Reader's Block by David Markson Read Free Book Online Page B
Authors: David Markson
period Reader is thinking of.
Thales of Miletus was believed to have predicted an eclipse of the sun for May 28, 585 B.C.
Evident as it is, why is Reader surprised to so rarely make the connection between aphrodisiac and Aphrodite?
Mathilde Wesendonck.
Nadezhda von Meek.
A miniature American flag, fixed beside one of the graves.
A completely unabridged performance of Les Troy ens was not given until 1969, exactly one hundred years after Berlioz died.
It had taken almost that long for Bach’s Mass in B Minor to be done completely also.
For Protagonist’s past. The girl named Fern Winters, lovely though fragile, who tolerated baseball games? Was she twenty-two when Reader last saw her?
Also Kate Winter then, strikingly handsome. And some few years more than twice Fern’s age, meaning a good deal nearer to Protagonist’s present.
Plus fictionalized names for each, if only provisionally?
Sonia Marmeladov. Catherine Earnshaw.
Matisse called Les Demoiselles d’Avignon a hoax.
Thales might have been a Hebrew, Herodotus thought.
I do not believe in God, though I believe in Picasso, said Diego Rivera.
Gerard Manley Hopkins died of typhoid fever in 1889. One of his brothers would live into the 1950s.
A verray, parfit gentil knyght.
And as for Protagonist’s former wife?
Reader has decided to let her look like Simonetta Vespucci.
Who may have been painted by Botticelli as well as by Piero di Cosimo.
Christina Rossetti almost certainly died a virgin.
The undeniable sexual attraction that Dorothy Wordsworth felt for William.
What is all this about Irish wit and humor? Have we any book in the house with any of it in? I’d like to read a page or two.
Are any of the books Protagonist is packing inscribed by their authors?
Or are those the ones he is more likely selling, for their added value?
Sapere aude.
Nerval once tried to lead a lobster by a ribbon through a public garden in Paris.
Tristan Corbiere did the same with a pig in Rome. In evening clothes.
Thy necessity is greater than mine.
Said Philip Sidney, in passing a drink to a dying soldier while dying himself.
Gottlob Frege.
The saloon that Protagonist now and again stops in at is an Edward Hopper.
Its name in semicircular lettering on the windows, Reader sees, viewed backwards from at the bar against wintry late afternoon sunlight.
Hilaire Belloc was an anti-Semite.
John Clare spent his last twenty-three years in an asylum. Not recognizing his own wife. At times claiming to be Byron. Or Nelson at Trafalgar.
No needle marks on your Annunciation’s arm, now.
We do not come to thoughts. They come to us.
Thought Heidegger.
The first translation of major length for purely literary purposes was a Latin Iliad, ca. 250 B.C., by Livius Andronicus.
Sheri Martinelli.
Diane Arbus committed suicide by opening her wrists in a bathtub.
Clare’s parents had been illiterate. He himself never revised a line.
I am! yet what I am who cares, or knows?
My friends forsake me like a memory lost.
I am the self-consumer of my woes.
In Joseph Conrad’s view there is not a single sincere line, unquote, in Moby Dick.
Boris Christoff and Tito Gobbi were brothers-in-law.
Richard Tucker and Jan Peerce were also.
When Sophocles was nearing ninety, his sons tried to have him declared incompetent. Sophocles won easy dismissal by reading to the jury from Oedipus at Colonus.
Which he was only then finishing.
Schleiermacher.
Then again, Reader may let Protagonist’s ex-wife look like Isabella d’Este.
Who was painted by both Leonardo and Titian.
The termites has got me, Mr. Mack.
Wallace Stevens’s wife Elsie was the model for the face on the United States dime and half-dollar.
Wallace Stevens’s wife Elsie and Wallace Stevens had separate bedrooms.
Hopkins to Robert Bridges: I am a eunuch, but it is for the Kingdom of God’s sake.
Baudelaire spent two hours a day getting dressed.
