Wanhope.
John Reed died of typhus.
Louise Bryant died of a cerebral hemorrhage.
Not even to a philosopher could old age be easy in the depths of poverty, Cicero said.
Nor could a fool find it anything but burdensome even amid ample wealth.
Maria Jeritza was the first Tosca to sing Vissi d’arte while lying on the floor.
Only because she had been elbowed off a couch by accident.
It was from God, Puccini decided.
Though with Jeritza also flaunting far too much obvious posterior, put in Geraldine Farrar.
Venus Callipyge.
Louise O’Murphy.
Tiepolo and Francesco Guardi were brothers-in-law.
Richard Wright died of a heart attack.
The question of Mikhail Sholokhov’s authorship of The Quiet Don.
The question of Dmitri Shostakovich’s authorship of his Memoirs.
St. Teresa of Lisieux knew The Imitation of Christ by heart.
John Masefield died of gangrene at eighty-eight when he refused to have an injured leg amputated.
Schopenhauer played the flute.
He has no insight into character. And no dramatic talent. His dialogue hardens to wood and stone.
Said Emerson about its author after reading Oliver Twist.
Camille Saint-Saëns talked with a lisp.
Mahler, discovering that Alma was having an affair with Walter Gropius.
And spending an entire day discussing it with Freud.
Is Macbeth impotent?
Hans Memling. That very model of a major minor master, as Erwin Panofsky had it.
The legend that as an impoverished, wounded soldier, Memling had begun to paint in gratitude to monks who sheltered him.
Edwin Arlington Robinson died of pancreatic cancer.
Warren’s Blacking.
30, Strand.
Carl Maria von Weber died of tuberculosis.
Ambrose Bierce fought at Shiloh, Stones River, and Chickamauga. And was wounded at Kenesaw Mountain.
The History of Rome Hanks and Kindred Matters.
Leonidas and the Three Hundred, who would perish at Thermopylae.
Only men who had already fathered sons to leave behind had been permitted to join the command.
Said of George Washington, at the height of the war with the British:
He sometimes throws and catches a ball for whole hours with his aides-decamp.
Nabokov appears to have died of an infection caught in a hospital where he was being treated for the flu.
Paul Bowles died of a heart attack.
Jane Bowles died after a stroke.
Friday is on their island with Robinson Crusoe for thirteen out of Crusoe’s twenty-eight years.
Why does Defoe not let him ever learn to speak more than pidgin English?
Why does Stephen Crane never actually state that the battle in The Red Badge of Courage is Chancellorsville?
La Scala was severely bombed in World War II.
The Vienna Staatsoper was severely bombed in World War II.
There are so few people who know how to make art. — Julian Schnabel.
One less than he thinks. — Robert Hughes.
In Coriolanus, Shakespeare allows someone to mention Cato.
Three centuries ahead of time.
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fu-Sa.
Pericles died of plague.
Stefan Lochner purchased a house in Cologne in 1442.
Konrad Witz purchased a house in Basel in 1443.
Martin Schongauer purchased a house in Colmar in 1477.
Hans Baldung Grien purchased a house in Strasbourg in 1527.
Paganini died of what was evidently cancer of the larynx.
Walter Pater died of gout.
It is written in a careless and humble style, in the vulgar tongue, which even housewives speak.
Said Dante of the Comedy.
William Etty.
The Axion Esti.
All through the night Rome went burning. Put that in the noontide and it loses some of its age-old significance, does it not?
Archaeological evidence for the historical reality of Gilgamesh.
Pergolesi died of consumption at twenty-six.
Laborare est Orare. Work is Worship.
Said the old monks.
Benedetto Croce died of a stroke.
Robert Schumann died mad, probably from syphilis.
Behold, this dreamer cometh.
Sophocles’ father manufactured swords.
John Dos Passos died of congestive heart failure.
Tyndale was permitted the indulgence of being strangled at the stake before they set fire to him.
A Farewell to Arms:
1590, George Peele’s version dating from.
Trying to imagine the shape of the modern world if Charles Martel had been defeated at Tours.
Simone Weil’s final hospitalization was ostensibly for tuberculosis and exhaustion. Nevertheless a coroner’s report labeled her death suicide by starvation.
The woman was mad, de Gaulle said.
Mantegna used a corpse as the model for one of his Crucifixions.
Géricault used several while painting The Raft of the Medusa.
Veit Stoss died blind. And destitute.
The almost unparalleled contemporary popularity of Euripides.
Greek soldiers captured and held as slaves after the disastrous expedition at Syracuse were actually given their freedom if they could teach passages from his plays from memory.
Which many could.
George Eliot translated Spinoza.
Emma Lazarus translated Judah Halevi.
Willem de Kooning’s father was a beer distributor.
An incidental notation of Malcolm Lowry’s, while describing a visit to a room used by De Quincey in the Lake District:
Smoking Prohibited.
She only said, My life is dreary,
He cometh not, she said;
She said, I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead.
Cousin Ruddy was habitually foul-mouthed.
Flannery O’Connor died of lupus.
In the century after their deaths, Ben Jonson’s name appeared in print three times as often as Shakespeare’s.
Salathiel Pavy.
Why does Joyce let Leopold Bloom think Saverio Mercadante was Jewish?
April 26, 1937. A Monday.
Which was also Guernica’s market day, drawing peasants in from the nearby countryside.