physics at the University of Chile.
Miroslav Holub’s —
Chief research immunologist at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences.
Dr. Franz Kafka, the gravestone names him.
Apropos of his Doctor of Laws degree.
Superimposed metastatic disease would be difficult to exclude in this region.
Reads a gladsome evaluation in the analysis of Novelist’s most recent bone scan.
So debilitatingly paranoid was Kurt Gödel in his later years, over imagined plots to poison him, that he essentially refused to eat.
And died weighing no more than sixty-five pounds.
Art cannot rescue anybody from anything.
Says the narrator of a Gilbert Sorrentino story.
The world has no pity on a man who can’t do or produce something it thinks worth money.
Says Gissing in New Grub Street.
And to this day is every scholar poor:
Gross gold from them runs headlong to the boor.
Says Marlowe, in Hero and Leander.
October 8, 1963, Remedios Varo died on.
We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant.
Pointed out the disaffected Muslim Wafa Sultan in 2006.
As Dickensian as anything Dickens ever wrote.
Graham Greene labeled W. C. Fields.
Maidservant gallantries, Constanza accused Mozart of.
Flaubert soils the brook in which he washes.
Said the critic Saint-Victor of L’Éducation sentimentale.
M. Flaubert n’est pas un écrivain.
Said Le Figaro of Madame Bovary.
Why, this is very midsummer madness.
We live not as we will — but as we can.
Said Menander.
Cocteau, meeting Diaghilev for the first time, and asking what he might do to involve himself in ballet —
Astonish me, Diaghilev tells him.
Demodocus, the blind bard whose songs of the fall of Troy evoke tears in Odyssey VIII.
Could he have perhaps been the source of the legend that Homer himself was blind?
Languidezza per il caldo — Languidly, because of the heat.
Suggests Vivaldi’s notation over the Summer segment of The Four Seasons.
For several hundred years, more than half a millennium after her death, coins bearing Sappho’s likeness were minted on Lesbos.
In all the centuries since history began, we know of no woman who can truly be said to rival her as a poet.
Said Strabo, equally as long after her era.
Rheumatic fever, Robert Burns died of.
The report that to keep him from sitting with a book for sixteen hours a day, Edmund Wilson’s parents bought him a baseball uniform. Which he happily put on — and sat in with a book for sixteen hours a day.
By way of an inheritance, Carl Jung’s wife was one of the most wealthy women in Europe.
Anyone who would employ the word diarrheic to describe a book as exactingly crafted in every line as Ulysses has either never read eleven consecutive words or possesses the literary perception of a rutabaga.
Ulysses. Diarrheic, unquote. Dale Peck.
Somewhat similarly, Roddy Doyle. A complete waste of time — Finnegans Wake.
Though in his instance at least acknowledging that he had read only three pages.
America’s Emily Dickinson dime?
Won’t you come into the garden? I would like my roses to see you.
Once said Richard Brinsley Sheridan to a pretty girl.
My whole life is messed up with people falling in love with me.
Once said Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Even more incomprehensible than the two-century neglect of a painter like Vermeer — the three centuries in which the music of Monteverdi was all but forgotten.
January 10, 1957, Gabriela Mistral died on.
Tolstoy’s ruined teeth.
Gogol’s.
Admire a small ship, but put your cargo in a large one.
Hesiod said.
Savonarola, in one of his inflammatory sermons, directs his words at contemporary artists:
I tell you, the Virgin dressed herself as a poor woman. And you represent her as a whore.
This approximately one hundred years before he might have been able to view Caravaggio’s version of her death — effected with such prototypal naturalism that her feet are not clean.
A critic. Someone who meddles with something that is none of his business.
Gauguin says Mallarmé said.
In flight from the Gestapo while a member of the French Resistance, Paul Eluard at one point hid for two months in an insane asylum.
Sartre’s The Respectful Prostitute was first produced in Paris precisely in the middle of a campaign against immorality.
And had to be advertised with the word Putain blacked out.
Homer. Euripides. Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
Being the works that Milton, blind, most frequently asked to have read to him.
Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen.
The last one that Borges asked to hear before his death.
October 17, 1973, Ingeborg Bachmann died on.
Sit in thy cell — and thy cell shall teach thee all things.
Said Saint Anthony.
Who evidently sat in his own for as long as twenty years without once taking any sort of bath — or even washing his face.
Lauritz Melchior and Helen Traubel, for years two of the Metropolitan’s central Wagnerians —