David Markson - This is Not a Novel and Other Novels

112 Mercer Street.

Princeton, New Jersey.

Rudyard Kipling was so repeatedly abused when farmed out to relatives as a child that when his mother finally reappeared and entered his bedroom for the first time to kiss him good night, he flung up his hands — to protect himself from the anticipated blow.

How often, if ever, pausing to remember?—

Museum, i.e., place of the muses.

An honest man but no poet.

Ben Jonson called Samuel Daniel.

A good rhymester but no poet.

Milton called Dryden.

No trace of Apelles’ work has come down from Greek antiquity — though it remained enormously valued in the Rome of the Caesars and beyond.

Elmhurst, New York, Albert Pinkham Ryder died in.

Proust’s deathbed photo. By Man Ray.

Joyce, asked to compare D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley:

Huxley at least dresses decently.

Eileen Farrell’s husband was a New York City policeman.

The redheaded maniac, van Gogh was called by the youngsters at Arles.

Il prete rosso —having been Vivaldi.

3.14159.

Clara Schumann’s letters to Brahms:

More interesting than Brahms’ to her.

Hey, Dads, will you take us to that new movie, what’s it called— Apoplexy Now ?

I can control the flow of paint. There is no accident.

Said Jackson Pollock.

Hemingway made a display of announcing to friends how frequently he bedded his wives. Someone asked Mary Hemingway about this later on.

If only, Mary Hemingway said.

Dost thou call me fool, boy?

All thy other titles thou hast given away; that thou wast born with.

Untalented and entirely lacking in ear.

Said a Baltimore music school, expelling Larry Adler.

Crapulous, John Adams called Paine’s Common Sense .

Neil Shicoff’s two-word telegram to a New York Times music reviewer who had disapproved of one of his performances.

Archimedes was able to calculate pi to one decimal place. Roughly four hundred years later, Ptolemy managed three.

The fact that Socrates wrote nothing.

The fact that Jesus wrote nothing.

The fact that Buddha wrote nothing.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s fluency in as many as eight languages, including Hebrew.

Including Portuguese.

The friendship of Freud and Wittgenstein’s sister Margarete.

Sir Edward Elgar flew kites.

Cuidado con el Ganado .

Hart Crane’s At Melville’s Tomb .

Is there evidence that Crane ever actually made the pilgrimage — to the northern reaches of the Bronx?

Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel —

Rarely remembering that the film is based on a novel by Heinrich Mann.

Munich, Oswald Spengler died in.

John Masefield, off a ship at eighteen, worked for a time in a Greenwich Village saloon.

Henry Fuseli taught drawing at the Royal Academy. Among others, to Blake.

The fifteen young Muslim girls who were left to burn to death in a school fire in Mecca when vice police drove off those coming to their aid — lest they be seen by men while not wearing their head scarves.

In 2002.

The woman in Pakistan who was raped — and under Muslim law was convicted of adultery and sentenced to be stoned to death.

In 2002.

There was no word for war in Yiddish.

Oscar Wilde, reading Marie Corelli while in Reading Gaol:

The way she writes, she ought to be in here.

It was James Laughlin who was called upon to make an official identification at the morgue after the death of Dylan Thomas.

To write only according to the rules laid down by previous classics signifies that one is not a master but a pupil.

Said Prokofiev.

Caruso was the eighteenth of twenty children. The two following him were the only others to live past infancy.

A man can be a grandfather in thirty years.

Pointed out Heraclitus.

Shakespeare became one at forty-three.

Doña Jeronima de las Cuevas, El Greco’s mistress — whose face he used for most of his Virgins.

Bulwer Lytton once threatened his wife with a carving knife.

Because she didn’t answer when he spoke to her, she claimed.

You better be careful what you are saying, if it is a white man you are talking about, the marshal says. I don’t care if he is a murderer or not.

At sixty-eight, Hans Sachs married a second wife. Of twenty-seven.

Vaughan Williams married a second wife at eighty.

Max Beerbohm married a second wife at eighty-four.

And died a month later.

Strangling is a very quiet death.

Says Ferdinand in The Duchess of Malfi .

Willem de Kooning’s Light in August . Oil and enamel on paper, 42 by 55 inches, ca. 1946.

Indianapolis, Indiana, Frances Farmer died in.

Carl Maria von Weber once unwittingly swallowed nitric acid — and for the rest of his life could speak only with difficulty.

Decades before it became commonplace, Joyce was generally most comfortable in tennis shoes.

Wittgenstein almost never wore a necktie.

Seventy thousand people died in London in the Great Plague of 1665.

Seventy thousand .

Two hundred thousand lost their homes in the Great Fire of one year later.

Gluck at one time gave singing lessons to an eight-year-old Marie Antoinette.

The brownstone in Brooklyn Heights where Auden, Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, Carson McCullers, Paul and Jane Bowles, and Gypsy Rose Lee all once shared boarding-house style meals — with Auden performing as housemother.

Ford Madox Ford was a nephew of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Jacques-Louis David was a great-nephew of François Boucher.

If Anne Brontë had not been Anne Brontë, would she still be Anne Brontë?

Such hard work it is to die? Such hard work?

Exceptionally shy, Virgil was known to be. In part because of a stutter.

Toulouse-Lautrec’s first teacher was the portrait painter Bonnat.

Who called his efforts abominable.

An explosion in a cesspool, Paul Elmer More called Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer .

The G-String Murders .

Why does Author not know if what used to be named Arbor Day is still celebrated?

Until he was almost fifty, Rousseau was forced to earn a living as a music copyist.

At least four popes have been assassinated.

Historical details regarding the Amazons were left by both the Greeks and the Persians but ceased with the Romans — as if they had abruptly disappeared.

Has it ever been verified that they existed?

Simone de Beauvoir was one inch taller that Sartre.

Luca Signorelli, at the sudden death of a young son — having the corpse stripped and making a full-length drawing of the boy for remembrance.

And with extraordinary fortitude, shedding not a tear, Vasari says.

Haarlem, Frans Hals died in.

This book on which I have grown thin through all these years, Dante speaks of.

A strict accounting of even the most trivial household expense, Hegel was said to keep.

To the last pfennig.

Cleopatra, in a burka.

Joan, in a burka.

Marilyn.

Albert Camus was having lunch in a Paris restaurant when he was informed he had won the Nobel Prize. By his waiter.

The pretense in speaking of second-rate 1940s Hollywood melodramas as film noir classics.

Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle.

Oscar Williams’ long-popular Little Treasury of Modern Poetry , dated 1946.

Containing five poems by Wallace Stevens, four by Ezra Pound, four by Marianne Moore, two by William Carlos Williams — and nine by Oscar Williams.

But I kissed her little sister,

And forgot my Clementine.

Gus Broberg. Bob Davies. Arnold Ferrin.

He who follows another will never overtake him.