The Last Novel by David Markson Read Free Book Online Page B

earlier.
    The influence of Donne upon the literature of England was singularly wide and deep — although almost wholly malign.
    Said Edmund Gosse.
    There is no indication whatsoever of anything even remotely resembling a State of Israel on the maps in most contemporary Arab schoolbooks.
    Sixty-seven, Cézanne died at.
    Some few days after having been caught for hours in a sudden downpour where he had been at work on a landscape.
    A sort of God of painting.
    Matisse was to call him.
    One can now hear famous pieces of music as easily as one can buy a glass of beer.
    Proclaimed Debussy in delight at the advent of the phonograph.
    They who drink beer will think beer.
    Said Washington Irving.
    Cracked, Edith Sitwell called Blake.
    Flaubert’s outrage at the notion of an illustrated edition of Bovary .
Jane, Jane,
Tall as a crane,
The morning light creaks down again.
    Still the most avant-garde book ever written.
    Anthony Burgess said of Tristram Shandy.
    A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table, than when his wife talks Greek.
    Johnson said.
    Mahler died in 1911. Alma not until 1964.
    Beckett, on the posthumous publication of letters or other papers that their authors might not have approved of:
    When a writer dies his widow should be burned on his funeral pyre.
    To publish one line of an author which he himself did not intend for publication — especially letters — is a despicable act.
    Had said Heine earlier.
    What the dickens, lower case — which has nothing to do with the author of Great Expectations.
    I cannot tell what the dickens his name is, says someone in The Merry Wives of Windsor, on stage by 1601.
    It is never difficult to paint, said Dalí.
    It is either easy or impossible.
    Willie Yeats, he was frequently called.
    William Cuthbert Faulkner, his full name was.
    Christopher Marlowe evidently wrote Tamburlaine while still a student at Cambridge.
    Learn or leave. A third alternative is to be flogged.
    Declared a Latin inscription at the entrance to a church-sponsored Medieval English elementary school.
    Rousseau’s father was a watchmaker.
    Lady Mary Wortley Montagu died of breast cancer.
    Too much interest in music could turn one effeminate.
    Kant said.
    Tolstoy’s certainty that Darwin was already beginning to be forgotten.
    As early as in 1903.
    Hugh Kenner’s sense of the same re Freud.
    Whom he called already nearly as dated as Trilby — in 1958.
    Goyisher kopf.
    Byron, with amiable confidence, to friends whose silence suggested that they did not particularly admire Don Juan:
    I wish you all better taste.
    The ugliness of some of his music is really masterly.
    Stated a London journal after an early Delius concert.
    Andromache. Alcestis. Helen. Medea. The Bacchae.
    Each of which Euripides ends with his chorus speaking an identical verse — to the effect that the ways of the gods are unpredictable.
    Helen, the most famous woman in Greek mythology — whose name is not a Greek name.
    The curiosity that we possess copies of ten evidently authentic letters of Dante’s — and not one of Shakespeare’s.
    August 11, 1494, Hans Memling died on.
    Dylan Thomas’s eighteenth birthday, Sylvia Plath was born on.
    I hate that dreadful hollow behind the little wood.
    Strolling on Park Avenue in New York, John Gielgud unexpectedly runs into Greta Garbo — Looking like a displaced charwoman, he later reports.
    Edgell Rickword lost an eye as an officer in France in World War I.
    Siegfried Sassoon was wounded twice.
    Thinking with someone else’s brain.
    Schopenhauer called reading.
    In the late spring of 1944, at the height of their efficiency, the forty-six ovens in the crematoriums at Auschwitz were incinerating as many as twelve thousand corpses per day.
    The word genocide had not existed until being coined by a Polish scholar in that same year.
    Italo Svevo had to pay to publish Confessions of Zeno.
    Stratford-on-Avon, Marie Corelli died in.
    I say that if you can tell a story in