Reader's Block by David Markson Read Free Book Online

Viareggio?

    Gentlemen, old Bach is here!

    Christopher Smart. Mad, lice-infested, incising A Song to David and the Jubilate Agno into the wainscotting of a jail cell.
    Known before that for insisting upon being joined in prayer wherever the impulse struck him, even at street corners. Or more ideally in rain.

    Frieda von Richthofen.

    Legend eternally insists that Cleopatra committed suicide by pressing an asp to her bosom. Plutarch suggests that it may have been by taking poison, however.

    Finnegans Wake, sans apostrophe. Finnegans ergo a plural noun, Wake a verb.

    Joyces write. Readers read.

    Fernand Leger was gassed while serving as a stretcher-bearer in World War I.

    Fuit Ilium,

    I’d as lief pray with Kit Smart as anyone else, Johnson said.

    What things have we seen
    Done at the Mermaid!

    Charmian and Iras committed suicide when Cleopatra did.

    Lorenzo da Ponte ended his days teaching Italian at what would later become Columbia University.

    Could Protagonist possibly have taught somewhere at some time also?

    Columbia likewise?

    Schopenhauer was an anti-Semite.

    Austerlitz. Smolensk. Borodino.

    Tycho Brahe wore a silver alloy nose. The bridge of his own had been severed in a duel.

    Horseflies that keep the horse from plowing, Chekhov called critics.

    Hendrickje Stoffels was illiterate.

    Hailey, Idaho, Ezra Pound was born in.

    Saskia.

    August 2, 1492. The deadline set by Ferdinand and Isabella for the expulsion of all Jews who did not convert to Catholicism. August 3, 1492. Columbus sailed.

    F. O. Matthiessen committed suicide in a plunge from a window.

    Jeremy Bentham’s skeleton is on display at University College, London.
    In Bentham’s clothes.

    Protagonist’s son or daughter may one day want his books.

    Some few? The better volumes of art reproductions?

    Rudolf Nureyev was an anti-Semite.

    Caddy held me. She smelled like trees.

    Galileo had three illegitimate children.

    From certain angles, the knotted root on Reader’s windowsill looks like a hand grasping in supplication. A woman named Kate Winter plucked it from an eddy at an embankment of the Ebro where Reader and she had paused during a long day’s driving.

    Freud had thirty-three operations for cancer on his mouth and throat.
    Joyce had twenty-five operations on his eyes.

    Excluding the minor coincidence of their names, there is no connection between the Fern Winters at Yankee Stadium and the Kate Winter in Spain. Reader knew them decades apart.

    No ideas but in things.

    George Sanders committed suicide.

    Gabriella Mistral once lived in Roslyn Harbor, Long Island.

    Bach and Handel were born in the same year.
    Wagner and Verdi were born in the same year.

    François Villon was born in the year Joan of Arc was burned at the stake.

    On mourra seul.

    Could a woman with one leg, on crutches, navigate in the sand of a beach?

    The word philosopher translates from the Greek as lover of wisdom. Pythagoras is credited with having originated its usage.

    Auden married Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika, whom he had never until then met, so that she could evade the Nazis through British citizenship.

    Djuna Barnes had no formal education whatsoever.

    Will Protagonist have spent time in Spain also?

    Dostoievsky’s father was the resident physician at a hospital for the poor. But treated his own serfs so abusively that a group of them ultimately murdered him.

    I would prefer not to.

    Roncesvalles. The story perhaps not being entirely mythical. An actual nephew of Charlemagne’s named Roland in fact probably having existed.

    To reproduce the exterminating gesture.

    When Poe, at twenty-seven, married his cousin Virginia Clemm, she was thirteen. And consumptive.
    In Germany not much earlier Novalis had been engaged to a girl of twelve. Who died, however.

    David Gascoyne spent two decades in mental hospitals.

    We have too many things and not enough forms, Flaubert said.

    H. G. Wells was an anti-Semite.

    Manitas de Plata.

    Dante