every one of his bills — electric, phone, whatever — on the same day that it arrived.
Boccaccio, one of the few intellectuals in the late Middle Ages determined to recover ancient manuscripts — but all too often coming upon them in monastery storerooms never locked, with pages torn out by the fistful, with what remains refuse-strewn and indecipherable. At Monte Cassino grass even grows in the loft where windows stand open.
Boccaccio bursts into tears.
Cavafy was forty-one before his first book was published — containing fourteen poems.
Remembering that in the Iliad, as rife with detailed violence as any war narrative ever written, not one captured Greek or Trojan is ever tortured.
— And that the only Southerner hanged by the Union during the Civil War was the commanding officer at Andersonville — where inconceivably barbarous conditions had cost 12,000 incarcerated Northerners their lives.
Teaching at New York University before its graduate art program had been fully established, during Prohibition, Erwin Panofsky sometimes met with students at a Fifty-Second Street speakeasy.
Juvenile trash.
Edmund Wilson dismissed the sum of J. R. R. Tolkien as.
Alicia Markova almost never in her career weighed more than ninety-eight pounds.
Was it Brigid Brophy who gave up on a certain Virginia Woolf novel when she discovered that Woolf believed one needed a corkscrew to open a bottle of champagne?
February 25, 1547, Vittoria Collona died on.
The first time that Ethel Waters sang Stormy Weather, in a show at the Cotton Club, she was given no fewer than twelve encores.
A Metropolitan Opera audience once demanded so many curtain calls after a Renata Tebaldi Desdemona that she finally came back out with her coat and hat on.
All the fruit will fall from any tree beneath which a menstruating woman happens to sit.
Says Pliny’s Natural History.
While also announcing that women who sneeze after making love are almost certain to miscarry.
The film Carmen Jones, with Dorothy Dandridge.
In which the dubbed lyric soprano voice is that of a very young Marilyn Horne.
The 1915 Cecil B. DeMille film of Carmen itself, with Geraldine Farrar.
Silent.
Stephen Crane was officially cited for bravery while a foreign correspondent during the Spanish-American War. At Guantánamo.
Will no one free me of this turbulent priest?
Canterbury, Joseph Conrad is buried in.
The only exercise I get these days is walking behind the coffins of my friends who took exercise.
Said Peter O’Toole in his late sixties.
Karl Marx regularly read Shakespeare aloud to his young children.
????A scheme of Robert Boyle’s, roughly 330 years ago, as recounted in Aubrey’s Brief Lives:
At his owne costs and chardges, he gott translated and printed the New Testament into Arabique, to send into the Mahometan countreys.
Every word of importance is already in the Koran. Anything in any other books can only be pernicious.
Having been the Muslim rationalization for destroying all 700,000 volumes in the great library at Alexandria in 642.
Is T. S. Eliot the only poet one can think of who could have spent a year on his own in Paris at twenty-three — and managed to have no sexual encounters whatever?
You have but two topics, yourself and me, and I’m sick of both.
Johnson once told Boswell.
I come of a people who do not even acknowledge Jesus Christ. Why am I supposed to acknowledge Abstract Expressionism?
Asked Jack Levine.
The porphyry disc near the center of the Piazza della Signoria in Florence, marking the spot where Savonarola was burned at the stake in 1498.
The statue of Giordano Bruno on the spot in the Piazza Campo de’ Fiori, in Rome, where he was burned in 1600.
Not distinguished looking in any way — neither handsome nor ugly, neither fat nor thin, neither tall nor short.
Said George Eliot of Dickens.
A peculiar face — not handsome, very ugly indeed.
Said Charlotte Brontë — of Thackeray.
No course in Shakespeare was taught at Harvard until as late as the 1870s.
Quentin de La Tour, harmlessly deranged in his later years — and frequently seen talking to trees.
Another of Novelist’s economic-status epiphanies:
Walking four or five blocks out of his way, and back, to save little more than nickels on some common household item.
While needing to stop to rest at least two or three times en route.
Writers are the beggars of Western society.
Said Octavio Paz.
There is no way of being a creative writer in America without being a loser.
Said Nelson Algren.
Finding oneself momentarily startled by a reference in Gorky’s diaries to Tolstoy chatting with Chekhov.
On the telephone.
Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night.
Says the King James translation of Psalms 91:5.
Thou shalt not nede to be afrayed for eny bugges by night.
Says Miles Coverdale’s earlier