Involved with Madame Blavatsky, Yeats once burned a rose and seriously watched all night for its ghost to appear.
Was Brahms the father of Clara Schumann’s last child?
Vittoria Colonna. To whom Michelangelo wrote sonnets.
John Donne delivered George Herbert’s mother’s funeral sermon.
Malcolm Lowry probably died from an overdose of sodium amytal tablets. A coroner’s verdict read misadventure rather than suicide, however, because, drunk, he had also choked on his own vomit.
Robert Walser spent his last twenty-seven years in a mental institution.
Rousseau’s mistress, Therese Levasseur, was an illiterate hotel maid. She and Rousseau had five children, all of whom he left anonymously at orphanages.
She also went to bed with James Boswell. Exactly thirteen times, according to the latter’s compulsive journal-keeping.
Tout, au monde, existe pour aboutir à un livre.
As a writer, he chews more than he bites off. Said Whistler of Henry James.
Diva. Thea.
Brahma. Vishnu. Shiva.
Joyce, Hesse, Mann, and Rilke all died in Switzerland. Stefan George, Robert Musil, and Erich Maria Remarque all died in Switzerland.
Myth, Religion, and Mother Right.
Robert Burns’s wife not only made light of his interminable infidelities, and took in one of his illegitimate children, but ventured that he should have had at least two wives to begin with.
Thalatta, thalatta!
One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing, Wilde said.
When Hemingway committed suicide, it was by leaning to press his forehead against the barrels of a shotgun braced at the floor.
Thirty-odd years earlier his father had used a revolver.
Thomas Babington Macaulay and Horatius at that bridge to the contrary, Lars Porsena did conquer Rome.
By the nine gods he swore.
Has Reader made any sort of decision about how long Protagonist’s small money will last?
And?
Else Lasker-Schuler’s tombstone at the Mount of Olives was uprooted when that part of Jerusalem was taken by Arab forces in 1948. The grave was never again located.
In his mid-twenties, Verdi lost his wife and two infant children within a space of two years.
In the decade before his death, Ad Reinhardt painted nothing but black canvases.
Alessandro Stradella was murdered.
no symbols where none intended
Benvenuto Cellini was once released from prison, after having killed, because a Pope needed some engraving.
And was thrown back in after insulting the Pope’s taste.
Degas’s mother was born in New Orleans.
Thou sayest it.
Protagonist’s obsolescent phonograph. And scarred long-playing records, never surrendered for compact discs.
Nor will there be a VCR.
Can Protagonist think of a single film that interests him as much as the three-hundredth best book he ever read?
Ecole Normale Superieure.
May 30, 1431:
Rouen, Rouen, O thou, my last dwelling place!
The devious-cruising Rachel.
Pierre Reverdy spent thirty years as a lay brother in a Benedictine monastery.
Though with his Poems in Frank O’Hara’s pocket.
From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.
The Bay Psalm Book.
Keats wrote the four great odes in one month.
Taking details for the urn from a painting by Claude Lorrain.
Ernestine Schumann-Heink had sons fighting on both sides in World War I.
The son fighting for the Germans was killed.
We are lost. We have burned a saint.
Guido Cavalcanti died of malaria.
Kazantzakis’s sequel to the Odyssey contains 33,333 lines.
Clara Westhoff.
Emily Dickinson told Thomas Wentworth Higginson that she had not read Whitman. But had heard he was disgraceful.
Has Reader decided if Protagonist will have ever seen Becky Sharp in later life? When did he last see Daisy Buchanan?
Another, for him?
Here, from not that long ago. A woman named Liz, who sculpted. And with a face so finely boned that even past midlife the chiaroscuro in certain light could make his breath catch.
Temple Drake. Constance Chatterley.
Though where now is Connie Chatterley too then?
Plato left behind seven different versions of the opening sentence of the Republic.
André Gide was an anti-Semite.
Vitelli.
Chick Stahl committed suicide by drinking carbolic acid.
In his mid-thirties, Edwin Arlington Robinson was working ten hours a day on the construction of a New York subway. Checking materials for twenty cents an hour.
Bishop Berkeley once lived in Rhode Island.
Franz Marc was killed by a grenade at Verdun.
Youth.
For Exmoor.
Could the entire town to all intents have become a depressed area? Any local industry extinct, stores or even certain private dwellings boarded up?
Surely then conveying a sense almost of recession into the past?
The robin chirps in the chinaberry tree.
I went down yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon the son of Ariston, that I might offer up my prayers to the goddess; and also because I wanted to see in what manner they would celebrate the festival, which was a new thing.
Jonathan Edwards was an anti-Semite.
While acknowledging he had never met one.
It strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.
The only twentieth-century novelist from whom he always learned something, Lionel Trilling called E. M. Forster.
E. M. Forster was thirty years old before he knew the facts of life.
Infinite riches in a little room.
Menander would drown at the Piraeus.
Virgil worked on the Aeneid for eleven years.
And said near his death that it was not finished and should be burned.
Joseph Michael Medwick.
Clover Adams committed suicide.
Basquiat.
Sinon. Who lied.
The Lover, which Reader little more than skimmed. Yet tones, images of light and shadow, loss. Abstractly lingering.
Gulley Jimson.
The sun don’t shine on the same dog’s ass all the time.
Quintus of Smyrna, the Posthomerica. Which is to say, what happened next. From the burial of Hector to the shipwreck of the Greeks en route home. Thought to be fourth century A.D.