David Markson - This is Not a Novel and Other Novels

Once more before he dies Author will reread Huckleberry Finn .

Alprazolam .

Demosthenes, to conquer his speech impediment:

Shouting orations into the surf with a mouth full of pebbles — or declaiming while running up and down hills.

Does anyone in Shakespeare have more lines than Hamlet?

Lily Tomlin’s program note that the understudy for her one-woman show was Zinka Milanov.

Who sued for two million dollars.

More than 60 percent of the people in the United States have not read a book from beginning to end since adolescence.

If then.

I sometimes think that never blows so red

The Rose as where some buried Caesar bled.

Mickey Cochrane. Ray Schalk. Nap Rucker.

Peggy Mitchell, the author of Gone with the Wind was commonly called.

Nate West, the author of Miss Lonelyhearts.

I have not for these things fished in other men’s waters; my Bible and my Concordance are my only library in my writing.

Said John Bunyan.

Isocrates, who starved himself to death. At ninety-eight.

Johnson wrote Rasselas in one week of evenings to pay for his mother’s funeral.

John Cleland wrote Fanny Hill to keep himself out of debtors’ prison.

Arcetri, near Florence, Galileo died in.

You can’t see out of the back of your head. I do not think there is any record of a man being able to criticize the people that came after him.

Said Pound.

Impecunitis.

What a joy — that syntax is no longer subversive in the White House.

Said John Steinbeck after the election of John F. Kennedy.

Yeats had his tonsils removed at fifty-five — by Dr. Oliver St. John Gogarty.

Tom Eliot. Wally Stevens.

At twenty-nine, Toscanini conducted the world premiere of La Bohème .

And conducted it again on its fiftieth anniversary.

The first occasion on which the word shit appeared in the New Yorker :

Quoting Richard M. Nixon.

Forgetting by now that Frieda Lawrence’s brother was Baron Manfred von Richthofen.

What Palestrina would have made of a Stockhausen score.

What Giotto would make of a Gerhard Richter canvas.

When you have a tan, she said, what have you got?

Dottie Parker.

Schopenhauer on critics:

Mistaking their own toy trumpets for the trombones of fame.

During the night after Modigliani’s death, and before her suicide from a fifth-floor window, Jeanne Hébuterne repeatedly sketched self-portraits that showed her stabbing herself with a knife.

Samuel Pepys owned 2,474 books.

De Quincey owned five thousand.

Wordsworth fewer than three hundred.

Jim Farrell.

Jim Agee.

Naomi Ginsberg’s lobotomy.

Rosemary Kennedy’s.

The wagon train moved slowly westward.

William Empson: You could do that with any poetry, couldn’t you?

I. A. Richards: You’d better go off and do it, hadn’t you?

The reaction when sudden sunshine on a late winter afternoon brings with it a first unanticipated hint of spring. At Dachau.

Al Naharot Bavel .

I see only a heap of white clothes, like a snowdrift. O God, she moves her arm!

Tertullian’s father was a Roman centurion.

Silver Spring, Maryland, Rachel Carson died in.

Garden Spring Valley, Maryland, Rosa Ponselle.

We Italians are irreligious and corrupt above others.

Concluded Machiavelli.

I was once in Italie myself, but I thanke God my abode there was but IX days. And yet I saw in that litle tyme, in one Citie, more libertie to sinne, than I ever hard tell of in our noble Citie of London in IX years.

Added Roger Ascham, in 1563.

A country of fiddlers and poets, whores and scoundrels.

Being Horatio Nelson’s subsequent two cents’ worth.

Ted Hughes writes the kind of stuff I throw away.

Said James Dickey.

I did greatly enjoy the first few years of Act I.

Said Alexander Woollcott of an operetta by Rudolf Friml.

The title for Vanity Fair came to Thackeray when he was almost asleep. And sent him literally bounding around his bedroom in delight.

The Republicans are as wicked as they are stupid, which is saying a great deal.

Said Bertrand Russell after a visit.

What Balzac would make of a novel of Author’s.

Bill de Kooning.

On Lucas Cranach’s tombstone: Pictor Celerrimus , the fastest painter.

Camilo José Cela fought on the side of the fascists during the Spanish Civil War.

Who is it that can tell me who I am?

Macedonian barber: How would you like your hair cut?

King Archelaus: In silence.

Ariosto spent twenty-six years writing and revising Orlando Furioso .

Frank, the Francis Beaumont of Beaumont and Fletcher was known as.

Charley Dickens, to Wilkie Collins and others.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poem about having seen an older man in the Copenhagen airport who was the very image of Hemingway.

And only later learning that it was.

Luciano Pavarotti and Placido Domingo made their Metropolitan Opera debuts within eight weeks of each other.

Acute lymphocytic leukemia, José Carreras recovered from.

Hadrian, at fifty, climbed Etna to watch the sunrise. Goethe climbed Vesuvius twice.

Wondering if youngsters still read Beau Geste.

Actually, more than his persistent tiredness, what has started to distress Author lately is the way he has found himself scuffing his feet when he walks.

But also the singular small missteps he sometimes unexpectedly takes. As if his Adidas have whims of their own.

Literature is what gets taught, Roland Barthes said.

Ridgfield, Connecticut, Geraldine Farrar died in.

Jimmy Whistler.

Opera is opera, symphony is symphony—

Said Verdi, in an ultimate judgment on Wagner.

Author is likewise not particularly gladdened by the several times in recent weeks that he has tripped at a curb. Or at the outside steps of his apartment building.

The Norman Rockwell of the intelligentsia, Robert Hughes called Alex Katz.

Liber scriptus proferetur,

In quo toturn continetur.

The Wandering Jew was claimed to have been seen in Newcastle in 1790.

And in London in 1818.

Farinelli was at one period commissioned to sing to Philip V of Spain every evening for a decade.

Giambattista Tiepolo was buried in Madrid, in a church that would later be destroyed.

The whereabouts of his remains having been unknown ever since.

They were overjoyed when the first plane hit the building; so I said to them: Be patient.

The sky will burn at forty-five degrees. Fire approaches the great new City. In an instant a huge scattered flame leaps up.

Why, with few exceptions, is the average painter so much more literate than the average actor?

Vaughan Williams went through life supported by a private income.

William Burroughs had a regular monthly allowance from his parents for twenty-five years after graduating from Harvard.

Where the last stand was made, the Long Hair stood like a sheaf of corn with all the ears fallen around him.

Said Sitting Bull.

From a description in Plutarch of a drinking bout:

As if one were laying in provisions for a siege.

Linares, Granada, Andrés Segovia was born in.

Linares, Granada, Manolete died in.

I feel like I’m solidly in the high-art literary tradition — unquote.

What news on the Rialto?

Realizing only after the fact that Miss Lonelyhearts’ real name is never mentioned.

Mademoiselle Côeur-Brisé.

Considering her inordinate reclusiveness, who then walked Emily Dickinson’s huge dog?

What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.