Is there a woman again after all?
Price of Admission Your Mind. Not for Everybody.
Alborak.
A man should never face the sun when urinating, Hesiod says.
Not to offend the sun god Helios, presumably being why.
Madame de La Fayette. Madame de Sévigné. Madame de Staël.
The Rev. G. A. Studdert Kennedy.
For forty-some years, Valéry awoke at 5 A.M. to make notes on what he thought of as the dawning of consciousness.
A big book, a big evil.
Said Callimachus.
During a literary dispute about epic poetry with Apollonius of Rhodes.
Who had once been his pupil.
At Alexandria.
The reason for your complaint lies, it seems to me, in the constraint your intellect imposes on your imagination. Said Schiller to a friend who had difficulty writing.
Sappho with white hair?
Sculpture is what you bump into when you back up to look at a painting.
Said Barnett Newman.
What moved thee, or how couldst thou take such journeys into the fanatic Arabia?
Dora Carrington committed suicide with a borrowed revolver.
Leonora Carrington was a better painter.
Ma in Ispagna son già milk e tre!
Capodistria.
The Laura whom Petrarch saw in a church at Avignon at twenty-three, and spent the rest of his life writing poems about, may very likely have never given him a thought.
Not only having been married, but already in progress toward eleven children.
Though Dante claims to have seen Beatrice no more than twice himself. While immortalizing her even more extraordinarily.
Boadicea committed suicide with poison.
Athenaeus. Seven volumes in the Loeb Classical Library.
Also in part a distant cousin innumerable times removed of the Tibetan Book of the Dead?
Of the cataloguing of the Cairo Geniza?
Reader and this notion of his.
Or does the absence of narrative progression plus that cross-circuited schematism possibly render it even a poem of sorts?
Not to add avec exactly 333 interspersed unattributed quotations awaiting annotation?
For a time, Beaumont and Fletcher actually lived together. Evidently so intimate that they indiscriminately wore each other’s clothing.
And with but one wench in the house between them, in John Aubrey’s phrase.
Fletcher alone being a cousin of Phineas and Giles, however.
A recording of Bella figlia deWamore, with Beniamino Gigli, Amelita Galli-Curci, Louise Homer, and Giuseppe de Luca. Dated December 1927.
Ergo, by one chance in thirty-one, possibly recorded on the day Protagonist was born.
Hugo de Sade. S
imon de’ Bardi.
Camus called Faulkner the greatest modern novelist.
But then named Pylon and Sanctuary as the best of his books.
Living a full life span, parents who will still have died too soon to learn what their children will truly become.
The identities of their ultimate defeats.
Han Van Meegeren was found out only when he was accused of having sold Dutch masterpieces to Hermann Goering in World War II. To prove they had been rather less than that, he diligently forged one additional Vermeer.
A. E. Ellis was who?
Harold Patrick Reiser.
Carrying groceries, a newspaper, an inexpensive bottle of wine. Protagonist evading splattered slush from passing vehicles at the highway.
Then along the barely discernable path to the room that had once been a garage at the rear of the less than beguiling house.
Room, or rooms?
Conrad Aiken’s father shot his wife and then himself. Leaving it to Aiken, at eleven, to climb a flight of stairs after hearing the shots and walk in on the bodies.
Katherine Anne Porter was an anti-Semite.
Lady Caroline Lamb.
Annabella Milbanke.
Jane Elizabeth Scott, Lady Oxford.
Augusta Leigh.
Claire Clairmont.
Marianna Segati.
Margarita Cogni.
Teresa Guiccioli.
Sergei Rachmaninoff was so depressed at the failure of his first symphony that he gave up composing. And had to undergo hypnosis to start again.
D. H. Lawrence’s father was a coal miner.
Henry Moore’s father likewise.
Much as the Nazis tried to make use of him, Nietzsche had in fact referred to earlier German anti-Semitism as both damnable and poisonous.
Beckett wrote Waiting for Godot in French, not English. Godot does not verbally suggest Dieu.
Laura and Beatrice. The latter having died at twenty-four.
A woman kneeling at a grave. A woman walking on a beach.
Der Tod und das Madchen.
Who does walk the winter beach at water’s edge in the distance far ahead of Protagonist?
He is completely alone here now.
Memento mori.
Emmanuel Ringelblum and his wife and young son were executed in the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto in 1944. Some of his Notes had been buried in milk cans.
Jane Ellen Harrison.
Courbet’s Sleeping Women.
Bernard Buffet’s Sleeping Women.
The Knave of Sceptres, Reversed: 111 News, Displeasure, Chagrin, Worry.
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
It is impossible for man’s happiness to be in this world. Said Aquinas.
Skokie, Illinois.
Missolonghi.
Jacqueline Picasso shot herself.
For Protagonist’s again distant literary past:
Malcolm Lowry: I have a funny story to tell you, about something that happened while you were out.
Protagonist: Happened? Oh, damn, I can smell it all over the apartment. You didn’t drink my shaving lotion?
Courbet’s Origin of the World.
Carl Sandburg was the one poet who would probably gain from translation.
Said Frost.
Philip Larkin was an anti-Semite.
Areopagitica.
Heiligenstadt.
He hath consumed a whole night in lying looking to his great toe, about which he hath seen Tartars and Turks, Romans and Carthaginians, fight in his imagination.
Francis William Bourdillon. Edward Rowland Sill. Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Winifred M. Letts.
Carel Fabritius was killed at thirty-two in a gunpowder depot explosion.
Not sorting books and phonograph records merely, but the narrowing residue of an entire life? Papers, files of correspondence?
Photographs of anyone other than his children, are there?