Текст книги "Reader's Block"

Автор книги: David Markson

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Gansevoort Street was named after a hero of the Revolutionary War. Melville’s maternal grandfather.

All life is sorrowful.

Are the Wandering Rocks in the Odysseyice floes from the Dnieper or the Don that have drifted into the Black Sea?

Protagonist nodded hello to the woman from the grave in passing on the street yesterday.

Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices.

In fact Protagonist has any number of friends.

Among the living and accessible.

Even if he has never quite been able to articulate for himself precisely why or even when it was that he commenced to fall out of touch.

With some of whom in what now appears a virtually separate incarnation he spent time endlessly.

Archimedes had to be dragged by main force to take a bath.

Sir John Denham once saved George Wither from being hanged by pleading that so long as Wither was alive, he, Denham, could never be the worst poet in England.

Paul de Man was an anti-Semite.

Except for Aquinas and the Bible, Descartes almost never read a word. He called the classics a waste of time.

The best critic and human being I’ve known in my life was my dear friend Paul de Man.

Had said Harold Bloom before de Man’s pro-Nazi World War II writings were discovered.

Kol Nidre.

Hadrian’s Animula, vagula, blandula.Which Reader was surprised to find Stevie Smith had done a translation of.

Though he remotely knew Byron’s.

Shall I, wasting in despair,

Die because a woman’s fair?

Keats may have been born above a livery stable.

Cennino d’Andrea Cennini.

Leon Battista Alberti.

Certain writers’ saloons near that Greenwich Village apartment would Protagonist have spent some of that other incarnation in?

Camus died in a car crash.

Ortwin de Graef.

A Yorkshire bishop convened a public burning of Jude the Obscure.

Probably in his despair at not being able to burn me, Hardy said.

The White Horse Tavern?

The Lion’s Head?

Anne Sexton sexually abused her older daughter.

Skibet Guar Videre.

The Viareggio?

Gentlemen, old Bach is here!

Christopher Smart. Mad, lice-infested, incising A Song to Davidand the Jubilate Agnointo the wainscotting of a jail cell.

Known before that for insisting upon being joined in prayer wherever the impulse struck him, even at street corners. Or more ideally in rain.

Frieda von Richthofen.

Legend eternally insists that Cleopatra committed suicide by pressing an asp to her bosom. Plutarch suggests that it may have been by taking poison, however.

Finnegans Wake,sans apostrophe. Finnegansergo a plural noun, Wakea verb.

Joyces write. Readers read.

Fernand Leger was gassed while serving as a stretcher-bearer in World War I.

Fuit Ilium,

I’d as lief pray with Kit Smart as anyone else, Johnson said.

What things have we seen

Done at the Mermaid!

Charmian and Iras committed suicide when Cleopatra did.

Lorenzo da Ponte ended his days teaching Italian at what would later become Columbia University.

Could Protagonist possibly have taught somewhere at some time also?

Columbia likewise?

Schopenhauer was an anti-Semite.

Austerlitz. Smolensk. Borodino.

Tycho Brahe wore a silver alloy nose. The bridge of his own had been severed in a duel.

Horseflies that keep the horse from plowing, Chekhov called critics.

Hendrickje Stoffels was illiterate.

Hailey, Idaho, Ezra Pound was born in.

Saskia.

August 2, 1492. The deadline set by Ferdinand and Isabella for the expulsion of all Jews who did not convert to Catholicism. August 3, 1492. Columbus sailed.

F. O. Matthiessen committed suicide in a plunge from a window.

Jeremy Bentham’s skeleton is on display at University College, London.

In Bentham’s clothes.

Protagonist’s son or daughter may one day want his books.

Some few? The better volumes of art reproductions?

Rudolf Nureyev was an anti-Semite.

Caddy held me. She smelled like trees.

Galileo had three illegitimate children.

From certain angles, the knotted root on Reader’s windowsill looks like a hand grasping in supplication. A woman named Kate Winter plucked it from an eddy at an embankment of the Ebro where Reader and she had paused during a long day’s driving.

Freud had thirty-three operations for cancer on his mouth and throat.

