Reader's Block (16 page)

Vico Road.

La Vestale
was Napoleon’s favorite opera.

There is no such thing as literal meaning.

There is no such thing as intrinsic merit.

Fish and guests in three days are stale, says Lyly in
Euphues.

El sueno de la razon produce monstruos.

Walter Slezak committed suicide.

One of Shelley’s grandfathers was born in New Jersey.

Tall but pot-bellied, Chaucer describes himself as.

Knut Hamsun was an anti-Semite.

And was so blatantly sympathetic with the Germans in both world wars that thousands of Norwegians mailed him back copies of his novels in contempt.

De Kooning: Some guy came into my studio for fifteen minutes and wrote something it took six hours to read.

Belmonte. Joselito. Manolete. Dominguin.

Ilse Koch.

Otto Weininger shot himself.

For Protagonist’s less distant literary past:

Donald Barthelme: Tell me what you’ve been up to.

Protagonist: You’ll be sorry you asked. Do you want to hear about the lung cancer surgery I just had, or the prostate cancer surgery I’m going to have?

Barthelme: Talk. And then I’ll tell you about my throat cancer.

Gondal. Angria.

Andrea del Sarto was sometimes hired to paint the equivalent of wanted posters on the walls of Florentine buildings.

As were Andrea del Castagno and Botticelli.

Dust hath closed Helen’s eye.

Virgil died in 19 B.C. Augustine is but one of many who appear to have sincerely believed that his fourth eclogue, which talks of the birth of a divine child, prophesied the coming of Christ.

Medieval legend would add that Saint Paul wept at his tomb for not having had an opportunity to convert him.

Caligula and his sister.

The line
Les lauriers sont coupes
is from a verse by Theodore de Banville.

Who filched it from an old nursery rhyme.

John Marston complained mockingly about the excessive scholarly allusions in the work of his Elizabethan contemporaries. Though proving readily able to refer to the most common current sources himself while doing so, including Vencenzo Cartari, Natale Conti, and Jean Tixier de Ravisi.

Has Reader sometimes felt he has spent his entire life as if preparing for doctoral orals?

In 1985, in 653 at bats, Wade Boggs swung and missed at a first pitch exactly once.

One of Gottfried Benn’s wives committed suicide.

So did one of his mistresses.

Schopenhauer once pushed an elderly seamstress down a flight of stairs because she had been talking loudly outside the door to his flat.

And was forced to pay her an annuity for the twenty years until her death.

Unlike the case with the
Metaphysics,
the title of the
Nicomachean Ethics
came from either its editor’s name, or its dedicatee’s. One or both having been Aristotle’s son. Nicomachus.

Brundisium.

Dear Sir,—I am in a Madhouse & quite forget your Name or who you are. You must excuse me for I have nothing to communicate or tell you of & why I am shut up I don’t know I have nothing to say so I conclude

Yours respectfully

John Clare

Cato the Younger committed suicide with a dagger. He spent the night before contemplating Socrates’ death in the
Phaedo.

Protagonist has had surgery for cancer twice?

Protagonist has prostate cancer still, but it is for the moment under control?

Nothing odd will do long;
Tristram Shandy
did not last.

Said Johnson.

Who also determined that time was too precious to be wasted on such as Fielding.

All of Heinrich Heine was banned by the Nazis. When something like
Die Lorelei
refused to go quietly, it miraculously became the work of Author Unknown.

Joyce died of a perforated ulcer.

Herrenvolk.

Naphtali Herz Imber.

The foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses. Thus Mark Twain on Titian’s
Venus of Urbino.

Whose fingertips rest almost unwittingly at her groin.

For whatever aesthete’s reasons, Rilke could not be troubled to attend his own daughter’s wedding.

As a boy, Dmitri Shostakovich played the piano in theaters showing silent movies.

As did Protagonist’s mother, at approximately the same date in time.

In Kingston, New York.

Catherine Tekakwitha.

Richard Tucker was once a cantor in Brooklyn.

The greatest music critic who ever lived, Auden called Shaw.

Galgenlieder.

Jean Genet was an anti-Semite.

Elpenor. Whom Odysseus forgot to bury.

Palinurus. Whom Aeneas remembered to.

Drusilla.

Would Reader look at the skull beside his desk differently if he decided it was a woman’s?

Protagonist has it. On a windowsill. On the windowsill of the window that looks out onto the graves.

Et in Arcadia ego.

King Saul committed suicide.

Every Man desires to live long; but no Man would be old. Said Swift.

Isaac Newton was idiosyncratic enough to say no when Voltaire wanted to meet him. And again with Benjamin Franklin.

How Beautiful with Shoes.

Akhmatova, in Leningrad, her son in prison, waiting in line daily, in the hope of at least being allowed to pass in a parcel. Can you put this into words? And I said: I can.

John Berryman:

Rilke was a jerk.

Margo Adams.

Concerning whom I may truly say, that of all the men of his time whom I have known, he was the wisest and justest and best.

I guess maybe there are two kinds of writers, writers who write stories and writers who write writing.

