. Who was a marshal of France at twenty-five.

And fought by Joan’s side at Orleans. And.

Baudelaire often wore pink gloves.

Martha Constantine, a handsome young woman, was treated with great indecency and cruelty by several of the troops, who first ravished, and then killed her by cutting off her breasts. These they fried, and set before some of their comrades, who ate them without knowing what they were.

Records Fox’s Book of Martyrs.

Clausewitz died of cholera.

The Prince, the King, the Emperor, the God Almighty of novelists.

Wilkie Collins called Walter Scott.

Robin Vote.

Vom Kriege.

Walter Benjamin and Gertrud Kolmar were cousins.

Monet dropped from the skies on me with a collection of magnificent pictures. I am now lodging two impecunious artists, for Renoir is also here. It’s like a nursing home. I love it.

Said a letter of Frederic Bazille’s — four years before he was killed at twenty-nine in the Franco-Prussian War.

Joe Tinker died of diabetes.

Johnny Evers died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Frank Chance died of tuberculosis.

The population of Athens at the height of its accomplishments was at best two hundred and seventy-five thousand.

The population of Dante’s Florence was probably forty thousand.

Abbotsford.

Piero della Francesca’s St. Agatha. Tiepolo’s. Zur-baran’s.

Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s.

Mary McCarthy died of lung cancer.

Hermann Prey died of a heart attack.

A double play gives you two twenty-sevenths of a ball game.

Pointed out Casey Stengel.

Harold Bloom’s claim to the New York Times that he could read at a rate of five hundred pages per hour.

Writer’s arse.

Spectacular exhibition! Right this way, ladies and gentlemen! See Professor Bloom read the 1961 corrected and reset Random House edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses in one hour and thirty-three minutes. Not one page stinted. Unforgettable!

Parisian brothels. The only place where one’s shoes were ever properly shined. Said Toulouse-Lautrec.

Dryden, to a publisher:

I find all your trade are sharpers.

Was Plutarch the first, writer ever to counsel kindness to animals?

The William Wordsworth Funeral Home, in Hollywood, F. Scott Fitzgerald was buried from.

Leonardo played the lyre.

So astonishingly well that his patron the Duke of Milan initially admired him more for that than for his art.

Modigliani and Soutine were once living in such penury that they shared a single cot. Sleeping in shifts.

A second-rate mind, T. E. Lawrence ranked Shakespeare’s as.

I bring you back Cathay!

Edwin Hubble died of a stroke.

Sir Alexander Fleming died of a heart attack.

The editor of Novy Mir began to read a prepublication copy of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in bed.

And then found himself so impressed that he not only got up but put on a suit and a necktie to finish with what he felt to be the requisite respect.

The Samuel Butler who wrote Erewhon died of pernicious anemia.

There seems to me too much misery in the world, said Darwin.

Cortes. 1519–1526:

Three hundred and fifteen soldiers. Sixteen horses. Seven cannon.

Of all books extant in all kinds, Homer is the first and best, Chapman said.

The sovereign poet, Dante called him. Without being able to read Greek.

That fiery splendour of narrative which seems almost to have died out of the world when the Iliad was complete, Gilbert Murray talked of.

Irving Berlin’s father was a cantor. Al Jolson’s father was a cantor.

Berlin died at one hundred. Of age alone, evidently.

George Santayana died of stomach cancer. Having spent his last years attended by Irish nuns at a convent in Rome.

Will scholars of relatively recent English literature have any idea three or four centuries from now how differently the names Yeats and Keats were pronounced?

Suzanne Valadon’s affair with Puvis de Chavannes. He fifty-seven. Valadon seventeen.

One of Wordsworth’s brothers died in a shipwreck. Another became master of Trinity College, Cambridge.

A brother of Walt Whitman’s died mad. Another was a lifelong imbecile.

Fragonard died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Chardin died of dropsy.

Cavendish, Vermont.

A pansy with hair on his chest, Zelda Fitzgerald called Hemingway.

Ninety percent Rotarian, supplied Gertrude Stein,

George Bernard Shaw died at ninety-four of complications after breaking a hip.

Valadon died of a stroke.

Brian Moore died of pulmonary fibrosis.

Papal censors in 1817 refused to allow the heroine in Rossini’s Cinderella opera to show her bare foot. The libretto had to be rewritten without the glass slippers.

Conchita Supervia. Teresa Berganza. Cecilia Bartoli.

Rarely remembering that it was Menander who said Whom the gods love die young.

Charles Brockden Brown sent Thomas Jefferson an inscribed copy of Wieland.

Telemann was Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s godfather.

It is noteworthy that on the whole children love their parents less than their parents love them. Perceived Hegel.

Richard Burton died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Death-of-the-Month-Club.

Ensor died at eighty-nine.

Having done every bit of his significant work before he was forty.

Thomas Wolfe died of tuberculosis which had spread to the brain.

Clutching the stern of one of the withdrawing Persian galleys at Marathon, a brother of Aeschylus was killed when his hand was chopped off by an ax.

Giacomo Leopardi died of cholera.

C. Wright Mills died of a heart attack.

Tim the ostler.

St. Augustine’s admission that even he could not comprehend God’s purpose in creating flies.

Jan van Eyck died in Bruges in 1441.

Petrus Christus died in Bruges in 1472 or 1473.

Hans Memling died in Bruges in 1494.

Gerard David died in Bruges in 1523.

Through the dim purple air of Dante fly those who have stained the world with the beauty of their sin. Said Oscar Wilde.

Dante is not worth the pains necessary to understand him.

Said Chesterfield.

Wilde died of encephalitic meningitis, almost certainly connected with syphilis.

Meg Merrilies.

Cecin’estpas un conte. Diderot, 1772. Cecin’estpas unepipe. Magritte, 1929.

Wilbur Wright died of typhoid fever.

Orville Wright died of a heart attack. Thirty-six years later.

Melville’s spelling: Don Quixotte.

August Strindberg was illegitimate.

Ulysses:

An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me, the book of a self-taught working man, and we all know how depressing they are.

Yes, Virginia.

Port Arthur, Texas, Robert Rauschenberg was born in.

Thelonious Monk died of a stroke.

Charles Mingus died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

The Oresteia. Aeschylus was sixty-seven.

Orestes. The Bacchae. Euripides was seventy-six and seventy-seven.

Philoctetes. Oedipus at Colonus. Sophocles was well past eighty.

Hillerich and Bradsby.

Gandhi suffered from chronic constipation. Henry James suffered from chronic constipation. Freud suffered from chronic constipation.

Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona, Horace said. There were brave men living before Agamemnon.

Aretino died of apoplexy.

Ariosto died of tuberculosis.

Le Douanier Rousseau once informed Picasso that they two were the two greatest living painters:

I in the modern style and you in the Egyptian.

Nine in the third place indicates: