Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels — bring home.
It cost Baudelaire five years of letters and poems to coax Madame Sabatier into bed. Once. Whatever calamity occurred, the affair was terminated on the same night.
Cold in the earth, and fifteen wild Decembers
From those brown hills have melted into spring.
Arnold Schoenberg was once turned down for a Guggenheim fellowship.
Pier della Vigna committed suicide after Frederick II had him blinded. Dante confronts him with much sympathy in the Inferno.
Raymond Radiguet wrote Devil in the Fleshat seventeen. And was dead at twenty.
Henry James was bored by Crime and Punishment.
Wagner was an anti-Semite.
Mariano Azuela, as a physician, rode with Pancho Villa.
Dies Irae.
Kafka laughed repeatedly when he was reading his own work.
Milena Jesenska died at Ravensbriick.
The one describes what has happened, the other what might. Hence poetry is something more philosophical and serious than history.
Dasjudentum in derMusik.
Humphrey Cobb was wounded, and gassed twice, in World War I. Paths of Glorywas his only book.
At the gatehouse, the window near which Protagonist generally chooses to sit looks out on the graves rather than on the street.
With snow, the ranks of still white stone can assume an almost occult unreality.
Frequently he will walk the nearby deserted streets in snow.
Ignis fatuus.
Moses spoke with a stutter. As did Virgil.
And Somerset Maugham. And Philip Larkin.
Raphael’s birth and death both occurred on Good Friday.
I hope you are getting some exercise and listening to music, dear Salman.
Early in the Iliad,on the battlements above the Scaean Gate, Helen points out the several Greek chieftains for the benefit of King Priam.
After the siege has ostensibly been in effect for a decade.
Bartlebooth.
Zelda Fitzgerald died in a fire in a mental hospital in Ashe-ville, North Carolina.
Our lives are haunted by a Georgia slattern, because a London cutpurse went unhung.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko was once married to Bella Akhmadulina.
Does one know today with whom Columbus sailed when he discovered America?
Said Freud after his break with Jung.
The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines.
Beatrice Silverman.
Adele Morales.
Lady Jean Campbell.
Beverly Bentley.
Carol Stevens.
Norris Church.
Romain Roiland, on Kathe KoUwitz: the voice of the silence of the sacrificed.
Leave the bum be. He’s just drunk.
October 12, 1492. At 2 A.M., the lookout on the Pinta.
Named Rodrigo de Triana.
No light; but rather darkness visible.
Leonard Warren collapsed and died, on stage, during a performance of La Forza del Destinoat the Metropolitan Opera.
Even in the worst of snows, Protagonist is hatless.
Elizabeth Shaw Melville:
Herman has taken to writing poetry. You need not tell anyone, for you know how such things get around.
Watching abstractedly among the ancient oaks as the entire cemetery commences to disappear.
Bertha Mason. Thornfield Hall.
Semper incumbebat libris.Spoken of Abelard.
Not realizing that one’s future is already one’s present even as that too is dissolving into past.
This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.Two years after the book’s appearance Borowski committed suicide.
Via gas.
Raymond Chandler was so obsessive about typo-free manuscripts that to cut down on the amount of his retyping he finally worked on half pages.
Edmund Wilson once proposed marriage to Djuna Barnes.
How often does the woman come to the grave?
What sort of regularity is there in the visits?
Does she sometimes fail to come?
Roald Dahl was an anti-Semite.
The 1941 Concise Cambridge History of English Literaturesaid that no one would ever read Ulysseseven if copies were given away.
Protagonist shoveling some of the snow? Into and along the pathways?
Hers?
Gitanjalu
Soutine died in Paris in 1943. As a Jew under the German occupation he could be given only the most unobtrusive of funerals. Picasso and Cocteau followed his coffin, however.
Simonides concluded it was better to be rich than wise.
Since I notice that the wise spend most of their time at the doorsteps of the rich.
Paula Modersohn-Becker was dead at thirty-one.
Set ye Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle, and retire ye from him, so that he may be smitten, and die.
Beniamino Gigli was once an apprentice in a tailor shop.
Benjamin Jowett said he read Pickwick Papersat least twice every year.
Not one of the philosophic essays of Charles Sanders Peirce appeared in book form in his lifetime.
Fatwa.
Myles na Gopaleen.
The opening sentence of Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford.
Proust and Henri Bergson were cousins by marriage.
Kant knew no music. And said that reading novels diluted the mind.
Though I never saw him, or had any personal communication with him, now that he is suddenly dead I realize that he was nearer, dearer, and more important to me than anyone else.
Said Tolstoy of Dostoievsky.
No greater man ever walked the earth than he.
Said Michelangelo of Dante.
Can Reader do anything unusual with the name he puts on the stone at which the woman kneels?