Said Raymond Chandler.

Garbo with no eyebrows?

Cal Lowell.

One fine morning in May a slim young horsewoman might have been seen riding a handsome sorrel mare along the flowery avenues of the Bois de Boulogne.

John Davidson drowned himself.

Simeon Solomon died in a workhouse.

Did ever a woman, since the creation of the world, interrupt a man with such a silly question?

Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.

Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work.

Protagonist has also had cataract surgery?

Gretcben am Spinnrade.

Picasso had two children in his late sixties.

It is patently more sensible, in this workaday world, to be a James Jones than a James Joyce. Said Protagonist’s father.

Mussorgsky was an anti-Semite.

The Sallynoggin Archive.

Norma Jean Baker committed suicide.

The cemetery framed beyond the window in January light. The skull, lower left foreground, a redundant nearer
memento mori.

The eschatology of the still white stones in snow.

Is there a woman again after all?

Price of Admission Your Mind. Not for Everybody.

Alborak.

A man should never face the sun when urinating, Hesiod says.

Not to offend the sun god Helios, presumably being why.

Madame de La Fayette. Madame de Sévigné. Madame de Staël.

The Rev. G. A. Studdert Kennedy.

For forty-some years, Valéry awoke at 5
A.M.
to make notes on what he thought of as the dawning of consciousness.

A big book, a big evil.

Said Callimachus.

During a literary dispute about epic poetry with Apollonius of Rhodes.

Who had once been his pupil.

At Alexandria.

The reason for your complaint lies, it seems to me, in the constraint your intellect imposes on your imagination. Said Schiller to a friend who had difficulty writing.

Sappho with white hair?

Sculpture is what you bump into when you back up to look at a painting.

Said Barnett Newman.

What moved thee, or how couldst thou take such journeys into the fanatic Arabia?

Dora Carrington committed suicide with a borrowed revolver.

Leonora Carrington was a better painter.

Ma in Ispagna son già milk e tre!

Capodistria.

The Laura whom Petrarch saw in a church at Avignon at twenty-three, and spent the rest of his life writing poems about, may very likely have never given him a thought.

Not only having been married, but already in progress toward eleven children.

Though Dante claims to have seen Beatrice no more than twice himself. While immortalizing her even more extraordinarily.

Boadicea committed suicide with poison.

Athenaeus. Seven volumes in the Loeb Classical Library.

Also in part a distant cousin innumerable times removed of the Tibetan Book of the Dead?

Of the cataloguing of the Cairo Geniza?

Reader and this notion of his.

Or does the absence of narrative progression plus that cross-circuited schematism possibly render it even a poem of sorts?

Not to add
avec
exactly 333 interspersed unattributed quotations awaiting annotation?

For a time, Beaumont and Fletcher actually lived together. Evidently so intimate that they indiscriminately wore each other’s clothing.

And with but one wench in the house between them, in John Aubrey’s phrase.

Fletcher alone being a cousin of Phineas and Giles, however.

A recording of
Bella figlia deWamore,
with Beniamino Gigli, Amelita Galli-Curci, Louise Homer, and Giuseppe de Luca. Dated December 1927.

Ergo, by one chance in thirty-one, possibly recorded on the day Protagonist was born.

Hugo de Sade. S

imon de’ Bardi.

Camus called Faulkner the greatest modern novelist.

But then named
Pylon
and
Sanctuary
as the best of his books.

Living a full life span, parents who will still have died too soon to learn what their children will truly become.

The identities of their ultimate defeats.

Han Van Meegeren was found out only when he was accused of having sold Dutch masterpieces to Hermann Goering in World War II. To prove they had been rather less than that, he diligently forged one additional Vermeer.

A. E. Ellis was who?

Harold Patrick Reiser.

Carrying groceries, a newspaper, an inexpensive bottle of wine. Protagonist evading splattered slush from passing vehicles at the highway.

Then along the barely discernable path to the room that had once been a garage at the rear of the less than beguiling house.

Room, or rooms?

Conrad Aiken’s father shot his wife and then himself. Leaving it to Aiken, at eleven, to climb a flight of stairs after hearing the shots and walk in on the bodies.

Katherine Anne Porter was an anti-Semite.

Lady Caroline Lamb.

Annabella Milbanke.

Jane Elizabeth Scott, Lady Oxford.

Augusta Leigh.

Claire Clairmont.

Marianna Segati.

Margarita Cogni.

Teresa Guiccioli.

Sergei Rachmaninoff was so depressed at the failure of his first symphony that he gave up composing. And had to undergo hypnosis to start again.

D. H. Lawrence’s father was a coal miner.

Henry Moore’s father likewise.

Much as the Nazis tried to make use of him, Nietzsche had in fact referred to earlier German anti-Semitism as both damnable and poisonous.

Beckett wrote
Waiting for Godot
in French, not English.
Godot
does not verbally suggest
Dieu.

Laura and Beatrice. The latter having died at twenty-four.

A woman kneeling at a grave. A woman walking on a beach.