David Markson - This is Not a Novel and Other Novels

Said Toscanini about critics reading politics into the Eroica .

Le Douanier Rousseau, who insisted he served with troops sent to Mexico to aid the Emperor Maximilian and actually saw those jungles.

But lied.

We killed him,

signed,

Morty.

Rubens attended Mass seven days a week.

Miroslav Holub and Zbigniew Herbert died within days of each other.

Author’s continuing sometime missteps.

His awareness that he probably ought to see a neurologist about same.

Crooked man, crooked mile.

Conversely, Author is still essentially willing to dismiss all of that as no more than age, the problems with his balance as well as the damnable obstinate weariness.

A Portrait of the Artist as an Alter Kocker .

Indeed. Old enough in fact to remember when Ted Williams was not the last baseball player to bat.400, but merely the most recent.

For that matter old enough to remember when the last player to bat.400 was Memphis Bill Terry.

Camden, New Jersey, Walt Whitman died in.

Given pause by the coincidence of the Declaration of Independence having been signed in the same year as the publication of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Carlyle once sent Edward Fitzgerald a copy of his latest book — with a note suggesting he should either read it or use the pages for lighting his pipe.

From far back in dimmest childhood he had been my ideal Elder Brother, and I still, through the years, saw in him, even as a small timorous boy yet, my protector, my backer, my authority and my pride.

Said Henry James, at the death of William.

The letters of Hélöise and Abélard. Forgeries or no?

Without music, life would be a mistake.

Said Nietzsche.

Music is neither good nor bad — to the deaf.

Said Spinoza.

Voltaire’s corpse had to be secretly driven out of Paris — sitting upright in a carriage — to be given a Christian burial.

Sartre’s impression that there was once an English author named Foe — who wrote such books as Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders .

Weimar, Nietzsche died in.

The black bat, night.

I have never killed a man. But I have read many obituaries with a lot of pleasure.

Said Clarence Darrow.

The friendship of Monet and Clemenceau.

A little plain woman with two smooth bands of reddish hair and a face with no good feature.

Being Emily of Amherst, as seen by Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

Selah , which marks the ends of verses in the Psalms, but the Hebrew meaning of which is unknown.

And probably indicates no more than pause, or rest.

Why does Author wish it implied more — or might stand for some ultimate effacement, even?

The 1953 Victor De Sabata La Scala Tosca, with Callas, Giuseppe di Stefano, and Tito Gobbi — is it the greatest single opera recording ever made?

The greatest anything recording?

Selah. Absolutely, all the illimitable connotations of Einstein’s cosmic Oy, vey Author hereby personally endows it with — a terminal desolation and despair.

Done? Done. Beware Selah .

Ravenna, Dante died in.

Brundisium, Virgil.

Chalcis, in Euboea — Aristotle.

For decades, at his most famous, Isaac Bashevis Singer kept his number listed in the Manhattan telephone directory.

As did Auden. And Allen Ginsberg.

Walter Pater’s habit of sometimes muttering Botticelli to himself — over and over — almost as a kind of incantation.

Molly Bloom’s familiarity with at least one episode in Rabelais — whom Joyce would nonetheless later persist in denying he had ever read.

Obscure, muddled, nervous, and confused.

Stated an official Prussian academic assessment of Hegel’s lectures.

Putridity and corruption.

Stated Kierkegaard re their published versions.

King Oliver. Who spent the last years of his life as a pool-hall attendant.

A critic is a man who knows the way but can’t drive the car.

Said Kenneth Tynan.

Salt Lake City, 1868—evidently the last insistently voiced claim of having seen the Wandering Jew.

Bessie Smith’s grave in Sharon Hill, Pennsylvania — which was without a headstone for thirty-three years. One of those who finally arranged for one having been Janis Joplin.

Inverness, Florida, Ted Williams died in.

Age.

Dammit.

Also being the cause of this new recent lightheadedness, Author is certain.

Moments in which whatever he’d had in mind seems to have almost sneakily floated off someplace just out of reach, flickering there — even taunting him.

Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.

An upside-down Matisse.

Beethoven’s Tenth, Brahms’ First was spoken of as.

For all the renown achieved by many, painters and sculptors in antiquity were considered little better than manual workers on a level with blacksmiths or shoemakers.

Cf. Plutarch: No well-born youth would want to be Phidias or Polyclitus, however much he may admire their art.

Or even in the Renaissance, the difference between a sculptor and a common stonecutter, which eluded Michelangelo’s magistrate father — and who considered his son’s elected career demeaning.

Muddling among old books has the quality of a sedative, and saves the tear and wear of an overwrought brain.

Said Scott.

The tradition that there was no one in fourteenth-century Florence who could not read — that even the donkey-cart driver could recite Dante.

The legend that a popular early Italian typeface, not too long after Gutenberg, was based on the handwriting of Petrarch.

Is my swan costume ready, please?

Asked Anna Pavlova on her deathbed.

According to his own wish, Liszt’s funeral was conducted without music.

Liszt’s.

Mais toujours seul; sans famine; même, quelle langue parlais-je?

An Oldsmobile convertible, Jackson Pollock was driving.

A Facel Vega, Camus was riding in. Michel Gallimard was doing the driving.

Fireplace Road, East Hampton. 10:15 P.M. August II, 1956.

National Route 5, Petit-Villeblevin. 1:54 P.M. January 4, 1960.

How long did the Virgin Mary survive Jesus?

How long before the Crucifixion had her husband, Joseph, died?

Theodore Roethke’s poem about the possibility that he would spend time locked away for madness in heaven as he did in life.

But there sharing it with the likes of Blake, and Clare, and Christopher Smart.

Gissing, clenching his teeth in despair at sight of a Tibullus priced at sixpence on a bookstall — sixpence being every cent he owned in the world.

The architect of Chartres Cathedral.

Unknown.

The invention of the compass, in use ca. 1200.

Unattributed.

Constable’s habit of frequently making detailed notes on the reverse of his sketches for landscapes — place, date, time, weather. And once:

Lovely. So much so that I could not paint for looking.

Somebody is living on this beach.

Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.

Said Wittgenstein, leaving it.

Rossini, shown a Mozart score in Mozart’s own hand:

And going to his knees to kiss the sheets.

Education is the best viaticum for old age.

Diogenes Laërtius says Aristotle said.

Dickens was the last mourner to turn aside from Thackeray’s grave.

And then walked off alone.

For there is such a little time that your youth will last — such a little time.

Says someone in Dorian Gray .

The legend that Rilke died after being pricked by the thorn of a rose.

Actually, from leukemia.

Valmont, near Glion, Switzerland. 3:30 A.M. December 29, 1926.