Текст книги "Reader's Block"

Автор книги: David Markson

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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 7 страниц)

Sing at noon? Madame, at noon I am happy to be able to spit.

Said Chaliapin.

Obviously, a nod. Fairly soon an innocuous comment in passing?

John Ringo committed suicide.

Were Jesus and Mary Magdalen lovers? In the Gnostic Gospels, the specific word for her relationship with him translates from the Greek as consort.

Lady Ottoline Morrell.

Juan de Yepes.

Louise Colet’s affair with Flaubert. Louise Colet’s affair with Musset. Louise Colet’s affair with Cousin. Louise Colet’s affair with Vigny.

And cetera.

the year is full of unforseen happenings

and the time of earthquakes is at hand

An upstart crow, beautified with our feathers.

Rousseau was an anti-Semite.

And/or in harsh weather? Huddled against winds? Snow in patches, Reader again sees.

Max Beckmann died of a heart attack while strolling in Central Park in Manhattan.

Praxiteles’ mistress/model Phryne was once on the verge of being convicted of impiety. It appears factual that the orator Hyperides, defending her, signaled for her to bare her bosom.

And won acquittal.

At Amherst, ca. 1880:

Emily, you wretch! None of this nonsense! I’ve traveled all the way from Springfield to see you. Come down at once.

Mai Zetterling.

Ypres.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hanged by the Gestapo.

In his Beheading of John the Baptist,Caravaggio spells out his name in some of the Baptist’s spilled blood at the lower edge of the canvas. Otherwise he signed no paintings.

All ages are contemporaneous.

Dante married a woman named Gemma Donati at eighteen or twenty after a formal family betrothal of years earlier. For all his repeated use of autobiography, he makes no single reference to her anywhere.

Gaudeamus igitur.

Are there two women upstairs, or more?

Even without seeing them come and go, conscious instantly of the first footfalls.

If to no other end, surely accentuating the isolation?

P

ier Paolo Pasolini was murdered.

Dino Campana died mad.

Paul Feyerabend was crippled from a wound as a German officer on the Russian front in World War II.

Narciso Yepes.

Protagonist kept company by chipmunks? By field mice? By the gulls?

Isocrates committed suicide by starving himself.

Living in slums, literally pawning clothes to buy food, at times Karl Marx could not afford paper to write on. Between 1850 and 1855 three of his children died. For one he had to beg a loan for a coffin.

H. L. Mencken was an anti-Semite.

Qumran.

Samuel Beckett was the best man at the wedding of Joyce’s grandson Stephen.

I think I shall be among the English poets after my death.

The same Antony who covered Brutus’s body with his own robe at Philippi had had Cicero’s head and right hand nailed up in the Forum only a year before.

Michelangelo Merisi.

Is there such a word as grueif Nelson Goodman invented it to illustrate a philosophic point but it has no other application beyond that classroom context whatsoever?

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

Panem et circenses.

Marie-Therese Walter hanged herself in a garage.

Women at the time of Troy wore only a single garment. Which is to say, no underclothing.

And did not bathe with any frequency.

John Bunyan wrote the better part of Pilgrim’s Progresswhile in jail for illegal preaching.

One kid, one kid, that father bought for two zuzim.

Should it be at least three years since Protagonist has been involved with a woman? Longer?

Why would he have become involved with no one since?

Or does the withdrawal obviously feed on itself and increasingly preclude even the chance of meeting someone to start with?

Helen unwashed? Andromache?

Moritz Schlick was shot and killed on the steps of the university library in Vienna by a student whose thesis he had failed.

Conchita Supervia died in childbirth.

Etienne Joseph Theophile Thore.

Who resurrected Vermeer after two full centuries of disregard.

Jules Bastien-Lepage.

For whom Reader can still sometimes be the fool.

Mill was reading Plato at seven. In Greek.

Heraclitus once had himself buried in cow dung when ill. For purposes of drawing out the fluids of dropsy, Diogenes Laertius says.

Grace Moore died in a plane crash.

Niels Lyhne.Which Joyce, Ibsen, Hesse, Mann, Strindberg, Rilke, Freud, were all profound admirers of. Rilke calling all of Jacobsen’s work as indispensable to him as the Bible.

Kilgore, Texas.

If indeed three or four years, will Protagonist have at least begun to become accustomed to the solitude?

Accustomed, or wearily acquiescent, does Reader mean?

I hope the bourgeoisie as long as they exist will have cause to remember my carbuncles.

Handel, born in central Germany, is buried in Westminster Abbey.

Henry Fielding is buried in Portugal.

Sophocles and Herodotus were intimate friends.

Solange Raytchine.

Attorney General: So then it is for the labour of two days that you ask a fee of two hundred guineas?

Whistler: No. I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime.

When Queen Christina of Sweden hired Descartes as a personal philosophy tutor in 1649, she dispatched a warship under a full admiral to convey him to Stockholm.

But then demanded daily instruction at 5 A.M. in the Scandinavian winter. Descartes caught pneumonia and died.

Renoir, Manet, Gauguin, and Edvard Munch all did portraits of Mallarmé.

Gurre-Lieder.

Frederick Delius was paralyzed and blinded by syphilis.

Tradition says that Saint Paul was decapitated.

John D. MacDonald is by any standards a better writer than Saul Bellow.

Sir James Frazer spent as many as fifteen hours a day, seven days a week, at his desk at Cambridge. Throughout his life. It eventually cost him his eyesight.

What sort of bargain can Reader turn Protagonist into if he does allow him to meet someone?

How little money does he in fact live on?

Would he even be able to pick up a dinner check for two people at a respectable restaurant?

Emanuel de Witte drowned himself.

Gertrude Stein had to pay to publish Three Lives,

And if I, Fern, would remember Lee Suffridge Priest for so long as I lived, who when I too was dead would remember me?

Oskar Kokoschka and Siegfried Sassoon were both wounded twice in World War I.

Fighting on opposite sides.

Dante and Duns Scotus were born in the same year.

There is no mystery in human creation. Will performs this miracle.

Said Camus.

Salvador de Madariaga propounds strongly suggestive evidence that Cervantes may have been a Sephardic Jew.

And how is Protagonist’s health, what with hospitalizations being mentioned?

Does Reader see any point in perhaps contriving current medical difficulties for him?

Major?

Protagonist has come to this place because he was told he has a limited time to live?

Doctor Subtilis.

To me it was only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life; it is just a piece of rhythmical grumbling.

Valéry said he could never write a novel for one insurmountable reason. He would have to include sentences like The Marquise went out at five.

Protagonist has cancer, but it is for the moment in remission?

Anaximander did or did not invent the gnomon.

Saint Ambrose was an anti-Semite.

Stranger, go tell the Spartans that we lie here in obedience to their bidding.

Pushkin and Lermontov were killed in duels less than five years apart.

Stephen Crane was the catcher on his Syracuse University baseball team.

Marsilio Ficino.

Leonidas. 480 B.C.

Arthur Koestler committed suicide with an overdose of barbiturates. His wife joined him.

St. Martin’s Churchyard, Laugharne, Carmarthenshire, Wales.

Mozart composed his last three symphonies in six weeks.

Plutarch: When the candles are out, all women are fair.

One of the titles on an extant bookseller’s bill to Joyce from Trieste, dated 1914, is Pinocchio.

Nirvana means without wind, or blown out. In the sense that desire no longer exists.

A railroad siding, the Astapovo station. November 7, 1910.

Ombra maifu.

Abstract Expressionism was invented by New York drunks.

Bitburg.

George Eastman committed suicide.

Djuna Barnes spent her last forty years as a near recluse in a one-room mews apartment in Greenwich Village. She died there at ninety.

Since Cassius first did whet me against Caesar,

I have not slept.

Conrad Aiken’s gravestone is a stone bench. With its inscription on the seat.

Incitatus.

The duel in which Pushkin was killed took place in 1837. The man who killed him, a French officer named Georges d’Anthes, lived another fifty-eight years.

Rupert Brooke was an anti-Semite.

R. B. Kitaj.

Protagonist went out at five?

Constance Mayer committed suicide by slashing her throat with Pierre Paul Prud’hon’s razor.

They are losing the Battle of the Ebro.

Psychic distance. Synesthetic equilibrium.

The Divine Comedycontains 14,230 lines.

Most of which Goethe described as repulsive.

Thucydides Mythistoricus.

Renoir’s father was a tailor.

There is no there there.

Why has Reader decided that Protagonist once worked as a logger? In prehistory. And near a town called Molalla, Oregon?

Tzeitl. Hodel. Chava.

A curator, showing Rodin certain of Blake’s drawings: He actually saw those things.

Rodin: He should have seen them three or four times.

Tennyson was reading Cymbelinewhen he died. His copy of the play was put into his coffin.

Was Freud sleeping with his wife’s sister?

Eulalia of Merida.

Hey, Djuna, are you still alive over there?

That great solemn ass Goethe, Claudel called him.

And can any of them, with whom he has mostly long now lost touch, be even now dead?

Becky Sharp? Sonia Marmeladov? Daisy Buchanan?

Whistle, and she’ll come to you, wrote John Fletcher, of Beaumont and Fletcher, three hundred years before Lauren Bacall.

Golden lads and girls all must,

As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

Two of Thomas Mann’s sons committed suicide.

As did two of Marx’s daughters.

T. E. Lawrence was illegitimate.

Louis Aragon won the Croix de Guerre in World War I and again in World War II.

Delacroix’s Journals.Berlioz’s Memoirs.

Thomas Gray was one of twelve children. All eleven others died as infants.

El Greco had to sue the Toledo Cathedral to be paid for his Disrobing of Christ.Which the Cathedral had commissioned.

Ljuba Welitsch was married to a traffic policeman.

Denis Diderot was an anti-Semite.

Hayim Bialik.

Lionel Johnson died after falling off a barstool.

Seymour Krim committed suicide.

Gepetto.

Or is it less the women than what the women represent? The years that have departed as well?

A life, that was?

Where there is no now now?

It was Dumas pere,not Dumas fits,who said that after God Shakespeare had created most. John Eglinton at the National Library in Ulyssesis not sure.

Taine said he had read The Charterhouse of Parmafifty times.

The drawing of Michelangelo and the colors of Titian! Wrote Tintoretto on the wall of his studio.

A good shoemaker and a poor fish-peddler.

Anaximander did or did not introduce the gnomon into Greece from Egypt.

Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence only increases in an arithmetical ratio.

Eliot, as an editor, rejected Animal Farm,

Another damned thick square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh, Mr. Gibbon?

The Metropolitan Opera once threatened to write it into Rosa Ponselle’s contract that she could not ride her bicycle through the streets of Manhattan to rehearsals.

Naturally there is a statue of Ovid on the shore of the Black Sea in Constanta. Naturally gazing Romeward.

Treitschke was an anti-Semite.

Robert Burton may have committed suicide. Legend has him having predicted the date of his death through astrology. Then making certain it was correct.

Miroslav Holub.

The British army sustained sixty thousand casualties on the first day of the Battle of the Somme.

The Middle Parts of Fortune.

There is no mention of Achilles’ heel in Homer. In fact there is no mention of it by anyone until Statius, in Latin, nine hundred years later.

Protagonist’s threadbare jeans and faded workshirts. Some few more presentable remnants hanging, virtually never any longer worn.

Spent Adidas.

Alan Turing committed suicide.

Swyne and Dour.

Azucena.

What Horace defined as a kind of uncontrolled energy in Pindar.

Possibly explaining why he sometimes makes no sense whatsoever.

Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften.

Can Protagonist even any longer afford to buy books?

Cézanne needed as many as five hundred sittings for a portrait. After a hundred and fifteen by Ambroise Vollard, he was willing to concede that the front of VoUard’s shirt was possibly acceptable.

He doesn’t come in heredisguised like Westminster Abbey.

Gordon Bunshaft.

Gustave Courbet died at fifty-eight. Late along, he was drinking a full dozen bottles of wine a day.

Odi et amo.

Tell the people it is no use to depend on me any more now. Said Crazy Horse, bayoneted in the back at Fort Robinson.

Plaza El Toreo, Mexico, D.F., October 30, 1960. Carlos Arruza (rejoneador),Juan Silveti, Joselito Huerta, Manuel Capetillo, others, siete orejas y dos rabos.A benefit for Curro Ortega, who some weeks earlier had lost a leg when gored.

Protagonist will have watched that, also.

Louis Althusser spent four years in a psychiatric hospital after strangling his wife.

Marxist. Structuralist. Manic-depressive.

This sentence is a lie.

The question of Hans Walter Gabler’s command of colloquial English.

Honorificabilitudinitatibus.

In 1886, believing him dead, Verlaine published an edition of Rimbaud’s poems. Rimbaud was running guns and trading slaves in Abyssinia.

Ancient rumor insisted, seemingly wrongly, that Euripides was killed by dogs set at him by a rival playwright.

Hapax legomenon?

Considering marriage with the daughter of the King of Portugal, Philip the Good of Burgundy sent Jan van Eyck to paint her portrait. Surreptitiously.

The whole experience of being hit by a bullet is very interesting and I think it is worth describing in detail.

John Howard Payne once proposed marriage to Mary Shelley.

Vigée-Lebrun.

Winthrop Mackworth Praed. Richard Monckton Milnes. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt.

A las cinco de la tarde.

A las cinco en punto de la tarde.

Has anyone ever discovered precisely what good news was brought from Ghent to Aix?

Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet.

Said cousin Dryden.

John Kennedy Toole committed suicide by running a hose from his exhaust pipe into his car.

Saint Jerome was an anti-Semite.

Der Stürmer.

I’ll lug the guts into the neighbour room.

Albany, New York, Bret Harte was born in.

One of Franz Schubert’s last requests, while already feverish from the typhoid that would kill him six days later, was for a copy of the latest Fenimore Cooper.

Where will Protagonist have been born?

Francis Phelan.

Tolstoy ranked Guy de Maupassant second only to Hugo as the great European writer of his day.

The eruption of Santorin, ca. 1475 B.C., with its inconceivable tidal waves, is almost surely what ended Minoan civilization in Crete. Was it also the pillar of fire and the parting of the waters during the Exodus from Egypt?

Pharaoh’s pursuing host inundated on lower ground?

Egon Schiele died in an influenza epidemic.

Mel Ott died in a car crash.

Whisky per tutti!

Like Socrates, Aristotle was charged with impiety late in life. But went into exile rather than stand trial.

Refusing to allow Athens to sin twice against philosophy, being how he put it.

Ye gods, what sound is this?

Can Chloe, heavenly Chloe, piss?

Nobody ever laid it down without wishing it were longer. Said Johnson of Robinson Crusoe.

Now and again, a fragment, still, flitting through Protagonist’s consciousness? Jacqueline du Pre, a Boccherini concerto?

Assia Wevill, for whom Ted Hughes left Sylvia Plath, committed suicide the same way Plath did.

With the difference that she gassed the child she had had by Hughes as well.

Homo Ludens.

Columbus swore to the end he was in India.

Xanthippe.

A novel of intellectual reference and allusion, so to speak minus much of the novel?

Or is he in some peculiar way thinking of an autobiography?

Saint Jude, patron saint of desperate causes.

Profoundly dependent on chloral, Dante Gabriel Rossetti barely skirted madness in his later years.

Or did not always skirt it.

Every character in Hamlet.

If not crazy, then criminal, Chateaubriand said.

Did or did not Dostoievsky once rape a young girl in a bathhouse?

As long ago as in 1350, in Florence, Taddeo Gaddi could complain that the art of painting was in pathetic decline.

Since the death of Giotto, he would have been talking about.

Heloise and Abelard are buried in a single sepulchre at Père Lachaise.

In Book XVI of the Iliad,Apollo wrenches off Patroclus’s armor, leading to the latter’s death.

Little more than two hundred lines later, Hector is shown stripping the same armor from Patroclus’s corpse.

Music has here entombed a rich treasure but still fairer hopes.

O happy dagger!

It is only the man whose intellect is clouded by his sexual impulses who could give the name of the fair sex to that undersized, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped and short-legged race.

Said Schopenhauer.

Three of Wittgenstein’s brothers committed suicide.

Three of Wittgenstein’s father’s sons committed suicide.

There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing. Said Mark Rothko.

Polly Garter. Rosie Probert. Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard.

Alone, what did Bloom feel?

Tulsi Das was born into a family of beggars, and abandoned. And said that as a boy he sometimes lived on scraps thrown to dogs.

Frans Hals was eighty-five when he painted The Regents of the Old Men ^ys Almshouse.

And living on charity himself.

Delenda est Carthago.

Tacitus was an anti-Semite.

How would the woman have lost her leg?

Does Reader remember with any certainty which leg it was?

Was Santorin also the origin of the Atlantis myth?

In Walter Scott’s The Antiquary,there are two Tuesdays in one week.

And the sun once sets in the east.

Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief

The name of the slough was Despond.

Blake was buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave.

Kavitavali.

For six years, in his twenties, Edward Elgar conducted a band in a lunatic asylum.

Rilke wrote most of the Duino Elegies,and the Sonnets to Orpheus,in less than one month.

Thera.

Enrico Caruso was once arrested for pinching a woman in the monkey house of the Central Park Zoo.

Has it crossed Reader’s mind to let someone Protagonist had known be buried at the cemetery?

Who?

Protagonist drawn there out of what unlikely sentiment?

Wastebasket.

Nordahl Grieg failed to return from a bombing mission over Berlin in 1943.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery failed to return from a reconnaissance flight over occupied France in 1944.

V. Gordon Childe committed suicide.

The bass arias of Sarastro in The Magic Flute.Which Shaw called the only music that would not sound out of place in the mouth of God.

San Pedro de Macon’s, Dominican Republic. Where Leroy Paige and Joshua Gibson, Jr., and James Bell and others spent a winter in 1937.

Erastus Corning II.

Colley Cibber. Nicholas Rowe. Laurence Eusden. Nahum Tate. Thomas Warton. William Whitehead. Thomas Shad-well. Henry J. Pye.

Laureates, all.

Someone nodded hello to Raskolnikov on the street yesterday.

Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.

Or of no describable genre?

A seminonfictional semifiction? Cubist?

Also in part a distant cousin innumerable times removed of A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake?

Obstinately cross-referential and of cryptic interconnective syntax in any case.

And as an incidental personal challenge, letting none of its intellectual mishegaasbe material Reader has ever used anywhere else.

Lector Ludens.

Henry Purcell was Gerard Manley Hopkins’s favorite composer.

Bricolage.

Yeats could never finish reading Ulysses.

Poetry is not written with ideas, Degas, it is written with words.

Mohammed was an anti-Semite.

Literate people who can spend hours in one’s home without a single glance at the titles on the bookshelves.

F. R. Leavis was so severely shell-shocked as a stretcher-bearer in World War I that for a time he was incapable of speech.

Gypo Nolan.

Ite, missa est.

You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.

Said Charles Darwin’s father.

Robin Hyde committed suicide.

Evelyn Waugh was found dead on a bathroom floor.

Protagonist having come upon his own name on one of the graves, though with meaningless remote dates?

And?

Wastebasket.

The Lord of the Flieswas rejected by twenty-one publishers.

The first time I saw Wystan Auden his socks didn’t match.

Herophilia, the Sibyl at Cumae, who lived a thousand years. And wished to die.

As Eliot discovered in Petronius.

Though how is Reader aware that while Cumae no longer exists the Sibyl’s cave still does?

Where Aeneas visited it. Northwest of Naples.

Johan Emanuel Schikaneder.

Spatial Form in Modern Literature.

Protagonist’s friends. From that life that was.

And among those who had moved to distant places and one had gradually ceased to hear from even then?

At Protagonist’s age, how long before one begins to suspect that some of them, also, are even now dead?

We are now able to suggest an explanation for the proverb There are many Manii in Aricia.

Hemingway: I just called to tell you I got that thing.

General Buck Lanham: That thing? What thing?

Hemingway: That Swedish thing, you know?

That Swedish thing. The Nobel Prize for Horses’ Backsides.

Voltaire was illegitimate.

