The Last Novel - By David Markson Page 0,28

windmills?

All cats are grey in the dark.

What would non-creative writing be?

George Steiner once casually wondered.

Musicke, the Elizabethan spelling was.

Hydeous. Swolne. Perswasion. Sinne. Subtill.

Brightnesse falls from the ayre.

He would not blow his nose without moralising on the state of the handkerchief industry.

Said Cyril Connolly of Orwell.

Billy Graham’s anti-Semitic exchange with Richard Nixon, as preserved on White House tapes.

E. M. Forster lived with his mother until her death when he was sixty-six.

Children of Palestrina, Verdi referred to Italian composers as.

Bastien-Lepage was dead at thirty-six.

Aubrey Beardsley was dead at twenty-five.

The somewhat notorious soprano Susanna Cibber. Who sang so movingly in an early performance of Handel’s Messiah that a Dublin bishop informed her afterward that any and all of her earthly sins were therewith irrevocably forgiven.

Charlotte Brontë died in March of 1855.

The Reverend Arthur Nicholls, whom she had married nine months before, would live until 1906.

A daughter of Dickens lived until 1929.

After Jean Stafford, vacationing, had explained to a weathered Wyoming ranch hand how she made her living:

That’s real nice work. I reckon you can even always arrange to do it in the shade.

Wondering why it always seems somehow not quite accurate — that Mozart was born only fourteen years before Beethoven.

Now I’ll have eine kleine pause.

Said Kathleen Ferrier — dying.

British cavalry in the Crimean War were so scandalously ill-supplied and neglected that many starved to death — as did the very horses that had survived the Charge of the Light Brigade.

February 2, 1940, Meyerhold was executed on.

Picasso, avec laughter, after being asked if he had used models for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon:

Where would I have found them?

A dreadful old fraud.

Edmund Wilson called Robert Frost.

A sententious, holding-forth old bore who expected every hero-worshipping adenoidal little twerp of a student-poet to hang on his every word.

James Dickey would elaborate subsequently.

Edith Piaf was four feet eight inches tall.

George Lyman Kittredge, who taught Shakespeare at Harvard for forty-eight years — and demanded that all of his students memorize at least six hundred lines per semester.

Six hundred lines. The student reciting the entire To be or not to be soliloquy has mastered all of thirty-five.

Alexander the Great once watched in puzzlement as Diogenes sifted through a heap of human bones.

How strange, Diogenes finally decided — that I cannot make a distinction between those of your father and those of his slaves.

Ephesus, Mary Magdalen died in.

Ephesus, the Virgin Mary may have died in.

José Clemente Orozco lost his left hand in a college chemistry explosion.

Mr. McChoakumchild, Dickens names the demanding schoolmaster in Hard Times.

Almost an insult to the serious reader, Shaw said.

An abridged, accelerated, night-school course.

Eugenio Montale saw in Pound’s version of culture in the Cantos.

Oh, Aaron Burr, what hast thou done?

Thou hast shooted dead that great Hamilton.

For a millennium, or longer, Greek and then Roman seamen along the coast of the Troad repeatedly insisted they had seen the ghosts of Achilles and/or Hector in full armor at the shore.

After Vicente Aleixandre’s Nobel Prize, Madrid renamed the street on which he lived in his honor.

Which was to say that one could then write to Sr. Vicente Aleixandre — on Calle Vicente Aleixandre.

There’s nothing more embarrassing than being a poet.

Suspected Elizabeth Bishop.

A remedy once suggested by Camille Pissarro for the betterment of French art:

Burn down the Louvre.

What I have always liked about this place are the windows.

Determined Bonnard, strolling through the same museum.

Mornings, when the leaves are dewy, some of them are like jewels where the earliest sunlight glistens.

A quirky new impulse of Novelist’s, at news of several recent deaths — Dialing the deceased, in the likelihood that no one would have yet disconnected their answering machines — and contemplating their voices one eerie final time.

A trampish sort of appearance.

Iris Murdoch recalled re Wittgenstein.

Joyce himself is an insignificant man, wearing very thick eyeglasses, dull, self-centered.

Says Virginia Woolf ’s diary.

Reality is under no obligation to be interesting.

Said Borges.

December 31, 1936, Unamuno died on.

October 18, 1955, Ortega.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, well into his political career, at least once wrote a book review.

Bach was fifteen when he began his professional music career.

As a boy soprano.

A quart or more of alcohol per day, uncounted amphetamines, uncounted aspirin, uncounted barbiturates — and at a minimum two packs of cigarettes.

Being Sartre in his most productive years.

The novels of Paul de Kock, which are admired by Molly Bloom.

As they were in fact by Karl Marx.

Dear President George W. Bush:

Herewith please find uncorrected proofs for the newly discovered rewritten version of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit. Kindly limit your review to twelve thousand words. Thank you.

John Kenneth Galbraith was made to repeat