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.
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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 su
rvive 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.