David Markson - This is Not a Novel and Other Novels

Isaac Bickerstaff, a pseudonym invented by Swift.

Which Steele borrowed to use as the name of the editor of the Tattler.

Jeffrey Broadbottom, one contrived by Chesterfield.

Jean Dubuffet started out as a wine merchant.

A good book is twice as good if it is short. Said Baltasar Gracián.

The world as perceived by Rimbaud: Full of grocers.

Degas’ misogyny.

John von Neumann, Edward Teller, and Eugene Wigner were schoolboys together.

Alessandro Manzoni once told Walter Scott that he was in Scott’s debt for everything he knew about writing fiction. To which Scott:

In that case, I Promessi Sposi is my finest work.

Siarö, near Stockholm, Jussi Bjoerling died in.

Hemingway, E. E. Cummings, John Dos Passos, Dashiell Hammett.

All volunteer ambulance drivers in Europe in World War I.

Charlotte Brontë mailed off the unsolicited, pseudonymous manuscript of Jane Eyre to a London publisher on August 24, 1847.

And saw it in print seven weeks and four days later.

Maria Callas, on her conflicts with Rudolf Bing over repertory:

Those lousy Traviatas he wanted to make me do.

The Marquis de Sade’s will asked that his coffin not be sealed for at least forty-eight hours — to make certain he was dead.

Leopold Bloom’s notion, at Paddy Dignam’s funeral, that there ought to be a telephone in the grave. And an airhole.

Chopin. By whom the words Jew and pig were used interchangeably.

Yid , having been Dostoievsky’s choice.

Author is experimenting with keeping himself out of here as much as possible because?

Can he really say? Why does he still have no idea whatever where things are headed either?

Where can the book possibly wind up without him

I love fools’ experiments. I am always making them.

Said Darwin.

All life is an experiment.

Said Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Ravel weighed less than one hundred pounds.

The standard Italian translation of Moby Dick is by Cesare Pavese.

Lex talionis .

In his later years, Titian was exempted from almost all taxes in Venice.

Out of regard for his rare excellence, the government decreed.

It depends on what the meaning of the word is is.

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.

God does not inhabit healthy bodies.

Said Saint Hildegard of Bingen.

Under threat of arrest in the Reign of Terror, Chamfort shot himself in the head and cut his throat.

And died of pneumonia while recovering.

Antonio Gramsci spent most of the last eleven years of his life in a Mussolini prison.

The announcement at the Metropolitan Opera on December II, 1956, that the evening’s Lucia di Lammermoor would be sung by one Dolores Wilson and not, as scheduled, by Callas — which led to a virtual riot in the lobby.

Joseph Cornell lived in the same house in Queens for fifty-four years.

Descartes, in Holland, had twenty-four different addresses in twenty.

Thérèse Levasseur, Rousseau’s mistress and later wife.

Who could barely read. And never learned to count money or recite the names of the months in sequence.

Mary Kalogeropoulos.

The custom of an audience standing during the Hallelujah Chorus .

Because George II was spontaneously moved to do so at Messiah’s first London performance — meaning that everyone else in attendance had to also.

Though everyone was already on his feet when it was played by the organist at Fenway Park after Carlton Fisk’s home run in the 1975 World Series.

Was Callas the finest Lucia ever?

Lily Pons? Joan Sutherland?

The Wandering Jew was claimed to have been seen in Brussels in 1640.

And in Leipzig in 1642.

Callas.

The citizens of Athens commissioned a statue of Pindar by popular subscription. In Rhodes, one of his poems was inscribed in gold on the wall of a temple.

The prize windbag of all ages, Ezra Pound saw fit to anoint him twenty-five hundred years later.

Pound in the same mood on Milton:

Disgusting, coarse-minded, asinine.

On Dryden:

A lunkhead.

Suppose one woke and found oneself a fraud?

Asks Virginia Woolf’s Diary .

Puccini’s wife once accused him of having an affair with their housemaid — and so hounded the girl that she killed herself.

And then was sentenced to five months in prison when a postmortem indicated that the girl had been a virgin.

Hamburg, Telemann died in.

We all understand the meaning in ordinary life of the word is .

I remark to a neighbor, Today is Monday, and there are no questions asked, and none need to be asked, about the meaning of is .

Says William Barrett in a commentary on Heidegger.

Erasure is as important as writing.

Said Quintilian.

Who also said, Write quickly and you will never write well.

Luther. Erasmus. Thomas More. John Wesley. Calvin.

All of whom believed unconditionally in the powers of witches — and most of whom approved their execution. Luther indeed having burned several at Wittenberg.

The friendship of Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell.

Thomas Mann went out of his way to praise Hesse’s Magister Ludi .

And then admitted to his son Klaus that he had no idea what it was about.

Carthage burned for seventeen days, when razed by Scipio Africanus the Younger.

Rome burned for nine, in Nero’s conflagration.

By Horace’s lights, the fact that Homer commended wine made it self-evident that he was a tippler.

Why does it seem odd to Author that Yeats and Kipling were born in the same year?

The writer who first suggested in print, decades after the fact, that Byron had committed incest with his half sister Augusta Leigh, was Harriet Stowe.

Woolsthorpe. Where Newton did or did not have his attention caught by an apple falling from a branch.

I prefer to think in torment than not to be able to think clearly.

Said Freud, rejecting drugs while enduring the cancer that slowly took his life.

Sein und Zeit.

Pope Julius II, who commissioned the Sistine Chapel, and who hired Raphael — and who always sought out Jewish physicians.

Rembrandt’s connection with the Jewish ghetto in Amsterdam. Even living there, in the years after his bankruptcy and eviction.

Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.

To salute all officers and all colors and standards not cased.

Leonardo’s long treatise on painting. In which the only one of his contemporaries he mentions by name is Botticelli.

New York City, Martha Graham died in.

L’être et le néant.

Oliver Goldsmith fled in panic into Saint James Park rather than sit through the opening night of She Stoops to Conquer .

Samuel Johnson, David Garrick, and Joshua Reynolds were among those who went searching for him to announce its success.

To avoid confusion with the painter George Frederic Watts, the critic Theodore Watts changed his name to Watts-Dunton.

And received a telegram from Whistler: Theodore, What’s Dunton ?

Sir Francis Bacon died of what began as a chill during an experiment to see how long he could preserve a fowl by freezing it in snow.

In 1626.

Hegel told himself he was depraved — his word — when he concluded he admired Rossini’s Figaro opera more than Mozart’s.

Daddy? Couldn’t that lady cut herself, standing on that seashell?

His mind and hand went together; and what he thought, he uttered with that easiness, that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.

The multitudinous seas incarnadine.