John Masefield was fourteen when he first went to sea.
David Alfaro Siqueiros once attempted to assassinate Trotsky.
Whoso pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvil, is right-wise king born of all England.
Verse deemed unsuitable to the state.
Is Noah’s drunkenness the earliest anywhere taken note of?
Avalokiteshvara.
Vanishing point.
She?
Marcel Proust collected signatures for petitions in protest against the conviction of Dreyfus.
Hugh Casey shot himself.
Saint John of Capistrano was an anti-Semite.
Fly’s Photograph Gallery.
Arthur Symons on Mallarme:
He made neither intrusion upon nor concession to those who, after all, were not obliged to read him.
Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe.
Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein.
Three quarks for Muster Mark!
Even in the solemn moments of the mass, when prayer should be the purest… when I should groan for what I have done, I sigh for what I have lost.
Ramon Mercader.
Goethe, to Eckermann: Have all the nations of the world since Euripides produced one dramatist worthy to hand him his slippers?
Apollinaire came extremely close to being permanently paralyzed by a head wound in World War I.
Once more before he dies Protagonist will read Moll Flanders.
My father’s a judge.
My mother pleaded her belly.
Sir Richard Burton, of the Kama Sutra,spoke twenty-nine languages.
Tchaikovsky was an anti-Semite.
Thomas Mann’s definition of a writer. Someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
Mrs. Hutchinson.
Harry Crosby shot himself in the head. After first shooting the young married woman with whom he was having an affair.
At sixteen, Montserrat Caballe was working in a handkerchief factory in Barcelona.
Plautus once worked in a flour mill.
Three years after Baudelaire’s death, the photographer Nadar glimpsed Jeanne Duval distantly, on crutches, on a Paris street.
There is no further word of her.
Protagonist obtusely hatless in these snows too?
Patterned after whom?
Faulkner died following a fall from a horse.
Like Keats’s father.
The Aeneidis rife with allusions to Homer, but also to Homeric criticism. It was Virgil’s assumption that his readers would recognize both.
Beiderbecke. Trumbauer.
The odd death of Emile Zola. From smoke inhalation, when a chimney in a bedroom fireplace backed up.
Dormir nonchalamment a V ombre de ses seins.
Hannibal committed suicide via poison.
Murray Gell-Mann.
The first person Dickens wanted to meet, on his first visit to America, was William Cullen Bryant.
Civilization and Its Distant Tents.
Cartons like an impermanent sculpture of found objects. On a stairway ending at a sealed-off door.
He had become a dirty bourgeois.
Lord, don’t help us. But don’t muck it up for us either.
Henry James most likely died a virgin. John Ruskin indisputably did.
Whistler was an anti-Semite.
Casals practiced Bach’s six suites for solo cello for twelve years before performing one in public.
Oh! do not add to my miseries by your constancy.
For Protagonist’s literary past:
Protagonist: Good Lord. Is that the same T-shirt of mine you put on when you were here six days ago?
Jack Kerouac: Oh, well. But I did have a shower.
Bhartrihari.
And money answereth all things.
Adrienne Rich’s husband committed suicide.
Elizabeth I did a translation of The Consolation of Philosophy.
As had Chaucer.
As had King Alfred.
Though in the latter’s instance into Anglo-Saxon.
Tending to forget that the account of the Good Samaritan, in Luke, is an anti-Semitic parable.
Tending to forget that Plato advocated totalitarianism.
La Noche Triste.
Aharon Appelfeld escaped from a Nazi labor camp at the age of eight. Eight. And spent three years hiding in the forests of Romania and the Ukraine.
Jerzy Kosinski did nothing of the kind.
Edith Metzger.
Anaxagoras committed suicide by starving himself.
In the first year of the eighty-eighth Olympiad.
And when asked near the end how he wished to be commemorated, said schoolchildren should be given a holiday.
In 1811 a huge Cimabue altarpiece of a Madonna and angels, which has been the Louvre’s finest thirteenth-century offering ever since, was bought in Tuscany for five francs.
0 lente, lente currite, noctis equi!
Was the diegetic diachronyof narration truly damaged by Flaubert, as Lyotard says?
Diegetic, dialogic, hegemonic. Privilege, as a verb. Foreground, as a verb. Valorize. Praxis. Simulacra. Metafiction. Logocentrism. Phallocentrism. Discourse. Signifier/signified. Aporia.
Late capitalism. Gynophobia.
Text.
None of the above.
Lang, Leaf, and Myers; Butcher and Lang. The King James Homer.
The Open Society and Its Enemies.
Protagonist has come to this place because he had no life back there at all.
Also tending to forget that character in The Plague,Joseph Grand? Who rewrites the same opening sentence for a novel eternally, with only minimal variations?
Justinian was an anti-Semite.
In 1959, in Mexico City, Reader happened upon a Shakespeare and Company Ulyssesfor pennies in a thieves’ market. Its front cover had faded and was detached, the spine and back cover were missing. Nor was it a first printing.