Late in her career, Kirsten Flagstad recorded a Tristan und Isoldein which the high Cs she had been missing repeatedly on stage were all reached magnificently.

Having been sung by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and dubbed in.

August Heat.

At Protagonist’s age, how long before one realizes that more of the people one had ever known anywhere are in fact now dead than alive?

Mary Powell.

Katherine Woodcock.

Elizabeth Minshull.

A title for all this, has Reader by chance yet given any thought to?

Thomas Heggen committed suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills.

I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail.

Tess Durbeyfield.

Mr. Flood’s Party?

Not Waving but Drowning?

The Shrine of the Little Flower. Royal Oak, Michigan.

The Temptation to Exist?

In 1666, a committee in the House of Commons was ready to call both the Plague and the Great Fire God’s retribution against England for harboring an atheist such as Thomas Hobbes.

Who played tennis until he was seventy-five.

Jung was an anti-Semite.

Antony threw himself on his sword after the defeat at Actium and the subsequent desertion of most of his troops.

Go faster, Jesus, why dost thou linger?

I indeed am going, but thou shalt tarry till I come.

Right Views.

Right Intentions.

Right Speech.

Right Conduct.

Right Livelihood.

Right Effort.

Right Remembrance.

Right Contemplation.

Avicenna studied Aristotle’s Metaphysicsso exhaustively and for so long that when he believed he finally fully understood it he handed out gifts to the poor in celebration.

Joaquin Rodrigo was blind from the age of three.

Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

Now and again, an image, still, flitting into Protagonist’s consciousness? Tanaquil Le Clercq, Ravel’s La Valse?

At thirty-nine, when his first wife died, Monet was so poverty-stricken he could not afford the few centimes to redeem a pawned locket that he knew she wished to be buried with, and had to borrow.

Heifetz was playing the Mendelssohn E minor concerto by the age of six.

Joyce had lost all his teeth by the age of forty-one.

More than one owner of a significant personal library, in the early years after Gutenberg, made it plain that no printedvolume would ever be a part of it.

The Timesof London officially listed Robert Graves as killed in action in 1916.

Graves would live until 1985.

Ella Sagersdorf.

For most of his life, Beethoven changed addresses on an average of more than twice a year.

And was more than once sued by landlords for having scribbled notations all over his walls.

All men by nature desire to know.

Krakatoa.

Eliot was sixty-eight when he married his second wife Valerie. Who was thirty.

Du musst dein Leben andern.

Leigh Hunt once went to jail for libel.

Virginia Hill committed suicide.

Concierto de Aranjuez.

You wanna walk in a parade? Everybody’s lonely.

Xerxes, invading Greece, halted at the site of Troy in homage to its heroes. Looking on the Trojan War as a European invasion of Asia which justified Persia’s own present aggression.

Seven centuries afterward.

Karl Barth was an anti-Semite.

Là ci darem la mano.

How is Protagonist’s eyesight?

Apparently no one has ever believed Vasari’s story that Filippo Lippi was once held prisoner by Barbary pirates but released when he astonished their leader by drawing his portrait.

Has Reader at least made a decision about giving Protagonist some sort of literary past?

Even if only from a good number of years back?

The leprosy of letters, Flaubert called critics.

Man shall be trained for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior. All else is folly.

Arshile Gorky hanged himself.

Initially, the word metaphysicsmeant only that which came behindthe Physicsin the Aristotle canon. An early editor made use of it for lack of better.

Tertullian has it that Democritus deliberately blinded himself in old age by staring into the sun. So as not to suffer the sight of beautiful women he could no longer possess.

But O that I were young again

And held her in my arms!

Two years after that condemnation of Hobbes, Samuel Pepys would find Leviathanselling, secondhand, for four times its original price:

It being a book the Bishops will not let be printed again.

Gidon Kremer.

For Protagonist’s literary past:

Protagonist: Isn’t it awfully long since Caitlin went to the ladies’ room?

Dylan Thomas: She’s probably in that other saloon across the street. Go buy her a drink and tell her I apologize for ignoring her, will you? She’ll let off less steam if it’s you instead of me.

William Ernest Henley lost a leg to bone disease.

Mikhail Bakhtin lost a leg to bone disease.

