David Markson - This is Not a Novel

1893. Sixty feet six inches.

Lillian Russell went out of her way to arrange to meet Amos Rusie.

The anti-Semitic clause in the Magna Carta.

And mighty poets in their misery dead.

Dreiser died of a heart attack.

Mencken died of a heart attack.

Barbaric degrees of drinking, Arrian says Alexander took to by the end.

Edward Hopper Highway. Susanne Langer Mews.

Even Homer sometimes nods, Horace said. Wordsworth sometimes wakes, Byron allowed.

Wordsworth on Byron in turn: Perverted.

E. M. Forster died of a massive stroke.

Solomon Grundy.

I suppose my main source of annoyance with him was his affectation of not being a writer, but a farmer, — this would have been pretentious even had he been a farmer.

Said Allen Tate, re Faulkner.

Correggio died either of heat prostration or from drinking foul water to relieve it.

Correggiosity.

The most stirring battle-poem in English is about a brigade of cavalry which charged in the wrong direction. Said Orwell.

So certain was Pliny the Younger that the histories of Tacitus would last through the centuries that he pleaded with Tacitus to be mentioned in them.

The centuries presently numbering nineteen.

Runnymede.

Rydal Mount.

Jean-Baptiste Greuze died impoverished and forgotten.

Dawn Powell was buried in a potter’s field.

Writer had but a glimpse of Faulkner. As it happens, of Hemingway tambien.

I see no point in reading, said Louis XIV.

Pliny the Younger having been a nephew, not a son.

Ty Cobb died of prostate cancer.

Faulkner, at a funeral. Small and beady-eyed. Hemingway at ringside.

Was Shane his first name or his last?

Faulkner in fact looking like a Eula Varner in-law.

Sit not down on the bushel.

You are leaving the American Sector.

Miguel de Unamuno died of a stroke.

Glenn Gould died of a stroke.

When and where did the last person die who still believed in the existence of Zeus?

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a cantaloupe.

Green-wood Cemetery, in Brooklyn, Lola Montez is buried in.

Bronislaw Malinowski died of a heart attack.

Vittorio Gassman died of a heart attack.

Lincoln never saw Europe.

The one person in the world he would have liked to meet, Lenin said, was Charlie Chaplin.

The one person in the world he would have liked to meet, Eliot said, was Joe Louis.

Camille Pissarro died of blood poisoning.

Le Douanier died of blood poisoning after neglecting a cut.

Is there a single Jane Austen volume that manages not to bring up the subject of money before the end of page one?

The Odessa steps.

Isak Dinesen died of what was recorded as emaciation.

W. S. Gilbert died while trying to rescue someone from drowning.

How old was the Virgin Mary?

Rogier van der Weyden’s panel of St. Luke sketching her portrait.

Clay Allison died of a broken neck.

Was Glenn Gould someone else who talked to himself, or would he have only been singing along?

Kenneth Rexroth’s incomparably godawful verses on the premise that people who shopped at Brooks Brothers caused the death of Dylan Thomas.

Malcolm Lowry, on the same death:

We drank his health, poured a libation of gin to his memory, and for some reason cut down a tree, likewise dead, and an old friend.

Died on Saturday, Buried on Sunday.

Rexroth died of a heart attack.

Jean Cocteau died of a heart attack.

The Brahms German Requiem: Listening to it is a sacrifice that should be asked of a man only once in his life, Shaw said.

Overheard, frequently, by Xenophanes: How old were you when the Persians came?

Writer has actually written some relatively traditional novels. Why is he spending his time doing this sort of thing?

That’s why.

But where is your friend, Daddy?

Melville’s lifetime earnings from his fiction — from more than forty-five years — would appear to barely exceed ten thousand dollars.

Minnie Hauk died blind. And living on charity.

Lenin died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Juvenal’s poetry is not mentioned anywhere, by anyone, during his lifetime or until almost two hundred years after his death.

By the era of Petrarch and Boccaccio and Chaucer, he has become O Master Juvenal.

Words, words, words.

Vous sortez du Secteur Americain.

Does Lunita Laredo desert Major Brian Tweedy, or does she die young?

What time was it forty-five minutes before the beginning of time?

Wanamaker’s department store, in Manhattan, Richard Strauss once conducted concerts in.

At Actium, what with the torching of a number of his ships, many of Antony’s troops were roasted alive in their own red-hot armor, says Dio Cassius.

What a coarse, immoral, mean, and senseless work Hamlet is, Tolstoy said.

By brooks too broad for leaping The lightfoot boys are laid …

Is Clarissa still the longest single novel in the language?

I must dye one day, and as good this day as another. Says a suicide in Rowley.

Trade is wholly inconsistent with a gentleman’s calling. Said John Locke.

Salamis, Solon’s ashes were scattered at.

Kipling died of a hemorrhage from duodenal ulcers.

Alfred de Musset died of heart failure.

Lope de Vega wrote what may have been as many as fifteen hundred plays. Of which almost a third survive.

Thomas Eakins made Walt Whitman’s death mask.

Camerado is in no one’s dictionary.

The rose-lipt girls are sleeping In fields where roses fade.

Edmund Wilson died of a coronary occlusion.

Sir Thomas Beecham died of a stroke.

Silas Tomkyn Comberbache.

Being a fictitious name once used by Coleridge in the dragoons.

Kilgore Rosewater.

Being one used by Kurt Vonnegut in a hospital.

Bix Beiderbecke died of pneumonia while also confronting delirium tremens.

Fichte died of an unspecified fever.

The friendship of Rene Char and Martin Heidegger.

Charlemagne could read but could not write.

Joan of Arc could do neither.

How old were you, what were you doing, when you heard Lord Byron was dead?

Genevieve de Galard-Terraube.

Oliver Goldsmith played the flute.

Hopp, hopp! Hopp, hopp! Hopp, hopp!

The Pervigilium Veneris.

Gertrude Stein, to Jacques Lipchitz:

Besides Shakespeare and me, who do you think there is?

Luis Bunuel died of cancer of the bile duct and the liver.

Tennyson, at fifteen, etched it with a sharp stone into the face of a boulder in the woods: Byron is dead.

Samuel Pepys once smacked his wife in the eye. In point of fact, on December 19,1664.

And so to bed.

Salvatore Quasimodo died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

I shall look as if I were dead, and that will not be true.

Zara Dolukhanova. Irina Arkhipova.

Tchitchikov.

Stein died of cancer of the uterus.

Berthe Morisot was a great-granddaughter of Fragonard. And married Manet’s younger brother.

Judah Halevi was trampled to death by an Arab horseman at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Or died in ways unknown at Damascus.

St. Lawrence was broiled on a gridiron in Rome. Or was beheaded.

William Ernest Henley died of tuberculosis.

At fifty-nine, George Eliot married a man twenty-one years younger than she.

Who on their Venice honeymoon jumped from a hotel-room balcony into the Grand Canal.

Did Professor Bloom take any books with him, do you know?

Someone said he had a twenty-six-volume complete Joseph Conrad. It’s only a weekend cruise.

Conway, New Hampshire, E. E. Cummings died in.