This is Not a Novel and Other Novels

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Author has finally started to put his notes into manuscript form.

A seascape by Henri Matisse was once hung upside down in the Museum of Modern Art in New York — and left that way for a month and a half.

The speedometer needle after the crash that killed Albert Camus was frozen at 145, in kilometers — meaning roughly ninety miles per hour.

The driver of another vehicle said the car had passed him going faster than that.

Leonardo da Vinci’s father had four wives.

Not one of whom was Leonardo’s mother.

An early intention was that Hector Berlioz would become a physician.

Until he went headlong out a hospital window during his first dissection.

Author had been scribbling the notes on three-by-five-inch index cards. They now come close to filling two shoebox tops taped together end to end.

Bertrand Russell was twenty-one years older than Wilfred Owen.

And would still be alive fifty-two years after Owen was machine-gunned in France in World War I.

Orchestra play like pig.

Being an Arturo Toscanini explanation of why he would not apologize to his Metropolitan Opera musicians after cursing at them in Italian.

Twenty-five years after she broke off their relationship, Charles Dickens had a tryst with Maria Beadnell, his still-remembered first love.

And found her fat and foolishly affected and wholly witless.

From the earliest biographical note on Rembrandt:

He could read only the simplest Dutch. And that haltingly.

Rembrandt.

Werner Heisenberg was thirty-one when he won the Nobel Prize.

And nine years earlier had been given a grade of C on his doctoral examinations.

By his own admission, William Butler Yeats, at twenty-seven, had not yet ever kissed a woman.

The Bodleian Library at Oxford, in the mid-seventeenth century, exchanged its First Folio Shakespeare for a Third — on the premise that the latter was more complete.

Actually, Author could have begun to type some weeks ago. For whatever reason, he’s been procrastinating.

Karl Marx never in his life saw the inside of a factory.

Visiting Maecenas at Rome, in the decades before the beginning of the common era, Virgil and Horace were able to use his heated swimming pool.

At thirty-seven, in Key West, Ernest Hemingway badly marked up Wallace Stevens’ face in a never fully explained fistfight.

Stevens was fifty-seven when it happened.

One hundred and sixteen thousand viewers had strolled past Le Bateau, the upside-down Matisse, without comment, before it was rehung correctly.

At the age of seven or eight, Sigmund Freud once deliberately urinated on the floor of his parents’ bedroom.

Aaron Copland, on listening to Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Fifth Symphony:

Like staring at a cow for forty-five minutes.

Mark Twain forgot Becky Thatcher’s name in the eight years between Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. And called her Bessie Thatcher in the later book.

Thomas Hardy’s anecdote about looking up a word in the dictionary because he wasn’t certain it existed — and finding that he himself was the only authority cited for its usage.

Realizing that all of Byron’s closest friends — Shelley, for instance — would have addressed him as my lord.

Corinna once defeated Pindar five times in a sequence of poetry contests at Thebes.

Pindar called her a sow.

Emerson was once quoted as having criticized Swinburne.

Swinburne called him a toothless baboon.

Stuff Melville dismissed Emerson as.

I.e., as in stuff and nonsense.

Conducting Don Giovanni in Boston in 1913, Felix Weingartner actually set aside his baton and joined in the applause after John McCormack’s II mio tesoro.

One reason for Author’s procrastination is that he seems not to have had much energy lately, to tell the truth.

For work, or for much of anything else.

At seventy-three, Charles Ives won a Pulitzer Prize for his Third Symphony.

Which he had written when he was thirty.

Keats. Wondering aloud where Shakespeare was sitting when he wrote To be or not to be.

Now and again, Picasso utilized the whitewashed walls of rented villas to sketch on. Once, a landlord demanded fifty francs for a fresh coat of paint—

Leaving for Picasso’s amusement years later the question of what the man had cost himself.

I can’t listen to music too often. It makes you want to say stupid, nice things.

Said Lenin.

The legend that nine months after his death, Dante appeared to one of his sons in a dream and told him where to find the last thirteen cantos of the Paradiso, until then believed to be unwritten.

Erwin Panofsky was on leave from Hamburg University in 1933, teaching in New York, when he received a telegram stating that as a Jew he was therewith dismissed from his German position.

Affixed to the message on a separate colored strip: Cordial Easter Greetings, Western Union.

Tolstoy, to Chekhov:

You know I can’t stand Shakespeare’s plays, but yours are worse.

A Joshua Reynolds self-portrait — with a bust of Michelangelo in the background.

A Hogarth — with his dog.

Basic research is what I am doing when I don’t know what I am doing.

Determined Wernher von Braun.

Nikolay Gogol’s possessions at the time of his death were little better than those of a pauper.

But did include a gold watch that had been Pushkin’s.

In the week before his suicide at seventeen, Thomas Chatterton is known to have lived on a single loaf of stale bread — stale to begin with, being all he could get on credit.

Shakespeare’s first child, his daughter Susanna, was born one day less than six months after his and Anne Hathaway’s marriage license was issued.

Shakespeare’s twins, Hamnet and Judith, were born less than two years later — a little less than three months before he turned twenty-one.

Mozart’s marital infidelities.

The suspicion re Constanze’s.

Author assumes that much of his lack of energy is simply a matter of age. But it’s been excessive, most recently.

Saint Anselm was said to have frequently excused himself from critical church meetings — to sit and read.

Vivaldi was said to have several times abruptly left the altar in the middle of saying Mass — to scribble down musical notations.

Queen Victoria once wrote to Lewis Carroll, at Oxford, asking for a copy of his next book—

And received an inscribed edition of An Elementary Treatise on Determinants.

I do at least three paintings a day in my head. What’s the use of spoiling canvas when nobody will buy anything?

Said Modigliani, penniless in Paris in his mid-twenties.

Anna Akhmatova’s memoir, fifty-four years later, of her affair with Modigliani in 1911. Sitting in the rain under an unreliable umbrella in the Luxembourg Gardens and reciting Verlaine to each other — unable to afford anything grander.

Bessie Smith may have been left to bleed to death at a Mississippi roadside after an automobile accident when an ambulance first took away a less severely injured white woman.

Or did she die en route to a second hospital after having been refused admittance at a first?

Winston Churchill failed Latin at Harrow.

As did Napoleon at Brienne.

Living in a single attic room in The Hague for the last seven years before his death at forty-four, Spinoza was known to sometimes go as long as three full months without once stepping out of doors.

Occasions on which the Nazis returned the ashes of murdered prisoners to their families.

Via parcel post.

From an early New York Times review of Prokofiev:

There are a few passages, but only a very few, that bear recognizable kinship with what has hitherto been considered music.

Balzac’s first noteworthy mistress was twenty-two years older than he.

And the mother of seven children.

Except in music, Beethoven had no schooling whatever after the age of eleven.

Having cut, burned, punctured, and tormented the patient, the physician then demands a fee that he does not deserve.

Said Heraclitus, twenty-five hundred years ago.

Equally long ago — when Xenophanes called it unjust that athletes were more highly honored than teachers.

Al Jolson’s first performances, when young and often hungry:

Singing Rosie, You Are My Posy in a Bowery saloon — for a free meal.

Then again, Author doesn’t feel he’s lost much time by not typing, since he’s done a good deal of shuffling and re-arranging of the index cards. Author is pretty sure that most of them are basically in the sequence he wants.

The greatest work of art ever, Karlheinz Stockhausen called the destruction of the World Trade Center.

On the wall in Gerhard Richter’s studio at the time also — a photo of the same event.

If you want to know how you really feel about someone, take note of the impression an unexpected letter from him makes on you when you first see it on the doormat.

Said Schopenhauer.

Alexander Pope, who was denied burial in the Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey:

Having been Catholic.

Byron, likewise:

Having been Byron.

Nothing preposterous can ever be said that hasn’t already been said by one of the philosophers.

Said Cicero.

The nunnery that was shut down in England in 1520 because — quote — of the dissolute disposition and incontinence of the religious women of the house, by reason of the vicinity of Cambridge University

All four of Richard Wright’s grandparents were former slaves.

Juvenal, explaining the impossibility of living in a second-century Rome rife with vulgarity, noise, theft, myriad nightmare dangers such as fires and/or roofs collapsing, et cetera:

Not to add poets endlessly reading their work even in the worst heat of August.

I ain’t got no quarrel with the Viet Cong. No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.

Said Muhammad Ali.

What cause have I to war at thy decree?

The distant Trojans never injured me.

Says Achilles, in Pope’s translation of the Iliad.

Marthe Boursin, whom Pierre Bonnard used as his model for Blue Nude in 1899.

And for Nude in the Bath—finished in 1946.

Charles Darwin was known to slice a fat book in half, to make it easier to handle.

Or to rip out any sections he was not interested in.

According to a friend who was in the room, Schubert composed his setting for Goethe’s Erlkonig in virtually less time than it had taken him to read the poem.

Scholars who are convinced that Shakespeare must certainly have been a military man. Or a lawyer. Or closely associated with royalty. Or even a Jew.

To which Ellen Terry: Or surely a woman.

Michelangelo once criticized the fact that Raphael was unfailingly accompanied by an entourage of pupils and admirers, saying he went parading about like a general—

To which Raphael: And you go about alone like a hangman.

Not that rearranging his notes means that Author has any real idea where the book is headed, on the other hand.

Ideally, in fact, it will wind up someplace that will surprise even Author himself.

Among the graffiti at Pompeii: Sarnius, Cornelio, suspendere.

Samius to Cornelius — Go hang yourself.

As an avowed admirer, Benjamin Franklin greatly hoped to meet Edward Gibbon. Gibbon declined.

Unwilling, he said, to socialize with someone who had revolted against his king.

A woman named Lorna Wilmott, who once let Dylan Thomas borrow her London flat. And returned to find that he had pawned her typewriter, her phonograph, the silver and her fur coat.

Maxim Gorky was the grandson of a Volga boatman.

A last castrato could still be heard in the Sistine Chapel choir into the second decade of the twentieth century.

The world goeth fast from bad to worse, said John Gower. Ca. 1375.

Richard Wagner’s pink underwear.

William Blake, at thirty, witnessed the death from consumption of his younger brother Robert—

And insisted he had seen Robert’s soul rising through the ceiling and clapping its hands for joy.

Maurice Utrillo was in and out of insane asylums repeatedly, commencing as early as at eighteen.

A mass of soapsuds and whitewash, said a critic of a Turner painting of a storm at sea.

I wonder what they think the sea’s like, said Turner.

Shelley wrote most of Prometheus Unbound perched high up on the overgrown ruins of the Baths of Caracalla.

One hundred and seventy years too early to have found himself in an ideal seat for the first concert of the Three Tenors.

Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.

As is already more than self-evident.

I am I because my little dog knows me.

Said Gertrude Stein.

Dope makes me come out all over in spots.

Allen Ginsberg says Dame Edith Sitwell said.

The first two publishers to whom Anne Frank’s father submitted her diary — turned it down.

Bysshe, everyone knew him as.

Momentarily startled to note that Luther’s wife was an ex-nun.

Then again recollecting that Luther in turn was an ex-monk.

Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were held in such esteem that in the century after their deaths Athens maintained official versions of their plays on file — and made it contrary to law to alter a single word in new productions.

Victor Hugo could never get past page four of Le Rouge et le Noir.

As he grew older, W. H. Auden was known for living in extraordinary filth. His own brother acknowledged that he frequently urinated in his kitchen sink.

He is the dirtiest man I have ever liked, Stravinsky said of him.

Was it Menander who announced that his new play was finished — all he had to do was write it?

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

This presumably by now self-evident also.

The Egyptians appear never in their history to have enjoyed one day of freedom.

Said Josephus, ca. 95 AD.

Beguiled by the romance of Gauguin’s removal to Tahiti.

Until remembering that the man deserted a wife and four young children at home.

I suppose all my books are gone.

Some, Dilly said. We had to.

Boccaccio’s last years were spent in enervating poverty.

In his will, Petrarch left him his own best heavy coat with which to confront the Tuscan winters.

Bach was once involved in a brawl in which he precipitously drew his sword.

Handel, the same. Though in both instances sensibleness prevailed.

Thomas Gainsborough, while an art student in London:

Deeply read in petticoats I am.

Dissection of corpses was not only illegal in Renaissance Florence, but punishable by death.

Leonardo managed to cleave into some thirty-odd nonetheless.

In his youth, Michelangelo performed some of his with a kitchen knife and household scissors.

Leonardo was also assiduous in attending executions — presumably to study the muscular contortions of the hanged.

Christopher Marlowe died at twenty-nine, leaving behind four younger sisters in Canterbury. All four probably had to make their mark instead of writing their name when signing a document.

The Captain Thomas Hardy — a relative — who was in command of Nelson’s flagship at Trafalgar.

The Marshal Ludwig Wittgenstein — not related — who was the youngest of the opposition commanders during Napoleon’s Russian campaign.

How many things there are in this world that I do not want.

Said Socrates, strolling through a marketplace in Athens.

There was no English translation of Oedipus Rex until a full century after the death of Shakespeare.

Sydney, Australia, Nellie Melba died in.

A mention of Henry David Thoreau in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s diary: Mr. Thorow.

Ugly as sin, the same entry calls him.

T. S. Eliot was afraid of cows.

Actually, in addition to not knowing where things might be headed, Author has to wonder whether his very typewriter will get there in the process. His less and less dependable forty-plus-year-old manual portable.

Particularly with the once ubiquitous neighborhood repair shop seeming no longer to exist.

Samuel Johnson was forced to drop out of Oxford because his family could not manage the costs.

And became Doctor Johnson only at sixty-four when he was granted an honorary degree.

Haydn’s Oxford Symphony.

After an honorary degree of his own.

Filippo Lippi’s reputation as a womanizer. To the extent that Cosimo de’ Medici once had him locked in, in an effort to keep him at his pigments.

The legend that Goya, at twenty-four, in Rome, broke into a convent and abducted a nun.

Charles Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were schoolboys together.

In later years, as a government clerk, Lamb stole as many as two hundred steel pens for Coleridge’s use.

Donatello. Brunelleschi. Uccello. Michelozzo. Antonio Pollaiuolo.

All of whom at one time or another assisted Lorenzo Ghiberti in designing or casting his doors for the Florence Baptistery

One London newspaper ran an actual news-style obituary when John Galsworthy killed off Soames Forsyte late in The Forsyte Saga.

Hannah Pritchard, the finest tragic actress of the eighteenth century — who allegedly never read a book.

An inspired idiot, Johnson called her.

Mr. Eliot’s work is no doubt brilliant, but it is not exactly the kind of material we care to add to our list.

Said the British publisher John Lane of a submission—after Eliot had published Prufrock.

The publisher did not care to add brilliant material to his list.

Ingram Frizer, who stabbed Marlowe, pleaded self-defense and went unpunished.

Superb administrative talent, Kafka’s superiors at the insurance company said he possessed.

Brahms so respected Dvořák as a colleague that he several times willingly assumed the chore of reading proofs of his scores for him.

Typewriter ribbons, too, Author finds it harder and harder to locate.

And typing erasers.

Did El Greco use hashish?

Tacitus, on Britain, a century after the Roman conquest:

A rude, scattered, and warlike people.

Hemingway was extremely slow to offer a guest a drink, said Virgil Thomson.

Schiller, writing to tell Goethe that Kant would contribute to a periodical he was editing—

And referring to Kant as the old bird.

Cleopatra never learned to speak Latin.

Evidently bedding Caesar and Antony via Greek.

The friendship of Picasso and Stravinsky.

Orbilius, a teacher of grammar. Remembered for two thousand years because Horace was one of his pupils — and named him the Whacker, for thrashings with his switch.

A letter written in Asia Minor, in 1615, and eventually delivered in London to:

The right worshipful fraternity of sirenical gentlemen, that meet the first Friday of every month, at the sign of the Mermaid in Bread Street.

January 1889, in Turin. Nietzsche, weeping, throws his arms around the neck of a mare being beaten by a coachman and then collapses in the street. Essentially the point of no return into his final madness.

To dress before her long-remembered 1939 concert at the Lincoln Memorial, Marian Anderson had to seek out someone’s private home:

The Washington hotels would not take us.

Dostoievsky’s profound, criminal, saintly face, Thomas Mann remarks.

Trash, Lenin viewed him as.

A volume of Sherlock Holmes, which fictional Leopold Bloom has borrowed from a Dublin library and which is thirteen days overdue on fictional June 16, 1904, was listed as missing by the actual library in 1906.

380 AD Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, Bishop of Constantinople — ordered Sappho’s poems to be burned.

1073 AD Pope Gregory VII — ordered Sappho’s poems to be burned.

Why is Orestes so central in so much of surviving Greek drama?

Or should the question be why bloodying one’s mother was so popular a topic?

The man’s simplicity was nothing short of astounding.

Said Abélard, regarding the uncle of Héloise who arranged for him to actually move into their home while tutoring her.

The inner truth and greatness of Nazism, Martin Heidegger spoke of.

A fatherly type, Knut Hamsun called Hitler.

Erich Kleiber held more than 130 rehearsals before conducting the world premiere of Wozzeck at the Berlin State Opera in 1925.

We are dealing here, from a musical viewpoint, with a capital offense, said one of the next morning’s reviews.

Youngsters, marching in what they announce as Indian file.

Who hearing them would know that the phrase comes from Fenimore Cooper?

Nahum Tate’s once regularly staged version of King Lear.

In which Cordelia and Edgar fall in love and live happily ever after.

I have met no one who has seen a sea on the west side of Europe. The truth is, no one has discovered if Europe is surrounded by water or not.