Joyce had twenty-five operations on his eyes.

Excluding the minor coincidence of their names, there is no connection between the Fern Winters at Yankee Stadium and the Kate Winter in Spain. Reader knew them decades apart.

No ideas but in things.

George Sanders committed suicide.

Gabriella Mistral once lived in Roslyn Harbor, Long Island.

Bach and Handel were born in the same year.

Wagner and Verdi were born in the same year.

François Villon was born in the year Joan of Arc was burned at the stake.

On mourra seul.

Could a woman with one leg, on crutches, navigate in the sand of a beach?

The word philosophertranslates from the Greek as lover of wisdom. Pythagoras is credited with having originated its usage.

Auden married Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika, whom he had never until then met, so that she could evade the Nazis through British citizenship.

Djuna Barnes had no formal education whatsoever.

Will Protagonist have spent time in Spain also?

Dostoievsky’s father was the resident physician at a hospital for the poor. But treated his own serfs so abusively that a group of them ultimately murdered him.

I would prefer not to.

Roncesvalles. The story perhaps not being entirely mythical. An actual nephew of Charlemagne’s named Roland in fact probably having existed.

To reproduce the exterminating gesture.

When Poe, at twenty-seven, married his cousin Virginia Clemm, she was thirteen. And consumptive.

In Germany not much earlier Novalis had been engaged to a girl of twelve. Who died, however.

David Gascoyne spent two decades in mental hospitals.

We have too many things and not enough forms, Flaubert said.

H. G. Wells was an anti-Semite.

Manitas de Plata.

Dante situates Mohammed in the ninth chasm of the Malebolgefor having sown division in the Church. He is seen slashed open from his chin to his anus and with his innards spilling out.

In retaliation, Muslim fundamentalists in the early 1990s threatened to blow up Dante’s tomb in Ravenna.

Seven hundred years after the fact.

Rosso Fiorentino committed suicide.

Benedetto Croce’s parents were killed in an earthquake.

Will Reader make anything out of that notion of Protagonist having seen the woman from the grave on the street?

Contrive something with more immediacy than that?

Bertrand Russell and Basil Bunting were conscientious objectors in World War I.

Robert Lowell and Kenneth Rexroth were conscientious objectors in World War II.

Here. This isn’t a musical peepshow. And don’t you smash that piano. Who’s paying here?

The first books printed in England, roughly four decades after Gutenberg, were a history of the Trojan War and a volume on chess. Both set by Caxton.

Raoul le Fevre. Guido della Colonne. Benoit de Sainte-Maure.

Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli.

The Mona Lisahas no eyebrows.

If Protagonist has in fact taught, it will have been only briefly. And/or part-time. Possibly in writing programs.

That and his few other past employments leaving him with no kind of retirement benefits.

And no more than minimal Social Security.

Caxton me fieri fecit.

The primary aim of this book is to explain the remarkable rule which regulated the succession to the priesthood of Diana at Aricia.

Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul

When hot for certainties in this our life!

Not one of the violent moments in Greek tragedy occurs on stage. Medea murdering her sons, for instance. Or Orestes bloodying Clytemnestra.

Does Reader yet know how long Protagonist has now been alone?

Who, when, the last woman in his life will have been?

Treat nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone.

Pio Baroja was an anti-Semite.

Magdalena Abakanowicz.

Melville. A little heterodox in the matter of clean linen.

Said Hawthorne.

Coleridge. Considerably more so.

Said several.

Sara Teasdale committed suicide with sleeping pills.

Could the woman who appears at the grave be the woman with one leg?

What belated queer obsession of Reader’s is this?

Jacqueline du Pre’s cello was a Stradivarius.

And was later Yo-Yo Ma’s.

Balzac called Ann Radcliffe a better novelist than Stendhal.

God is dead, everything is permitted.

Preoccupied, Beethoven was known to lather his face and then forget to shave.

He also possessed an unstrung piano, adequate in his deafness.

Ernst Toller hanged himself.

Mr. Earbrass.

Jim Thorpe is buried in Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania.

Isaac Newton’s father was illiterate.

