David Markson - This is Not a Novel

Writer reminding himself that the Avignon here was a brothel in Barcelona, not the city.

What artists do cannot be called work.

Says Flaubert’s Dictionary of Accepted Ideas.

La Grosse Margot.

The precious, pinchbeck, ultimately often flat prose of Vladimir Nabokov.

The fundamentally uninteresting sum total of his work.

Some dozen years after Berlin Alexanderplatz, living on handouts as a wartime refugee in California, Alfred Doeblin applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship. With a recommendation from Thomas Mann.

Guess.

The friendship of Lorca and Salvador Dali.

It may be for years, and it may be forever.

Or even a polyphonic opera of a kind, if Writer says that too.

Andre Chenier had published only two poems when he was guillotined.

Skeptic: And can you possibly have read all these walls of books?

Anatole France: Not one tenth of them. I don’t suppose you use your Sevres china every day?

Gabriele Miinter.

Lise Meitner.

Prokofiev died on the same day as Stalin.

Aldous Huxley died on the same day as John F. Kennedy.

Nathanael West died one day after F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Hemingway died one day after Louis-Ferdinand Celine.

West and Fitzgerald had had dinner together one week earlier.

Machado de Assis was an epileptic.

Twice as many baseball batters are hit by a pitch on days when the temperature is in the nineties as when it is in the seventies.

Rousseau was categorically convinced of the existence of vampires.

Gammer Guiton’s Needle.

Goldengrove unleaving.

It took Eliot forty years to allow that the word Jew in Gerontion might be capitalized.

Then Abraham fell upon his face and laughed.

June 16, 1904.

Stephen Dedalus has not had a bath since October 1903.

Transnistria.

Edward Teller lost a foot in a streetcar accident.

Par Lagerkvist died of a stroke.

Howells and Mark Twain once canceled a dinner they had planned for Maxim Gorky — after discovering that the woman he had sailed from Russia with was not his wife.

Fra Angelico was said not to be able to paint a Christ without weeping.

For the World, I count it not an Inne, but an Hospitall; and a place not to live, but to Dye in. Says Browne in the Religio Medici.

Cola di Rienzi’s father was a saloonkeeper.

Django Reinhardt spent his childhood in a Gypsy caravan.

And was considerably less than literate.

Cesar Vallejo died of an intestinal infection.

I’ve been reading Cousin Bette. I’ve been reading it all summer. I may never finish.

William Kapell died in a plane crash.

Dinu Lipatti died of lymphogranulomatosis.

Archytas, who invented the baby’s rattle. Which Aristotle actually takes note of. In Politics VIE 6, 1340b 25–28.

Chekhov died of consumption.

Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf at least once played the violin in a string quartet in which two of the other performers were Mozart and Haydn.

Beaumarchais died of a stroke.

Alain-Fournier was killed in action in France less than two months into World War I.

Protesilaus, in Iliad II. The first Greek to leap from the ships onto Trojan soil. And the first slain.

Pylaemenes. Who is fatally speared at the collarbone by Menelaus in Iliad V.

And is inadvertently shown alive again in Iliad XIII.

He fell, immortal in a bulletin.

East Tenth Street in Manhattan, Adelina Patti grew up on.

There is no hippopotamus in this lecture room at the present moment.

Lamarck died blind.

And was buried in a pauper’s grave.

Gehenna.

Isaac Newton died of complications from a kidney stone.

Ramanujan died of tuberculosis.

Badges? I don’t have to show you no stinkin’ badges.

One of St. Jerome’s letters to St. Augustine took nine years to be delivered.

Capitoline. Palatine. Aventine. Caelian. Esquiline. Viminal. Quirinal.

What existed before the Big Bang?

Where?

Exclude God from your response.

Camille Pissarro was poverty-stricken for much of his working career.

Alfred Sisley was perhaps worse off, and for longer.

William Goyen died of leukemia.

Fragonard’s The Swing.

Which William Carlos Williams had the impression was Watteau’s.

Plato talked too much, Diogenes said.

While dismissing Socrates as a lunatic altogether.

Erasmus was indisputably the most famous author of his day. Thomas More even admitted to being thrilled that the very fact of their friendship would help keep his own name alive with posterity.

A piece of dreck, Luther on the other hand called him.

I, O Plato, see a table and a cup. But I see no tableness or cupness.

Dickens’ astonishing manic walks. Of as many as twenty-five miles — and at a headlong pace.

Oedipus Rex did not win first prize in the dramatic competition in the year when it was first presented.

Any contemporary philosopher who ventured to compare himself with Leibniz could at best wind up wishing he had a quiet corner to go die in, said Diderot.

William Wycherley married a second wife, far younger than he, at seventy-five. And died eleven days later.

George Herbert died of consumption.

The most odious of small creeping things, Landor called critics.

A walk 2 . What on earth for 2 .

Asked Auden at someone’s country home.

Dizzy Dean had less than a fourth-grade education. But a post-doctoral sense of the joys of that game, said Marianne Moore.

Hemingway, on Ezra Pound’s indictment for treason: If Ezra has any sense he should shoot himself. Personally I think he should have shot himself somewhere along after the twelfth canto although maybe earlier.

Disraeli said he had read Pride and Prejudice at least sixteen times.

The straight line predominates in nature. Ingres once said.

Only curved lines are to be found in nature. Ingres once said.

Maud Gonne was six feet tall. Akhmatova was five feet eleven.

Jessica Mitford died of brain cancer.

Ellen Glasgow was buried in the same coffin as the exhumed remains of her two favorite dogs.

Venus Pudica. Venus Anadyomene.

Absolute reason expired at eleven o’clock last night.

Think how many royal bones Sleep within this heap of stones.

— Wrote Beaumont re Westminster Abbey.

Roger Martin du Gard died of a heart condition.

Arthur Honegger died of a heart condition.

Henry James ill-advisedly took an author’s curtain call on the opening night of his play Guy Domville.

And was hissed.

The Hebrew in Exodus 34:29–30 translates literally to say that after Moses came down from Sinai for the second time, the skin on his face sent forth beams, meaning it shone.

A mistranslation in the Latin Vulgate said he was horned.

Ergo Michelangelo. And cetera.

Rameau died of typhoid fever.

Lovis Corinth.

Rilke wrote standing up. Lewis Carroll wrote standing up. Thomas Wolfe wrote standing up.

Robert Lowell and Truman Capote wrote lying down.

Writer sits.

Jens Peter Jacobsen died of tuberculosis.

Balzac often worked for sixteen or eighteen hours consecutively, generally beginning at midnight. Awash in coffee.

Gibbon died of infectious complications from hydrocele.

Contemporary architecture is basically a bore.

Writer sometimes also talks to himself.

As did Yeats.

As did Yeats even walking the streets of Dublin.

Mad as the mist and snow.

Writer sitting and/or talking to himself being no more than renewed verification that he exists.