Said Herodotus, ca. 445 BC.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning so admired George Sand that she knelt and kissed her hand when they met.

Which Beethoven had once done with Haydn.

Geoffrey Chaucer was once accused of rape. And paid an unrecorded sum for the woman to withdraw her suit.

Coleridge, in acute financial need during a period of his severest addiction to opium, was given an anonymous gift of one hundred pounds.

From Thomas De Quincey.

Homer himself left no inheritance.

Said Ovid’s father, wishing his son might pursue a more remunerative occupation.

The erotic drawings that John Ruskin came upon in Turner’s studio after Turner’s funeral — and burned.

The seventy or more drawings by Degas of women from Paris brothels — with which one of Degas’ brothers did the same.

In research for his biography of Henry James, Leon Edel read fifteen thousand James letters.

Including those on which the frequent exhortation Burn this, please had obviously been ignored.

Why does it seem like the earliest fragment of American history that Author can remember ever having learned—

That Dolley Madison saved Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of George Washington when the British burned the White House in 1814?

Is Plautus the first author ever to refer to Alexander of Macedon as Alexander the Great?

Bach spent the last twenty-seven years of his life as cantor at the Thomasschule in Leipzig.

As the best musicians are not available, we must accept a man of moderate ability — had said a member of the Leipzig Municipal Council in hiring him.

Isadora Duncan lost two children when a chauffeur forgot to set the brake while cranking an automobile and it lurched into the Seine.

Alle Menschen müssen sterben.

In the First Pythian Ode, Pindar describes an eruption of Mount Etna.

In Prometheus Bound, Aeschylus describes an eruption of Mount Etna.

In Aeneid III, Virgil describes an eruption of Mount Etna.

But I will pull out of all this in Taormina. Under Etna, wait and see.

Said Malcolm Lowry, depressed after an eviction and awaiting freighter passage from New York to Sicily.

Asses loaded with books.

Mohammed, who could not read or write, dismissed the ews as.

Emily Dickinson left behind 1,775 poems.

Meaning a fraction less than one per week from every week of her adult life.

Dolley Madison also saved the silver.

How can I tell what I think until I see what I say?

Nothing written by Dante’s hand is known to exist — no manuscript, no document of any sort, nor is there even a signature.

Cf. six authenticated signatures of Shakespeare’s — among other items.

Athens, in the era of the ranking dramatists, or even as late as Plato, had no public library.

The ancient Romans built their greatest masterpieces of architecture — for wild beasts to fight in.

Grumbled Voltaire.

At certain seasons he kept those boots on for such a length of time that when he drew them off, the skin came away altogether with the leather.

Said Ascanio Condivi, a friend of Michelangelo’s.

As if painted with mud. Hideous. Irremediable. Like the designs schoolchildren make by squeezing flies between the folds of a sheet of paper. Worse.

Being but few of the more typical critical comments on Cezanne in the year or so before his death.

Wallace Stevens’ wife Elsie had an eighth-grade education.

Nora Joyce had a year or two less.

Among Annabella Milbanke’s charges, when seeking a separation from Byron:

That he shot off pistols in a drawing room while she lay one floor above in labor.

Truman Capote could not publish In Cold Blood until the two murderers, with whom he had become inordinately intimate, were executed.

I’m beside myself with joy, he was heard to say when a date was set.

Billie Holiday sang with an Artie Shaw band in a New York hotel ballroom in 1938.

And was not only not allowed in the hotel dining room, but made to come and go through the hotel kitchen.

Hillel. Unable to afford tuition.

And who almost froze to death listening to classroom lectures on an outside window ledge.

Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona, in which characters depart Verona by ship — when the city is nowhere near the sea.

Shakespeare’s King John — in which the Magna Carta is not once mentioned.

Santa Monica, California, Miles Davis died in.

At forty-two, teaching at the University of Chicago, Thorstein Veblen had still not been promoted above the rank of instructor.

Brahms was forty-three before he completed his first symphony.

A symphony is no joke — unquote.

This will never do.

Pronounced the opening sentence of a review by Francis Jeffrey of Wordsworth’s The Excursion.

It is rain upon rocks. Who can understand him. Said Byron of the same poem.

Five hundred years, virtually to the year, before the Taliban:

Ornaments, women’s jewelry, perfumes, mirrors, cosmetics, chessboards, playing cards, lutes, harps, carnival masks, books, illuminated manuscripts, paintings especially of women, more—

Into Savonarola’s Bonfires of the Vanities.

The friendship of Wittgenstein and John Maynard Keynes.

The many to whom, for years, Robert Schumann was known only as Clara Wieck’s husband.

And are you musical too, Mr. Schumann?

Melville, late along, possessed no copies of his own books.

Pope’s legs were so thin that he wore three pairs of stockings to partially disguise them.

Kant, in the same predicament, had to contrive special devices to keep his stockings up at all.

José da Silva, the Portuguese-Jewish playwright who was forcibly converted to Christianity — and then was burned alive by the Inquisition for secretly continuing to practice Judaism.

With one of his plays being performed in a Lisbon theater on the same afternoon.

Sophocles may have choked to death on a grape. Well past ninety.

Any number of literary works were flung into Savonarola’s conflagrations with the rest. With printing still in its essential infancy, how many irreplaceable single copies of Greek and Latin manuscripts were lost?

The fact that Isaac Babel was executed in a Moscow prison cellar.

The strong possibility that the manuscript of a novel confiscated at his arrest still exists in Stalin-era files.

William Harvey’s medical practice fell off radically after the publication of his treatise on the circulation of the blood.

’Twas believed by the vulgar that he was crack-brained, explains John Aubrey.

Georges Seurat, who was dead at thirty-one.

And had sold only two paintings in his life.

Jascha Heifetz and Nathan Milstein, who both studied under Leopold Auer.

Who studied under Joseph Joachim.

To whom Brahms dedicated his only violin concerto.

When in Rome, do as the Romans do.

Said Cervantes, in Part II of Don Quixote in 1615.

Said Robert Burton, in The Anatomy of Melancholy in 1621.

Said Saint Ambrose — in the late fourth century.

Raphael’s stanze in the Vatican—

Where horses were stabled during the sack of Rome by armies of Charles V.

Picasso, in his seventies, discussing form and structure in art.

Then tossing aside an ink-stained desk blotter with the comment: Jackson Pollock.

Author still uses a typewriter instead of a computer because?

Can he really say? Why does he still listen to music on 33⅓ rpm long-playing vinyl phonograph records?

The still extant bill of sale for fifty-eight pairs of gloves that Balzac purchased at one time.

Many of Ronsard’s poems were set to music in his lifetime.

Deaf from sixteen, he never heard them.

Giorgio de Chirico’s habit of doing new versions of his better known works, with faked dates decades after the fact, and then insisting that these were the originals.

Ouspensky, at the very commencement of World War I, taking note of a military truck loaded with crutches.

For limbs that had not yet been lost.

In 1827, an earliest Paris production of Hamlet, in English. With Hugo, Dumas, Eugene Delacroix, Berlioz, Alfred de Vigny, Sainte-Beuve, and Gerard de Nerval all known to have attended.

If it would please God that I might go and tend sheep with my sister and brother.

Said Joan of Arc, after her first several victories.

Clemenceau, to a new private secretary:

Certain letters you will have to draft yourself. Now listen: a sentence consists of a noun and a verb. If you want to use an adjective, come and ask me first.

Tolstoy kept a portrait of Dickens on the wall in his study.

Handel hung in Gluck’s bedroom.

Women, in ancient Greece, were not permitted to do the shopping.

Shakespeare’s sonnets, published in 1609, many probably written in the 1590s.

The realization that there had never been a sonnet in English at all until ca. 1540, when Sir Thomas Wyatt translated Petrarch.

Vaslav Nijinsky spent the last thirty-two years of his life in an insane asylum.

Thirty-two.

In addition to his native German, Heinrich Schliemann spoke English, French, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Polish, Greek, Russian, Arabic, and Latin.

Most of which he had taught himself.

In addition to his native French, Jean-Francois Champollion spoke Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Coptic, Chaldean, Sanskrit, Persian, and Chinese.

And possibly others.

For some years, Marcel Duchamp was the second-ranked chess master in France.

Giordano’s Andrea Chénier—which concludes with Chénier and Madeleine di Coigny strolling off hand in hand toward the guillotine.

Who in real life probably never met.

Claudio Muzio. Elisabeth Rethberg. Rosa Ponselle. Zinka Milanov.

Jane Austen, at the thought of attending an opera:

Very tiresome.

Priests ought never to have children — except by married women.

Says Rousseau in the Confessions.

The lunatic woman’s suffrage demonstrator, affronted by its nudity, who repeatedly slashed the Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery in London in 1914.

Lucrezia, wife of Andrea del Sarto, model for so many of his exotic Madonnas. Long after his death, a young apprentice is rendering a copy of one in a Tuscany church when an ancient shawled creature who had been at prayer pauses beside him. At last a hand lifts:

It was I, she says, and shuffles on.

Keats showed On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer to Cowden Clarke the morning after he wrote it.

Apparently Clarke did not know the difference between Cortés and Balboa either.

Chapman. Who in his day was far better known as a playwright than for his translations.

And yet existed at times in calamitous poverty.

I am merry when I have nere a penny in my purse.

Says a letter of Thomas Nashe, who himself saw moments that must have sometimes changed his tone.

Xenophanes, who lived to be one hundred.

And buried his sons.

As did Anaxagoras.

Maurice Ravel’s refusal of the Legion of Honor—

On the premise that government had no right to judge artists.

After a bench heaved from a window during a 1527 political uprising in Florence smashed the left arm of Michelangelo’s David, Giorgio Vasari was one of two sixteen-year-old boys who managed to salvage the pieces.

Alexander A. Alekhine.

Undesirable originality, Beethoven’s Eroica was once condemned for.

Obscure, uncouth, barbaric, and affected, someone labeled an early volume of Yeats.

Very great is the number of the stupid. Said Galileo.

There are always more fools in the majority than in the minority.

Said Anatole France.

One of C. P. Cavafy’s earliest pieces of writing, an essay, in English:

Give Back the Elgin Marbles.

I wish women would repeat the Lord’s Prayer before opening up their mouths.

Said Luther.

From a Hemingway letter, on T. S. Eliot:

A damned good poet and a fair critic; but he can kiss my ass as a man.

On Scott Fitzgerald:

A rummy and a liar.

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.

Begins an Orwell essay dated 1941.

Rank vegetable growth, Rebecca West called the sentences of Henry James. One feels that if one took cuttings of them one could raise a library in the garden.

Brussels, René Magritte died in.

O, what a number of lies this young man has told about me.

Said Socrates, the first time he heard Plato read one of his dialogues.

Says a legend recorded by Diogenes Laërtius.

Author’s pleasure in learning that the main thoroughfare through Copenhagen is named Hans Christian Andersen Boulevard.

The Marquis de Sade, a century and a half before On the Road:

Writing One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom on a single continuous forty-five-foot roll of paper.

Brahms had blond hair.

As did Mozart.

And Saint Thomas Aquinas.

Hemingway on Sherwood Anderson:

A slob.

The first edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species sold out in one day.

Pope Sixtus IV, in the late fifteenth century, was forced to actually issue a bull threatening excommunication for anyone who did not return volumes borrowed from the Vatican library.

Bach had twenty children, of whom nine survived him.

Twenty.

Mozart had seven, of whom two lived.

Vladimir Mayakovsky in New York, in 1925: The filth is worse than in Minsk.

And it is unimaginably filthy in Minsk.

Dostoievsky wrote The Gambler in sixteen days.

Stephen Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage in ten. At twenty-one.

Donizetti wrote L’Elisir d’Amore in a week.

The friendship of Crane and Joseph Conrad.

The night before the audition that gained her admission into the Stockholm Academy of Music, Birgit Nilsson milked ten cows on her family’s farm.

The first signed work of visual art, a Greek vase, ca. 700 BC.

Its signature Aristonothos.

Caesar, asked to name the best death:

A sudden one.

Visiting friends, Cyril Connolly was known to mark his place in their books with anything from a string of spaghetti to a leaf of lettuce.

And to depart leaving it there.

Brahms had blue eyes.

As did Abraham Lincoln.

And Hitler.

Giacomo Meyerbeer selflessly gave Richard Wagner all manner of aid at the start of Wagner’s career.

For which in turn Wagner later scurrilously denigrated him in an anti-Semitic pamphlet.

Anonymously.

Rudyard Kipling’s only son was killed fighting with the Irish Guards in World War I.

We have the same job, Virginia.

Said Katherine Mansfield, in a letter to Virginia Woolf.

The only writing I have ever been jealous of.

Said Woolf of Mansfield.

The credible folktale that Marco Polo and his father and uncle, disreputable and queerly dressed, were not recognized and almost denied entry to the Venice family home on their return from the East — after twenty-four years.

Jorge Santayana, it originally was.

Josephine was six years older than Napoleon.

Keep apart, keep apart and preserve one’s soul alive — that is the teaching for the day. It is ill to have been born in these times, but one can make a world within a world.

Wrote George Gissing.

Je suis le savant au fauteuil sombre.

Painting at the court of Sultan Mohammed II in Constantinople, Gentile Bellini improvised a severed head of John the Baptist.

The sultan deemed it unrealistic — and on the spot had a passing slave decapitated for Bellini’s edification.

In his comick scenes he is seldom very successful.

Said Johnson of Shakespeare.

Spurinna.

Charlotte Brontë was four feet nine inches tall.

Sarah Bernhardt was illegitimate.

Marseilles, Rimbaud died in.

Wondering if youngsters still in fact read Marco Polo.

In 1490, a Rome census showed a population of roughly ninety thousand.

Including 6,800 registered prostitutes.

She wouldn’t care a straw whether her husband was an artist or a cobbler, said Haydn of his wife.

Whom he also called an infernal beast.

The Yannis Ritsos verses in which Greek antiquity and the present exist simultaneously — and Phaedra smokes too many cigarettes.

Robert Browning outlived Elizabeth by almost thirty years.

James Dickey flew more than one hundred combat missions in the Pacific in World War II.

Joseph Heller flew sixty in Europe.

Addison and Steele were schoolboys together.

As were Jonathan Swift and William Congreve.

As were John Dryden and John Locke.

Blake’s portraits of Mohammed, Canute, Owen Glendower, Wat Tyler, Lot, William Wallace, and others.

All of whom he insisted had posed for him, in visitations.

The occasions during their collaboration when Braque and Picasso could not always say with certainty which cubist canvas had been the work of whom.

My ex-wife, Picasso would later speak of Braque as.

Beethoven was once seen to throw a dish at a servant. And again at a waiter.

My musical career would no doubt at last become quite charming, if only I could live one hundred and fifty years.

Said Berlioz, when he finally began to receive the critical esteem he deserved.

François Villon’s mother was illiterate.

As was Walt Whitman’s.

As was D. H. Lawrence’s father.

Not long after Scott Fitzgerald’s death, Scribner’s let The Great Gatsby go out of print.

And then rejected the collection called The Crack-Up.

I am Cinna the poet. I am not Cinna the conspirator.

Claude Monet’s love of the sea:

When I die, I should like to be buried in a buoy.

Heinrich Heine’s grave in Montmartre was deliberately despoiled by the Nazis in World War II.

An image that has lingered in Author’s mind: Nelly Sachs and Paul Celan, some few years afterward, silently bearing flowers to the site.

Almost nothing whatever is known about Livy.

Rome’s historian has no history, as Taine put it.

Virtually nothing is known about Lucretius either.

Ignoring Saint Jerome’s silliness about him having been driven mad by a love potion.

Zora Neale Hurston’s jesting claim that she once avoided a pedestrian traffic ticket by telling the police officer that since she always saw white people cross on green, she naturally therefore assumed the red was for her.

The Calvary sculpted by Claus Sluter in the late fourteenth century which included the figure of Jeremiah — wearing eyeglasses.

Be silent, good people. I am the Protestant whore.

Called Nell Gwyn out a carriage window to an anti-Catholic London mob.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Whose 1944 Free French reconnaissance flight went down without a sign somewhere off Corsica.

Where they burn books, they’ll end up burning people, said Heine.

In 1821.

The painter’s painter, Whistler called Velazquez.

Everything that Velazquez does may be regarded as absolutely right, said Ruskin.

Leopold Bloom, thinking of the overheard tinkle into a chamber pot as a kind of chamber music.

The likelihood that Joyce adopted the title for his poems from the same pun.

Tamerlane, in 1398, seeking justification in the Koran for an attack on Delhi and given a verse by the mullahs: 0 Prophet, make war upon the infidels and unbelievers, and treat them with harshness.

Whereupon he massacred one hundred thousand unarmed prisoners.

The First Crusade, achieving Jerusalem three hundred years before that, as witnessed by the priest Raymond of Agiles:

Wonderful things were to be viewed. Numbers of the Saracens were beheaded. Others were tortured for several days and then burned in flames. In the streets were seen piles of heads and hands and feet.

A decorator tainted with insanity, Harper’s Weekly once called Gauguin.

Whitman never saw Europe.

Wallace Stevens did not either.

Thunder occurs when clouds collide.

Said Anaxagoras.

Teacher, look! The birds are on fire!

Fra Angelico. Who never painted without first offering a brief prayer.

Bach. Who would not compose without doing so also.

Thanks to God, I have always remained an athiest.

Said Luis Buñuel.

Euripides died in Macedonia. Athens subsequently sent formal emissaries asking that his remains be returned for burial in his homeland. Macedonia said no, electing to retain the honor.

