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 Go
dot—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.