David Markson - The Last Novel

Asked W. S. Gilbert.

When the stove is clean enough I shall turn on the gas.

Wrote Anna Wickham — twelve years before she hanged herself instead.

Where the synecdoche of tessera made a totality, however illusive, the metonymy of kenosis breaks this up into discontinuous fragments.

Somewhere declareth Harold Bloom.

It may be essential to Harold Bloom that his audience not know quite what he is talking about.

Commenteth Alfred Kazin — pointing out other immortal phrasings altogether.

How many of you are there in the quartet?

The affecting ancient legend that when Pindar was a youngster, bees once coated his lips with honey while he slept.

Alprazolam.

Robert Pershing Doerr.

Pausing to remember that no fewer than eight characters in Hamlet — eight — die violently.

The Theatre Sarah Bernhardt in Paris.

Whose name the Nazis changed during the occupation because of her having been a Jew.

174517 —

Which Primo Levi could read tattooed on his left forearm from Auschwitz onward.

Light from the lighthouse at Alexandria, one of antiquity’s Seven Wonders, was visible from as far as twenty miles at sea.

Helmut Newton died in a car crash. At eighty-three.

Trying to conceive of having attended Georgia State College for Women in the mid-1940s.

And wondering who in heaven’s name there was for Flannery O’Connor to have a conversation with.

Paul Valéry’s wife was a niece of Berthe Morisot — and had in fact posed for Morisot any number of times.

Alexander Blok’s wife was the daughter of the chemist Mendeleyev.

Morningless sleep.

Epicurus called death.

Leonardo. Michelangelo. Botticelli. Raphael. Watteau. Claude. Van Dyck. Guido Reni. Pontormo. Poussin. Donatello. Reynolds.

Being but a handful among artists who never married.

An unpurchasable mind.

Shelley credited himself with.

Baudelaire, twice — in print — called upon Poe as a kind of patron saint to intercede for him during a prayer.

Malcolm Lowry, seemingly serious himself, told a friend he had once prayed to Kafka:

And he answered my prayer.

In addition to French, Delacroix read fluently in Greek, Latin, Italian, English, and evidently German.

Latin, French, Italian, and Flemish.

Rubens wrote letters in.

Jemand musste Josef K. verleumdet haben.

Pigalle’s sculpture of a naked eighty-plus-year-old Voltaire — for which the body was posed for by a different elderly man altogether.

Saul Kripke had mastered advanced calculus before finishing grammar school.

In Omaha.

She Who Was Once the Helmet-Maker’s Beautiful Wife.

Readers who assume that the title Samson Agonistes means something about Samson in pain.

After the breakthrough by Marian Anderson and Mattiwilda Dobbs, the next two dominant black singers at the Metropolitan were Leontyne Price and Martina Arroyo. Arroyo was frequently mistaken for Price. I’m the other one, love, she told the Met doorkeeper who got it wrong one morning.

Eyeless in Gaza, at the mill with slaves.

Fanny Burney’s account of her surgery for breast cancer at fifty-nine, in 1811.

Before anesthesia.

Dwight Eisenhower was once asked by an assistant if he would like to meet Robert Frost, who happened to be visiting someone else at the White House.

Eisenhower could not think of a reason why he should bother.

A hetaera named Cyrene, remembered for 2,400 years — because Aristophanes indicates that she could perform in a dozen different positions.

Theoris and Archippe, two others remembered for slightly longer.

Because Sophocles had affairs with each.

Apelles’ long-lost Birth of Venus, painted 1,800 years before Botticelli’s — and said to have been a likeness of Phryne, the most beautiful of them all.

And all of whom must surely have been included in an equally irretrievable work by Suetonius —

His lost book entitled On Famous Courtesans.

Shakespeare’s younger sister.

The Westminster Review called Emily Brontë.

Cervantes was a relative of his.

Kipling said of Mark Twain.

I think what attracted me was less art itself than the artist’s life, the freedom to live as one pleased.

Said Bonnard, re having become a painter.

Nulla dies sine linea.

Not a day without a line, Pliny says Apelles said.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., was wounded three times in the Civil War.

John Simon’s verdict that there were two things he was able to say about the poems of Robert Creeley:

They are short; they are not short enough.

It was I killed the old pawnbroker woman and her sister Lizaveta with an axe and robbed them.

March 13, 1979, Madeleine Grey died on.

Contemporary art criticism, second decade, fourteenth century. From the Purgatorio:

In painting Cimabue was thought to hold the field, but now Giotto has the cry, so that the other’s fame grows dim.

Our sodomite-saint.

Malcolm Muggeridge called T. E. Lawrence.

Jack Daniel’s Tennessee sour mash whiskey.

Being the best thing he knew about America, Jacques Lacan said.

A London street called Ropemaker’s Lane, Daniel Defoe died in.

Gibbon, on Samuel Johnson:

Bigoted.

Boswell, on Gibbon:

Ugly, affected, disgusting.

It’s a terrible thing to die young. Still, it saves a lot of time.

Quoth Grace Paley.

Bertrand Russell was born ten years before James Joyce, and died on Joyce’s birthday — twenty-nine years after him.

Jane Avril died in an old people’s home. Forty-one years after the death of Toulouse-Lautrec.

Nietzsche, who proclaimed that God was dead — but whose own coffin was adorned with a silvered cross.

Damn, I’m almost sorry you called. Can you even begin to guess how many friends of mine that makes, just in the past year or so?

I assume you’re aware of something else too, chum? At our age, we don’t replace them.

The failure of the 1853 premiere of Verdi’s La Traviatta — essentially because the soprano was viewed as too plump for a heroine dying of tuberculosis.

Troppo prosperosa, being the Italian.

I think A Bend in the River is much, much better than Conrad.

Pronounced the humility-drenched author of A Bend in the River.

The acute suggestiveness in Pascal’s apology for having written a particularly long letter.

Because he hadn’t had the time to write a short one.

Peoples bore me,

literature bores me, especially great literature.

Says Henry in The Dream Songs.

The Homer of painting, Reynolds called Michelangelo.

The Homer of painting, Delacroix called Rubens.

Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train.

Said Maynard Keynes, at a 1929 return of Wittgenstein to Cambridge after fifteen years away.

An eclectic realist of disputed merit.

The actual catalogue of the Metropolitan Museum once called Manet.

Miles Davis’s speedometer had already reached 105 miles per hour, on New York’s West Side Highway, when one of the people with him asked if he should be driving so fast.

I’m in here too, Davis’s concept of reassurance was.

Corbière was dead at thirty.

Giorgione, at thirty-three or thirty-four.

Books weaken the memory.

Says Plato in the Phaedrus.

Machines cannot think.

Charles Ives gave away the cash that came with his Pulitzer Prize.

Badges of mediocrity, dismissing such awards as.

Created only for imbeciles, rogues, and rascals, Cézanne had had it.

Conversely Edvard Grieg, who displayed his medals unabashedly — particularly since they sped him through customs with all complications waived, he discovered.