Tchaikovsky’s utterly ill-conceived marriage, which lasted only weeks.

And in fleeing from which he initially attempted suicide — and then underwent a nervous breakdown.

Physics is much too difficult for me. I wish I were a film comedian.

Said Wolfgang Pauli.

Kuesnacht, near Zurich, Carl Jung died in.

The correspondence between T. S. Eliot and Groucho Marx.

Initiated by Eliot.

Vesalius passed his final examinations at the University of Padua with such astonishingly high grades that the following morning he was appointed a professor of surgery.

For all that later sensibilities would find it mawkish, Dickens himself always wept when he read the death of Little Nell in public.

Puccini admitted that he did the same after writing Mimi’s death in La Bohème.

From a letter of 1682, to the effect that a ship carrying Quakers is en route to Cape Cod:

Much spoil can be made of selling the whole lot to Barbadoes, where slaves fetch good prices in rum and sugar and we shall do the Lord great good by punishing the wicked. Yours in the bowels of Christ—

Cotton Mather.

Forks were first introduced in England in 1611.

Which is to say, about the time Shakespeare was writing The Winter’s Tale and/or The Tempest and preparing to retire to Stratford.

Milton treated his three daughters so sternly that when he decided to marry for a third time, one of them said that news of a wedding was of no consequence:

But might I hear of his death, that were something.

Realizing that through the entire Middle Ages, Italian merchants still kept their books in Roman numerals.

The curiosity that Jesus never appears to condemn slavery, though mentioning it in passing more than once.

The best-selling novels in five of the first fourteen years of the twentieth century were by Winston Churchill.

An earlier Winston Churchill.

There are eighty-six chapters in Middlemarch.

And eighty-six epigraphs.

For years, Vachel Lindsay sold his poetry on street corners. The first time he did so, in New York in 1905, he took in thirteen cents.

And was overjoyed.

No single book or manuscript is listed among Shakespeare’s possessions in his will.

There was a man and a dog too this time.

The barometer of his emotional nature was set for a spell of riot.

Hackenbush.

Hobbes. Descartes. Pascal. Spinoza. Locke. Leibniz. Hume. Kant. Schopenhauer. Kierkegaard. Nietzsche. Santayana. Wittgenstein.

Not one of whom ever married.

Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife,

He would have written sonnets all his life?

Clement Greenberg was asked to deliver the eulogy at Jackson Pollock’s funeral, but refused — outraged that Pollock had caused the death of an innocent passenger in the crash that killed him.

As if written illegally, under fear of the police.

Bertolt Brecht said of Kafka’s fiction.

Like a naked man among people wearing clothes.

Milena Jesenská perceived him.

An illegitimate wretch who is a scholar is more worthy than an ignorant high priest.

Said Maimonides.

The Regents of the Old Men’s Almshouse.

Hals himself was eighty-four.

Athens, 399 BC. A jury of 501 male citizens over the age of thirty.

Guilty, 281 to 220.

Goethe wrote Werther in four weeks.

Schiller wrote William Tell in six.

Laurence Olivier, shoring up the confidence of a young Alec Guinness during a rehearsal of Twelfth Night:

Fascinating. I’d never realized before that Malvolio could be played as a bore.

Agathon, the first Greek dramatist to write a tragedy without using a subject from myth, and at whose home Plato situates the Symposium — and by whom not one play remains.

Modern critical interpretations of Oedipus Rex that suggest Jocasta knows all along.

Commentary on the pigeons in the Piazza San Marco dates from as early as the mid-I200s.

Elie Wiesel’s advance against royalties for the first American edition of Night was $100.

Daniele da Volterra, who was commissioned by Pope Paul IV to conceal some of the nudity in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment.

And was thereafter referred to as the Breeches-Maker.

Michelangelo was still alive at the time of the pope’s decision.

Tell his Holiness to look to setting the world in order. To reform a picture costs no great trouble.

Montaigne, in all of his autobiographical pages, mentions his wife only less than does Dante in his.

The Wandering Jew was claimed to have been seen in Hamburg in 1542, 1547, and 1564.

And in Vienna in 1599.

Caedmon, sing me something!

As Plutarch reports it, after Socrates’ trial — and his death — his accusers were looked upon with such disfavor that they eventually hanged themselves.

Alfred North Whitehead was made to retire at Imperial College, London, at the age of sixty-two.

Harvard was quite content to have him move there and teach for an additional thirteen years.

Rome, Ingeborg Bachmann died in.

Anthony Powell, George Orwell, Henry Green, and Cyril Connolly all attended Eton at the same time.

Along with Ian Fleming.

Malcolm Lowry, William Empson, Kathleen Raine, and Michael Redgrave were contemporaries at Cambridge.

Along with Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt, and Kim Philby.

Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?

The First Folio Shakespeare, in 1623, was only the second Workes of a playwright published in England. Ben Jonson’s had been the first, seven years earlier — and to a certain ridicule, for seeming pretentious.

Francis Beaumont, of Beaumont and. So astute a critical reader that even Jonson himself, according to Dryden, asked him to look through his manuscripts and suggest revisions.

The Black Death, 1348-49. Presumably brought to Europe on shipboard by rats from the Near East.

Nonetheless leading to tens of thousands of Jews being massacred across Spain and France and Germany, accused of poisoning wells.

Salvador Dali, once lecturing at the Sorbonne, began by removing his right shoe and sock — and then soaked his bare foot in a pan of milk throughout.

God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions.

An anonymous Cynic philosopher, re the Odyssey:

I do not find that Odysseus the Wise does anything but dine and chase women.

T. E. Lawrence, who spent four years working on a new translation of same—

And then decided he fundamentally agreed with the antique earlier judgment.

D. H. Lawrence, on a difference between the novel and older poetic epics:

In a novel, you know there is a water closet on the premises.

In a letter from Florence Hardy, mentioning that her husband is at his desk:

Writing an intensely dismal poem with great spirits.

Eliot took private French lessons in Paris from Alain-Fournier, evidently just when the latter had begun writing Le Grand Meaulnes.

And four years before he would be shot and killed in a German ambush in World War I.

Remembering that a faithful small-scale copy of The Last Judgment by Marcello Venusti, made before garments were added, exists in Naples.

Gigantic Emily Brontë Emily Dickinson called her.

A Wayward Nun, Dickinson called herself.

David Garrick, retiring from the stage:

Now I will sit down and read Shakespeare.

Schrödinger’s cat.

Captain Gardiner, I will not do it. Even now I lose time. Good bye, good bye. God bless ye, man, and may I forgive myself, but I must go.

Theories that Milton’s blindness was caused by glaucoma. Or by detached retinas.

Or congenital syphilis.

Above Rodin’s grave at Meudon:

A cast of The Thinker.

Like Alexander with the Iliad, Napoleon carried a copy of Plutarch’s Lives with him eternally.

Being reminded that Garrick would also later be buried adjacent to the Shakespeare monument in Westminster Abbey.

Max Beerbohm lived in Italy for most of forty-six years.

And never learned to speak Italian.

A Vatican cardinal, visiting Nicolas Poussin’s modest house in Rome: How distressing that you have no servant.

Poussin: How distressing that you have so many.

Tolstoy had an illegitimate son he never acknowledged.

Karl Marx had an illegitimate son he never acknowledged.

Henrik Ibsen had an illegitimate son he never acknowledged.

Teaching mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, Isaac Newton lectured so abstractly that often no students appeared at his classes at all.

That utterly dreary German scoundrel Wagner.

Dostoievsky called him.

Whose tale, locked for some decades, now, in Author’s memory?—

Of someone visiting at an old people’s home and noticing a woman beyond an unclosed bathroom door — scrubbing her face in a toilet bowl.

And why peculiarly indelible?

James Baldwin borrowed money from Marlon Brando with which to finish his first novel.

Phoenix, Arizona, Frank Lloyd Wright died in.

Learning from the Divine Comedy that one-way traffic had been established in thirteenth-century Rome.

Within weeks of John Berryman’s father’s suicide, when Berryman was twelve, his mother remarried. To their landlord.

Books agreeing with Copernicus or Kepler or Galileo — i.e., acknowledging that the earth moved around the sun — remained on the Catholic Index until as late as 1835.

One’s delayed awareness that in Hamlet, Claudius prays. Or attempts to.

And that Hamlet never does.

Are you actually the Arnold Schoenberg.

Somebody had to be.

Pliny the Younger was a pupil of Quintilian’s.

Years afterward, learning that Quintilian could not afford a proper dowry for his daughter, Pliny sent the money as a gift.

Dryden was England’s first official Poet Laureate.

One hundred and seventy-five years earlier, both Oxford and Cambridge had awarded the title to John Skelton.

Fifteen thousand children were among the prisoners who passed through Theresienstadt.

Ninety-some survived.

The probability that James Joyce and Lenin exchanged pleasantries.

In a Café Odéon in Zurich, in 1915, which both spent much time in.

Pascal could see no worth whatsoever in poetry.

The original of Lady Macbeth. Whose name was Gruoch.

Yeats, in the mid-1930s, noting that he had met Gerard Manley Hopkins several times more than fifty years earlier, but remembered almost nothing:

A boy of seventeen, Walt Whitman in his pocket, had little interest in a querulous, sensitive scholar.

At thirty-three, with a number of what would become his most famous poems already written, Edwin Arlington Robinson’s total lifetime earnings as an author came to seven dollars.

The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, in the year 2000, on the Holocaust:

A fairy tale.

Handel wrote Messiah in twenty-two days.

I like a view but I like to sit with my back to it.

Said Gertrude Stein.

Vasari’s painful single-sentence description of an aging Piero di Cosimo, struggling to continue painting while suffering from palsy — and enraged when the maulstick and even his brushes would fall from his hand.

Renoir’s arthritis.

27, rue de Fleurus.

Benvenuto Cellini had at least six illegitimate children.

The proposal that Dylan Thomas would sleep on a couch in Stravinsky’s Los Angeles living room while they collaborated on an opera.

Precluded by Thomas’s death.

The King Lear that Verdi always hoped to write but didn’t.

Remembering that the Chinese invented moveable type well before Gutenberg.

As did the Koreans.

Poaching venison and rabbits from Sir Thomas Lucy.

Too raw for the majority of women.

Said Sainte-Beuve of Madame Bovary.

Writing in bed, Mark Twain preferred.

Fretful, timorous, and a tell-tale — Coleridge’s own description of his childhood self.

The schoolboys drove me from play, and were always tormenting me, and hence I took no pleasure in boyish sports, but read incessantly.

Schrödinger’s equation.

Pausing to recall that before watches became commonplace, one told time by heeding church bells. Or when possible by sundial.

As in the London of John Donne or of Samuel Pepys, for example.

Copies of all of the now long lost plays of Sophocles and Euripides still existed at Constantinople until 1203.

When the city’s churches and libraries were indiscriminately ravaged and torched by the abortive Fourth Crusade.

According to Suetonius, Virgil first wrote the entire Aeneid in prose — and only then recast it into verse.

From an earliest major review of Jane Eyre:

Sheer rudeness and vulgarity. An anti-Christian composition.

Of Wuthering Heights:

Repulsive vulgarity. Odiously and abominably pagan.

Herefordshire, Jenny Lind died in.

Poor Tom’s a-cold.

At Lamb House, in Rye, Henry James had no fewer than eight writing desks.

And most often paced back and forth dictating.

Johnson. Boswell. Gibbon. Walpole. Goldsmith. Sterne. Garrick. Edmund Burke. Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Sarah Siddons.

All of whom sat for Joshua Reynolds.

Napoleon. Louis XVI. Catherine the Great. Rousseau. Voltaire. Washington. Jefferson. Franklin. John Paul Jones. Diderot. Lafayette.

All of whom sat for Jean-Antoine Houdon.

By order of the Council of Avignon, 1209, forbidden to handle bread or fruit set out for sale:

Harlots and Jews.

There were 945 booksellers in Paris in 1845.

Tolstoy carried on a vast correspondence. In 1908, Thomas Edison sent him an early dictaphone. Tolstoy learned to make great use of it, in the two years until his death.

Goethe’s English spelling:

I am luky.

The best dramatic writer since the days of Shakespeare and Massinger, Walter Scott called Joanna Baillie.

Who was forgotten before her death.

Fragonard was so little known at his death that there would appear to have been no obituary anywhere.

How many miles to Babylon?

Threescore miles and ten.

Beaumarchais, who wrote The Marriage of Figaro and The Barber of Seville—and who surreptitiously arranged for the sale of muskets and cannon and gunpowder to the Americans during the Revolution.

And was never paid until an Act of Congress compensated his heirs sixty years later.

Donne would not last, Drummond of Hawthornden says Ben Jonson said.

For not being understood.

An uninteresting, and one may almost say, a justly exterminated race.

The New York Times called the American Indian, in an 1855 review of Hiawatha.

An amiable barbarian. Voltaire called Shakespeare.

For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.

The reading or non-reading of a book — will never keep down a single petticoat.

Said Byron.

Stevie Smith’s cheerfully gruesome voice, Robert Lowell called it.

There are no English critics of weight or judgment who consider Mr. Joyce an author of any importance.

Said Edmund Gosse, two years after the publication of Ulysses.

Who can plow through such stuff?

Added George Moore.

The best thing that could happen to English literature is that a large number of our critics should be taken to a remote place in the country and locked up alone for six months with a volume of Wordsworth.

Concluded Alfred Noyes in the same regard.

Can I get there by candle-light?

Yes, and back again.

As his deafness progressively increased, Beethoven banged harder and harder on pianos. And made a total ruin of several.

Strabo’s Geography, dated 7 BC. Which states that the world is round and that one could reach India by sailing westward from Spain.

Plutarch read ceaselessly. Whether eating, having his haircut, being shaved, or even riding horseback, he says.

Shelley’s habit of reading everything aloud, whatever the circumstances so that his friend Hogg finally once yanked a book from his hands and flung it out a window.

For the first several centuries, the Mass in the Roman church was conducted in Greek, not Latin.

Rather than in shorthand, Henry James’s dictation at Lamb House was taken by his secretary on a Remington typewriter.

The universe was created on October 26, 4004 BC. At 9:00 AM.

Announced Archbishop Ussher, in 1645.

The death of Hector occurred on August 28, 1185 BC. Declared an equally perspicacious scholar.

Abu Said, a Sufi poet and saint.

Who sat in a recess in a chapel and said Allah! continually for seven years.

Beverly Hills, California, Sergei Rachmaninoff died in.

As did Bruno Walter.

Saint John of the Cross was exceptionally short and slight.

Half a friar, Saint Teresa of Avila playfully spoke of him as.

A half-bottle, Toulouse-Lautrec called himself because of his own stunted growth.

Washington had Tom Paine’s The Crisis—These are the times that try men’s souls — read to his troops.

Lafayette was nineteen when Washington made him a major general.

The value of a classical education, according to a mid-nineteenth-century dean of Christ Church, Oxford, one Thomas Gaisford:

That it enables us to look down with contempt on those who have not shared its advantages.

Oh, isn’t life a terrible thing, thank God?

Says Polly Garter.

We have to believe in free will. We’ve got no choice.

Said Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Fetch up Nell Gwyn, he says. They fetch her up. Next morning, Chop off her head! And they chop it off.

Outside of the family and attendants, Victor Hugo was the last person to see Balzac on the evening of his death:

The nurse and the servant stood in a kind of horrified silence as they listened to his dying rattle. An overpowering, sickening odor was wafted from the bed. Unquote.

Martha Washington could barely read or write.

Theodora Bosanquet.

The best work of the best poet.

Dryden called the Georgics.

The apocryphal notion that after four years on the Sistine ceiling scaffolding, Michelangelo could read only by holding pages above his head.

Kierkegaard’s father was fifty-seven when Kierkegaard was born.

Who could be more oppressive than the landlords?

Asked Saint John Chrysostom.

Ca. 400 AD.

These new composers seem to be satisfied only if they can produce the greatest possible tonal disturbance.

Said a critic of Claudio Monteverdi.

In 1603.

Dead! Dead! And never called me mother.

Evidently several life preservers were flung overboard only moments after Hart Crane’s suicide leap into the Gulf Stream. A boat was lowered and circled for an hour or more, before the freighter sailed on.

Adriaen Brouwer. Who was found dead outside a tavern at thirty-two.

But by whom Rembrandt had bought eight paintings. And Rubens as many as seventeen.

Lermontov. Whose first fame accrued to a poem condemning Pushkin’s death in a duel.

And who four years later was killed in a duel himself.

Where did Author learn that Boris Pasternak borrowed the name Zhivago from the manufacturer’s identification on a Moscow manhole cover?

Aware that the myth begins with the infant Oedipus being abandoned on a mountainside.

Not always remembering that in archaic Greece exposing unwanted children was common practice.

An honorary degree of Thomas Mann’s from the University of Bonn was formally rescinded when he condemned the Nazi regime and went into exile.

I find it impossible to take him seriously as a major writer and have never ceased to be amazed at the number of people who can.

Said Edmund Wilson of Kafka.

J. Edgar Hoover lived with his mother until her death when he was forty-three.

Mordecai Peter Centennial Brown.

Stephen Crane’s judgment that War and Peace should have been one third its length:

It goes on and on like Texas.

William Byrd. John Dowland. Thomas Campion.

The suggestion that most editors are failed writers.

To which Eliot: So are most writers.

Odious vermin, Henry Fielding called critics.

The first time Osip Mandelstam was arrested by Soviet authorities, Stalin himself phoned Pasternak to indicate that Mandelstam would be released. Pasternak then asked if he and Stalin might meet for a chat. A chat about what? Why, about life, about love, about death—

Stalin had already hung up.

