The word genocide had not existed until being coined by a Polish scholar in that same year.
Italo Svevo had to pay to publish Confessions of Zeno.
Stratford-on-Avon, Marie Corelli died in.
I say that if you can tell a story in a picture and if a reasonable number of people like your work, it is art.
Said Norman Rockwell.
If more than ten percent of the population likes a painting it should be burned.
Said Shaw.
Ronald Reagan was a clandestine informer for the FBI when it was investigating so-called left-wing influences in Hollywood in the 1940s.
Confucius was illegitimate.
Michelangelo’s passing comment to Raphael, at the Vatican, that there was a young painter in Florence who would bring sweat to his brow — unquote — if he ever fulfilled himself.
Meaning Andrea del Sarto.
Michelangelo, who was incidentally eight years older than Raphael — and would outlive him by forty-four.
And Andrea by thirty-three.
The paper shit is endless.
Quoth a 1911 letter of Einstein’s re university teaching.
Reviewers who have accused Novelist of inventing some of his anecdotes and/or quotations — without the elemental responsibility to do the checking that would verify every one of them.
Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs.
Said John Osborne.
Sein oder nicht sein — ja, dass ist die Frage.
Reads Schlegel’s translation.
March 3, 1996, Marguerite Duras died on.
Simonides once rejected a meager fee to compose an ode to the winner of a mule race, insisting he did not write about jackasses.
The fee was increased. Wind-swift steeds, the jackasses miraculously became.
Isamu Noguchi’s sets for Martha Graham.
Eva Hesse was dead at thirty-four.
The fact is, I did not eat every day during that period of my life.
Said André Breton, explaining a possible origin for some of his earliest surrealist writings.
The Pope may judge all and be judged by no man.
Said Innocent III.
Pericles’ mistress Aspasia, who ran a school for courtesans — and was comfortably at home in intellectual discussion with Socrates.
No different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation.
Said someone on radio named Rush Limbaugh about American soldiers abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq.
People having a good time.
Bovine spongiform encephalopathy.
On exhibition in a New York gallery in 2005, a portrait of Seamus Heaney — by Derek Walcott.
Which would barely pass muster in an undergraduate painting class, according to the New York Times.
Curiously impressed by the fact that Auden paid 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.