Which flows into the Avon.
Jimmy Whistler, he was naturally called.
Rubens often had the Latin classics read to him while he was working.
Canova later did the same.
Schopenhauer’s first published work was his dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason.
His novelist mother said it sounded like something for druggists.
George Santayana was an anti-Semite.
It is virtually certain that Lucrezia Borgia never poisoned anyone. Or committed incest. Victor Hugo and Gaetano Donizetti notwithstanding.
Why is the red wheelbarrow beside the white chickens rather than vice versa?
Enter Caesar, in his nightgown.
Hannah Wilke’s final exhibition.
Randall Jarrell is assumed a suicide. He would appear to have stepped quite deliberately into the path of the car that killed him.
Well he kept her there in a bath
With a gallon of lysol in a bath
Gerald died that afternoon.
Victor Hugo, hélas!
Utrillo once pawned Modigliani’s only decent clothes to buy wine.
Ernest L. Thayer majored in philosophy under William James at Harvard.
C. P. Cavafy lived with his mother until he was thirty-six.
No, no! said the Queen. Sentence first — verdict afterwards.
The man himself lay in the bed.
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was killed in an infantry charge in France in 1915.
T. S. Eliot’s father manufactured bricks.
William H. McGuffey.
William H. Bonney.
Levi-Strauss:
The invention of melody is the supreme mystery of man.
Jackson Pollock once held a job cleaning bird droppings from statues in New York parks.
Work out your own salvation with diligence.
For all his madness, it would turn out that Holderlin had furtively kept all of Suzette Gontard’s letters throughout the forty years between her death and his own. Eighty years after that they would come to be published.
And somewhere men are laughing, and
somewhere children shout.
Tennyson said that scissorswas the one word in the English language he could not rhyme.
Raphael, Caravaggio, Watteau, Van Gogh, and Toulouse-Lautrec each died at thirty-seven.
Ronsard was so prodigally admired during his lifetime that both Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots sent him gifts. And then was unread for two centuries.
Boswell’s practice of scribbling down every other word Johnson said irritated any number of their acquaintances. Ill-bred, Hester Thrale called him.
W. H. Davies lost a foot while jumping a freight train.
Men never do evil so completely and so cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
Said Pascal.
Pythagoras claimed to remember visiting Hades between his several alleged reincarnations.
And having seen Homer hanging from a tree and Hesiod in chains because of their disrespect for the gods.
In Gargantua,Epistemon makes the same visit. Reporting that Achilles is a beggar, Hector supports himself by scraping pots in a kitchen, Helen is a madame, Alexander darns socks, Cleopatra sells onions, and King Arthur cleans grease out of hatbands.
According to Xenophanes, Pythagoras also once asked someone to stop striking a puppy because he recognized the voice of a dead friend in its yelping.
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
At least one more for Protagonist’s background?
Again then, not infinitely long past. A woman named Susan, who edited books. But also snapped some photographs of him that will presumably now remain the last he will ever have had taken.
Brett Ashley.
Anna Wickham committed suicide.
Stephen Foster died after a fall in a rooming house on the Bowery.
He owned thirty-eight cents.
Seneca was an anti-Semite.
Jacques Derrida. Roland Barthes. Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Roman Jakobson. Michel Leiris. Julia Kristeva. Phillipe Sollers. Louis Althusser. Paul Ricoeur.
All variously attended seminars of Jacques Lacan’s.
Yannis Ritsos. Iannis Xenakis.
Jeanne Hebuterne, with child, jumped from a window on the morning after Modigliani’s death.
I am growing older. I have been in hospitals. Are there things to be put down?
David Smith died in a car crash.
The sitter for the Mona Lisawas one Lisa Gherardini, wife of a Francesco del Giocondo.
Presumably her eyebrows were plucked.
James Russell Lowell was an anti-Semite.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.
Napoleon told Goethe he had read The Sorrows of Young Wertherseven times.
Trying to articulate for himself precisely why or even when it was that he commenced to fall out of touch.
Not to call. Not to go. Not to do.
Or was he not even that fully aware of the process until he found it to be a fait accompli?
The sound of a door shutting is heard from below.
Cosimo Tura died in a poorhouse.
Discordia concors.
Anne Hathaway was twenty-six when she told Shakespeare she was pregnant.
Shakespeare was eighteen.
Casta diva.
Aristotle was born in the first year of the ninety-ninth Olympiad and died in the third year of the hundred and fourteenth.
Ergo having been either sixty-two or sixty-three.
He may also have died a suicide. Diogenes Laertius says he drank wolfsbane. Though most other sources blame chronic indigestion.
The Poemsof Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell sold two copies.
Guido Reni.
Who was once as widely admired as Ronsard.
The reign of the shopwindow, Ortega called it as long ago as in 1930.