Are there manuscripts?
Pliny the Elder died of asphyxiation after landing a boat to get a closer view of the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D.
Fritz Wunderlich died in a fall down a flight of stairs.
Is there a typewriter?
John Heminges and Henry Condell.
And why has Reader only this tardily determined that Protagonist will have had five or six books dedicated to him in that other incarnation also?
Even if he will not be certain he has copies of all of these in among his cartons any longer.
I think: Is it the blue dressing gown, or the white one? That’s very important. I must find that out — it’s very important.
Parmigianino died mad.
Anactoria.
Alan Ladd committed suicide.
My younger and shallower and vainer brother, William James spoke of Henry as.
So worthy a friend.
Chaucer was an anti-Semite.
Kafka died in 1924. All three of his younger sisters would later be incinerated by the Nazis.
Three.
Zinka Milanov. The Nile aria.
Christopher Caudwell was killed while covering a Loyalist retreat at the Jarama River in 1937. On his first day in combat.
Paideia.
Lucia Joyce, institutionalized, when told of her father’s death:
What is he doing underground, that idiot?
Henri Heine, he was naturally called in his decades in Paris.
Kneeling at a grave. Walking a beach.
Eternal devotion beside the point, after Beatrice’s death Dante had at least four children by the never-spoken-of Gemma Donati.
James Joyce’s daughter.
A forty-year-old Olympia portable, in fact. Not even electric.
Modeled after whose?
Pietro Torrigiano took a hammer to a Madonna he had sculpted in Seville when he was not paid what he anticipated.
And was jailed by the Inquisition for sacrilege.
Where in a masterpiece of spiting one’s face he starved himself to death.
Who’s the coon?
Asked Wallace Stevens re a photo of Gwendolyn Brooks.
Proust so admired Whistler that he once stole one of his gloves at a reception for a souvenir.
Gala Eluard, who became Gala Dali. Her affair with Max Ernst. Her affair with Giorgio de Chirico. And cetera, when married or otherwise.
When was the last time Protagonist actually did sit down to a full meal at a better restaurant?
When was the last time he let himself hail a taxi?
Edith Wharton was an anti-Semite.
Máquina de escribir.
Machine à écrire.
Macchina da scrivere.
Nothing bores me more than political novels and the literature of social intent, Nabokov said.
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
Fleeing the start of World War II, Gwen John collapsed and died on a street in Dieppe.
Josef Mengele, M.D.
John Gould Fletcher drowned himself.
Dickens was certain after reading only her first novel that the name George Eliot belonged to a woman.
O, rocks! she said. Tell us in plain words.
By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
In a lawsuit that prevented him from teaching in New York in 1940, Bertrand Russell’s writings were described as lecherous, libidinous, lustful, venerous, erotomaniac, aphrodisiac, irreverent, narrow-minded, untruthful, and bereft of moral fiber. Unquote.
May, 1886:
Little cousins,
Called back.
Emily
Vladimir Mayakovsky had an illegitimate daughter in the United States.
I am become death, the shatterer of worlds. Recited J. Robert Oppenheimer from the Bhagavad-Gita at Alamogordo.
Schreibmaschine.
When was the last time Protagonist took a trip? Simply went somewhere?
Principia Mathematica. Logic and Knowledge. The Analysis of Mind. The Analysis of Matter.
And over this loathsome and grotesque mask of death, the hair, the beautiful hair, still blazed like sunlight and flowed downwards in rippling gold.
Tolstoy thought King Lear so bad a play as to be not worth discussion.
Vachel Lindsay committed suicide by drinking Lysol.
Is it evident to Reader that he has lost interest in the idea of doing anything with the women upstairs?
Do you know that the king had not even heard of Wittgenstein!
Brahms died of cancer of the liver.
Why do you always wear black?
I am in mourning for my life.
There was once an actual portrait of Petrarch’s Laura, by Simone Martini. However it is long lost.
Within two years of Stephen Crane’s death in the Black Forest, Cora had returned to Jacksonville and opened a brothel.
Beyond the dunes. Flotsam. Odds and ends.
William the Conqueror came before Richard III. Announced Shakespeare through a dark window to Burbage.
Carlos Arruza died in a car crash.
In one of Protagonist’s own unread books, perhaps? Why does Reader think of him sensing he should remember something about someone else who often walked along a beach?
Teresa Stich-Randall.
Regine Olsen.
Ezra Pound was an anti-Semite.
All the Jew part of the Bible is black evil, an Ezra nicety.
Protagonist the Penniless. Protagonist the Hermit.
Deus vult?
Bachelard. Baudrillard. Blanchot. Barthes. Bataille.
Sorting, packing.
Toward what final bleak contemplation amid the disarray?
I have read Mr. Scott’s book fourteen times; and it is a rather tiresome book.
Said someone of The Architecture of Humanism.
Condorcet probably committed suicide.
The first writer known to condemn slavery is Euripides.
We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow.
If forced to choose, Reader assumes, he would rescue a cat from a burning building before a Giacometti.
September 28, 1891, 12:30 A.M. 104 East 26th Street, New York. Cardiac dilatation, mitral regurgitation, contributing asthenia.
Melville.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Va, pensiero, sull’ ali dorate.
Why is virtually all landscape in Andrea Mantegna comprised of rock?
How many times had Reader heard the Smetana before he discovered that the Moldau was a river?