Reader's Block (13 page)

Anaximander did or did not invent the gnomon.

Saint Ambrose was an anti-Semite.

Stranger, go tell the Spartans that we lie here in obedience to their bidding.

Pushkin and Lermontov were killed in duels less than five years apart.

Stephen Crane was the catcher on his Syracuse University baseball team.

Marsilio Ficino.

Leonidas. 480 B.C.

Arthur Koestler committed suicide with an overdose of barbiturates. His wife joined him.

St. Martin’s Churchyard, Laugharne, Carmarthenshire, Wales.

Mozart composed his last three symphonies in six weeks.

Plutarch: When the candles are out, all women are fair.

One of the titles on an extant bookseller’s bill to Joyce from Trieste, dated 1914, is
Pinocchio.

Nirvana means without wind, or blown out. In the sense that desire no longer exists.

A railroad siding, the Astapovo station. November 7, 1910.

Ombra maifu.

Abstract Expressionism was invented by New York drunks.

Bitburg.

George Eastman committed suicide.

Djuna Barnes spent her last forty years as a near recluse in a one-room mews apartment in Greenwich Village. She died there at ninety.

Since Cassius first did whet me against Caesar,

I have not slept.

Conrad Aiken’s gravestone is a stone bench. With its inscription on the seat.

Incitatus.

The duel in which Pushkin was killed took place in 1837. The man who killed him, a French officer named Georges d’Anthes, lived another fifty-eight years.

Rupert Brooke was an anti-Semite.

R. B. Kitaj.

Protagonist went out at five?

Constance Mayer committed suicide by slashing her throat with Pierre Paul Prud’hon’s razor.

They are losing the Battle of the Ebro.

Psychic distance. Synesthetic equilibrium.

The
Divine Comedy
contains 14,230 lines.

Most of which Goethe described as repulsive.

Thucydides Mythistoricus.

Renoir’s father was a tailor.

There is no there there.

Why has Reader decided that Protagonist once worked as a logger? In prehistory. And near a town called Molalla, Oregon?

Tzeitl. Hodel. Chava.

A curator, showing Rodin certain of Blake’s drawings: He actually saw those things.

Rodin: He should have seen them three or four times.

Tennyson was reading
Cymbeline
when he died. His copy of the play was put into his coffin.

Was Freud sleeping with his wife’s sister?

Eulalia of Merida.

Hey, Djuna, are you still alive over there?

That great solemn ass Goethe, Claudel called him.

And can any of them, with whom he has mostly long now lost touch, be even now dead?

Becky Sharp? Sonia Marmeladov? Daisy Buchanan?

Whistle, and she’ll come to you, wrote John Fletcher, of Beaumont and Fletcher, three hundred years before Lauren Bacall.

Golden lads and girls all must,

As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

Two of Thomas Mann’s sons committed suicide.

As did two of Marx’s daughters.

T. E. Lawrence was illegitimate.

Louis Aragon won the Croix de Guerre in World War I and again in World War II.

Delacroix’s
Journals.
Berlioz’s
Memoirs.

Thomas Gray was one of twelve children. All eleven others died as infants.

El Greco had to sue the Toledo Cathedral to be paid for his
Disrobing of Christ.
Which the Cathedral had commissioned.

Ljuba Welitsch was married to a traffic policeman.

Denis Diderot was an anti-Semite.

Hayim Bialik.

Lionel Johnson died after falling off a barstool.

Seymour Krim committed suicide.

Gepetto.

Or is it less the women than what the women represent? The years that have departed as well?

A life, that was?

Where there is no now now?

It was Dumas
pere,
not Dumas
fits,
who said that after God Shakespeare had created most. John Eglinton at the National Library in
Ulysses
is not sure.

Taine said he had read
The Charterhouse of Parma
fifty times.

The drawing of Michelangelo and the colors of Titian! Wrote Tintoretto on the wall of his studio.

A good shoemaker and a poor fish-peddler.

Anaximander did or did not introduce the gnomon into Greece from Egypt.

Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence only increases in an arithmetical ratio.

Eliot, as an editor, rejected
Animal Farm,

Another damned thick square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh, Mr. Gibbon?

The Metropolitan Opera once threatened to write it into Rosa Ponselle’s contract that she could not ride her bicycle through the streets of Manhattan to rehearsals.

Naturally there is a statue of Ovid on the shore of the Black Sea in Constanta. Naturally gazing Romeward.

Treitschke was an anti-Semite.

Robert Burton may have committed suicide. Legend has him having predicted the date of his death through astrology. Then making certain it was correct.

Miroslav Holub.

The British army sustained sixty thousand casualties on the first day of the Battle of the Somme.

The Middle Parts of Fortune.

There is no mention of Achilles’ heel in Homer. In fact there is no mention of it by anyone until Statius, in Latin, nine hundred years later.

Protagonist’s threadbare jeans and faded workshirts. Some few more presentable remnants hanging, virtually never any longer worn.

Spent Adidas.

Alan Turing committed suicide.

Swyne and Dour.

Azucena.

What Horace defined as a kind of uncontrolled energy in Pindar.

Possibly explaining why he sometimes makes no sense whatsoever.

Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften.

Can Protagonist even any longer afford to buy books?

Cézanne needed as many as five hundred sittings for a portrait. After a hundred and fifteen by Ambroise Vollard, he was willing to concede that the front of VoUard’s shirt was possibly acceptable.

He doesn’t come
in here
disguised like Westminster Abbey.

Gordon Bunshaft.

Gustave Courbet died at fifty-eight. Late along, he was drinking a full dozen bottles of wine a day.

Odi et amo.

Tell the people it is no use to depend on me any more now. Said Crazy Horse, bayoneted in the back at Fort Robinson.

Plaza El Toreo, Mexico, D.F., October 30, 1960. Carlos Arruza
(rejoneador),
Juan Silveti, Joselito Huerta, Manuel Capetillo, others,
siete orejas y dos rabos.
A benefit for Curro Ortega, who some weeks earlier had lost a leg when gored.

Protagonist will have watched that, also.

Louis Althusser spent four years in a psychiatric hospital after strangling his wife.

Marxist. Structuralist. Manic-depressive.

This sentence is a lie.

The question of Hans Walter Gabler’s command of colloquial English.

Honorificabilitudinitatibus.

In 1886, believing him dead, Verlaine published an edition of Rimbaud’s poems. Rimbaud was running guns and trading slaves in Abyssinia.

Ancient rumor insisted, seemingly wrongly, that Euripides was killed by dogs set at him by a rival playwright.

Hapax legomenon?

Considering marriage with the daughter of the King of Portugal, Philip the Good of Burgundy sent Jan van Eyck to paint her portrait. Surreptitiously.

The whole experience of being hit by a bullet is very interesting and I think it is worth describing in detail.

John Howard Payne once proposed marriage to Mary Shelley.

Vigée-Lebrun.

Winthrop Mackworth Praed. Richard Monckton Milnes. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt.

A las cinco de la tarde.

A las cinco en punto de la tarde.

Has anyone ever discovered precisely what good news was brought from Ghent to Aix?

Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet.

Said cousin Dryden.

John Kennedy Toole committed suicide by running a hose from his exhaust pipe into his car.

Saint Jerome was an anti-Semite.

Der Stürmer.

I’ll lug the guts into the neighbour room.

Albany, New York, Bret Harte was born in.

One of Franz Schubert’s last requests, while already feverish from the typhoid that would kill him six days later, was for a copy of the latest Fenimore Cooper.

Where will Protagonist have been born?

Francis Phelan.

Tolstoy ranked Guy de Maupassant second only to Hugo as the great European writer of his day.

The eruption of Santorin, ca. 1475 B.C., with its inconceivable tidal waves, is almost surely what ended Minoan civilization in Crete. Was it also the pillar of fire and the parting of the waters during the Exodus from Egypt?

Pharaoh’s pursuing host inundated on lower ground?

Egon Schiele died in an influenza epidemic.

Mel Ott died in a car crash.

Whisky per tutti!

Like Socrates, Aristotle was charged with impiety late in life. But went into exile rather than stand trial.

Refusing to allow Athens to sin twice against philosophy, being how he put it.

Ye gods, what sound is this?

Can Chloe, heavenly Chloe, piss?

Nobody ever laid it down without wishing it were longer. Said Johnson of
Robinson Crusoe.

Now and again, a fragment, still, flitting through Protagonist’s consciousness? Jacqueline du Pre, a Boccherini concerto?

Assia Wevill, for whom Ted Hughes left Sylvia Plath, committed suicide the same way Plath did.

With the difference that she gassed the child she had had by Hughes as well.

Homo Ludens.

Columbus swore to the end he was in India.

Xanthippe.

A novel of intellectual reference and allusion, so to speak minus much of the novel?

Or is he in some peculiar way thinking of an autobiography?

Saint Jude, patron saint of desperate causes.

Profoundly dependent on chloral, Dante Gabriel Rossetti barely skirted madness in his later years.

Or did not always skirt it.

Every character in
Hamlet.

If not crazy, then criminal, Chateaubriand said.

Did or did not Dostoievsky once rape a young girl in a bathhouse?

As long ago as in 1350, in Florence, Taddeo Gaddi could complain that the art of painting was in pathetic decline.

Since the death of Giotto, he would have been talking about.

Heloise and Abelard are buried in a single sepulchre at Père Lachaise.

In Book XVI of the
Iliad,
Apollo wrenches off Patroclus’s armor, leading to the latter’s death.

Little more than two hundred lines later, Hector is shown stripping the same armor from Patroclus’s corpse.

Music has here entombed a rich treasure but still fairer hopes.

O happy dagger!

It is only the man whose intellect is clouded by his sexual impulses who could give the name of the fair sex to that undersized, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped and short-legged race.

Said Schopenhauer.

Three of Wittgenstein’s brothers committed suicide.

Three of Wittgenstein’s father’s sons committed suicide.

There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing. Said Mark Rothko.

Polly Garter. Rosie Probert. Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard.

Alone, what did Bloom feel?

Tulsi Das was born into a family of beggars, and abandoned. And said that as a boy he sometimes lived on scraps thrown to dogs.