Irgun.
Honor, power,
Thales of Miletus was believed to have predicted an eclipse of the sun for May 28, 585 B.C.
Evident as it is, why is Reader surprised to so rarely make the connection between aphrodisiac and Aphrodite?
Mathilde Wesendonck.
Nadezhda von Meek.
A miniature American flag, fixed beside one of the graves.
A completely unabridged performance of Les Troy ens was not given until 1969, exactly one hundred years after Berlioz died.
It had taken almost that long for Bach’s Mass in B Minor to be done completely also.
For Protagonist’s past. The girl named Fern Winters, lovely though fragile, who tolerated baseball games? Was she twenty-two when Reader last saw her?
Also Kate Winter then, strikingly handsome. And some few years more than twice Fern’s age, meaning a good deal nearer to Protagonist’s present.
Plus fictionalized names for each, if only provisionally?
Sonia Marmeladov. Catherine Earnshaw.
Matisse called Les Demoiselles d’Avignon a hoax.
Thales might have been a Hebrew, Herodotus thought.
I do not believe in God, though I believe in Picasso, said Diego Rivera.
Gerard Manley Hopkins died of typhoid fever in 1889. One of his brothers would live into the 1950s.
A verray, parfit gentil knyght.
And as for Protagonist’s former wife?
Reader has decided to let her look like Simonetta Vespucci.
Who may have been painted by Botticelli as well as by Piero di Cosimo.
Christina Rossetti almost certainly died a virgin.
The undeniable sexual attraction that Dorothy Wordsworth felt for William.
What is all this about Irish wit and humor? Have we any book in the house with any of it in? I’d like to read a page or two.
Are any of the books Protagonist is packing inscribed by their authors?
Or are those the ones he is more likely selling, for their added value?
Sapere aude.
Nerval once tried to lead a lobster by a ribbon through a public garden in Paris.
Tristan Corbiere did the same with a pig in Rome. In evening clothes.
Thy necessity is greater than mine.
Said Philip Sidney, in passing a drink to a dying soldier while dying himself.
Gottlob Frege.
The saloon that Protagonist now and again stops in at is an Edward Hopper.
Its name in semicircular lettering on the windows, Reader sees, viewed backwards from at the bar against wintry late afternoon sunlight.
Hilaire Belloc was an anti-Semite.
John Clare spent his last twenty-three years in an asylum. Not recognizing his own wife. At times claiming to be Byron. Or Nelson at Trafalgar.
No needle marks on your Annunciation’s arm, now.
We do not come to thoughts. They come to us.
Thought Heidegger.
The first translation of major length for purely literary purposes was a Latin Iliad, ca. 250 B.C., by Livius Andronicus.
Sheri Martinelli.
Diane Arbus committed suicide by opening her wrists in a bathtub.
Clare’s parents had been illiterate. He himself never revised a line.
I am! yet what I am who cares, or knows?
My friends forsake me like a memory lost.
I am the self-consumer of my woes.
In Joseph Conrad’s view there is not a single sincere line, unquote, in Moby Dick.
Boris Christoff and Tito Gobbi were brothers-in-law.
Richard Tucker and Jan Peerce were also.
When Sophocles was nearing ninety, his sons tried to have him declared incompetent. Sophocles won easy dismissal by reading to the jury from Oedipus at Colonus.
Which he was only then finishing.
Schleiermacher.
Then again, Reader may let Protagonist’s ex-wife look like Isabella d’Este.
Who was painted by both Leonardo and Titian.
The termites has got me, Mr. Mack.
Wallace Stevens’s wife Elsie was the model for the face on the United States dime and half-dollar.
Wallace Stevens’s wife Elsie and Wallace Stevens had separate bedrooms.
Hopkins to Robert Bridges: I am a eunuch, but it is for the Kingdom of God’s sake.
Baudelaire spent two hours a day getting dressed.
Irgun.
Honor, power,
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