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.