Reader's Block by David Markson Read Free Book Online Page A

situates Mohammed in the ninth chasm of the Malebolge for having sown division in the Church. He is seen slashed open from his chin to his anus and with his innards spilling out.
    In retaliation, Muslim fundamentalists in the early 1990s threatened to blow up Dante’s tomb in Ravenna.
    Seven hundred years after the fact.

    Rosso Fiorentino committed suicide.

    Benedetto Croce’s parents were killed in an earthquake.

    Will Reader make anything out of that notion of Protagonist having seen the woman from the grave on the street?

    Contrive something with more immediacy than that?

    Bertrand Russell and Basil Bunting were conscientious objectors in World War I.
    Robert Lowell and Kenneth Rexroth were conscientious objectors in World War II.

    Here. This isn’t a musical peepshow. And don’t you smash that piano. Who’s paying here?

    The first books printed in England, roughly four decades after Gutenberg, were a history of the Trojan War and a volume on chess. Both set by Caxton.

    Raoul le Fevre. Guido della Colonne. Benoit de Sainte-Maure.

    Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli.

    The Mona Lisa has no eyebrows.

    If Protagonist has in fact taught, it will have been only briefly. And/or part-time. Possibly in writing programs.

    That and his few other past employments leaving him with no kind of retirement benefits.

    And no more than minimal Social Security.

    Caxton me fieri fecit.

    The primary aim of this book is to explain the remarkable rule which regulated the succession to the priesthood of Diana at Aricia.
    Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul
    When hot for certainties in this our life!

    Not one of the violent moments in Greek tragedy occurs on stage. Medea murdering her sons, for instance. Or Orestes bloodying Clytemnestra.

    Does Reader yet know how long Protagonist has now been alone?
    Who, when, the last woman in his life will have been?

    Treat nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone.

    Pio Baroja was an anti-Semite.

    Magdalena Abakanowicz.

    Melville. A little heterodox in the matter of clean linen.
    Said Hawthorne.

    Coleridge. Considerably more so.
    Said several.

    Sara Teasdale committed suicide with sleeping pills.

    Could the woman who appears at the grave be the woman with one leg?

    What belated queer obsession of Reader’s is this?

    Jacqueline du Pre’s cello was a Stradivarius.
    And was later Yo-Yo Ma’s.

    Balzac called Ann Radcliffe a better novelist than Stendhal.

    God is dead, everything is permitted.

    Preoccupied, Beethoven was known to lather his face and then forget to shave.
    He also possessed an unstrung piano, adequate in his deafness.

    Ernst Toller hanged himself.

    Mr. Earbrass.

    Jim Thorpe is buried in Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania.

    Isaac Newton’s father was illiterate.

    Curiously, there is no refrigeration in that part of Kingston as Reader sees it, instead there are old-fashioned iceboxes. Meaning deliveries by truck of blocks of ice.

    Does Reader now have some notion of setting his novel back practically a lifetime ago?

    Or is memory merely getting in the way of imagination for a minute?

    Pouring out liquor is like burning books.
    Said Faulkner.

    Probably it will not be Kingston in any case.

    Frank Plumpton Ramsey was dead at twenty-six.

    Robert Frost had exactly five poems accepted in the first seventeen years in which he was submitting.

    Heinrich Schliemann. Sir Arthur Evans. Carl Blegen.

    Saint Augustine was an anti-Semite.

    Why is this night different from all other nights?

    From Rabelais’s will:
    I have nothing. I owe much. The rest I leave to the poor.

    Shelley once insisted he had seen the devil leaning against a tree on his lawn.
    And eyes staring at him from Mary’s breasts.

    Hippo is now a town in Algeria called Bone.

    Willard Hershberger slashed his throat with a straight razor in a Boston hotel room.

    The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
    Which would have been virtually the day before yesterday, in the