Curiously, there is no refrigeration in that part of Kingston as Reader sees it, instead there are old-fashioned iceboxes. Meaning deliveries by truck of blocks of ice.

Does Reader now have some notion of setting his novel back practically a lifetime ago?

Or is memory merely getting in the way of imagination for a minute?

Pouring out liquor is like burning books.

Said Faulkner.

Probably it will not be Kingston in any case.

Frank Plumpton Ramsey was dead at twenty-six.

Robert Frost had exactly five poems accepted in the first seventeen years in which he was submitting.

Heinrich Schliemann. Sir Arthur Evans. Carl Blegen.

Saint Augustine was an anti-Semite.

Why is this night different from all other nights?

From Rabelais’s will:

I have nothing. I owe much. The rest I leave to the poor.

Shelley once insisted he had seen the devil leaning against a tree on his lawn.

And eyes staring at him from Mary’s breasts.

Hippo is now a town in Algeria called Bone.

Willard Hershberger slashed his throat with a straight razor in a Boston hotel room.

The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

Which would have been virtually the day before yesterday, in the period Reader is thinking of.

Thales of Miletus was believed to have predicted an eclipse of the sun for May 28, 585 B.C.

Evident as it is, why is Reader surprised to so rarely make the connection between aphrodisiac and Aphrodite?

Mathilde Wesendonck.

Nadezhda von Meek.

A miniature American flag, fixed beside one of the graves.

A completely unabridged performance of Les Troy enswas not given until 1969, exactly one hundred years after Berlioz died.

It had taken almost that long for Bach’s Mass in B Minor to be done completely also.

For Protagonist’s past. The girl named Fern Winters, lovely though fragile, who tolerated baseball games? Was she twenty-two when Reader last saw her?

Also Kate Winter then, strikingly handsome. And some few years more than twice Fern’s age, meaning a good deal nearer to Protagonist’s present.

Plus fictionalized names for each, if only provisionally?

Sonia Marmeladov. Catherine Earnshaw.

Matisse called Les Demoiselles d’Avignona hoax.

Thales might have been a Hebrew, Herodotus thought.

I do not believe in God, though I believe in Picasso, said Diego Rivera.

Gerard Manley Hopkins died of typhoid fever in 1889. One of his brothers would live into the 1950s.

A verray, parfit gentil knyght.

And as for Protagonist’s former wife?

Reader has decided to let her look like Simonetta Vespucci.

Who may have been painted by Botticelli as well as by Piero di Cosimo.

Christina Rossetti almost certainly died a virgin.

The undeniable sexual attraction that Dorothy Wordsworth felt for William.

What is all this about Irish wit and humor? Have we any book in the house with any of it in? I’d like to read a page or two.

Are any of the books Protagonist is packing inscribed by their authors?

Or are those the ones he is more likely selling, for their added value?

Sapere aude.

Nerval once tried to lead a lobster by a ribbon through a public garden in Paris.

Tristan Corbiere did the same with a pig in Rome. In evening clothes.

Thy necessity is greater than mine.

Said Philip Sidney, in passing a drink to a dying soldier while dying himself.

Gottlob Frege.

The saloon that Protagonist now and again stops in at is an Edward Hopper.

Its name in semicircular lettering on the windows, Reader sees, viewed backwards from at the bar against wintry late afternoon sunlight.

Hilaire Belloc was an anti-Semite.

John Clare spent his last twenty-three years in an asylum. Not recognizing his own wife. At times claiming to be Byron. Or Nelson at Trafalgar.

No needle marks on your Annunciation’s arm, now.

We do not come to thoughts. They come to us.

Thought Heidegger.

The first translation of major length for purely literary purposes was a Latin Iliad,ca. 250 B.C., by Livius Andronicus.

Sheri Martinelli.

Diane Arbus committed suicide by opening her wrists in a bathtub.

Clare’s parents had been illiterate. He himself never revised a line.

I am! yet what I am who cares, or knows?

My friends forsake me like a memory lost.

I am the self-consumer of my woes.

In Joseph Conrad’s view there is not a single sincere line, unquote, in Moby Dick.

Boris Christoff and Tito Gobbi were brothers-in-law.

