The Last Novel - By David Markson Page 0,29

his senior year in high school.

Scarcely intelligible, Dryden labeled Shakespeare’s language.

Quote: His whole style is so pestered with figurative expressions that it is as affected as it is coarse.

A jockey can earn more in one race than a schoolteacher is paid in an entire year.

Objected Juvenal — close to nineteen hundred years ago.

He who today writes artistically dies without recognition or reward.

Complained Lope de Vega — in 1609.

Landlords in lower Manhattan who were shrewd enough, over the years, to accept recent work by moneyless young artists instead of rent.

One of those, in the late 1940s, who wasn’t — and rather than two paintings by Robert Rauschenberg insisted upon the month’s $15.

Jaroslav Seifert, like Dostoievsky earlier, who once eluded execution only moments before the shots were to be fired.

Yet afterward insisted he was no more traumatized by the recollection than a youngster remembering last year’s measles.

The nephew of Aeschylus named Philocles, also a playwright, all of whose plays are lost.

But who was talented enough to gain the prize for tragedy in the year when Sophocles presented Oedipus Rex.

A cask of brandy, Nelson’s corpse was brought back to London in, after Trafalgar.

To slow decomposition.

Agonies of galloping speechlessness.

Beckett once talked of a writer’s block as.

When you can see the bandwagon, it’s already gone.

Said de Kooning.

Late-life Nietzsche postcards — that he signed Kaiser Nietzsche.

Freakish, Voltaire called the Divine Comedy.

Extravagant, absurd, disgusting.

Horace Walpole made it.

According to Ford Madox Ford, Flaubert once opened his front door to Henry James and Ivan Turgenev in his dressing gown — and thus offended James’s sensibilities virtually beyond redemption.

The nicest old lady I ever met.

Faulkner decided to christen James.

Multiple surgical chain staples are evident in the right lung, consistent with prior resections.

Reads a recurrent notation in reports on Novelist’s chest x-rays.

A post-Mao version of the Long March — which implies that forcibly conscripted porters carried him on a litter for much of the 5,000 miles.

All the ills from which America suffers can be traced back to the teaching of evolution.

Said William Jennings Bryan — in 1924.

Abortionists, feminists, gays, lesbians — all in good part responsible for 9/11, said Jerry Falwell.

I totally concur. Said Pat Robertson.

David Gascoyne’s addiction to Benzedrene. And lighter-fluid fumes.

Look, look, master, here comes two religious caterpillars.

Remembering that Charles Darwin is buried in Westminster Abbey.

Fundamentalismbecility.

Django Reinhardt died of a cerebral hemorrhage — while fishing in the Seine.

People who actually believe that Damien Hirst’s fourteen-foot shark in a tank of formaldehyde has something even remotely to do with art.

Our father who art in heaven

Stay there.

Requested Jacques Prévert.

Tamara Geva. Vera Zorina. Maria Tallchief. Tanaquil Le Clercq.

All of whom married George Balanchine.

Offensive, ill-written, mechanical. All in all, detestable.

Sainte-Beuve called the novels of Stendhal.

I count only on being reprinted in 1900.

Said Stendhal himself, who died in 1842.

I shall hear in heaven.

Which Beethoven did or did not say, nearing death.

Do Not Leave Car Unattendant.

Jean Giono was twice imprisoned for collaboration with the Nazis in World War II.

Englishing Pindar is so exacting, concluded Abraham Cowley, that if one were to attempt it literally it would sound as if one certifiable lunatic had translated another.

Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov were for a time roommates.

The first use of the word classic in its long since traditional sense — by the Latin critic Aulus Gellius, ca. 180 AD.

I am no Einstein.

Once said Einstein.

Pope Eliot.

Dylan Thomas called him.

Michelangelo’s David stood on the open porch of the Palazzo Vecchio, where Michelangelo had asked that it be placed, from 1504 until 1873 — when Florence moved it into the Academy and out of the weather.

And to where some cretin a hundred and twenty years later would take a hammer to its left foot.

Only a single, incomplete manuscript of the Annals of Tacitus remained extant after the Dark Ages.

August 21, 2005, Dahlia Ravikovitch died on.

Pacing along as if they had an appointment at the end of the world —

Reads an Isak Dinesen description of a herd of elephants.

The ménage à trois involving Paul and Gala Eluard and Max Ernst — After which Gala became Gala Dalí.

Simone de Beauvoir’s affair with Nelson Algren.

Which she later infuriated him by writing about.

A leper and a sodomite.

Emerson called Swinburne.

Like a vile scum on a pond.

Pound viewed G. K. Chesterton.

Landskip, painters long spoke of it as.

Dreiser, years in advance, telling H. L. Mencken that he has already prepared his dying words:

Shakespeare, I come.

Alan Turing was dead at forty-one.

You don’t have a computer? So how do you write your books?

You don’t still use a typing machine?

Wondering if anyone, ever, has listened to Elgar’s first Pomp and Circumstance march without