Melville’s older son Malcolm committed suicide at eighteen.

Sarah Gamp was William Faulkner’s favorite fictional character.

Dirty stinking Degenerate Bobs was here from Boston, North End, Mass. Warp son of a bitch.

The Duchess of Medina Sidonia. Whom Reader once saw at zparador onthe Costa del Sol, being escorted to jail after political protest.

Young Lochinvar.

Frank O’Hara died after being hit by a jeep on the beach at Fire Island.

Unquestionably, Protagonist will have spent time in Spain.

Wolf Solent.

La Duquesa Roja.

Claude Lorrain was very nearly illiterate.

John Greenleaf Whittier to the contrary, the woman in Frederick, Maryland, who displayed a Union flag when Stonewall Jackson entered the town was a Mrs. Mary Quantrell.

Pushkin’s dramatic poem in which an envious Salieri poisons Mozart.

Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera based on same.

Dan Pagis. Nathan Zach.

Frank Stella: What you see is what you see.

Georg Buchner died of typhus in 1837, at twenty-three. Woyzeckwould not be published until forty-two years later.

Who touches a hair of yon grey head

Dies like a dog! March on! he said.

Malcolm Melville had played on a local baseball team. This when Melville himself was already in the customs sheds, and with virtually all of his fiction ten and fifteen years behind him.

No image arises of the somber, disregarded author rooting on the sidelines at a game.

Michael Ventris died in a car crash.

Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother.

Did the woman herself ever see the photograph?

Yeats died in southern France in 1939. His body was returned to Ireland on an Irish destroyer after World War II.

Pier Angeli committed suicide.

Joe Orton was murdered.

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.

Bernal Diaz del Castillo.

Agnes von Kurowsky.

Now I know you. No field, no home, no wife, no woman – no friends, no love.

Jacques Louis David was repeatedly drawn to sketch prisoners being led to the guillotine.

Isadora Duncan was strangled when her long scarf became caught in a wheel of her open Bugatti.

God, children know something they can’t tell; they like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed!

Linear B.

Dear me, I am about to become a god.

Karl Marx was an anti-Semite.

Karl Marx was descended on both sides from long lines of rabbis and Talmudic scholars.

Zyklon B.

Charles Martel.

Benjamin Robert Haydon committed suicide.

On the evidence, Shakespeare’s small Latinwas plainly more than that.

Oft did I weary of wrestling with thee.

Carved an unknown galley slave into an oar.

And Rudyard Kipling into his desk.

At the house on the beach, what becomes of Protagonist’s path to the highway when the snows are heavier than those Reader has visualized?

What is the winter really like, precisely at ocean’s edge?

He stank so badly, though we were great chums

I had to leave him; then rats ate his thumbs.

Watching abstractedly before the dunes as the entire shore commences to disappear?

Roger van der Weyden signed none of his paintings.

Either as Roger van der Weyden or Rogier de la Pasture.

J

oyce was influential enough to be able to aid at least a dozen Jews in escaping from Nazi Germany. Hermann Broch among them.

Tekiah. Shevarim. Teruah. Tekiab.

It remains a scandal to philosophy that there is as yet no satisfactory proof of an external world, Kant said.

Does Protagonist continue to walk the beach at his usual hour now also?

But surely not at this time of year a woman who does the same?

Robert Lowell died of a heart attack in a taxi.

After his cremation, Gandhi’s ashes were scattered into the Ganges, considered sacred. At Allahabad.

Where it and the Jumna conjoin.

Ruth Kligman, who was thrown clear in the crash that killed Jackson Pollock and a friend of hers, later had an affair with Willem de Kooning.

And later had an affair with Franz Kline.

Caponegro. Latiolais.

Darling Jill.

Robert Louis Stevenson died of a cerebral hemorrhage at forty-four, but had been emaciated by tuberculosis before that. A bundle of sticks in a bag, Henry Adams said he looked like.

Doch das Sein – was ist das Sein?

Isaac Babel disappeared in one of Stalin’s purges. Nothing whatsoever is known about his death.

Conversely, orders allegedly given by Stalin in regard to Pasternak: Don’t touch the cloud-dweller.