Richard Tucker and Jan Peerce were also.

When Sophocles was nearing ninety, his sons tried to have him declared incompetent. Sophocles won easy dismissal by reading to the jury from Oedipus at Colonus.

Which he was only then finishing.

Schleiermacher.

Then again, Reader may let Protagonist’s ex-wife look like Isabella d’Este.

Who was painted by both Leonardo and Titian.

The termites has got me, Mr. Mack.

Wallace Stevens’s wife Elsie was the model for the face on the United States dime and half-dollar.

Wallace Stevens’s wife Elsie and Wallace Stevens had separate bedrooms.

Hopkins to Robert Bridges: I am a eunuch, but it is for the Kingdom of God’s sake.

Baudelaire spent two hours a day getting dressed.

Irgun.

Honor, power, wealth, fame, love of women.

Algernon Swinburne’s father was an admiral.

When I could have used a wife, I could not support one; when I could support one, I no longer needed any.

Said Kant.

Why has Reader always automatically assumed that the skull beside his desk is a man’s?

Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. Ernestine Schumann-Heink. Elisabeth Schumann. Eleanor Steber. Elisabeth Soderstrom. Ebe Stignani. Elena Suliotis. Erna Sack.

Being a successful reader of poetry on stage, said Akhmatova, is not necessarily the same as being a writer of successful poetry.

Snorri Sturluson was assassinated.

Twenty American publishers rejected Elie WiesePs Night.

Browning’s Sordellocontains 5983 lines. Tennyson said he understood two of them.

Holbein died of plague.

Percy Bridgman committed suicide.

Photographs of anyone other than his children, has Protagonist kept?

Of himself with?

T. E. Lawrence died in a motorcycle crash.

Thomas Campion’s songs were essentially forgotten for well over two centuries.

But the Philistines took him, and put out his eyes, and brought him down to Gaza, and bound him with fetters of brass; and he did grind in the prison house.

Igor Stravinsky was an anti-Semite.

Being sent to a dictionary at fifteen for eleemosynaryon the first page of Tom Jones.Has Reader come upon the word twice since?

Give him a jugful and he will write one hundred poems. Said Tu Fu of Li Po.

He dozes in a wine shop

On a city street in Chang-an.

Saint Luke was hanged from an olive tree.

Or may have died a natural death at eighty-four.

I cannot survive on a miserable organist’s job, as your Master Bach did.

Johnny Keats’s piss-a-bed poetry, Byron called it.

Other women for Protagonist’s background, should Reader add?

A lithe, dark-eyed girl named Christine, who danced? And even in repose seemed always moving?

Becky Sharp. Maggie Tulliver.

How many years past? How recently will Protagonist have ever seen her since?

Philip Rahv committed suicide.

Aesop was executed for embezzlement.

By the early Middle Ages, every third church in Europe claimed to possess splinters from the True Cross. Or the nails. Or thorns from the Crown of Thorns. Several heads of John the Baptist existed, and at least as many corpses of Mary Magdalen.

Not to add Christ’s foreskin.

Philip Larkin:

I wouldn’t mind seeing China if I could come back the same day.

Kristallnacht.

Edna St. Vincent Millay died at the first light of morning after having sat up all night reading a new translation of the Aeneid.

I have a narrative. But you will be put to it to find it.

None of Andrew Marvell’s best poems was published in his lifetime.

The Queen of Pentacles, Reversed: Certain Evil, a suspicious Woman, a Woman justly regarded with Suspicion, Doubt, Mistrust.

Louis-Ferdinand Celine was an anti-Semite.

Who even well into World War II was still calling for the extermination of every Jew in Europe.

John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart.

Alcuin.

Because of Homer, Troy exerted such an enduring appeal that Julius Caesar contrived to trace his lineage back to its supposed survivors.

A millennium later Geoffrey of Monmouth would do the same for the kings of England.

At thirty-six, Dante was banished from Florence under penalty of death. In his twenty remaining years he would never be back.

Renzo and Lucia.

Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.

The Laocobnwas come upon by workmen digging in a vineyard not far from the Colosseum in 1506. In no time, Michelangelo was at the scene. And identified it at once, from descriptions in the elder Pliny.

