A novel of intellectual reference and allusion, so to speak minus much of the novel?
Or is he in some peculiar way thinking of an autobiography?
Saint Jude, patron saint of desperate causes.
Profoundly dependent on chloral, Dante Gabriel Rossetti barely skirted madness in his later years.
Or did not always skirt it.
Every character in Hamlet.
If not crazy, then criminal, Chateaubriand said.
Did or did not Dostoievsky once rape a young girl in a bathhouse?
As long ago as in 1350, in Florence, Taddeo Gaddi could complain that the art of painting was in pathetic decline.
Since the death of Giotto, he would have been talking about.
Heloise and Abelard are buried in a single sepulchre at Père Lachaise.
In Book XVI of the Iliad,Apollo wrenches off Patroclus’s armor, leading to the latter’s death.
Little more than two hundred lines later, Hector is shown stripping the same armor from Patroclus’s corpse.
Music has here entombed a rich treasure but still fairer hopes.
O happy dagger!
It is only the man whose intellect is clouded by his sexual impulses who could give the name of the fair sex to that undersized, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped and short-legged race.
Said Schopenhauer.
Three of Wittgenstein’s brothers committed suicide.
Three of Wittgenstein’s father’s sons committed suicide.
There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing. Said Mark Rothko.
Polly Garter. Rosie Probert. Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard.
Alone, what did Bloom feel?
Tulsi Das was born into a family of beggars, and abandoned. And said that as a boy he sometimes lived on scraps thrown to dogs.
Frans Hals was eighty-five when he painted The Regents of the Old Men ys Almshouse.
And living on charity himself.
Delenda est Carthago.
Tacitus was an anti-Semite.
How would the woman have lost her leg?
Does Reader remember with any certainty which leg it was?
Was Santorin also the origin of the Atlantis myth?
In Walter Scott’s The Antiquary,there are two Tuesdays in one week.
And the sun once sets in the east.
Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief
The name of the slough was Despond.
Blake was buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave.
Kavitavali.
For six years, in his twenties, Edward Elgar conducted a band in a lunatic asylum.
Rilke wrote most of the Duino Elegies,and the Sonnets to Orpheus,in less than one month.
Thera.
Enrico Caruso was once arrested for pinching a woman in the monkey house of the Central Park Zoo.
Has it crossed Reader’s mind to let someone Protagonist had known be buried at the cemetery?
Who?
Protagonist drawn there out of what unlikely sentiment?
Wastebasket.
Nordahl Grieg failed to return from a bombing mission over Berlin in 1943.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery failed to return from a reconnaissance flight over occupied France in 1944.
V. Gordon Childe committed suicide.
The bass arias of Sarastro in The Magic Flute.Which Shaw called the only music that would not sound out of place in the mouth of God.
San Pedro de Macon’s, Dominican Republic. Where Leroy Paige and Joshua Gibson, Jr., and James Bell and others spent a winter in 1937.
Erastus Corning II.
Colley Cibber. Nicholas Rowe. Laurence Eusden. Nahum Tate. Thomas Warton. William Whitehead. Thomas Shad-well. Henry J. Pye.
Laureates, all.
Someone nodded hello to Raskolnikov on the street yesterday.
Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.
Or of no describable genre?
A seminonfictional semifiction? Cubist?
Also in part a distant cousin innumerable times removed of A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake?
Obstinately cross-referential and of cryptic interconnective syntax in any case.
And as an incidental personal challenge, letting none of its intellectual mishegaasbe material Reader has ever used anywhere else.
Lector Ludens.
Henry Purcell was Gerard Manley Hopkins’s favorite composer.
Bricolage.
Yeats could never finish reading Ulysses.
Poetry is not written with ideas, Degas, it is written with words.
Mohammed was an anti-Semite.
Literate people who can spend hours in one’s home without a single glance at the titles on the bookshelves.
F. R. Leavis was so severely shell-shocked as a stretcher-bearer in World War I that for a time he was incapable of speech.
Gypo Nolan.
Ite, missa est.
You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.
Said Charles Darwin’s father.
Robin Hyde committed suicide.
Evelyn Waugh was found dead on a bathroom floor.
Protagonist having come upon his own name on one of the graves, though with meaningless remote dates?
And?
Wastebasket.
The Lord of the Flieswas rejected by twenty-one publishers.
The first time I saw Wystan Auden his socks didn’t match.
Herophilia, the Sibyl at Cumae, who lived a thousand years. And wished to die.
As Eliot discovered in Petronius.
Though how is Reader aware that while Cumae no longer exists the Sibyl’s cave still does?