This is Not a Novel by David Markson Read Free Book Online Page B

1477.

    Hans Baldung Grien purchased a house in Strasbourg in 1527.
    Paganini died of what was evidently cancer of the larynx.
    Walter Pater died of gout.
    It is written in a careless and humble style, in the vulgar tongue, which even housewives speak. Said Dante of the Comedy.
    William Etty.
    The Axion Esti.
    All through the night Rome went burning. Put that in the noontide and it loses some of its age-old significance, does it not?
    Archaeological evidence for the historical reality of Gilgamesh.
    Pergolesi died of consumption at twenty-six.
    Laborare est Orare. Work is Worship. Said the old monks.
    Benedetto Croce died of a stroke.
    Robert Schumann died mad, probably from syphilis.
    Behold, this dreamer cometh.
    Sophocles’ father manufactured swords.
    John Dos Passos died of congestive heart failure.
    Tyndale was permitted the indulgence of being strangled at the stake before they set fire to him.
    A Farewell to Aims:
    1590, George Peele’s version dating from.
    Trying to imagine the shape of the modern world if Charles Martel had been defeated at Tours.
    Simone Weil’s final hospitalization was ostensibly for tuberculosis and exhaustion. Nevertheless a coroner’s report labeled her death suicide by starvation.
    The woman was mad, de Gaulle said.
    Mantegna used a corpse as the model for one of his Crucifixions.
    Gericault used several while painting The Raft of the Medusa.
    Veit Stoss died blind. And destitute.
    The almost unparalleled contemporary popularity of Euripides.
    Greek soldiers captured and held as slaves after the disastrous expedition at Syracuse were actually given their freedom if they could teach passages from his plays from memory.
    Which many could.
    George Eliot translated Spinoza. Emma Lazarus translated Judah Halevi.
    Willem de Kooning’s father was a beer distributor.
    An incidental notation of Malcolm Lowry’s, while describing a visit to a room used by De Quincey in the Lake District:
    Smoking Prohibited.
    She only said, My life is dreary
    He cometh not, she said; She said, I am aweary, aweary
    I would that I were dead.
    Cousin Ruddy was habitually foul-mouthed.
    Flannery O’Connor died of lupus.
    In the century after their deaths, Ben Jonson’s name appeared in print three times as often as Shakespeare’s.
    Salathiel Pavy.
    Why does Joyce let Leopold Bloom think Saverio Mercadante was Jewish?
    April 26, 1937. A Monday.
    Which was also Guernica’s market day, drawing peasants in from the nearby countryside.
    No matter how frequently, always given pause at remembering there is no color whatsoever in the canvas.
    A little, plain, provincial, sickly-looking old maid. Being Charlotte Bronte, as seen by George Henry Lewes.
    Robert Southey died of—quote—softening of the brain.
    And what should they know of England who only England know?
    Gauguin once tried to kill himself with arsenic. But vomited.
    Do you think up that material when you’re drunk? Asked a cousin of Faulkner’s.
    Dittersdorf, you’re not in tune.
    Tintoretto died of what appears to have been stomach cancer.
    Trollope died of a stroke.
    Milledgeville, Georgia.
    Tracts free as the Lord supplies the funds.
    Frank Lloyd Wright died of a heart attack after surgery.
    Hilda Doolittle died of the flu, though already assaulted by a heart attack and a stroke.
    Even after Einstein on the Beach had been performed at the Metropolitan Opera, Philip Glass was driving a taxi in New York City.
    Hypatia, who was battered to death by Christian fanatics.
Tantum religio potuit suadere maloram, Lucretius said.
Such are the evils that religion prompts.
    Emotion recollected in tranquility.
    The best words in the best order.
    Vivaldi died of no one knows what. Of internal fire, the 1741 Vienna church registry having poetically settled for.
    A social and moral pervert, Theodore Roosevelt called Tolstoy.
    Roosevelt on Henry James: A miserable little snob.
    On Thomas Paine: A filthy little atheist.
    Spinoza’s tomb. At the Nieuwe Kerk in The