Shakespeare wanted art.

Nietzsche lost his reason because he thought too much. I do not think and therefore cannot go mad.

Said Nijinsky, mad.

J. Alfred Prufrock: full of high sentence.

Chaucer’s Clerk of Oxenford: ful of hy sentence.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

Said Eliot.

Sartre and Albert Schweitzer were cousins.

William Inge committed suicide.

Kiri Te Kanawa. Keri Hulme.

Did Protagonist leave a forwarding address?

Once, certainly, more of an existence than these cartons and the caw of seagulls?

Beckett wrote Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable,and Waiting for Godotin less than two years in the late 1940s.

While living on virtually no money other than the few centimes his wife earned by dressmaking.

Napoleon and Karl Marx had hemorrhoids.

As did Wordsworth.

As did Tennessee Williams.

The Unnamed.

In the house on the beach Protagonist is naturally paying rent. In the house at the cemetery, which Reader has thought of as abandoned, is he living more or less illegally?

Protagonist as a squatter?

Jim don’t know nobody in China.

When Dickens, at twelve, worked from 8 A.M. until 8 P.M., six days a week, at the blacking factory, he also walked an hour each way to and from his family’s Camden Town slum.

And spent Sunday visiting his father in debtor’s prison.

What shall I do for pretty girls

Now my old bawd is dead?

Mahatma Gandhi: I see no virtue in being uninformed.

One of Max Planck’s sons was executed for plotting against Hitler.

Housman published a volume entitled Last Poemsin 1922.

And lived until 1936.

I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back.

Or could Protagonist have been given use of the gatehouse in return for essentially nonexistent custodial duties?

Watchman, what of the night?

Richard Strauss was an anti-Semite.

Brutus committed suicide after the defeat by Antony and Octavian by throwing himself on his sword. Antony removed his own cape to cover the body.

Cassius forced a servant to kill him after the same rout.

I am completely alone here now.

Captured by Moorish pirates at sea, Cervantes spent five years as a slave before being ransomed.

Plato finished the Lawsin his late seventies, among other things sanctioning the death penalty for those who question the state religion.

Did he stop to remember how and why Socrates had died fifty years before?

Brandeis. Cardozo. Frankfurter.

Readers were so anxious over the fate of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shopthat six thousand of them in New York alone actually met the ship carrying the novel’s final installment.

Sir Thomas Browne wished that men could reproduce without intercourse. Like trees, he suggested. Fathering twelve children nevertheless.

Why, I will see thee at Philippi, then.

There is no known portrait of Anne Bradstreet.

Horace was in fact one of Brutus’s officers in Macedonia. But made his way back to Italy safely.

Erasmus was an anti-Semite.

Photographs of Protagonist with?

Tiresias concluded that 90 percent of the pleasure in sex was woman’s.

For which presumption Hera blinded him. Though in compensation Zeus gave him second sight.

Someone else for Protagonist’s past?

Also from some time ago. A woman named Josie, who taught. And so reminded him of a certain Modigliani nude that he tacked up a reproduction of the painting as a kind of talisman.

Molly Bloom. Daisy Buchanan. Isabel Archer.

Euripides’ mother was a fruit seller.

For years, Defoe was a hosier.

Where was Jesus between the ages of twelve and twenty-nine?

The mobled queen.

Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman went to Dodger games at Ebbets Field together.

Kant was only five feet tall. Wagner was very little taller.

En ce bordeau ou tenons nostre estat.

Elfriede Heidegger would appear to have been a considerably better-looking woman than Hannah Arendt.

Quanah Parker.

Byron went into permanent exile from England in late April of 1816, near Passover. One of the last London friends he saw was the composer Isaac Nathan.

Who brought him a farewell gift of matzos.

Romain Gary committed suicide. As had his wife Jean Seberg a year earlier.

If there’s no God, how can I be a captain then?

Montcorbier.

Jussi Bjoerling’s D-flat in the Cuius animamof Rossini’s Stabat Mater,

October 7, 1849. At forty, in Baltimore. Filthy, starving, drunk and/or with delirium tremens, crying out at unseen creatures.

