Conversely offered Zora Neale Hurston.
Pietro Aretino died in the midst of a hysterical fit of laughter that apparently turned into an apoplectic stroke.
As had the Athenian comic playwright Philemon — at ninety-nine.
Or one hundred and one.
Lord Byron by the kilo, Dumas père described George Sand’s early romantic novels as.
Renaissance paintings on which Bernard Berenson falsified the attributions — when handed money under the table by the dealer Duveen.
Jude the Obscene, someone called it.
As an apprentice, Claude Lorrain worked with the landscape painter Agostino Tassi — who a few years earlier had earned such small art-world immortality as he possesses by raping Artemisia Gentileschi.
Artemisia. Who is granted only one sentence in Novelist’s two-volume 1962 Everyman’s Dictionary of Pictorial Art — at the end of the entry on her father.
All female artists are sluts.
Quoth Flaubert’s Dictionary of Accepted Ideas.
I leave before being left. I decide.
Said Brigitte Bardot.
Winslow Homer spent his last twenty-seven years on the isolated Maine peninsula of Prout’s Neck.
— My nearest neighbor is half a mile away. I am four miles from the PO and under a snowbank most of the time. Night before last it was twelve below zero.
January 13, 1864, Stephen Foster died on.
Little Friend, Little Friend, I got two engines on fire. Can you see me, Little Friend?
I’m crossing right over you. Let’s go home.
Guido Reni’s abnormally exaggerated terror of witchcraft.
To the extent that the mere sight of an old woman at a market could send him rushing away.
Losing her sight in later life, Constance Garnett arranged to have Russian books read aloud — and then dictated her translations.
A quack, Vladimir Nabokov called Thomas Mann.
A complete mediocrity — D. H. Lawrence.
That total fake — Ezra Pound.
Despicable, loathsome, sick, third-rate — Dostoievsky.
Time is the only critic without ambition.
John Steinbeck said.
The severest test of the imagination — is to name a cat.
Said Samuel Butler.
Schopenhauer’s poodle.
Called Atma.
Picasso’s play, Desire Caught by the Tail — which could be performed for the first time only privately, because of the Nazi occupation of Paris.
But avec Camus, Sartre, Michel Leiris, Raymond Queneau, Dora Maar, Pierre Reverdy, Simone de Beauvoir.
The short story by one Heinz von Lichberg, published in Berlin six years before Nabokov would live there for a decade and a half — about an older man’s obsession with a young girl.
— And entitled Lolita.
There are four chances in 2,598,960 of being dealt a royal flush in a hand of poker.
How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you was?
Asked Satchel Paige.
Baudelaire wrote a poem about Watteau.
Verlaine wrote a poem about Watteau.
Proust wrote a poem about Watteau.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, long since categorically exposed as a fraud.
Nonetheless incessantly reprinted throughout the Muslim world — not to add dramatized on television.
Kant’s father was a saddle maker.
If you are going to make a book end badly, Robert Louis Stevenson once pointed out, it must end badly from the beginning — Such as by mentioning an eighth-story roof in its very first paragraphs.
And which should presumably call to mind Chekhov’s admonition that if a pistol is displayed in a first act, it had damned well better be fired by the last.
Raphael died on his thirty-seventh birthday.
Always young in men’s memories, someone thought to say.
Old. Tired. Sick. Alone. Broke.
Only days before Edna St. Vincent Millay’s birth, her mother’s brother’s life was saved in a New York hospital. Millay’s middle name, those few days later, was taken from the name of the hospital.
Florence Nightingale.
Simply because she was born there.
Canon in D Major for Strings and Continuo.
By Johann Pachelbel.
Does having been six feet eight inches tall make Charles Olson the tallest known poet?
How tall was William Langland, who because of his height was called Long Will?
One half of the children born die before their eighth year. This is nature’s law; why try to contradict it?
Inquired Rousseau.
John Jay Chapman’s conclusion that a visiting Martian would come away with a more critical lesson about life on earth from attending an Italian opera than from reading Emerson.
The lesson that there are two sexes.
September 13, 1506, Andrea Mantegna died on.
Kenesaw Mountain Landis.
Lente currite noctis equi.
Says Ovid in the Amores.
O lente lente currite noctis equi.
Says Marlowe, at the end of Faustus.
Of no significance whatsoever. But the hospital where Dylan Thomas would die, sixty-one years after the fact, was the one after which Edna Millay had been named.
O run slowly, slowly, horses of the night.
Pandora’s box. Which in the first written version of the tale, in Hesiod, is in fact a jar.
A reference to the good old hearty female stench, unquote.
Which Pound excised from Eliot’s manuscript of The Waste Land.
Sacred Scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, not the earth.
Said Luther, dismissing this fool, Copernicus.
Flat, clumsy, labored, and embarrassingly crude, Isaac Deutscher called Doctor Zhivago.
Which Akhmatova found so intermittently inept that she refused to believe Pasternak had written it all.
Like Benedetto Croce earlier, Ignazio Silone lost both of his parents in an earthquake.
Paul Robeson’s Othello.
With José Ferrer as Iago.
Renée Fleming’s Metropolitan opening-night Desdemona — sung only three weeks after having given birth to a second child.
Because of a promise to his mother, Jorge Luis Borges recited the Lord’s Prayer every night of his life:
Even though I don’t know whether there’s anybody at the other end of the line.
God seems to have left the receiver off the hook.
Once suggested Arthur Koestler — in more general political terms.
And prayers have no power the Plague to stay.
Wrote Long Will.
Montaigne was taught to read and speak Latin before he knew French.
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was reading Plato and Aristophanes, in Latin translations, at the age of eight.
Anton Bruckner, in old age, tells Gustav Mahler that he can readily foresee his coming interrogation by his Maker — Why else have I given you talent, you son of a bitch, than that you should sing My praise and glory? But you have accomplished much too little.
Cosima Wagner’s Jewish great-grandmother.
Egon Schiele was once briefly jailed — but then not prosecuted — on allegations of abducting and molesting a girl of thirteen.
Q. Who is the Buddha?
A. Three pounds of flax.
After a performance, Queen Victoria once ventured to inform Paderewski that he was a genius.
To which: Perhaps, Your Majesty. But before that I was a drudge.
The word nihilism.
Coined by Turgenev, for use in Fathers and Sons.
The next night he did not know where he was, did not feel the cold. The wind blew dust along the ground and into his mouth as he sang.