David Markson - This is Not a Novel and Other Novels

Doak Walker died after being paralyzed in a skiing accident.

Abba Kovner.

Rimsky-Korsakov died of a heart attack.

Leonard Bernstein died of a heart attack though already doomed by lung cancer.

A kind of shopgirl’s philosophy, Lévi-Strauss dismissed much of Sartre as.

An ecstatic schoolgirl anti-style, Leslie Fiedler accused Kerouac of.

Wharton died of a series of strokes.

Burn down their synagogues. Banish them altogether. Pelt them with sow dung. I would rather be a pig than a Jewish Messiah.

Amiably pronounced Luther.

I told you not go with drunken goy ever.

Says the ghost of Leopold Bloom’s father.

What the world would know of the Holocaust if the Germans had won.

Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan. 1495–1498.

The fellow that was pilloried, I have forgot his name.

You can actually draw so beautifully. Why do you spend your time making all these queer things?

Picasso: That’s why.

Give me a laundry list and I will set it to music.

Said Rossini.

The Girls in Their Summer Dresses.

The friendship of Menander and Epicurus.

St. Anthony was illiterate.

And did not bathe. Ever.

The exact route by which Hannibal crossed the Alps.

Which to this day historians have not determined.

Voltaire said he would believe in doctors when he met one who was a centenarian.

Dying himself at eighty-four, of uremia.

A hundred devils trample me down if old drunkards do not outnumber old doctors, Rabelais said.

Is Frans Hals the most documented drinker among earlier artists?

Is Addison close to it among writers?

Walker Percy died of prostate cancer.

Lillian Nordica. The first American to sing at Bayreuth.

George London. The first American to sing Boris Godunov at the Bolshoi.

Katherine Mansfield died of tuberculosis.

Rube Waddell died of tuberculosis.

July 14, 1789. There were seven prisoners, total, in the fortress.

A man can die but once; we owe God a death.

The Colossus of Rhodes crashed down in an earthquake in 224 BC Fully three centuries later Pliny the Elder would comment on the monstrous bronze fragments that still lay about the harbor.

George Herbert played the lute.

Nordica died of pneumonia after a shipwreck in the Malay Archipelago.

London died after years of paralysis from a stroke.

An intriguing speculation of La Fontaine’s:

Was St. Augustine as wise as Rabelais?

Then Werther blew his silly brains out — unquote — while Charlotte went on cutting bread and butter.

Chares of Lindus.

Ann Rutledge died of typhoid fever. At nineteen.

Auden died of a heart attack in a hotel room.

Richard Tucker died of a heart attack in a hotel room.

Dirty, dull, and false.

Said R. L. S. of Tom Jones.

Yeats and Pound married cousins.

Coleridge and Southey married sisters.

Domenico Scarlatti died penniless. Farinelli saw to it that his family was cared for.

Our American Cousin.

Stevie Smith died of a brain tumor.

Ava Gardner died of pneumonia.

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 también.

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?