There are more than 530 miles of bookshelves in the Library of Congress.

Most of Homer is trash, determined Walter Savage Landor.

Who felt the same way about Dante.

Two thousand years before Shakespeare, Aeschylus apparently acted in his own plays also.

And may have directed them as well.

No man has a right to set himself up as a lecturer at $50 per night who cannot for one minute take his eyes from his manuscript.

Said a Rockford, Illinois, newspaper about Melville.

Was Apollinaire the first to call it cubism in print?

Oh I have been to Ludlow fair

And left my necktie God knows where.

Oskar Kokoschka’s life-size effigy of Alma Mahler.

Which he sometimes slept with.

A cursed, conceited, wily heathen.

Being Aristotle as viewed by Luther.

Pontormo, who studied under Leonardo, Piero di Cosimo, and Andrea del Sarto.

Vasari, who studied under Andrea and Michelangelo.

Pierre Corneille died in poverty.

Buddha warned his disciples to avoid the company of women.

Asked his favorite pupil: What if one of them should speak to us?

Keep wide awake, Ananda.

Horace Walpole’s cautious suggestion to Gibbon that certain lesser technical portions of the Decline and Fall might be boring.

After which Gibbon never spoke to him again.

Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe all once worked together in the same German architectural studio.

For approximately a century and a half, Vivaldi was as little known and little rated among composers as was Vermeer for even longer among painters.

Vermeer having evidently been mentioned in print only three times in his life, and all three inconsequentially.

The friendship of Parson Malthus and David Ricardo.

Under the Caesars, a virgin could not be executed.

Thus any so sentenced were matter-of-factly deflowered beforehand.

At a doctor’s suggestion, Mozart went horseback riding every morning for four years.

Ceasing a month or two before his death when he was forced to sell his mount — for need of the few ducats.

Louvain, Dirck Bouts died in.

John Ruskin, educated at home, had no friends among boys of his own age.

John Stuart Mill, the same.

Much too early I came to many places, or too late: the beer was not yet ready, or was already drunk.

Says Odin, in the Elder Edda.

The era when postage was still paid for by the person who received the delivery.

And Scott said that his fan mail was driving him toward the poorhouse.

Byron, briefly, on Southey: Twaddle.

On Wordsworth: Drivel.

On Keats: Flay him alive.

At certain moments in his madness, John Clare was heard to hold conversations with Shakespeare.

When Hölderlin talked to himself it was often as if in a dialogue between two extraordinarily different personalities.

Thomas Love Peacock read voraciously in Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, and of course English.

Having left school at thirteen.

There’s nothing to say that hasn’t been said before.

Says Terence in the Eunuch.

We can say nothing but what has been said; the composition and method is ours only.

Says Burton in the Anatomy.

Jonson’s To Celia—Drink to me only with thine eyes.

Which he contrived by juggling fragments from the Greek of Philostratus.

James Ensor’s portrait of himself as a beetle.

Drawn twenty-four years before The Metamorphosis.

Sakyamuni.

Mendelssohn, on Liszt:

Few brains.

On Berlioz:

One ought to wash one’s hands after handling one of his scores.

Paul Robeson’s father was a former slave.

Sigmund Freud was one of those who categorically refused to allow that the William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon could have been the author of the plays.

And told Arnold Zweig that it almost made him angry that Zweig believed otherwise.

The Athenian general Phocion, who was interrupted by extraordinary cheering during a speech:

Have I inadvertently said something stupid?

Huckleberry Finn is thirteen.

Raskolnikov is twenty-three.

Winslow Homer was an artist-correspondent at the front during the Civil War.

Schopenhauer was someone else who talked to himself — loudly, on public thoroughfares.

In Wordsworth’s instance the talk meant that he was composing verses — which he completed in his head before putting them down on paper.

Entirely fourth-rate — Tchaikovsky re Handel.

Pushkin’s tentative English — much of it learned by struggling through Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.

Molly Bloom is thirty-three.

Have the people who conclude that Shakespeare’s plays were written by the Earl of Oxford ever read the poetry Oxford actually did write?

The twenty-four letters of the Greek alphabet. Ergo, the twenty-four books of the Iliad and of the Odyssey.

Arranged by editors at Alexandria centuries after the fact.

When you are going to bed on a sleeper car, put your wallet in a sock under your pillow. That way, in the morning you’ll never forget your wallet, because you’ll be looking for your sock.

Said Ping Bodie.

Eliot was not a very experienced writer, he didn’t write very much, he didn’t write very much poetry.

Said Allen Ginsberg.

Every poet is a fool. Which is not to say that every fool is a poet.

Said Coleridge.

Teresa Stratas, who in midcareer took time to work in Mother Teresa’s hospice in Calcutta.

And later in orphanages in Romania.

Was Stalin’s right arm withered, or was it his left?

Jerusalem, Martin Buber died in.

As did Else Lasker-Schiller.

And S. Y. Agnon.

And Yehuda Amichai.

Paradise Lost sold fewer than three hundred copies a year in its first ten years in print.

The Courtship of Miles Standish sold fifteen thousand copies on its first day.

Giacomo Puccini’s fanatic addiction to duck hunting.

There is no peace to be found except in the woods.

Said Michelangelo.

Herodotus claimed that Nebuchadnezzar’s walls at Babylon were thick enough so that two four-horse chariots could traverse them side by side. No one believed him for twenty-four hundred years — until excavation showed them thicker than that.

Swinburne suffered epileptic seizures. Once in the British Museum.

The United States Constitution was formally declared to be in effect in March of 1789. At a celebration in Philadelphia, provision was made for tables serving kosher food.

Van Dyck was known to do many of his portraits in no longer than an hour.

It is wonderful how soon a piano gets into a log hut on the frontier.

Said Emerson.

There is hardly a pioneer’s hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare.

Said Tocqueville.

Is Suetonius the first writer ever known to make a reference to Christianity?

Revolting immorality.

Said an earliest Italian response to Rigoletto.

Like mending a sewer and setting it to music.

Said a New York newspaper of the Anvil Chorus in a first American review of Il Trovatore.

Are there still cedars in Lebanon?

Dionysius Exiguus, a monk in sixth-century Rome who calculated the birth of Christ as having occurred 531 years earlier — and for the first time designated the years since as anni Domini nostri.

Is this the little woman who made this great war?

Said Lincoln to Harriet Beecher Stowe.

To celebrate my fiftieth birthday, Hemingway told Charles Scribner, I fucked three times, shot ten straight pigeons (very fast ones) at the club, drank with friends a case of Piper Heidsieck brut and looked the ocean for big fish all afternoon.

Why has Author always been suspicious that that parenthesis may be inadvertently modifying the wrong activity?

And looked the ocean?

For years, Stanley Spencer regularly put on his clothes over his pajamas.

And came and went that way no matter how formal the occasion.

Meleager, who compiled one of the earliest anthologies, indicating how many of Sappho’s verses he had included:

Few. But roses.

I shall never see Atthis again, and indeed, I really long to be dead.

The first painting Gauguin ever sold was to Degas.

Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!

Says Estragon.

Every man is as God made him, and often a good deal worse.

Says Sancho Panza.

William Carlos Williams died at seventy-nine — having lived virtually all of his life within a ten-minute walk of where he was born.

North’s translation of Plutarch, which Shakespeare so heavily depended upon.

And which was actually translated from the French version of Amyot.

Hermann Hesse was at one time a patient of Jung’s.

9 Ridge Road.

Rutherford, New Jersey.

The two hundred extant First Folios.

The forty-six Gutenberg Bibles.

Beethoven. Schubert. Liszt.

All pupils of Salieri.

Antigonus II, who drunkenly told Zeno the Stoic to make any request whatsoever and as king he would fulfill it.

At which Zeno requested that he step outside and vomit.

Baltimore, Edgar Allan Poe died in.

As Heraclitus saw it, Homer should have been driven from the lists and beaten with rods, for all the deceitful and adulterous acts he showed the gods involved in.

A mere trifle consoles us, a mere trifle distresses us.

Said Pascal.

Names are known to this day of artists who painted scenery for Aeschylus and Sophocles.

The Wandering Jew was claimed to have been seen in Lübeck in 1601 and 1603.

And in Paris in 1604.

If the sun were to go out, how long would we continue to see the sun?

Why has Author composed that line as a question when he would have known how to calculate the answer by the age of twelve or thirteen?

Eastward Ho! On which Jonson, Chapman, and John Marston collaborated.

And which for years the Oxford Companion to English Literature listed as Eastward Hoe.

Frederica von Stade’s father was killed in World War II. No more than weeks before her birth.

Sunt lacrimae rerum.

A hunchbacked toad.

The playwright-critic John Dennis called Pope.

Sickly, D. H. Lawrence called Yeats.

Mayakovsky angrily condemned the suicide of Sergei Essenin, in print, as an act of cowardice—

Five years before killing himself.

Agatha Christie has been translated into more languages than any other English author except Shakespeare.

Eight minutes, twenty seconds. Give or take.

Boccaccio offered a series of public lectures on the Divine Comedy in Florence as early as in 1373.

Electra, in blue jeans.

Which is not from a Yannis Ritsos poem.

Wordsworth’s illegitimate daughter.

Byron’s.

Shelley’s.

Schopenhauer’s.

Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.

Being maried to an author is a very hard life.

Said Nora Joyce.

Saint Teresa’s corpse was twice stolen before it was at last returned to Ávila for burial.

Pindar was buried in Thebes.

According to Pausanias, at a racetrack.

Macaulay insisted he knew every word of Paradise Lost and of The Pilgrim’s Progress by heart.

Benjamin Britten was a conscientious objector in World War II.

Giambattista Vico’s mother was illiterate.

As was his wife.

Diana of the Crossways.

Defoe was nearing sixty when he published his first novel.

Hardy was nearing sixty when he published his first volume of poems.

Benjamin Franklin was still making marriage proposals to younger women in his mid-seventies.

Why should not old men be mad?

Darer, Holbein, and Quentin Massys all did portraits of Erasmus.

Diego Rivera’s 1932 mural in Rockefeller Center. With its portrait of Lenin that he refused to remove.

Whereupon the Rockefellers effaced the entire wall.

The Mexico City Rivera mural that included the phrase Dios no existe.

Which in that case he finally agreed to alter.

Marlowe was two months older than Shakespeare.

As recently as in the year 2000:

A small Cimabue panel of a Madonna and Child discovered under the stairs in a country manor in Suffolk.

Karl Marx reread the Oresteia once every year.

Soutine’s famous Carcass of Beef, which he painted from an actual eviscerated steer in his Paris studio.

And which decomposed to such a degree that neighbors finally brought the police.

Good Lord, how you have to mess about in life!

Said van Gogh.

I paint what I think, said Rivera.

Paganini, who owned a Stradivarius viola, commissioned Harold in Italy because he knew Berlioz needed the money.

And then never performed it because it wasn’t challenging enough.

Toronto, Glenn Gould died in.

Caravaggio’s father was a stonemason.

That lump, Ezra Pound called Robert Lowell.

Oscar Wilde died in 1900.

Bosie Douglas in 1945.

There are 16,696 lines in the Iliad.

I must die; must I then die complaining?

Asked Epictetus.

If your Hercules had his hair cropped, he would not show skull enough to hold his brains.

Said Cellini of a sculpture of Baccio Bandinelli’s.

Two of the thugs hired to castrate Abélard were themselves caught and mutilated. And also blinded.

Stravinsky, born near St. Petersburg, became a French citizen in 1934.

And an American in 1945.

In his manic, suicidal last year, Randall Jarrell was once called upon to introduce Hannah Arendt to a college gathering — and talked for twenty minutes about Johnny Unitas.

Without exception, the best and least selfish man I ever knew, said Byron after Shelley’s death.

Presumably not remembering that Shelley had deserted Harriet, nineteen and four months pregnant, to run off with Mary, also pregnant — and leaving Harriet to drown herself less than two years later.

Enrico Fermi’s wife was a Jew. When the family left an increasingly anti-Semitic Italy to accept his Nobel Prize in Stockholm in 1938, instead of returning they sailed directly to New York — having made plans with virtually no word to anyone beforehand.

Edmund Spenser died in poverty.

But was buried in Westminster Abbey very near Chaucer.

Tom Paine died in poverty.

Five people attended his funeral.

For years, following Pearl Harbor, the Metropolitan Opera left Madame Butterfly off its schedule.

Why did Saint Paul not date any of his letters?

Heinrich Böll was wounded three times as a conscripted German infantryman in World War II.

Debussy, on the personality of Proust:

A bit of the concierge.

Louis Norman Newsom.

A past which was never a present, the historian Grote called the romanticized era of the Trojan War.

Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop, and Muriel Rukeyser were at Vassar together.

Being annoyed at Aristotle for mentioning that someone once accused Euripides of having bad breath.

Or does Author more likely mean being amused at being annoyed?

Yet in either instance, why, still, is Author so lacking in energy?

In fact why has Author now and again even caught himself taking a nap, which he cannot recall having ever done before in his entire adult life?

Like his younger grandchildren, for heaven’s sake.

Yeats once proposed marriage to Maud Gonne and was turned down.

And in no time thereafter proposed to her daughter.

Whistler did not get married until he was fifty-four.

Edmund Wilson managed to go through life without reading Don Quixote.

And through a full ten-year period without paying his income tax.

Henriette Sontag, the soprano at the first performance of Beethoven’s Ninth — who turned Beethoven to face the audience so that he might see the applause.

A fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.

Bertrand Russell called Christianity.

Emile Zola’s first English publisher spent three months in jail for obscenity.

Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata was once banned from the mails by the United States Postal Service.

Puppies and first operas should be drowned.

Said Carl Maria von Weber.

No painting by Rogier van der Weyden is signed.

No painting by Hugo van der Goes is signed.

William Faulkner once allowed himself to be interviewed on radio during a University of Virginia football game.

And was introduced as a winner of the Mobil Prize.

Gerard de Nerval spent much of the last decade and a half of his life in and out of mental institutions.

Antwerp, Rubens died in.

Tacitus, when young, defending other young writers against the eternal Old Guard:

What is different is not necessarily worse.

Julia Ward Howe was paid five dollars by the Atlantic Monthly for The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

Eliot used custom-made umbrellas with deliberately outsize handles.

So that no one would take one from a cloakroom by mistake, he told Herbert Read.

Julian Schnabel’s claim to The New York Times that his peers among painters were Duccio, Giotto, and van Gogh.

Gabriele Fallopio.

Bartolommeo Eustachio.

Pomes, Bronson Alcott said Whitman pronounced it.

Why is it said of a batter in baseball that he flied out rather than that he flew out?

Lying on the floor was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. It was not until they examined the rings that they recognized who it was.

Tolstoy. Tchaikovsky. Lenin. Gorky. Rilke. Einstein.

Each of whom posed for a portrait by Leonid Pasternak.

Plutarch’s report of an epidemic of women’s suicides in Miletus.

And of a law enacted that all suicides must thenceforth be carried naked through the city before burial.

At which the suicides cease.

Theo van Gogh once asked Camille Pissarro to take in Vincent as a boarder.

Pissarro’s wife declined to have such an unbalanced individual at loose among her young children.

Amelia Earhart flied the Atlantic?

Wondering if youngsters still read The Count of Monte Cristo.

Practically all those interviewed in the aftermath of the World Trade Center disaster agreed that they had never confronted anything more horrendous.

Author’s curiosity as to whether anyone thought to inquire of the writer of Slaughterhouse-Five.

One should always read with a pen in one’s hand. Says Delacroix in the Journals.

Dickens’ best friend when, at twelve, he worked in the blacking factory:

A boy named Bob Fagin.

Verdi wrote Il Trovatore and La Traviata in less than a month each.

As to boundaries, the Great Spirit knows no boundaries, nor will his red children acknowledge them.

Said Tecumseh.

Several of Montaigne’s ancestors — Jews, on his mother’s side — had been burned at the stake in the Spanish Inquisition.

It is setting a high value on our opinions to roast people alive on account of them.

Said Montaigne himself not unreasonably.

Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer. Which Byron, Scott, Hugo, Balzac, Baudelaire, Thackeray, Rossetti, Poe, and Robert Louis Stevenson all admired.

Picasso. Joan Mini. Philip Guston. Willem de Kooning.

Who were all devoted to Krazy Kat.

Pomes Penyeach.

Sophocles, in old age, on finally being free from sexual urgings:

Like escaping from bondage to a raving maniac.

Pope Leo X, to Sebastiano del Piombo, as to why he was holding off on commissions for Michelangelo:

There is absolutely no getting on with the man.

Pope Clement VII, a decade later:

When Buonarroti comes to see me, I always take a seat and bid him be seated himself at once — feeling positive that he will do so without leave or license otherwise.

On one of his visits to the wreck of his ship early in the novel, Robinson Crusoe finds gold — but quickly realizes it is of no value to him at all.

However, upon second thoughts, I took it away.

A fraud and a fake, Nabokov called Eliot.

Needing a moment to remember that Sir Arthur Sullivan, of Gilbert and, was also the composer of Onward, Christian Soldiers.

And The Lost Chord.

Orchard Street, in Manhattan, Jan Peerce grew up on.

Heidelberg, Fritz Wunderlich died in.

Sarah Siddons was a member of the eminent eighteenth-century Kemble acting clan.

Born, naturally, in an obscure small-town inn while the family was on tour.

Alleged of a fellow violinist at the American debut of Jascha Heifetz. Is it warm in here?

To which the man next to him: Not for pianists.

Swift’s dedication in A Tale of a Tub:

To His Royal Highness Prince Posterity.

To feel pain at the misfortunes of others is a weakness unworthy of the wise man.

Said Seneca.

As late as well into the fifth century, Saint Augustine was finding it necessary to rebuke certain Christians for still celebrating December 25 as the winter solstice — i.e., the rebirth of the sun — rather than as the Nativity of Christ.

Chares of Lindus, who in 278 BC designed the great bronze Colossus of Rhodes. And then committed suicide when it far overran its construction budget.

In future we shall feel obliged if you will send us the milk and the water in separate cans.

Said Constable in a note to his dairyman.

Arthur Koestler was condemned to death as a spy by Franco’s forces during the Spanish Civil War.

But released in a high-level prisoner exchange.

Paul Celan was apparently comfortable in translating verse from no fewer than eight languages.

Leonardo, explaining to the Duke of Milan how it occurred that he might sit in front of The Last Supper for hours and not add a single brushstroke:

Men of genius often are doing most when they work least.

To take charge of this post and all government property in view.

To walk my post in a military manner, keeping always on the alert and observing everything that takes place within sight or hearing.

The friendship of Babe Ruth and Bix Beiderbecke.

Plato and Aristotle and other philosophers are now in Hell. An old woman knows more about the Faith than Plato.

Said Savonarola.

Greta Garbo was never married.

I think it a very grievous punishment, in the liberal arts, to display oneself to fools, and to expose our compositions to the barbarous judgment of the stupid.

Said Molière.

Was Walter Benjamin the first to point out that where every home once possessed room after room in which people had died, in today’s world virtually everyone dies somewhere else?

A vulgar, brutal boor, wholly ignorant of political science, of military affairs, of everthing else which a statesman should know.

Said a London journal of Lincoln at the start of the Civil War.

Dostoievsky wrote The Eternal Husband in Dresden. And had to borrow the money to mail it to his publisher in St. Petersburg.

Two years earlier, while writing The Idiot:

They demand from me artistic finish, the purity of poetry, and they point to Turgenev and Goncharov. Let them take a look at the conditions under which I work.

Seven wealthy towns contend for Homer dead,

Through which the living Homer begged his bread.

Tchaikovsky, leaving Bayreuth after the first full four-day performance of the Ring:

As if I’d been let out of prison.

Peg Woffington.

Habitual incest with his sisters, Suetonius says Caligula practiced.

When not prostituting them to his favorites.

Geraldine Farrar’s Carmen, where Caruso as Don José had to literally wrestle her away to avoid being kicked and punched in Act III, let alone continue to sing.

On the Continent the works of Shakespeare are honored in a double way; by the admiration of Italy and Germany, and by the contempt of the French.

Said Coleridge.

Xenophon, who learned that the older of his two sons had been killed in battle — and who did not weep.

I knew my son was mortal.

Roman Jews recited the Kaddish for three days at the site of Caesar’s funeral pyre — in gratitude for the freedom of worship he had granted them.

Locarno, Erich Maria Remarque died in.

Was Farrar the finest Carmen ever? Was Mary Garden the finest Salome?

Whose word can Author take that Emmy Destinn may have been the finest Cio-Cio-San?

An heroic mess, Victor Hugo called Delacroix.

Le grand Maître, Cézanne always spoke of him as.

John Gielgud was a great-nephew of Ellen Terry.

Twenty-one times, in the Iliad, the Trojans are labeled tamers of horses.

Not once is anyone ever seen halting to scrape off his sandals.

Before his death, Rabbi Zusya said, In the coming world, they will not ask me: Why were you not Moses? They will ask me: Why were you not Zusya?

Says a Hasidic tale.

One should never allow the impression of one’s body to remain in the bedclothes after arising.

Said Pythagoras.

Freud once attended a lecture by Mark Twain.

The French disease, syphilis was initially called in Europe.

The excellence of a poet is inseparably associated with the excellence of the man himself, and it is impossible for one to become a good poet unless he has previously become a good man.

Said Strabo.

He was a bum poet, of course, being a bum person.

Said Robert Graves of D. H. Lawrence.

The man is disreputable and his poems are among the worst ever seen.

Said Anatole France of Paul Verlaine.

A great deal of nuclear waste will still be lethal six times as far into the future as all of recorded history presently goes back into the past.

Tiglath-pileser. Sargon. Sennacherib. Ashurbanipal.

A tissue of puerilities, fables, inequities, insults, imprecations, heresies, and blasphemies.

Being the Talmud, as condemned by Justinian.

I don’t understand them. To me that’s not literature. Said Cormac McCarthy of Henry James and Marcel Proust.

Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.

Gustav Mahler was one of fourteen children.

Pliny the Younger’s assertion that reading the Greek and Latin orators could cure digestive problems.

Seventeen hundred years later, William Hazlitt’s that Tom Jones would do the same.

Tolstoy, in his diary, on George Bernard Shaw: His triviality is astounding.

By chance, Toscanini made an abrupt change of plans regarding a trip from New York to Italy in 1915.

And canceled passage on the Lusitania.

~ ~ ~

A reactionary bourgeois award, Pravda called Pasternak’s Nobel Prize.

Which he was forced to decline.

Jedwabne.

Evidently not one of the major Latin poets in Rome was born in Rome itself.

Among them, Seneca, Lucan, and Martial in fact came from Spain.

Vespasian, struggling to rise from his deathbed:

An emperor should die standing.

Saint Francis of Assisi, finding his own deathbed infested with mice—

Which he decided was amusing.

Sardanapalus.

If you’d like to hear something pleasant — the cost of living is very cheap in Hades.

Said Callimachus.

Leopold Bloom is not circumsized.

And has not had a bar mitzvah.

Salamanca, Unamuno died in.

Madrid, Ortega y Gasset.

Scriabin. Who would never handle money without first putting on gloves.

The legend that Diogenes, living in a barrel, saw a child drinking out of his hands — and threw away his cup.

The legend that Shakespeare began his London career by minding horses outside the theater.

A friend quotes from Macbeth: Is this a dagger which I see before me?

At which Malcolm Lowry: Naturally you realize he was tight as a tick when he wrote that?

Tennyson and Browning have adjacent graves in Westminster Abbey.

Pascal’s rotting teeth.

Van Gogh’s.

James Agee’s initial version of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was rejected by Fortune magazine — which had assigned it.

Unfailingly given pause in recalling that Melville left school at twelve.

Or that English was essentially Jack Kerouac’s second language.

Guido di Pietro. Who became Fra Giovanni da Fiesole. And whose paintings were termed angelic.

Ergo: Fra Angelico.

Without doubt the greatest intellect in Western philosophy.

Spengler called Leibniz.

Petrarch was so esteemed in his own day that decades before his death, Arezzo passed a law that the house where he was born was never to be altered.

Red Cloud, Nebraska, Willa Cather spent her childhood in.

A volume of Andrei Voznesensky’s verse, which appeared when he was thirty-two, sold three hundred thousand copies via subscription before official publication.

In 1817, being sent at the age of five from India to England for schooling, Thackeray was on a ship that stopped for provisions at an island west of Africa. A servant led him to a garden and impressed upon him to remember the man they saw strolling there.

The island being St. Helena.

Hegel, at Jena in his mid-thirties, had a view of Napoleon also, on horseback practically under his window — only a day before French soldiers would terrify him by entering his rented room while plundering the city.

The version of Cassius’s suicide after the defeat at Philippi that says he used the same dagger with which he had helped to assassinate Caesar.

Nine in the second place means:

The axletrees are removed from the wagon.

The sentries on guard near the decomposing corpse of Polyneices in Antigone—

Whom Sophocles lets remind us that they have situated themselves upwind.

Braque’s father was a housepainter.

Baudelaire, still basically unknown, once wrote to Wagner praising his music but not including a return address:

Lest you might think I wanted something from you.

Michelangelo, designing the dome of St. Peter’s — and responding to the suggestion that he might outdo Brunelleschi’s dome in Florence:

In size. Not in beauty.

The poet shall compose nothing contrary to the ideas of the lawful, or just, or beautiful, or good, which are allowed by the state.

Said Plato.

For what other reason, truly, would an educated man go to the theater, except to see Menander?

Asked Plutarch.

Santa Maria del Fiore.

André Gide was repeatedly beaten up as a schoolboy. François Mauriac aussi.

Robert Herrick so admired Ben Jonson that he regularly spoke of him as Saint Ben.

Jacques Barzun’s utterly mystifying insistence that virtually no one has ever heard of Vico.

They rowed her in across the rolling foam—

The cruel, crawling foam.

Wrote Kingsley.

The foam is not cruel, neither does it crawl. Wrote Ruskin.

Santiago, Chile, Pablo Neruda died in.

Quousque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?

After Shelley’s corpse was burned on the beach at Viareggio, and his ashes transported for interment in the English Cemetery in Rome, Trelawny bought an adjacent plot.

And was buried there fifty-nine years later.

Joyce said he spent twenty thousand hours writing Ulysses.

Lakehurst, New Jersey. 7:25 P.M. May 6, 1937.

Carlyle, at eighty-four, reread all of Shakespeare.

Leonardo’s Paris Madonna of the Rocks. Leonardo’s London Madonna of the Rocks.

Delacroix’s Paris Medea. Delacroix’s Berlin Medea.

The Julian calendar lost eleven minutes and fourteen seconds each year. Adding up to approximately twelve days by the late sixteenth century.

The Gregorian calendar first began to replace the Julian in 1582. And will need one day’s correction 3,333 years from that date, which is to say in the year 4915.

Scapa Flow.

Reminding oneself that for all his lifelong pose of New England provincialism, Robert Frost not only spent two years in his mid-twenties as a special student at Harvard, but attended courses by George Santayana and William James.

Remembering that Gertrude Stein, at Radcliffe, studied with Santayana and James also.

I like it less than anything of yours I have read, Edmund Wilson told Nabokov re Lolita.

While later calling his translation of Eugene Onegin awkward, banal, clumsy, and disastrous.

Aeschylus was thirty years older than Sophocles. Sophocles was fifteen years older than Euripides.

Wondering what her stepbrothers Gerald and George Duckworth actually managed to do, sexually, to Virginia Woolf?

Schmucks with Underwoods, Jack Warner called writers.

Four different horses were shot out from under Ney at Waterloo.

I do not write for the public.

Said Hopkins.

I am not a poet by trade; I am a professor of Latin.

Said Housman.

A seminonfictional semifiction.

Obstinately cross-referential and of cryptic interconnective syntax.

Probably by this point more than apparent — or surely for the attentive reader.

As should be Author’s experiment to see how little of his own presence he can get away with throughout.

At the recent millennium, Sylvia Plath would have been sixty-eight.

Anne Sexton, seventy-two.

Arnold Schoenberg’s father was a shoemaker.

Because of his death having been a suicide, the local curé would not allow the church hearse to be used for van Gogh’s funeral. One had to be requested from a neighboring village.

Isaac Bickerstaff, a pseudonym invented by Swift.

Which Steele borrowed to use as the name of the editor of the Tattler.

Jeffrey Broadbottom, one contrived by Chesterfield.

Jean Dubuffet started out as a wine merchant.

A good book is twice as good if it is short. Said Baltasar Gracián.

The world as perceived by Rimbaud: Full of grocers.

Degas’ misogyny.

John von Neumann, Edward Teller, and Eugene Wigner were schoolboys together.

Alessandro Manzoni once told Walter Scott that he was in Scott’s debt for everything he knew about writing fiction. To which Scott:

In that case, I Promessi Sposi is my finest work.

Siarö, near Stockholm, Jussi Bjoerling died in.

Hemingway, E. E. Cummings, John Dos Passos, Dashiell Hammett.

All volunteer ambulance drivers in Europe in World War I.

Charlotte Brontë mailed off the unsolicited, pseudonymous manuscript of Jane Eyre to a London publisher on August 24, 1847.

And saw it in print seven weeks and four days later.

Maria Callas, on her conflicts with Rudolf Bing over repertory:

Those lousy Traviatas he wanted to make me do.

The Marquis de Sade’s will asked that his coffin not be sealed for at least forty-eight hours — to make certain he was dead.

Leopold Bloom’s notion, at Paddy Dignam’s funeral, that there ought to be a telephone in the grave. And an airhole.

Chopin. By whom the words Jew and pig were used interchangeably.

Yid, having been Dostoievsky’s choice.

Author is experimenting with keeping himself out of here as much as possible because?

Can he really say? Why does he still have no idea whatever where things are headed either?

Where can the book possibly wind up without him

I love fools’ experiments. I am always making them.

Said Darwin.

All life is an experiment.

Said Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Ravel weighed less than one hundred pounds.

The standard Italian translation of Moby Dick is by Cesare Pavese.

Lex talionis.

In his later years, Titian was exempted from almost all taxes in Venice.

Out of regard for his rare excellence, the government decreed.

It depends on what the meaning of the word is is.

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.

God does not inhabit healthy bodies.

Said Saint Hildegard of Bingen.

Under threat of arrest in the Reign of Terror, Chamfort shot himself in the head and cut his throat.

And died of pneumonia while recovering.

Antonio Gramsci spent most of the last eleven years of his life in a Mussolini prison.

The announcement at the Metropolitan Opera on December II, 1956, that the evening’s Lucia di Lammermoor would be sung by one Dolores Wilson and not, as scheduled, by Callas — which led to a virtual riot in the lobby.

Joseph Cornell lived in the same house in Queens for fifty-four years.

Descartes, in Holland, had twenty-four different addresses in twenty.

Thérèse Levasseur, Rousseau’s mistress and later wife.

Who could barely read. And never learned to count money or recite the names of the months in sequence.

Mary Kalogeropoulos.

The custom of an audience standing during the Hallelujah Chorus.

Because George II was spontaneously moved to do so at Messiah’s first London performance — meaning that everyone else in attendance had to also.

Though everyone was already on his feet when it was played by the organist at Fenway Park after Carlton Fisk’s home run in the 1975 World Series.

Was Callas the finest Lucia ever?

Lily Pons? Joan Sutherland?

The Wandering Jew was claimed to have been seen in Brussels in 1640.

And in Leipzig in 1642.

Callas.

The citizens of Athens commissioned a statue of Pindar by popular subscription. In Rhodes, one of his poems was inscribed in gold on the wall of a temple.

The prize windbag of all ages, Ezra Pound saw fit to anoint him twenty-five hundred years later.

Pound in the same mood on Milton:

Disgusting, coarse-minded, asinine.

On Dryden:

A lunkhead.

Suppose one woke and found oneself a fraud?

Asks Virginia Woolf’s Diary.

Puccini’s wife once accused him of having an affair with their housemaid — and so hounded the girl that she killed herself.

And then was sentenced to five months in prison when a postmortem indicated that the girl had been a virgin.

Hamburg, Telemann died in.

We all understand the meaning in ordinary life of the word is.

I remark to a neighbor, Today is Monday, and there are no questions asked, and none need to be asked, about the meaning of is.

Says William Barrett in a commentary on Heidegger.

Erasure is as important as writing.

Said Quintilian.

Who also said, Write quickly and you will never write well.

Luther. Erasmus. Thomas More. John Wesley. Calvin.

All of whom believed unconditionally in the powers of witches — and most of whom approved their execution. Luther indeed having burned several at Wittenberg.

The friendship of Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell.

Thomas Mann went out of his way to praise Hesse’s Magister Ludi.

And then admitted to his son Klaus that he had no idea what it was about.

Carthage burned for seventeen days, when razed by Scipio Africanus the Younger.

Rome burned for nine, in Nero’s conflagration.

By Horace’s lights, the fact that Homer commended wine made it self-evident that he was a tippler.

Why does it seem odd to Author that Yeats and Kipling were born in the same year?

The writer who first suggested in print, decades after the fact, that Byron had committed incest with his half sister Augusta Leigh, was Harriet Stowe.

Woolsthorpe. Where Newton did or did not have his attention caught by an apple falling from a branch.

I prefer to think in torment than not to be able to think clearly.

Said Freud, rejecting drugs while enduring the cancer that slowly took his life.

Sein und Zeit.

Pope Julius II, who commissioned the Sistine Chapel, and who hired Raphael — and who always sought out Jewish physicians.

Rembrandt’s connection with the Jewish ghetto in Amsterdam. Even living there, in the years after his bankruptcy and eviction.

Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.

To salute all officers and all colors and standards not cased.

Leonardo’s long treatise on painting. In which the only one of his contemporaries he mentions by name is Botticelli.

New York City, Martha Graham died in.

L’être et le néant.

Oliver Goldsmith fled in panic into Saint James Park rather than sit through the opening night of She Stoops to Conquer.

Samuel Johnson, David Garrick, and Joshua Reynolds were among those who went searching for him to announce its success.

To avoid confusion with the painter George Frederic Watts, the critic Theodore Watts changed his name to Watts-Dunton.

And received a telegram from Whistler: Theodore, What’s Dunton?

Sir Francis Bacon died of what began as a chill during an experiment to see how long he could preserve a fowl by freezing it in snow.

In 1626.

Hegel told himself he was depraved — his word — when he concluded he admired Rossini’s Figaro opera more than Mozart’s.

Daddy? Couldn’t that lady cut herself, standing on that seashell?

His mind and hand went together; and what he thought, he uttered with that easiness, that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.

The multitudinous seas incarnadine.

The executioner I have heard to be very good, and I have a little neck.

Ventured Anne Boleyn.

Do it to Julia!

Jeanie Deans. Nelly Dean.

At the age of eight or nine, Richard Brautigan once returned home from school and found that his entire family had moved away without a word.

Still remembered from antiquity:

That Menander was extraordinarily handsome.

Xenophon the same.

Charlemagne had eight legitimate children from four wives.

And ten otherwise.

Caesar’s premature baldness.

Giacomo Meyerbeer, in his early twenties, played the bass drum in a performance of something of Beethoven’s.

And never once came in at the right time, Beethoven said.

Being reminded that the earliest use of writing was in making lists.

For commerce.

I. G. Farben. To Commandant, Auschwitz:

In contemplation of experiments with a new soporific drug, we would appreciate your procuring for us a number of women.

Langston Hughes was a busboy in a Washington hotel when he left three poems beside Vachel Lindsay’s dinner plate — which led to his first publication in white periodicals.

Brautigan lived alone in an empty house for a week before neighbors tracked down an address and took up a collection for bus fare.

The version of the myth that has Odysseus sail far enough beyond the Pillars of Hercules to found what becomes Lisbon.

Richard M. Nixon, after the shooting by National Guardsmen of four undergraduates at Kent State University, re college students protesting the Vietnam War:

Bums.

Was Andrea Mantegna’s Padua fresco The Martyrdom of Saint James, destroyed by a bomb in 1944, perhaps the greatest single loss to art in World War II?

Thomas Hardy’s ashes were placed in Westminster Abbey — but his heart was buried in the Dorchester countryside that he had called Wessex in the novels.

Louis Aragon once threatened to beat up any Paris critic who reviewed his next book. None did.

Chekhov wrote as many as eight hundred short stories.

I. G. Farben. To Commandant, Auschwitz:

We consider the price of two hundred marks per woman excessive. We propose to pay not more than 170 per head. We need approximately 150 women.

The greatest living Englishman, C. P. Snow called Paul Dirac in the early 1970s.

Everything vital in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded religions and composed our masterpieces.

Said Proust.

We owe the invention of the arts to deranged imaginations.

Said Saint-Évremond.

If on a winter’s night with no other source of warmth Author were to burn a Julian Schnabel, qualms?

Qualmless.

Marianne Moore wore a Nixon campaign button.

Umberto Eco, asked about the impulse behind writing The Name of the Rose.

I felt like poisoning a monk.

Auden’s Manhattan residence, for years, was in a shoddy apartment building on St. Mark’s Place in Greenwich Village.

Where an earlier tenant had been Trotsky.

Luciano Pavarotti’s apartment on Central Park South had earlier been Sophia Loren’s.

Christmas Day, 800 AD.

Frozen music, Schelling called architecture.

Anne Boleyn’s daughter.

Göttingen, Max Planck died in.

How near to where Anne Hutchinson and fourteen out of fifteen of her family members were massacred by Indians does the Hutchinson River Parkway run?

I. G. Farben. To Commandant, Auschwitz:

We acknowledge your accord. Prepare for us 150 women in the best possible health.

Reichenbach Falls.

A Lucas Cranach woodcut, illustrating a corrosive anti-Catholic tract of Luther’s:

The Pope, athwart a pig, blessing a pile of dung.

At a memorial Mass for Beethoven a week after his death, the music chosen was Mozart’s Requiem.

The report that Ben Jonson could recite verbatim every word he had ever written.

Leibniz died sitting up with a copy of John Barclay’s Argenis in his lap.

E. E. Cummings died after chopping firewood.

Saint Catherine of Siena could read but not write. Her letters and other works were dictated.

A brother of Gaetano Donizetti’s became the ranking bandsman in the Ottoman army.

Donizetti Pasha, being known as.

I. G. Farben. To Commandant, Auschwitz:

Received consignment of 150 women. Despite emaciated condition they were found satisfactory. We will keep you posted regarding the experiment.

Evidently more truth than legend: Euripides, in his seventies, and before his final two years in Macedonia, living in a cave on Salamis with an extraordinary view of the sea, very much alone, disliking visitors, surrounded by books. Quote:

Thinking to himself, and writing.

Elnora Comstock, have you lost your senses?

Tardily realizing — qualms after all.

Author would undeniably be distressed at the loss of Schnabel’s portrait of William Gaddis.

Georg Trakl was a pharmacist.

E. T. A. Hoffmann was a lawyer.

I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we are abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers.

Says Walden.

During his first half-dozen years in New York, Jasper Johns worked as a window dresser.

Applying for a job at Time magazine, John Berryman was asked to submit writing samples.

And was not hired.

At huge expense, the remains of Saint Luke were purchased from Bosnia by the City of Venice in the early Renaissance and received by the Doge in the most solemn of ceremonies.

Whereupon a Benedictine monastery in Padua claimed they already had them.

Kate Smith could not read music.

Whistler, on failing chemistry and flunking out of West Point:

If silicon had been a gas, I would have been a major general.

Middleton Murry’s suspicion that D. H. Lawrence was impotent.

Similar speculations regarding Swift.

And Kierkegaard.

And Thoreau.

And Henry James.

The Metropolitan Opera was on tour in San Francisco at the time of the 1906 earthquake. Awakened at 5:13 A.M., Caruso would later say his first thought was that he was back home in Naples and Vesuvius had erupted. Olive Fremstad would be found in a park clutching roses that had been flung to her on stage the evening before.

Art is not truth. Art is a lie that enables us to recognize truth.

Said Picasso.

If all the Armenians were to be killed tomorrow, and if half the Russians were to starve to death the day after, it would not matter to me in the least. My sole interest lies in writing.

Said the long-since unread George Jean Nathan.

There are no women subjects in Plutarch’s Lives.

White does not exist in nature, said Renoir.

I. G. Farben. To Commandant, Auschwitz:

The tests have been completed. All subjects died. We will contact you regarding a further shipment.

Three full days of national mourning were declared in Chile at the death of Gabriela Mistral.

Gogol briefly taught history at the University of St. Petersburg. One of his students was Turgenev — who later said he had known less than nothing about his subject.

Translator’s English, John Wain called Susan Sontag’s prose.

Glen Ellen, California, Jack London died in.

Tennyson’s father was severely epileptic.

The friendship of Brahms and Johann Strauss, Jr.

Heisenberg, why have you been dancing all evening?

Why not, Dirac? The party is filled with nice girls.

How did you know they were nice before you danced with them?

Paul Morphy died insane. Buddy Bolden también.

I don’t believe in all that creeping Jesus stuff. But the public likes it.

Said Massenet of his religious compositions.

When cohabitating, neither husband nor wife should be in a state of intoxication, lethargy, or melancholy. The wife should not be asleep at the time.

Said Maimonides.

Adolf Eichmann read Lolita while awaiting trial in Jerusalem.

And was indignant over what he termed its unwholesomeness.

Gertrude Stein and me are just like brothers.

Says Hemingway in a letter.

This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.

The winter during which Shelley and Thomas Love Peacock attended at least six performances of Don Giovanni.

There is nothing perfect in this world, Peacock said. Except Mozart.

Thackeray started out as an artist.

And was rejected when an illustrator was being sought for the first installments of Pickwick Papers by the equally young Dickens.

The Reverend Eliot, Pound at times called him.

The Tsetse, Conrad Aiken had it.

The main house on Horace’s Sabine farm, given to him by Maecenas, was a mansion of no less than twenty-four rooms.

Voltaire’s mansion at Ferney had fourteen bedrooms.

Jack the Ripper was left-handed.

Like Osama bin Laden.

Incredibly shallow, Wittgenstein called A. J. Ayer.

While also dismissing Plato as a frightful waste of time — unquote.

Does anyone ever die who is not remembered through the remainder of at least one other entire lifetime by someone?

From future transmigrations save my soul.

Thales of Miletus, asked why he never became a father:

Because I love children.

Asked to name the easiest task in life:

To give advice.

Trying to recall a single view of landscape — or just once a patch of sunlight — in a Dostoievsky novel.

Trying to recall a single scene in all of Jane Austen showing male characters only, without a woman present.

Mantua, Giulio Romano died in.

Bologna, Guido Reni.

Dating from as long ago as 1600—complaints about pollution of the air in London from excessive industrial use of coal. Inquinating the blood, said Sir Thomas Browne, causing catarrhs and coughs.

A traveler smelled London before he saw it, said John Evelyn.

And somebody’s gotta pay the rent.

It isn’t sex that causes trouble for young ballplayers. It’s staying up all night looking for it.

Said Casey Stengel.

Doomsday accounts of our souls, Ibsen called poetry.

Now Barabbas was a robber.

Says John 18:40.

Now Barabbas was a publisher.

Said Byron.

Delacroix posed for one of the figures in Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa.

Géricault’s portraits of the mad. Done at the Salpetrière asylum and elsewhere — via special permission.

The legend that Aesop was thrown to his death over a cliff at Delphi by priests — because of blasphemy.

Ad Reinhardt, on why so many painters did their drinking at the Cedar Tavern:

To run into the people they most disliked. Other painters.

Boccaccio’s eyewitness description of the Black Death. Samuel Pepys’ of the Fire of London.

Emile Durkheim was the son of a rabbi.

Claude Lévi-Strauss was the grandson of a rabbi.

The last recorded execution for witchcraft in Europe occurred in Switzerland, in 1782.

I have never seen a situation so dismal that a policeman couldn’t make it worse.

Said Brendan Behan.

Michael Puchberg.

Reggio nell’Emilia, Ferruccio Tagliavini died in.

The myth that in the Elysian Fields, Helen marries Achilles.

The myth that in the Elysian Fields, Medea marries Achilles.

The myth that Helen is hanged from a tree by envious women.

Nothing but a bunch of damned bullshit.

Said Harry Truman of Douglas MacArthur’s Old Soldiers Never Die speech.

Evidently not one word was said in print in Milton’s lifetime about Lycidas, L’Allegro, or Il Penseroso.

Persistently lingering, why? — that image of that woman washing her face in a toilet bowl.

And when once she was young and delicate and fair?

But having nothing to do with the question of why, again, still, is Author so often so damnably tired?

La chair est triste, hélas! et fai lu tous les livres.

At seventy-seven, Georges Rouault burned no less than 315 canvases that he felt were not as good as they might be — and that he would never find time to do more work on.

Johann Theophilus Goldberg.

The cloudy perception that labels Hardy a better poet than novelist.

Lessing wrote Laocoön without ever having seen the sculpture.

Hegel and Fichte are buried next to each other in Berlin.

Edmund Wilson once proposed marriage to Edna St. Vincent Millay—

And only afterward became aware that she was sleeping with at least four other men at the same time that she was seeing him.

Eugene O’Neill, who died rich, left not one cent in his will to any of his three children.

Einstein. Churchill. Shaw.

All of whom went out of their way to meet Charlie Chaplin.

Never seeming to remember that Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes is based on a poem by George Crabbe.

Francois Villon’s heatless garret near the Sorbonne — where his inkwell froze solid.

Saint Anthony lived 105 years.

Without ever learning to read or write.

Perfection in life is to carry out in maturity the dreams of one’s youth.

Said Alfred de Vigny.

When Chagall paints you do not know if he is asleep or awake. Somewhere or other inside his head there must be an angel.

Said Picasso.

Let us indulge our own lunacy.

Said Chagall.

Guido of Arezzo. Who gave the names to the first six notes of the scale.

Ca. 1040 AD.

Willem de Kooning did not have his first one-man show until he was forty-three.

From Seneca, writing to a friend about suicide:

But I am running on too long. How can a man end his life if he cannot end a letter?

Edith Stein.

Endlösung.

Gauguin fathered at least four illegitimate children in Tahiti.

In addition to the legitimate clan he had deserted at home.

Zeuxis, who ultimately began to give away his paintings — because they had simply become beyond price.

Though Aristotle would call Polygnotus the greater artist.

Bordeaux, Goya died in.

Truman Capote’s mother was a suicide. His adoptive father, whose name he had taken, went to prison for grand larceny.

Vaness, sí. Battle, no.

Schumann’s ever-increasing intermittent madness.

Once being visited by the spirits of Schubert and Mendelssohn — and making note of a theme he insisted they had given him.

Demons and hyenas at the worst of it, he also saw.

Always acknowledge the gift of a book before there has been time to read it, said Eliot.

If you wait you will have to commit yourself to an opinion.

There are many Nobel Prize winners I wouldn’t want as friends.

Said a member of the Swedish Academy after the award to V. S. Naipaul.

Karl Marx learned Russian mainly to read Pushkin. Joyce learned Norwegian to read Ibsen.

At the age of three, Jeremy Bentham read a then-current eight-volume history of England.

Joseph Brodsky had no schooling after the age of fifteen.

Lawrence Sterne’s love letters to his mistress:

Which he sometimes copied word for word from letters he had earlier written to his wife.

According to Castiglione, two self-important Vatican cardinals once informed Raphael that the faces of Saint Peter and Saint Paul in one of his paintings were too red.

And were informed by Raphael in turn that he had given the matter much thought — and was convinced the saints would be blushing in heaven to see their church governed by men such as themselves.

Shakespeare’s equal, Voltaire called Lope de Vega.

Six in the fifth place means:

Repeatedly ill, nonetheless does not die.

Ernest, don’t you think that Al Jolson is greater than Jesus?

Ernest insisted Zelda Fitzgerald said.

Évariste Galois.

Kalamazoo, Michigan, Richard Tucker died in.

The mackerel-crowded seas.

Maynard Keynes was born in the year Marx died.

Paparazzo, which in the plural becomes paparazzi — but which was originally the name of a character in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita.

And which Fellini himself took from the name of an actual person in a travel book of Gissing’s.

Leonhard Euler.

Anton Bruckner was so completely the socially inept rustic that he once handed a tip to a conductor who had rehearsed one of his compositions.

We talk about our assholes, and we talk about our cocks, and we talk about who we fucked last night, or who we’re gonna fuck tomorrow, or when we got drunk, or when we stuck a broom in our ass in the Hotel Ambassador in Prague — anybody tells one’s friends about that.

Said Allen Ginsberg in an anthologized interview.

Tonstant Weader fwowed up.

Said Dorothy Parker, about something else altogether.

When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain.

I have now done nothing for fifty years but earn and spend money, and it has become clear to me that spending money gives more pleasure than earning it.

Said Lorenzo de’ Medici.

Titian. Tintoretto. Veronese. Bellini. Giorgione. Canaletto. Piazzetta. Guardi. Longhi. Verrocchio. Antonello da Massina.

All deaths in Venice.

Beethoven. Brahms. Gluck. Haydn. Mahler. Mozart. Schubert. Strauss. Vivaldi. Wolf. Bruckner. Berg.

All in Vienna.

That malignant deity criticism, Swift named it.

Florence Foster Jenkins was seven when she made the recording.

Charles Demuth’s I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold, from the William Carlos Williams poem.

Which Williams wrote at the corner of West Fifteenth Street and Ninth Avenue in Manhattan.

The used dressing gown of Flaubert’s that Sacha Guitry bought at auction in 1930.

A tacky raincoat of Jack Kerouac’s, did Author read something similar about?

Take care, you who call yourself my judge. Take care what you do. For the truth is that I have my mission from God, and you put yourself in great danger.

Said Joan of Arc to her chief Inquisitor.

Perchance you who pronounce my sentence are in greater fear than I who receive it.

Said Giordano Bruno to the several of his.

No man at all can be living for ever, and we must be satisfied.

Says a peasant woman in Synge, after a last son has been drowned.

A critic once told Whistler that one of his paintings wasn’t good. Whistler told the critic he shouldn’t say it wasn’t good, only that he didn’t like it:

And then, you know, you are perfectly safe.

It has also been adopted by the Freudians as the supreme glory of their dirty and degraded cult—

Noted an early London article re Ulysses.

Now Barabbas was a book reviewer.

Rarely did any friend or other person eat at his table. Says Vasari of Michelangelo.

Spinoza’s queer insistence that he found it almost impossible to believe he had ever been a child.

An obnoxious squeak, Charles Lamb heard in Shelley.

A latrine, Baudelaire called George Sand.

Frederick Delius for a time taught music in Jacksonville, Florida.

Cicero’s ironic view of philosophers who preach that men should repudiate ambition — but who sign their books.

Roger Clemens was discarding that splintered bat.

William Wycherley’s seven years in debtors’ prison.

A great mind unequaled anywhere, Goethe said of Scott.

While of Byron:

Only Shakespeare and the Ancients his superior.

The realization that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all wrote between forty and seventy years after the events in question.

Cavafy worked for the Ministry of Public Works in Alexandria for thirty years.

Anthony Trollope worked for the British Post Office for thirty-three.

Jeanne la Pucelle.

Dickens, in America, met Kate Douglas Wiggin, then twelve.

The Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment.

Crucifixion, for example.

Woodland Hills, California, Buster Keaton died in.

Emily Sarah Sellwood.

Cyril Connolly once snuffed out a cigar in his chocolate mousse at the New York apartment of Diana and Lionel Trilling. Diana Trilling took it as a deliberate affront.

What high rooftop could who have shouted this from, that Author knows it all these years later?

The friendship of Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin.

Puella.

Thomas Nashe, informing Gabriel Harvey of Robert Greene’s drinking habits:

In one yeare he pist as much against the walls, as thou and thy two brothers in three.

Theo van Gogh died within six months of Vincent.

August 6th, 1916, Officer previously reported died of wounds now reported wounded, Graves, Capt. R., Royal Welsh Fus.

The greatest artist who has ever written, George Eliot called Jane Austen.

A prose Shakespeare, agreed Macaulay.

Without poetry — Charlotte Brontë’s dissent.

How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?

Asked Johnson of the American Revolution.

The Wandering Jew was claimed to have been seen in Munich in 1721.

The extent to which Aristophanes quotes or parodies Euripides — so that he appears to know much of the work by heart.

The extraordinary implication that the audience is thus assumed to know it too.

Lenin saw Sarah Bernhardt in La Dame aux Camélias—and admitted that he wept.

Stephen Crane, on horseback. Happiest there, said Conrad.

The legend that Bucephalus whinnied at sight of himself in a painting by Apelles that Alexander did not like.

Your Majesty’s horse knows more about art than you do, the artist is said to have said.

Attila could not read or write.

A madman, a charlatan, and a miserable fool. Being Rousseau, via Voltaire.

Seventy-two virgins.

Brahms was twice offered an honorary degree by Cambridge and twice declined.

For fear of crossing the Channel, friends suspected.

From Nightwood:

Pray to the good God; she will keep you.

From The Recognitions:

Just ask God, baby, She’ll protect you.

Chet Baker died on a sidewalk in Amsterdam. Almost surely from drugs.

Poetry must be as well written as prose.

Said Pound.

Seventy-two white raisins?

Modernsky, Schoenberg mocked Stravinsky as.

The infantrymen who during combat took time to set up a marker where Ernie Pyle was killed in the Pacific in 1945.

Wondering idly how many people who live in Rochester — have read Rochester.

One hundred and fifty carriages followed Washington Irving’s funeral procession in New York in 1859.

Apelles’ explanation for his mastery:

Knowing when to take his hand from the picture.

To know when to stop is of the same importance as to know when to begin.

Said Paul Klee, twenty-two hundred years later.

Missa Papae Marcelli.

The computer analysis that says readings in modern high school senior honors classes are less difficult than those used by people Author’s age when they were in the eighth grade.

Alleged of Einstein, when he was given the news of Hiroshima:

Oy, vey.

Salzburg, Paracelsus died in.

There lived a singer in France of old,

By the tideless, dolorous midland sea.

Eliot, John Reed, Alan Seeger, and Walter Lippmann were in the same class at Harvard.

112 Mercer Street.

Princeton, New Jersey.

Rudyard Kipling was so repeatedly abused when farmed out to relatives as a child that when his mother finally reappeared and entered his bedroom for the first time to kiss him good night, he flung up his hands — to protect himself from the anticipated blow.

How often, if ever, pausing to remember?—

Museum, i.e., place of the muses.

An honest man but no poet.

Ben Jonson called Samuel Daniel.

A good rhymester but no poet.

Milton called Dryden.

No trace of Apelles’ work has come down from Greek antiquity — though it remained enormously valued in the Rome of the Caesars and beyond.

Elmhurst, New York, Albert Pinkham Ryder died in.

Proust’s deathbed photo. By Man Ray.

Joyce, asked to compare D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley:

Huxley at least dresses decently.

Eileen Farrell’s husband was a New York City policeman.

The redheaded maniac, van Gogh was called by the youngsters at Arles.

Il prete rosso—having been Vivaldi.

3.14159.

Clara Schumann’s letters to Brahms:

More interesting than Brahms’ to her.

Hey, Dads, will you take us to that new movie, what’s it called—Apoplexy Now?

I can control the flow of paint. There is no accident.

Said Jackson Pollock.

Hemingway made a display of announcing to friends how frequently he bedded his wives. Someone asked Mary Hemingway about this later on.

If only, Mary Hemingway said.

Dost thou call me fool, boy?

All thy other titles thou hast given away; that thou wast born with.

Untalented and entirely lacking in ear.

Said a Baltimore music school, expelling Larry Adler.

Crapulous, John Adams called Paine’s Common Sense.

Neil Shicoff’s two-word telegram to a New York Times music reviewer who had disapproved of one of his performances.

Archimedes was able to calculate pi to one decimal place. Roughly four hundred years later, Ptolemy managed three.

The fact that Socrates wrote nothing.

The fact that Jesus wrote nothing.

The fact that Buddha wrote nothing.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s fluency in as many as eight languages, including Hebrew.

Including Portuguese.

The friendship of Freud and Wittgenstein’s sister Margarete.

Sir Edward Elgar flew kites.

Cuidado con el Ganado.

Hart Crane’s At Melville’s Tomb.

Is there evidence that Crane ever actually made the pilgrimage — to the northern reaches of the Bronx?

Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel—

Rarely remembering that the film is based on a novel by Heinrich Mann.

Munich, Oswald Spengler died in.

John Masefield, off a ship at eighteen, worked for a time in a Greenwich Village saloon.

Henry Fuseli taught drawing at the Royal Academy. Among others, to Blake.

The fifteen young Muslim girls who were left to burn to death in a school fire in Mecca when vice police drove off those coming to their aid — lest they be seen by men while not wearing their head scarves.

In 2002.

The woman in Pakistan who was raped — and under Muslim law was convicted of adultery and sentenced to be stoned to death.

In 2002.

There was no word for war in Yiddish.

Oscar Wilde, reading Marie Corelli while in Reading Gaol:

The way she writes, she ought to be in here.

It was James Laughlin who was called upon to make an official identification at the morgue after the death of Dylan Thomas.

To write only according to the rules laid down by previous classics signifies that one is not a master but a pupil.

Said Prokofiev.

Caruso was the eighteenth of twenty children. The two following him were the only others to live past infancy.

A man can be a grandfather in thirty years.

Pointed out Heraclitus.

Shakespeare became one at forty-three.

Doña Jeronima de las Cuevas, El Greco’s mistress — whose face he used for most of his Virgins.

Bulwer Lytton once threatened his wife with a carving knife.

Because she didn’t answer when he spoke to her, she claimed.

You better be careful what you are saying, if it is a white man you are talking about, the marshal says. I don’t care if he is a murderer or not.

At sixty-eight, Hans Sachs married a second wife. Of twenty-seven.

Vaughan Williams married a second wife at eighty.

Max Beerbohm married a second wife at eighty-four.

And died a month later.

Strangling is a very quiet death.

Says Ferdinand in The Duchess of Malfi.

Willem de Kooning’s Light in August. Oil and enamel on paper, 42 by 55 inches, ca. 1946.

Indianapolis, Indiana, Frances Farmer died in.

Carl Maria von Weber once unwittingly swallowed nitric acid — and for the rest of his life could speak only with difficulty.

Decades before it became commonplace, Joyce was generally most comfortable in tennis shoes.

Wittgenstein almost never wore a necktie.

Seventy thousand people died in London in the Great Plague of 1665.

Seventy thousand.

Two hundred thousand lost their homes in the Great Fire of one year later.

Gluck at one time gave singing lessons to an eight-year-old Marie Antoinette.

The brownstone in Brooklyn Heights where Auden, Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, Carson McCullers, Paul and Jane Bowles, and Gypsy Rose Lee all once shared boarding-house style meals — with Auden performing as housemother.

Ford Madox Ford was a nephew of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Jacques-Louis David was a great-nephew of François Boucher.

If Anne Brontë had not been Anne Brontë, would she still be Anne Brontë?

Such hard work it is to die? Such hard work?

Exceptionally shy, Virgil was known to be. In part because of a stutter.

Toulouse-Lautrec’s first teacher was the portrait painter Bonnat.

Who called his efforts abominable.

An explosion in a cesspool, Paul Elmer More called Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer.

The G-String Murders.

Why does Author not know if what used to be named Arbor Day is still celebrated?

Until he was almost fifty, Rousseau was forced to earn a living as a music copyist.

At least four popes have been assassinated.

Historical details regarding the Amazons were left by both the Greeks and the Persians but ceased with the Romans — as if they had abruptly disappeared.

Has it ever been verified that they existed?

Simone de Beauvoir was one inch taller that Sartre.

Luca Signorelli, at the sudden death of a young son — having the corpse stripped and making a full-length drawing of the boy for remembrance.

And with extraordinary fortitude, shedding not a tear, Vasari says.

Haarlem, Frans Hals died in.

This book on which I have grown thin through all these years, Dante speaks of.

A strict accounting of even the most trivial household expense, Hegel was said to keep.

To the last pfennig.

Cleopatra, in a burka.

Joan, in a burka.

Marilyn.

Albert Camus was having lunch in a Paris restaurant when he was informed he had won the Nobel Prize. By his waiter.

The pretense in speaking of second-rate 1940s Hollywood melodramas as film noir classics.

Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle.

Oscar Williams’ long-popular Little Treasury of Modern Poetry, dated 1946.

Containing five poems by Wallace Stevens, four by Ezra Pound, four by Marianne Moore, two by William Carlos Williams — and nine by Oscar Williams.

But I kissed her little sister,

And forgot my Clementine.

Gus Broberg. Bob Davies. Arnold Ferrin.

He who follows another will never overtake him.

Said Michelangelo.

If you are alone, you are wholly your own.

Said Leonardo.

Swinburne’s pronouncement that he was a better poetic dramatist than Euripides.

Scott, proposed as Poet Laureate — but calling the entire concept ridiculous.

Byron, mocking Southey for accepting the position.

Browning condemning Wordsworth for the same.

Saussure’s doctoral dissertation: On the use of the genitive case in Sanskrit.

Madame Tussaud began a death mask of Robespierre only instants after his severed head was handed down from the guillotine.

The era when books were still chained to desks or lecterns in certain libraries.

Hashshasheen. Assassin.

Diogenes, explaining why people give to beggars, but not to philosophers:

Because they think it possible that they themselves might become lame or blind, but they do not expect to turn out philosophers.

New Haven, Connecticut, Hermann Broch died in.

A thoroughly superficial book with all the profundity of Rebecca.

Scott Fitzgerald called For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Isaac Bashevis Singer’s father was a rabbi.

The insistence of both Plutarch and Arrian that the Persians under Darius III at Issus lost 120,000 men — to Alexander’s 450.

The feminist character in Ibsen’s Rosmersholm whose name Cicily Isabel Fairfield borrowed as a pseudonym — to become Rebecca West.

Philomela.

To spend too much time in Studies is Sloth; To use them too much for Ornament is Affectation.

Said Bacon.

Janet Baker. Marilyn Horne. Grace Bumbry.

All of whom attended master classes with Lotte Lehmann.

Jackson Pollock and Philip Guston went to high school together.

I certify that this vehicle has been inspected and that there are no children left on board.

Auden’s first volume of poems — and Stephen Spender’s — were both published by Spender himself on a small hand-operated press.

Charon. Who charged an obolus for the ferry ride across the Styx.

Christina Rossetti’s pet wombat.

Disappointment to this day that Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau never sang at the Metropolitan.

Genghis Khan had five hundred wives and/or concubines.

Moe Berg and Allen Ginsberg were distant cousins.

Toby Greene. Who jumped ship with Melville in the South Pacific and later reappeared — as a housepainter in Buffalo — to verify events in Typee.

These are not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in schools alongside some big black bucks.

Being Dwight D. Eisenhower — edifying someone re Southerners opposed to desegregation.

William Faulkner voted for Adlai Stevenson.

An obolus. Six of same having equaled one ancient drachma.

Ivan the Terrible died while playing chess with Boris Godunov.

Dante tires one quickly; it is like looking at the sun.

Said Joyce.

Lavinia.

One of Melville’s grandfathers took part in the Boston Tea Party.

As did one of Edith Wharton’s great-grandfathers.

An uncle of Kafka’s was the director general of the Spanish railway system.

Henry, why are you here?

Waldo, why are you not here?

A pack of lies, Carlyle dismissed poetry as.

Stone dolls, Isaac Newton called sculpture.

You cannot trust the ones who are too careful. As writers or drinkers. Old Goethe cannot have been so good a man as Keats or Chatterton or Rimbaud. The ones that burn.

Said Lowry.

Mark Twain’s was the first house in Hartford with a telephone.

Norway’s king attended Kirsten Flagstad’s funeral.

Do certain people actually remember learning to read?

Monte Carlo, Lillie Langtry died in.

Louis MacNeice died of pneumonia after descending into a mine to check on sound effects while producing a program for the BBC.

Glee-wood, the harp was called in Anglo-Saxon.

Harry Haller, in Steppenwolf—in a setting based on Zurich, ca. 1920—speaks of three mail deliveries each day.

Leopold Bloom, in the Ulysses set a decade and a half earlier, notes the nine o’clock evening postman meaning the last delivery of what in Dublin at that time would have been five.

Haller even then complains of junk mail.

Kurt Weill’s father was a cantor.

James Levine’s grandfather was one.

They said I was mad, and I said they were mad, and, damn them, they outvoted me.

Said Dryden’s sometime collaborator Nathaniel Lee, upon being confined to Bedlam.

Titian might have become an even greater painter if he had ever really learned elementary draftsmanship i.e., if he had ever really learned to draw.

Michelangelo evidently suggested.

Ellen Terry once refused the lead in a play Henry James had written particularly with her in mind.

James called her a hag.

Pliny the Younger’s detail-by-detail letter of 79 AD to Tacitus about the death of his uncle in the eruption of Vesuvius that buried Pompeii.

The claim that Vicente Huidobro’s mother could trace her ancestry back to El Cid.

I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all.

Begins Malone Dies.

Two of Jane Austen’s brothers became admirals in the Royal Navy.

Mornings, when the leaves are dewy, some of them are like jewels where the earliest sunlight glistens.

The Persistence of Memory.

Itzhak Perlman. Nigel Kennedy. Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg. Midori. Shlomo Mintz.

Who all studied under Dorothy DeLay.

An appointment with E. M. Forster that Tennessee Williams once canceled.

Because he could not abide old men with urine stains on their trousers, Gore Vidal said Williams said.

Nabokov once dismissed Don Quixote as overrated during a lecture at Harvard.

Harvard thinks otherwise, he was complacently informed by Harry Levin.

Michael Praetorius.

Simone Signoret.

They are hardly more obscure than Hegel or Swedenborg. Said Nerval, refusing to explain the meaning of some sonnets.

The possibility that Phidias died in jail.

Now, listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddam face.

Nazim Hikmet was buried in Moscow. Thirty-eight years later a tree from Turkey was transplanted beside his grave.

Not long after Byron’s death, Teresa Guiccioli had an affair with Lamartine.

Was E. T. A. Hoffmann the first writer to use the word Philistine in its modern cultural sense?

What might Johannes Kepler have been allergic to, that his nose ran eternally?

Remembering that Bedlam is a contraction of Bethlehem, from London’s Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem, since approximately 1400 an asylum.

Where in the eighteenth century tours were conducted — to view the chained inmates.

Only three former baseball players appeared at Ty Cobb’s funeral.

Litheck, Dietrich Buxtehude died in.

Josephine Baker’s mother was an East St. Louis washerwoman.

Omar Khayyám. Which translates as Omar the Tentmaker.

Though in fact he was a mathematician and astronomer.

Saint-Rémy.

Perhaps the greatest woman poet since Sappho, Harriet Monroe called Edna Millay.

I think she is every bit as good as Elizabeth Browning, acknowledged Hart Crane.

I can only say I do not greatly care for Madame Browning.

Andy Warhol and Philip Pearlstein were once apartment mates.

Rubáiyát. Which itself means nothing more exotic than quatrains.

Jascha Heifetz once composed a piece of popular music under the pseudonym Jim Hoyle — and was called Jim by his friends from then on.

Fritz, Nietzsche was known as among intimates.

Point Barrow, Alaska. August 15, 1935.

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.

Said Johnson.

Major Marcus Reno. Captain Frederick Benteen.

Or yet again, Author simply passing casually through his apartment — with one foot or the other now and then not quite touching down where it should.

And was it yesterday that Author’s right shoulder thumped into the corridor wall just outside his bedroom?

A passage he has normally navigated ten thousand times without a second thought?

There was a crooked man, and he went a crooked mile.

Drawing unsatisfactory.

Say Hitler’s records at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts — where he failed the admittance exams.

Was Chardin the greatest still-life painter ever?

In the meanwhile another of the actors conquers Poland.

Southey’s several old-fashioned epic poems which Richard Porson suggested would be read after Homer and Virgil were forgotten:

But not until then.

Empson’s uncounted misquotations.

Stanley Kunitz delivered the eulogy at the funeral of Mark Rothko.

After Nero arranged the murder of his own mother, Seneca shamelessly wrote the letter to the Senate for him declaring that she had committed suicide.

Eliot’s ashes were buried at East Coker — though there is a cenotaph at Westminster Abbey.

Devon, Jean Rhys died in.

The myriad Anna Akhmatova poems, written over decades, which she or friends were forced to immediately memorize.

Because under Soviet rule she was afraid to put them on paper.

Sick-of-it-all. Desperate. Brokenhearted. Disillusioned-with-tubercular-husband.

Critics are like eunuchs in a harem. They’ve seen it done every day of the week, but they can’t do it themselves.

Said Brendan Behan.

Utterly remote from the interests of the people and the state.

Being a typical party functionary’s comment on Akhmatova’s work when she was expelled from the Writers’ Union.

The rioting at the premiere of Le Sacre du Printemps in 1913—

Cocteau’s recollection of himself, Stravinsky, Diaghilev, and Nijinsky holding an exhausted postmortem on a carriage ride through the Bois de Boulogne in the hours afterward.

Who wrote this fiendish Rite of Spring.

What right had he to write the thing?

Jackson Pollock was classified 4F because of psychiatric problems and thus never drafted in World War II.

Jack Kerouac was given a Section Eight discharge from the army for mental instability but subsequently served in the merchant marine.

Pietro Spina.

Forgetting to remember that Tintoretto’s name comes from the fact that his father was a dyer.

Or that Correggio’s comes from the name of the small town where he was born.

Moll Flanders, in a burka.

Anna Karenina, in a burka.

Scarlett.

Bernini once sculpted a marble bust of Charles I of England whom he had never seen.

Van Dyck had done portraits at three different angles — which were shipped to Rome for Bernini’s use.

It cautioned all ladies of quality not to run off with blackamoors and it warned all good wives to look well to their linen.

Said Thomas Rymer, finding at least some trifling merit in Othello.

Motiveless malignity.

Our first aim is to serve God and spread the Christian faith.

Said Cortés.

I have come to take away their gold.

Said Pizarro.

Max Beckmann was severely shell-shocked in World War I.

David Jones the same.

Palma, Majorca, Joan Miró died in.

Diderot, who was known to gesticulate excessively in conversation — and was seen to slap Catherine the Great repeatedly on the thighs.

At which the empress was merely amused.

Amy Levy. At twenty-eight. In 1889.

Blake was given a pauper’s funeral.

And buried without a headstone.

Scott Fitzgerald was three years older than Hemingway.

And one year older than Faulkner.

Dylan Thomas was one day older than John Berryman.

Anne Hathaway died seven years after her husband, at sixty-seven.

The first pianist to perform with the side of the piano facing the audience was Liszt.

Out of vanity over his profile.

Dame Myra Hess. Her recitals in London during the Blitz.

Not only eager to talk about himself, but reluctant to have the conversation stray from the subject.

Said Thoreau of Whitman.

As overrated as Citizen Kane.

Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd were for a time roommates.

Nikos Kazantzakis was a pupil of Henri Bergson’s.

Otherwise presumably educated souls who could not for the life of them point out Thermopylae on a map.

Or the Rubicon. Or Trafalgar.

Nathaniel Hawthorne never learned which side won the Civil War.

John Gower died blind.

So much trash belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature.

The London Athenaeum called Moby Dick.

Schoolboy drivel.

Edith Wharton called Ulysses.

Lynwood Thomas Rowe.

George Orwell’s decision that his real name should be used on his grave.

Gabriel Fauré played the organ at the funeral of Paul Verlaine.

Sviatoslav Richter sat at the piano for hours as mourners viewed Pasternak’s open coffin.

The legend that Diogenes died in Corinth on the same day as Alexander the Great in Babylon.

Kiss me, Hardy.

How long did Schiller leave the rotten apples in his desk before replacing them with less-rotten apples?

Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time—which was composed and first performed in a German prisoner-of-war camp.

October 25, 1400. The death of Chaucer. October 25, 1415. Agincourt.

Billie Holiday’s bank balance at her death registered a total of seventy cents.

Though hospital attendants found $750 taped to her leg.

Saint Jerome slept with works of Aristotle under his pillow.

Taking it for granted for so long that one no longer thinks to be astonished—

That Milton, blind, dictated Paradise Lost.

Biblia Graeca Septuaginta, fol. 1594, Frankfurt.

The volume with which Johnson once knocked down his bookseller employer Thomas Osborne during an argument.

Lex clavatoris designati rescindenda est.

Remembering that Bizet’s Carmen is based on a novel by Prosper Mérimée.

Not remembering that the Mérimée is in turn based on a narrative poem by Pushkin.

Do you lack anything?

I do. That you stand out of my sunlight a little.

Statius, today unread.

Who is given more space in the Divine Comedy than anyone except Virgil or Beatrice.

Recanati, near Ancona, Beniamino Gigli died in.

Michael Faraday’s father was a blacksmith.

Sarah Josepha Hale.

As a form of preventive medicine, Voltaire took an enema at least three times a week.

Hart Crane did not finish high school.

George Gershwin did not finish high school.

John Cheever did not finish high school.

Marlon Brando did not finish high school.

‘Twas brillig.

Albert Einstein’s estate came to no more than $65,000.

Karl Marx left less than two hundred and fifty pounds.

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.

Gigli’s legato.

There is such a thing in this state of Louisiana as the Napoleonic code, according to which whatever belongs to my wife is mine also — and vice versa.

One’s response if asked to answer quickly: What language did Jesus speak?

Homeric beer drinking, Brahms was credited with.

A stupid man’s report of what a clever man says is never accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.

Said Russell.

Flowing with milk and honey, the Old Testament promised the Promised Land would be.

Utterly barren, Strabo found it.

Heidegger was buried in the same small-town German cemetery he had passed every day on his way to school eight decades before.

Rémy de Gourmont’s perception that there are two kinds of writers:

Writers who can write and writers who cannot.

Edward I banished all Jews from England in 1290. None were allowed back until 1655, under Cromwell.

Shakespeare found Shylock where?

His books are to be eradicated from the memory of man. Said the Edict of Worms re Luther.

1915. The first use of poison gas in battle, at Ypres on the Western Front. By the Germans.

1939. The first use of gas chambers for the execution of civilians, commencing with experiments on retarded children. By the Germans.

Boccherini. At one point so influenced by Haydn that he was spoken of as Haydn’s mistress.

Samuel Beckett was awarded the Croix de Guerre for his work with the French Resistance in World War II.

Leopold Bloom is five feet nine and one-half inches tall.

Dasein.

Einsatzgruppen.

Monteverdi was seventy-five when he wrote The Coronation of Poppea.

Vienna, Schrödinger died in.

Jim should have stuck to music instead of bothering with writing. To think he was once on the same platform with John McCormack.

Said Nora.

Was The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction the most frequently cited critical essay in the second half of the twentieth century?

Howland Island. July 2, 1937.

Catullus, dead at thirty, was wealthy enough to have owned a custom-built yacht.

What did you bring that book I didn’t want to be read to out of up for?

Absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence.

La Jolla, California, Amelita Galli-Curci died in.

As did Raymond Chandler.

As did Leo Szilard.

How many Cy Young Awards would Cy Young have won?

But now the garret is a thing of the past. A good writer is a rich writer, and a rich writer is a good writer.

Proclaimed an awesomely cognizant, incomparably discerning magazine editor named Lewis Lapham ca. 2001.

And burbled as it came.

At least once, Descartes was involved in a duel with swords over a woman.

Arnold Schoenberg, who had converted to Christianity, deliberately reaffirmed his Jewishness in formal ceremonies in Paris after having had to flee the rise of Hitler.

Marc Chagall stood as witness to the reconversion.

David Hockney’s rationalization that because he himself could never draw like an Old Master, most of the Old Masters really could not either, but gained an edge by manipulating images via optical devices.

The fact that Thomas Wolfe was the only significant American novelist of his time more drawn to Munich or Berlin than to Paris.

His unappetizing politics.

Watson, you idiot, somebody stole our tent.

Nobody comes. Nobody calls.

Marat’s skin disease — which could be salved by soaking in warm water.

Explaining why Charlotte Corday found him in his bath.

Jacques-Louis David, who had visited him at his same bath only a day earlier — ergo the realism in the canvas of the murder.

615 Cahuenga Building.

Hollywood Boulevard.

Earlier versions of the myth of Troy — predating the Iliad—in which Hector is still alive when Achilles lashes him to his chariot and drags him around the walls.

Guarneri was a pupil of Stradivari.

The Guarneri that Heifetz had used was appraised after his death at six million dollars.

Mistinguett.

One hundred and eighty different plants are referred to in Shakespeare.

There’s fennel for you, and columbines.

Every bride is beautiful, Hillel said.

The myth that Dionysus invented wine.

On Mount Nysa.

In Libya.

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows.

Nietzsche’s insomnia. Jorge Luis Borges’.

God-almighty rubbish, Leo Stein called Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse — who through fifty years of correspondence continued to greet each other as Herr Mann and Herr Hesse.

Gertrud Kolmar was at forced labor in a Berlin factory until transported to her death in Auschwitz in 1943.

Eglantine.

The original manuscript of I Stood Tip-toe upon a Little Hill—which Cowden Clarke cut up into a dozen or more fragments for admirers of Keats who wanted keepsakes.

Alice B. Toklas survived Gertrude Stein by twenty-one years.

But was buried beside her in Père Lachaise.

Reno, Nevada, Dizzy Dean died in.

El Greco ended his days the equivalent of bankrupt.

While living in twenty-plus rooms.

John Huss is said to have chanted hymns as he was being burned alive.

Auden’s conviction that Beethoven was homosexual.

Joseph Brodsky and a friend were asked to select Akhmatova’s burial site at a Leningrad cemetery.

And could locate only drunken gravediggers to deal with.

It is not disorderly and slovenly carriage which makes us sages.

Said Spinoza, even in poverty always formally dressed.

The runners return to their respectable bases.

Hon. John M. Woolsey.

The likely presence of Laurel and Hardy in the background of Waiting for Godot—is the notion Hugh Kenner’s?

The Aegean, Callas’s ashes were scattered in.

According to Tacitus, Petronius slept all day. And some-way lounged into fame in spite of profoundest indolence.

D’où venons nous?

Que sommes nous?

Où allous nous?

Someone once actually gave Picasso credit — in print — for the discovery that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points.

The only difference between myself and a madman is that I am not mad.

Said Dali.

The friendship of Strindberg and Gauguin.

Tintoretto’s Susanna and the Elders.

In which Susanna looks to weigh in at close to two hundred pounds.

Santayana’s annoyance at the perpetual tremblings and tears and fainting fits in Dante. This shivering and swooning philosopher — unquote.

Wonderful man! I long to get drunk with him.

Says Byron in his journal regarding Scott.

Manzoni was so revered throughout Italy by the end of his life that parents recognizing him in public would ask him to literally bless their children.

Alberto Moravia’s suggestion that a woman’s body is all that modern man any longer possesses of nature.

Verte desnuda es recordar la tierra.

Contributed Lorca.

Aristotle’s conclusion that one could tell how bad a play was by the amount of food eaten in the audience during the performance.

Inverurie, near Aberdeen, Mary Garden died in.

Jules Laforgue died four days after his twenty-seventh birthday. His wife of less than eight months would die a year later. Tubercular both.

Edward Jenner.

In the era of the desert anchorites of fourth-century Egypt and the Near East, one convent is chronicled as having housed 130 nuns — not one of whom ever bathed.

Socrates’ father was a sculptor.

Scott Joplin’s father was a former slave.

Nominative. Genitive. Dative. Accusative. Ablative.

Stop giving instructions to God.

Niels Bohr once told Einstein.

Aposiopesis.

The George Grosz drawing of Jesus, crucified, wearing a gas mask and combat boots, and captioned Shut up and carry out your orders.

Dated 1928.

The Max Ernst painting of the Virgin Mary spanking the infant Jesus.

If anyone pilfer this, may he die the death, be boiled in a cauldron, may epilepsy and fever overtake him, may he be broken on the wheel and hanged. Amen.

Says the Latin inscription on an extant hand-copied twelfth-century church Bible.

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.

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.

Where are those who were in this world before us? Go to the cemetery and look at them.

Said Anon. in the twelfth century.

The ways we miss our lives are life.

Methinks I have the keys of my prison in my own hand, and no remedy presents itself so soon to my heart as mine own sword.

Said Donne, in Biathanatos.

All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story

Said Isak Dinesen.

On the tomb of Esteban Murillo in Seville: Vive moriturus. Live as though about to die.

No one truly believes in his own death.

Said Freud.

A man’s dying is more the survivors’ affair than his own. Says someone in The Magic Mountain.

As many as thirty thousand people may have attended Beethoven’s funeral.

Brancusi. Soutine. Léger. Vlaminck. André Derain. Jacques Lipchitz. Suzanne Valadon. Kees van Dongen. Picasso.

All of whom attended Modigliani’s — after his death in a paupers’ ward.

I left my capacity for hoping on the little roads that led to Zelda’s sanatoriums.

Said Scott.

Timor mortis conturbat me.

Says William Dunbar’s Lament for the Makers: The fear of death distresses me.

Which Author suspects he has quoted before in his life.

As late as in the mid-nineteenth century, shepherds in the neighborhood of Marathon insisted that the clash of swords and the cries of horses could still be heard after the fall of darkness on the plain.

Mougins, near Cannes. Late morning. April 8, 1973.

Oxford, Mississippi. 2:30 A.M. July 6, 1962.

Ketchum, Idaho. Soon after dawn. July 2, 1961.

St. Vincent’s Hospital, Greenwich Village. Ca. 1 P.M. November 9, 1953.

Schwesterhaus vom Roten Kreuz, Zurich. 2:15 A.M. January 13, 1941.

Hollywood, California. 5:15 P.M. December 21, 1940.

Kierling, near Vienna. Noon. June 3, 1924.

Railroad station, Astapovo. 5:45 A.M. November 7, 1910.

East Twenty-sixth Street, Manhattan. 12:30 A.M. September 28, 1891.

Auvers-sur-Oise. 1:30 A.M. July 29, 1890.

Gad’s Hill, Kent. 6:10 P.M. June 9, 1870.

Haworth Parsonage, Yorkshire. Ca. 2 A.M. March 31, 1855.

Haworth Parsonage, Yorkshire. 2 P.M. December 19, 1848.

Vienna. Amid lightning, late afternoon. March 26, 1827.

Missolonghi. 6 P.M. April 19, 1824.

Bay of Spezia. Hour unknown. July 8, 1822.

Piazza di Spagna, Rome. II P.M. February 23, 1821.

Stratford-upon-Avon. Hour unrecorded. April 23, 1616.

Madrid. Hour unrecorded. Identical with the foregoing.

Eleanor Bull’s tavern, Deptford. Perhaps 7 P.M. May 30, 1593.

Castle of Cloux, near Amboise. Hour unrecorded. May 2, 1519.

Age. Age.

Every man is worth just so much as the things he busies himself about.

Said Marcus Aurelius.

Sophocles dressed the chorus of his next play in mourning, after the death of Euripides.

Or are all these nuisance disabilities somehow more serious than Author acknowledges?

So persistently worn out. And that peculiar lightheadedness still, his sense almost of something beckoning from just beyond the edges of vision.

Threescore miles and ten.

Edgar Allan Poe’s wife Virginia, dying of tuberculosis in their Fordham cottage — and having to be swaddled in his old army greatcoat because Poe could not afford firewood.

The same coat Poe then wore to the funeral.

My memory and intellect have gone to wait for me elsewhere.

Wrote Michelangelo to Vasari at eighty-three.

I know the color of that blood. It is arterial blood — I cannot be deceived in that color. That drop of blood is my death warrant.

And a sensation even of gaps in his consciousness? As if moments have sometimes bolted past that Author has somehow managed not to be aware of until they are gone? Recently, did one?

Thunder occurs when clouds collide.

Go, litel bok, go, litel myn tragedye.

Which Chaucer says in Troilus and Criseyde.

Having appropriated it from Ovid’s Tristia.

And with brightness involved? A flooding of stunning light?

Velazquez was in the employ of Philip IV for almost forty years.

I am utterly crushed, wrote the king in the margin of a document dealing with his death.

Light. Terrifically, it seems.

But why in heaven’s name is Author convinced that he only hours ago abruptly stopped working and went in to lie down? In the middle of the day? Another nap? Could Author have taken a nap almost without realizing that he did?

The legend that Ibsen, dying, lay near a window and confused the people passing on the street with characters from his plays.

The legend that Mozart, dying, asked that a canary be removed from his room — unable to abide its song.

And Author’s shoulder smacking against the corridor wall again?

A passage he has normally navigated ten thousand times without a second thought?

You and I must always remain young, and you shall always be beautiful to me. We must keep no count of the years.

Wrote Ausonius to his wife.

Wrote Ausonius — whom Gibbon disparaged as a second-rate poet.

As if Author’s Adidas have whims of their own.

Yis-ga-dal v’yis-ka-dash sh’may rab-bo.

I like a view but I like to sit with my back to it.

His secretary’s recollection that in his last moments Henry James asked to hear the sounds of her Remington — typing one of his manuscripts.

And after the corridor? This even newer image of Author’s bed having gotten to be such a vast distance across the room?

Why can’t Author tell whether he is imagining that or remembering it?

Among the wreaths and bouquets at the funeral of Verlaine — one nodding bunch of violets.

Brought by Mallarmé.

Plus the sense that Author could also not seem quite able to make his way across?

Hovering there, did he almost seem to be?

O God! O God! That it were possible

To undo things done; to call back yesterday

Says someone in Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness.

Your Majesty’s horse knows more about art than you do.

But the brightness, was that when the brightness occurred?

Going in to take a nap he is now not sure he is really remembering having gone in to take at all?

That terrificness, that extraordinary flooding.

I have wasted my hours.

Said Leonardo at the end of his life.

Leonardo.

When, dammit, that terrificness?

Does anyone know any longer where Spinoza is buried?

Where Rembrandt?

Where Marlowe?

Did anyone essentially ever know, with Mozart?

Light? Brightness?

“Dad? Dad? Say something.”

Rosie, You Are My Posy.

A sentence consists of a noun and a verb. If you want to use an adjective, come and ask me first.

Orchestra play like pig.

“Dad? Please? You can’t just sit there and stare. Talk to us. Answer us, Dad. We love you, you know?”

I do at least three paintings a day in my head. What s the use of spoiling canvas when nobody will buy anything?

A symphony is no joke.

You know I can’t stand Shakespeare’s plays, but yours are worse.

“Dad? We truly want to bring the children. But they won’t understand at all, if you just sit and don’t say anything. They’ll be frightened. Dad?”

Couldn’t that lady cut herself, standing on that seashell?

Go, litel bok.

“Oh, Dad. Oh, Dad.”

Selah.