David Markson - The Last Novel

Claude Lorrain’s Coast View with Acis and Galatea, which Dostoievsky once saw in Dresden and writes in A Raw Youth of having dreamed about.

And writes in The Possessed of having dreamed about.

And writes in The Dream of a Ridiculous Man of having dreamed about.

Emily Dickinson’s refusal to sit for a photographer.

Henrik Ibsen was virtually never known to take off his hat without immediately combing his hair — having even glued a small mirror inside the hat to make use of when he did so.

September 23, 1835, Vincenzo Bellini died on.

April 8, 1848, Gaetano Donizetti died on.

There was no memorial of any sort for Byron in Westminster Abbey until 1969.

Still always slightly surprised to recall — that John McCormack died an American citizen.

The so-called anarchist artist who in 1988 smeared a large X in his own blood on a wall in the Museum of Modern Art — and in the process splattered an adjacent Picasso.

I can’t understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems; it’s like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.

Quoth Philip Larkin.

The sound of Bix Beiderbecke’s cornet:

Like a girl saying yes, Eddie Condon said.

The sound of Paul Desmond’s alto saxophone:

Like a dry martini, being what Desmond himself said he wanted.

Exactly the right tone of thought and feeling to appeal to grocers.

Leslie Stephen credited Dickens with.

Napoleon was five feet six inches tall.

A dozen or fifteen years before much of the nudity in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment would be concealed by papal order, a ranking Vatican cardinal voiced the first complaint about same.

And shortly discovered his own portrait on the wall — in hell.

As almost happened similarly to a prior in Milan after his complaints about Leonardo’s apparent desultoriness in work on The Last Supper — complaints that abruptly ceased at Leonardo’s hint regarding who might become the model for Judas.

Kindly see me safe up. As for coming down I shall shift for myself.

Said Sir Thomas More — being led to the gallows.

In Robert Schumann’s diary, after a first meeting with Berlioz:

There is something very pleasant about his laugh.

Thou shalt commit adultery.

The brains of a ram, Shaw attributed to Sophocles.

Of a third-rate village policeman — to Brahms.

Poor England, when such a despicable abortion is named genius.

Said Thomas Carlyle of Charles Lamb.

Anybody can be nobody.

Said Eugene V. Debs.

Novelist’s personal genre. For all its seeming fragmentation, nonetheless obstinately cross-referential and of cryptic interconnective syntax.

Wondering why one is surprised to realize that Thoreau was dead at forty-five.

A lament of Schopenhauer’s:

Over how frequently the mere purchase of a book is mistaken for the appropriation of its contents.

Two pages of The Mill on the Floss are enough to start me crying.

Said Proust.

Sour of speech, averse to laughter, unable to be merry even over the wine, but what he writes is full of honey and the Sirens.

Says a line of uncertain attribution re Euripides.

Lope de Vega had at least three illegitimate children.

Gustav Klimt may have had as many as fourteen.

Though the courts recognized only four, in regard to his estate.

Utterly crazy about women.

Suidas says of Menander.

Looking at them in society, one fancies there’s something in them, but there’s nothing, nothing, nothing. No, don’t marry, my dear fellow, don’t marry.

Repulsive, an early New York Times review called Degas.

Pigs at the pastry cart.

John Updike called critics.

Says a 1796 London jestbook:

Shakespear seeing Ben Jonson in a necessary-house, with a book in his hand reading it very attentively, said he was sorry his memory was so bad, that he could not sh-te without a Book.

Dürer’s hausfrau wife.

Whom he on occasion remanded to eat with their maid.

Lenin played tennis.

The sign in the window says Pants Pressed Here. But when you bring in your pants, you discover that it is the sign that is for sale.

Being Kierkegaard — on the typical obscurity of what normally passes for philosophy.

The first use of the phrase stream of consciousness.

In a review by May Sinclair of Dorothy Richardson’s Pointed Roofs — in April 1918.

The remedies of all our diseases will be discovered after we are dead.

Assumed John Stuart Mill.

Charlotte has been writing a book, and it is much better than likely.

Announced the Reverend Patrick Brontë, in the mid-1840s, to his other offspring.

Karl Marx was for some years a London correspondent for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune.

Attempting to detour the young Thomas Aquinas from a career in the church, his family once arranged for a seductive woman to be sent to his rooms.

Whom he chased off with a flaming brand from his hearth.

Maid of Athens, ere we part,

Give, oh give me back my heart!

For a time, Rilke and Cocteau had apartments in the same Paris building — evidently without ever becoming acquainted.

Every passenger in the non-smoking section of a plane that crashed off Norway in 1948 was killed.

Bertrand Russell had been smoking — and was one of those able to swim to safety.

Ravel once composed music for Diaghilev that Diaghilev never used.

And which almost led to a duel between them.

April 23, 1554, Gaspara Stampa died on.

I don’t very much enjoy looking at paintings in general. I know too much about them.

Said Georgia O’Keeffe.

Harvard was founded in 1636.

The University of Mexico — in 1553.

One of the most illiterate books of any merit ever published.

Edmund Wilson called This Side of Paradise.

Not a lovable man.

John O’Hara said of Scott Fitzgerald himself.

Occasions on which one has seen it transliterated as Theodor Dostoievsky.

A tea-time bore.

Dylan Thomas called Wordsworth.

A son of Einstein’s died in a mental institution at fifty-five — having been confined there for a third of a century.

The relatively recent revelation that Einstein had also had an illegitimate daughter.

Unhesitatingly specifying Pound’s anti-Semitism as the reason, Yevgeny Yevtushenko once refused to appear on the same podium with him at a literary event.

Teddy Dostoievsky?

The Duccio Madonna and Child purchased by the Metropolitan Museum in 2004 for more than $45,000,000.

Which is eight inches wide and eleven inches high.

Jan Peerce. Leonard Warren. Richard Tucker. Robert Merrill.

The Lower East Side. The Bronx. Williamsburg. Williamsburg.

Jacques Derrida failed his entrance exams to the École Normal Supérieure. Twice.

People are exasperated by poetry which they do not understand, and contemptuous of poetry which they understand without effort.

Said Eliot.

We cease to wonder at what we understand.

Said Johnson.

Sir Thomas Beecham once told an orchestra that a certain passage in Mozart should sound innocent — quote — like a breath of spring. It should float on the air like a voice from another world.

When the musicians stared emptily:

Oh, well, anyway, play it legato.

A real good guy.

William Carlos Williams called Emily Dickinson.

A bitchy little spinster.

Denise Levertov saw her as instead.

Géricault’s intensity when at work on The Raft of the Medusa:

The mere sound of a smile could prevent him from painting, someone said.