David Markson - This is Not a Novel and Other Novels

For the work of the pen let the writer be sent a beautiful girl.

Says a copyist’s note at the end of a different manuscript from the same period.

But look where sadly the poor wretch comes reading.

The happenstance that Lorca and Hart Crane once met — briefly, during Lorca’s stay in New York. Unfortunately with neither really knowing anything about the other’s work.

Hath the rain a father?

Corona, Queens, Louis Armstrong died in.

Sunnyside, Queens, Bix.

At sixty-seven, Paul Robeson was mugged on a New York street.

He must be some escaped lunatic.

Said an early Boston review of Leaves of Grass .

Getting and spending.

Freud waved his rights to royalties on translations of his work into Hebrew or Yiddish.

The letters of Voltaire take up a total of ninety-eight volumes.

Chamfort’s ironic distillation of the essential attitudes in the French Revolution:

Be my brother or I’ll kill you.

The one experience I shall never describe, Virginia Woolf called her intended suicide.

I have the feeling that I shall go mad. I hear voices and cannot concentrate on my work. I have fought against it, but cannot fight any longer.

The morning’s recollection of the emptiness of the day before.

Its anticipation of the emptiness of the day to come.

The last book Einstein had been reading when he died was Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision .

Blaise Cendrars once played the piano in a silent-movie theater on the Bowery.

Not very many years after Al Jolson had been singing for his supper nearby.

When daybreak came we were zooming through New Jersey with the great cloud of Metropolitan New York rising before us in the snowy distance. Dean had a sweater wrapped around his ears to keep warm. He said we were a band of Arabs coming in to blow up New York.

Terrorists . Which was in fact the literary term chosen to categorize the earliest nineteenth-century female Gothic novelists.

Tchaikovsky. Glinka. Borodin. Mussorgsky.

Who are buried in the same St. Petersburg cemetery.

Pollock. De Kooning. Frank O’Hara. Ad Reinhardt. Jean Stafford. Maggie Oldring.

Who are buried in the same one in East Hampton.

In a more traditional sort of novel, would it be time here for Author to bring back that obscure, lorn creature performing her ablutions at a toilet bowl?

Avec what startling dramatic revelation appended?

Langston Hughes’ request that a particular Duke Ellington composition be played at his funeral:

Do Nothing Till You Hear from Me .

Drumcliff churchyard.

All I can do is be kind to my husband and grow up children. Movie is nothing but exhibition dancing. What is the meaning of dancing and songs?

Aristophanes of Byzantium, asked which poem by Archilochos he most admired:

The longest.

Diogenes, asked what sort of wine he preferred:

That which belongs to another.

What a man does is all that counts, not what he intends to do.

Said Picasso.

The friendship of Felix Mendelssohn and Queen Victoria.

The red and roundy sun, John Clare called it.

Milan, Eugenio Montale died in.

Giuseppe Ungaretti anche .

Naples, Salvatore Quasimodo.

No woman ever created a single permanent work of art.

Said Schopenhauer.

Dylan Thomas was asked to be best man at Vernon Watkins’ wedding.

And managed not to get there.

Constantin Brancusi studied under Rodin.

Isamu Noguchi studied under Brancusi.

Anselm Kiefer studied under Joseph Beuys.

El Greco was a pupil of Titian’s.

The younger Pliny’s tale of the reader from Cadiz who so admired Livy that he traveled the full distance to Rome simply to have one view of him in the flesh — and then immediately left again.

Kurt Vonnegut once played chess against Garry Kasparov. And was cunning enough to resign after very few moves.

Even though Kasparov was playing a dozen or more games simultaneously.

Spain sent 130 ships to England in the Armada.

Fifty-four limped back.

Doll Tearsheet.

The only thing that we learn from history — is that we never learn anything from history.

Hegel said.

Gutless swooning full of sapless trees and dehydrated lusts. Reads a Faulkner description of Tennyson.

Thirteen pages in seven weeks. Five days on one page. Three days on eight lines.

Read random notations in Flaubert’s letters re progress on Madame Bovary .

Moritzburg, near Dresden, Kaethe Kollwitz died in.

One of the influences on Dvořák’s New World symphony was Hiawatha . Which Dvořák had no less first read in Czech.

Children, be comforted. I am well.

Being Haydn’s last words.

Mahler’s — singular — in a context which made no sense:

Mozart.

I hate to see him eating so many dinners and writing so few books.

Said William Dean Howells, of the extent to which Mark Twain was celebrated in his later years.

A complete absence of aesthetic feeling — unquote — Tolstoy found in Shakespeare.

Ernest Jones and Stefan Zweig spoke at Freud’s funeral.

Donatello died paralyzed.

Donatello.

The illusion that Deep Blue was somehow thinking.

Armageddon. At the hill of Megiddo — in the plains of Jezreel.

In southern Galilee.

I have traveled a good deal in Concord.

Raphael appears to have painted a total of exactly fifty Madonnas.

Has anyone ever identified manna ?

Et in Arcadia ego.

Chopin was buried in concert dress.

Delacroix was one of his pallbearers.

Solon, hearing a new poem of Sappho’s, saying he wished to memorize it:

Once I possess it fully, I can happily die.

The Leucadian Rock.

The Tarpeian Rock.

And it was like coriander seed, white, and the taste of it was like wafers made with honey.

George Moore’s assertion that he had in effect invented adultery.

Which he said had not occurred in any English novels before his own.

Sunt apud infernos tot milia formosarum.

Said Propertius: Among the dead there are thousands of beautiful women.

Thomas Mann’s claim that everything Bertolt Brecht wrote adhered far too predictably to the Communist party line.

Brecht’s response that Mann was a half-wit.

Auden’s response when asked if he believed in capital punishment:

That he would definitely approve of it in regard to Brecht.

Diderot, writing art criticism, and finding fault with a nude of Boucher’s:

All the same, just let me possess her as she is, and I do not think I shall waste time complaining that her hair is too dark.

Black Drop. Four ounces @ eleven shillings .

Being the brand of opium most favored by De Quincey and Coleridge. By Byron not infrequently also.

At one’s local apothecary.

Bert Brecht.

A faint sound to the praise of God, Hrotswitha von Gandersheim described her Latin comedies as.

Evidently wholly unaware of their sexual connotations.

Tomis, on the Black Sea, Ovid died in.

Cristoforo Colombo. Cristóbal Colon.

Sprawling, ignorant, indecent, unmelodious, seldom metrical.

Robert Graves called Pound’s Cantos .

A barbarian loose in a museum, Yvor Winters called Pound himself.

Shepherd of adulterers, a heretical older Tertullian called the pope.

Wittgenstein’s Vienna. Wittgenstein’s Nephew. Wittgenstein’s Ladder. Wittgenstein’s Poker.

Ferdinand and Isabella, los reyes católicos .

The former of whom had Jewish ancestry.

The likelihood that Torquemada did also.

Bah! For me it is simply allegro con brio .