David Markson - This is Not a Novel and Other Novels

Physics is much too difficult for me. I wish I were a film comedian.

Said Wolfgang Pauli.

Kuesnacht, near Zurich, Carl Jung died in.

The correspondence between T. S. Eliot and Groucho Marx.

Initiated by Eliot.

Vesalius passed his final examinations at the University of Padua with such astonishingly high grades that the following morning he was appointed a professor of surgery.

For all that later sensibilities would find it mawkish, Dickens himself always wept when he read the death of Little Nell in public.

Puccini admitted that he did the same after writing Mimi’s death in La Bohème .

From a letter of 1682, to the effect that a ship carrying Quakers is en route to Cape Cod:

Much spoil can be made of selling the whole lot to Barbadoes, where slaves fetch good prices in rum and sugar and we shall do the Lord great good by punishing the wicked. Yours in the bowels of Christ—

Cotton Mather.

Forks were first introduced in England in 1611.

Which is to say, about the time Shakespeare was writing The Winter’s Tale and/or The Tempest and preparing to retire to Stratford.

Milton treated his three daughters so sternly that when he decided to marry for a third time, one of them said that news of a wedding was of no consequence:

But might I hear of his death, that were something.

Realizing that through the entire Middle Ages, Italian merchants still kept their books in Roman numerals.

The curiosity that Jesus never appears to condemn slavery, though mentioning it in passing more than once.

The best-selling novels in five of the first fourteen years of the twentieth century were by Winston Churchill.

An earlier Winston Churchill.

There are eighty-six chapters in Middlemarch .

And eighty-six epigraphs.

For years, Vachel Lindsay sold his poetry on street corners. The first time he did so, in New York in 1905, he took in thirteen cents.

And was overjoyed.

No single book or manuscript is listed among Shakespeare’s possessions in his will.

There was a man and a dog too this time.

The barometer of his emotional nature was set for a spell of riot.

Hackenbush.

Hobbes. Descartes. Pascal. Spinoza. Locke. Leibniz. Hume. Kant. Schopenhauer. Kierkegaard. Nietzsche. Santayana. Wittgenstein.

Not one of whom ever married.

Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife,

He would have written sonnets all his life?

Clement Greenberg was asked to deliver the eulogy at Jackson Pollock’s funeral, but refused — outraged that Pollock had caused the death of an innocent passenger in the crash that killed him.

As if written illegally, under fear of the police.

Bertolt Brecht said of Kafka’s fiction.

Like a naked man among people wearing clothes.

Milena Jesenská perceived him.

An illegitimate wretch who is a scholar is more worthy than an ignorant high priest.

Said Maimonides.

The Regents of the Old Men’s Almshouse .

Hals himself was eighty-four.

Athens, 399 BC. A jury of 501 male citizens over the age of thirty.

Guilty, 281 to 220.

Goethe wrote Werther in four weeks.

Schiller wrote William Tell in six.

Laurence Olivier, shoring up the confidence of a young Alec Guinness during a rehearsal of Twelfth Night :

Fascinating. I’d never realized before that Malvolio could be played as a bore.

Agathon, the first Greek dramatist to write a tragedy without using a subject from myth, and at whose home Plato situates the Symposium — and by whom not one play remains.

Modern critical interpretations of Oedipus Rex that suggest Jocasta knows all along.

Commentary on the pigeons in the Piazza San Marco dates from as early as the mid-I200s.

Elie Wiesel’s advance against royalties for the first American edition of Night was $100.

Daniele da Volterra, who was commissioned by Pope Paul IV to conceal some of the nudity in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment.

And was thereafter referred to as the Breeches-Maker.

Michelangelo was still alive at the time of the pope’s decision.

Tell his Holiness to look to setting the world in order. To reform a picture costs no great trouble.

Montaigne, in all of his autobiographical pages, mentions his wife only less than does Dante in his.

The Wandering Jew was claimed to have been seen in Hamburg in 1542, 1547, and 1564.

And in Vienna in 1599.

Caedmon, sing me something!

As Plutarch reports it, after Socrates’ trial — and his death — his accusers were looked upon with such disfavor that they eventually hanged themselves.

Alfred North Whitehead was made to retire at Imperial College, London, at the age of sixty-two.

Harvard was quite content to have him move there and teach for an additional thirteen years.

Rome, Ingeborg Bachmann died in.

Anthony Powell, George Orwell, Henry Green, and Cyril Connolly all attended Eton at the same time.

Along with Ian Fleming.

Malcolm Lowry, William Empson, Kathleen Raine, and Michael Redgrave were contemporaries at Cambridge.

Along with Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt, and Kim Philby.

Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?

The First Folio Shakespeare, in 1623, was only the second Workes of a playwright published in England. Ben Jonson’s had been the first, seven years earlier — and to a certain ridicule, for seeming pretentious.

Francis Beaumont, of Beaumont and. So astute a critical reader that even Jonson himself, according to Dryden, asked him to look through his manuscripts and suggest revisions.

The Black Death, 1348-49. Presumably brought to Europe on shipboard by rats from the Near East.

Nonetheless leading to tens of thousands of Jews being massacred across Spain and France and Germany, accused of poisoning wells.

Salvador Dali, once lecturing at the Sorbonne, began by removing his right shoe and sock — and then soaked his bare foot in a pan of milk throughout.

God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions.

An anonymous Cynic philosopher, re the Odyssey :

I do not find that Odysseus the Wise does anything but dine and chase women.

T. E. Lawrence, who spent four years working on a new translation of same—

And then decided he fundamentally agreed with the antique earlier judgment.

D. H. Lawrence, on a difference between the novel and older poetic epics:

In a novel, you know there is a water closet on the premises.

In a letter from Florence Hardy, mentioning that her husband is at his desk:

Writing an intensely dismal poem with great spirits.

Eliot took private French lessons in Paris from Alain-Fournier, evidently just when the latter had begun writing Le Grand Meaulnes .

And four years before he would be shot and killed in a German ambush in World War I.

Remembering that a faithful small-scale copy of The Last Judgment by Marcello Venusti, made before garments were added, exists in Naples.

Gigantic Emily Brontë Emily Dickinson called her.

A Wayward Nun, Dickinson called herself.

David Garrick, retiring from the stage:

Now I will sit down and read Shakespeare.

Schrödinger’s cat.

Captain Gardiner, I will not do it. Even now I lose time. Good bye, good bye. God bless ye, man, and may I forgive myself, but I must go.

Theories that Milton’s blindness was caused by glaucoma. Or by detached retinas.

Or congenital syphilis.

Above Rodin’s grave at Meudon:

A cast of The Thinker .

Like Alexander with the Iliad , Napoleon carried a copy of Plutarch’s Lives with him eternally.