Eyeless in Gaza, at the mill with slaves.
Fanny Burney’s account of her surgery for breast cancer at fifty-nine, in 1811.
Before anesthesia.
Dwight Eisenhower was once asked by an assistant if he would like to meet Robert Frost, who happened to be visiting someone else at the White House.
Eisenhower could not think of a reason why he should bother.
A hetaera named Cyrene, remembered for 2,400 years — because Aristophanes indicates that she could perform in a dozen different positions.
Theoris and Archippe, two others remembered for slightly longer.
Because Sophocles had affairs with each.
Apelles’ long-lost Birth of Venus, painted 1,800 years before Botticelli’s — and said to have been a likeness of Phryne, the most beautiful of them all.
And all of whom must surely have been included in an equally irretrievable work by Suetonius —
His lost book entitled On Famous Courtesans.
Shakespeare’s younger sister.
The Westminster Review called Emily Brontë.
Cervantes was a relative of his.
Kipling said of Mark Twain.
I think what attracted me was less art itself than the artist’s life, the freedom to live as one pleased.
Said Bonnard, re having become a painter.
Nulla dies sine linea.
Not a day without a line, Pliny says Apelles said.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., was wounded three times in the Civil War.
John Simon’s verdict that there were two things he was able to say about the poems of Robert Creeley:
They are short; they are not short enough.
It was I killed the old pawnbroker woman and her sister Lizaveta with an axe and robbed them.
March 13, 1979, Madeleine Grey died on.
Contemporary art criticism, second decade, fourteenth century. From the Purgatorio:
In painting Cimabue was thought to hold the field, but now Giotto has the cry, so that the other’s fame grows dim.
Our sodomite-saint.
Malcolm Muggeridge called T. E. Lawrence.
Jack Daniel’s Tennessee sour mash whiskey.
Being the best thing he knew about America, Jacques Lacan said.
A London street called Ropemaker’s Lane, Daniel Defoe died in.
Gibbon, on Samuel Johnson:
Bigoted.
Boswell, on Gibbon:
Ugly, affected, disgusting.
It’s a terrible thing to die young. Still, it saves a lot of time.
Quoth Grace Paley.
Bertrand Russell was born ten years before James Joyce, and died on Joyce’s birthday — twenty-nine years after him.
Jane Avril died in an old people’s home. Forty-one years after the death of Toulouse-Lautrec.
Nietzsche, who proclaimed that God was dead — but whose own coffin was adorned with a silvered cross.
Damn, I’m almost sorry you called. Can you even begin to guess how many friends of mine that makes, just in the past year or so?
I assume you’re aware of something else too, chum? At our age, we don’t replace them.
The failure of the 1853 premiere of Verdi’s La Traviatta — essentially because the soprano was viewed as too plump for a heroine dying of tuberculosis.
Troppo prosperosa, being the Italian.
I think A Bend in the River is much, much better than Conrad.
Pronounced the humility-drenched author of A Bend in the River.
The acute suggestiveness in Pascal’s apology for having written a particularly long letter.
Because he hadn’t had the time to write a short one.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature.
Says Henry in The Dream Songs.
The Homer of painting, Reynolds called Michelangelo.
The Homer of painting, Delacroix called Rubens.
Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train.
Said Maynard Keynes, at a 1929 return of Wittgenstein to Cambridge after fifteen years away.
An eclectic realist of disputed merit.
The actual catalogue of the Metropolitan Museum once called Manet.
Miles Davis’s speedometer had already reached 105 miles per hour, on New York’s West Side Highway, when one of the people with him asked if he should be driving so fast.
I’m in here too, Davis’s concept of reassurance was.
Corbière was dead at thirty.
Giorgione, at thirty-three or thirty-four.
Books weaken the memory.
Says Plato in the Phaedrus.
Machines cannot think.
Charles Ives gave away the cash that came with his Pulitzer Prize.
Badges of mediocrity, dismissing such awards as.
Created only for imbeciles, rogues, and rascals, Cézanne had had it.
Conversely Edvard Grieg, who displayed his medals unabashedly — particularly since they sped him through customs with all complications waived, he discovered.
The meaningless oddity that one of Washington’s pet hounds at Mount Vernon — was named Truman.
The report that Turner, told he was dying, asked his doctor to leave the room for a glass of sherry and then to judge things again.
Which the doctor allegedly did — but with no change of diagnosis.
Amiri Baraka’s slapdash, banal, repetitious, self-contradictory, mendacious poem, Somebody Blew Up America.
Novelist is forgetting odious.
He who writes for fools will always find a large audience.
Said Schopenhauer.
Tertian malaria, Velazquez died of.
The words honest — or honesty — occur fifty-two times in Othello.
Diodorus Siculus. Twelve volumes in the Loeb Classical Library.
Dio Cassius. Nine volumes.
Freud’s first publication in English — via the Hogarth Press.
Which is to say, by Leonard and Virginia Woolf.
There’s rosemary for you and rue for you.
Echoed John Webster — at most six years after Ophelia’s earlier usage.
Ted Williams, bedded after a stroke, seen reaching out to lightly bat away a child’s balloon — and missing.
Ted Williams.
Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.
Said Cesare Pavese.
Les bourgeois, ce sont les autres.
Said Jules Renard.
Baudelaire wore rouge.
Because of global warming, the last snows will be gone from Kilimanjaro very possibly within Novelist’s own remaining lifetime.
January 5, 1942, Tina Modotti died on.
Cardinal Newman, being directed by Everett Millais to a tall chair atop a platform where he was to sit for his portrait:
Your Eminence, on that eminence, if you please.
Abject bottom-licking narcissism —
Martha Gellhorn found in Hemingway.
Bogus, Zelda Fitzgerald’s word for him was.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s addiction to chloral hydrate. And whiskey.
There will always be another poet.
Said Stevie Smith.
You never paint the Parthenon; you never paint a Louis XV armchair. You make pictures out of some little house in the Midi, a packet of tobacco, or an old chair.
Said Picasso.
Until the election of Marguerite Yourcenar, in 1981, no woman had ever been named to the French Academy.
On the original title pages of Jane Austen, before the posthumous disclosure of her identity:
By a Lady.
Ray Bradbury’s father was a telephone lineman.
His third wife, Lady Jean Campbell, in regard to life with Norman Mailer: