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 foo
ls’ 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.