For the love of God, Montresor!

Valerie Solanis. Ruth Steinhagen.

Henry Adams was an anti-Semite.

Pound put his son Omar into other people’s care as an infant. He saw him once, for a few hours, when the boy was twelve. And not again until he was twenty.

Stalin was one of Maxim Gorky’s pallbearers.

Hegel died in a cholera epidemic.

Florence Margaret Smith.

Not squatter but caretaker? Guardian of the deceased?

Yad Vashem.

Mount Abora is in no atlas.

Once, at a formal Nobel Prize occasion, Knut Hamsun snapped Selma Lagerlof s garter.

Fragonard died completely forgotten.

Nicholas de Stael committed suicide.

The first time Elgar’s Pomp and CircumstanceMarch No. 1 was performed in London, in 1901, the audience literally stood up and cheered. The orchestra played it again and the same thing happened. It had to be played yet a third time before the program could go on.

Augusta Leigh. Incest consummated or not?

Demosthenes copied out Thucydides eight times, in determination to emulate the prose.

Damon Rutherford.

How long, O Catiline?

Could there for that matter be thefts in the cemetery? Intruders?

Of or in regard to what?

Reader’s mental wastebasket, a thought for.

Tanaquil Le Clercq. Performing major roles for Balanchine at seventeen.

And in a wheelchair from polio not ten years later.

Delmore Schwartz died of a heart attack in a seedy Times Square hotel. Three days passed before anyone could be found to claim his body.

James Baldwin was an anti-Semite.

Not sorting books and phonograph records merely, but the narrowing residue of an entire life? Papers, files of correspondence?

Are there manuscripts?

The Blotner biography says that although he was in New York, Faulkner did not attend the memorial service held after Dylan Thomas’s death. In fact he wore a gray tweed jacket, an emerald vest, and a Tyrolean hat. With a feather.

But how is Reader aware that like Tarquin, Tanaquil is an Etruscan name?

Like Lars Porsena.

An enormous dungheap, Voltaire dismissed the sum of Shakespeare as.

Pisistratus.

Involved with Madame Blavatsky, Yeats once burned a rose and seriously watched all night for its ghost to appear.

Was Brahms the father of Clara Schumann’s last child?

Vittoria Colonna. To whom Michelangelo wrote sonnets.

John Donne delivered George Herbert’s mother’s funeral sermon.

Malcolm Lowry probably died from an overdose of sodium amytal tablets. A coroner’s verdict read misadventurerather than suicide, however, because, drunk, he had also choked on his own vomit.

Robert Walser spent his last twenty-seven years in a mental institution.

Rousseau’s mistress, Therese Levasseur, was an illiterate hotel maid. She and Rousseau had five children, all of whom he left anonymously at orphanages.

She also went to bed with James Boswell. Exactly thirteen times, according to the latter’s compulsive journal-keeping.

Tout, au monde, existe pour aboutir à un livre.

As a writer, he chews more than he bites off. Said Whistler of Henry James.

Diva. Thea.

Brahma. Vishnu. Shiva.

Joyce, Hesse, Mann, and Rilke all died in Switzerland. Stefan George, Robert Musil, and Erich Maria Remarque all died in Switzerland.

Myth, Religion, and Mother Right.

Robert Burns’s wife not only made light of his interminable infidelities, and took in one of his illegitimate children, but ventured that he should have had at least two wives to begin with.

Thalatta, thalatta!

One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing, Wilde said.

When Hemingway committed suicide, it was by leaning to press his forehead against the barrels of a shotgun braced at the floor.

Thirty-odd years earlier his father had used a revolver.

Thomas Babington Macaulay and Horatius at that bridge to the contrary, Lars Porsena did conquer Rome.

By the nine gods he swore.

Has Reader made any sort of decision about how long Protagonist’s small money will last?

And?

Else Lasker-Schuler’s tombstone at the Mount of Olives was uprooted when that part of Jerusalem was taken by Arab forces in 1948. The grave was never again located.

In his mid-twenties, Verdi lost his wife and two infant children within a space of two years.

