David Markson - This is Not a Novel and Other Novels

Said Michelangelo.

If you are alone, you are wholly your own.

Said Leonardo.

Swinburne’s pronouncement that he was a better poetic dramatist than Euripides.

Scott, proposed as Poet Laureate — but calling the entire concept ridiculous.

Byron, mocking Southey for accepting the position.

Browning condemning Wordsworth for the same.

Saussure’s doctoral dissertation: On the use of the genitive case in Sanskrit.

Madame Tussaud began a death mask of Robespierre only instants after his severed head was handed down from the guillotine.

The era when books were still chained to desks or lecterns in certain libraries.

Hashshasheen . Assassin.

Diogenes, explaining why people give to beggars, but not to philosophers:

Because they think it possible that they themselves might become lame or blind, but they do not expect to turn out philosophers.

New Haven, Connecticut, Hermann Broch died in.

A thoroughly superficial book with all the profundity of Rebecca.

Scott Fitzgerald called For Whom the Bell Tolls .

Isaac Bashevis Singer’s father was a rabbi.

The insistence of both Plutarch and Arrian that the Persians under Darius III at Issus lost 120,000 men — to Alexander’s 450.

The feminist character in Ibsen’s Rosmersholm whose name Cicily Isabel Fairfield borrowed as a pseudonym — to become Rebecca West.

Philomela.

To spend too much time in Studies is Sloth; To use them too much for Ornament is Affectation.

Said Bacon.

Janet Baker. Marilyn Horne. Grace Bumbry.

All of whom attended master classes with Lotte Lehmann.

Jackson Pollock and Philip Guston went to high school together.

I certify that this vehicle has been inspected and that there are no children left on board.

Auden’s first volume of poems — and Stephen Spender’s — were both published by Spender himself on a small hand-operated press.

Charon. Who charged an obolus for the ferry ride across the Styx.

Christina Rossetti’s pet wombat.

Disappointment to this day that Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau never sang at the Metropolitan.

Genghis Khan had five hundred wives and/or concubines.

Moe Berg and Allen Ginsberg were distant cousins.

Toby Greene. Who jumped ship with Melville in the South Pacific and later reappeared — as a housepainter in Buffalo — to verify events in Typee .

These are not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in schools alongside some big black bucks.

Being Dwight D. Eisenhower — edifying someone re Southerners opposed to desegregation.

William Faulkner voted for Adlai Stevenson.

An obolus. Six of same having equaled one ancient drachma.

Ivan the Terrible died while playing chess with Boris Godunov.

Dante tires one quickly; it is like looking at the sun.

Said Joyce.

Lavinia.

One of Melville’s grandfathers took part in the Boston Tea Party.

As did one of Edith Wharton’s great-grandfathers.

An uncle of Kafka’s was the director general of the Spanish railway system.

Henry, why are you here?

Waldo, why are you not here?

A pack of lies, Carlyle dismissed poetry as.

Stone dolls, Isaac Newton called sculpture.

You cannot trust the ones who are too careful. As writers or drinkers. Old Goethe cannot have been so good a man as Keats or Chatterton or Rimbaud. The ones that burn.

Said Lowry.

Mark Twain’s was the first house in Hartford with a telephone.

Norway’s king attended Kirsten Flagstad’s funeral.

Do certain people actually remember learning to read?

Monte Carlo, Lillie Langtry died in.

Louis MacNeice died of pneumonia after descending into a mine to check on sound effects while producing a program for the BBC.

Glee-wood, the harp was called in Anglo-Saxon.

Harry Haller, in Steppenwolf —in a setting based on Zurich, ca. 1920—speaks of three mail deliveries each day.

Leopold Bloom, in the Ulysses set a decade and a half earlier, notes the nine o’clock evening postman meaning the last delivery of what in Dublin at that time would have been five.

Haller even then complains of junk mail.

Kurt Weill’s father was a cantor.

James Levine’s grandfather was one.

They said I was mad, and I said they were mad, and, damn them, they outvoted me.

Said Dryden’s sometime collaborator Nathaniel Lee, upon being confined to Bedlam.

Titian might have become an even greater painter if he had ever really learned elementary draftsmanship i.e., if he had ever really learned to draw.

Michelangelo evidently suggested.

Ellen Terry once refused the lead in a play Henry James had written particularly with her in mind.

James called her a hag.

Pliny the Younger’s detail-by-detail letter of 79 AD to Tacitus about the death of his uncle in the eruption of Vesuvius that buried Pompeii.

The claim that Vicente Huidobro’s mother could trace her ancestry back to El Cid.

I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all.

Begins Malone Dies .

Two of Jane Austen’s brothers became admirals in the Royal Navy.

Mornings, when the leaves are dewy, some of them are like jewels where the earliest sunlight glistens.

The Persistence of Memory .

Itzhak Perlman. Nigel Kennedy. Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg. Midori. Shlomo Mintz.

Who all studied under Dorothy DeLay.

An appointment with E. M. Forster that Tennessee Williams once canceled.

Because he could not abide old men with urine stains on their trousers, Gore Vidal said Williams said.

Nabokov once dismissed Don Quixote as overrated during a lecture at Harvard.

Harvard thinks otherwise, he was complacently informed by Harry Levin.

Michael Praetorius.

Simone Signoret.

They are hardly more obscure than Hegel or Swedenborg. Said Nerval, refusing to explain the meaning of some sonnets.

The possibility that Phidias died in jail.

Now, listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddam face.

Nazim Hikmet was buried in Moscow. Thirty-eight years later a tree from Turkey was transplanted beside his grave.

Not long after Byron’s death, Teresa Guiccioli had an affair with Lamartine.

Was E. T. A. Hoffmann the first writer to use the word Philistine in its modern cultural sense?

What might Johannes Kepler have been allergic to, that his nose ran eternally?

Remembering that Bedlam is a contraction of Bethlehem, from London’s Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem, since approximately 1400 an asylum.

Where in the eighteenth century tours were conducted — to view the chained inmates.

Only three former baseball players appeared at Ty Cobb’s funeral.

Litheck, Dietrich Buxtehude died in.

Josephine Baker’s mother was an East St. Louis washerwoman.

Omar Khayyám. Which translates as Omar the Tentmaker.

Though in fact he was a mathematician and astronomer.

Saint-Rémy.

Perhaps the greatest woman poet since Sappho, Harriet Monroe called Edna Millay.

I think she is every bit as good as Elizabeth Browning, acknowledged Hart Crane.

I can only say I do not greatly care for Madame Browning.

Andy Warhol and Philip Pearlstein were once apartment mates.

Rubáiyát. Which itself means nothing more exotic than quatrains.

Jascha Heifetz once composed a piece of popular music under the pseudonym Jim Hoyle — and was called Jim by his friends from then on.

Fritz, Nietzsche was known as among intimates.

Point Barrow, Alaska. August 15, 1935.