In the decade before his death, Ad Reinhardt painted nothing but black canvases.

Alessandro Stradella was murdered.

no symbols where none intended

Benvenuto Cellini was once released from prison, after having killed, because a Pope needed some engraving.

And was thrown back in after insulting the Pope’s taste.

Degas’s mother was born in New Orleans.

Thou sayest it.

Protagonist’s obsolescent phonograph. And scarred long-playing records, never surrendered for compact discs.

Nor will there be a VCR.

Can Protagonist think of a single film that interests him as much as the three-hundredth best book he ever read?

Ecole Normale Superieure.

May 30, 1431:

Rouen, Rouen, O thou, my last dwelling place!

The devious-cruising Rachel.

Pierre Reverdy spent thirty years as a lay brother in a Benedictine monastery.

Though with his Poemsin Frank O’Hara’s pocket.

From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.

The Bay Psalm Book.

Keats wrote the four great odes in one month.

Taking details for the urn from a painting by Claude Lorrain.

Ernestine Schumann-Heink had sons fighting on both sides in World War I.

The son fighting for the Germans was killed.

We are lost. We have burned a saint.

Guido Cavalcanti died of malaria.

Kazantzakis’s sequel to the Odysseycontains 33,333 lines.

Clara Westhoff.

Emily Dickinson told Thomas Wentworth Higginson that she had not read Whitman. But had heard he was disgraceful.

Has Reader decided if Protagonist will have ever seen Becky Sharp in later life? When did he last see Daisy Buchanan?

Another, for him?

Here, from not that long ago. A woman named Liz, who sculpted. And with a face so finely boned that even past midlife the chiaroscuro in certain light could make his breath catch.

Temple Drake. Constance Chatterley.

Though where now is Connie Chatterley too then?

Plato left behind seven different versions of the opening sentence of the Republic.

André Gide was an anti-Semite.

Vitelli.

Chick Stahl committed suicide by drinking carbolic acid.

In his mid-thirties, Edwin Arlington Robinson was working ten hours a day on the construction of a New York subway. Checking materials for twenty cents an hour.

Bishop Berkeley once lived in Rhode Island.

Franz Marc was killed by a grenade at Verdun.

Youth.

For Exmoor.

Could the entire town to all intents have become a depressed area? Any local industry extinct, stores or even certain private dwellings boarded up?

Surely then conveying a sense almost of recession into the past?

The robin chirps in the chinaberry tree.

I went down yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon the son of Ariston, that I might offer up my prayers to the goddess; and also because I wanted to see in what manner they would celebrate the festival, which was a new thing.

Jonathan Edwards was an anti-Semite.

While acknowledging he had never met one.

It strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.

The only twentieth-century novelist from whom he always learned something, Lionel Trilling called E. M. Forster.

E. M. Forster was thirty years old before he knew the facts of life.

Infinite riches in a little room.

Menander would drown at the Piraeus.

Virgil worked on the Aeneidfor eleven years.

And said near his death that it was not finished and should be burned.

Joseph Michael Medwick.

Clover Adams committed suicide.

Basquiat.

Sinon. Who lied.

The Lover,which Reader little more than skimmed. Yet tones, images of light and shadow, loss. Abstractly lingering.

Gulley Jimson.

The sun don’t shine on the same dog’s ass all the time.

Quintus of Smyrna, the Posthomerica.Which is to say, what happened next. From the burial of Hector to the shipwreck of the Greeks en route home. Thought to be fourth century A.D.

There is no death and art can prove it.

Stanley Ketchel was twenty-four years old when he was fatally shot in the back by the common-law husband of the lady who was cooking his breakfast.

Protagonist has come to this place because he had no life back there at all.

I came to Comala because I was told that my father, a certain Pedro Paramo, was living here.

Irina Ratushinskaya. At twenty-eight, as late as in 1982, sentenced to seven years in the strictest of Russian prison camps.

For writing verse deemed unsuitable to the state.

Pseudodoxia Epidemica.

Some of the battle descriptions in the later books of the Aeneiddo perhaps come off as perfunctory.

If that was what Virgil had in mind?