St. John of the Cross was the son of a weaver.
J. Robert Oppenheimer died of throat cancer.
Maugham died of a stroke.
At last she grew common and infamous and gott the Pox, of which she died.
Says Aubrey’s Brief Lives of one Elizabeth Broughton.
Paper will put up with anything that’s written on it.
Said Stalin.
The best geometer in the world, Hobbes claimed Descartes could have become.
But that he had no head for philosophy.
Kurt Weill died of a heart attack.
Turner was considerably less than fastidious about cleanliness.
The Reader.
Being Aristotle’s nickname at Plato’s Academy.
A colt that kicks its mother.
Being what Plato personally called him after an early disagreement.
Samuel ha-Nagid.
Say it out for God’s sake and have done with it.
Said William James to Henry.
Molokai. June 1885.
We lepers.
Anagnostes.
No Man is my name, and No Man they call me.
A Walk in the Sun.
A decade after Nelson’s death at Trafalgar, Emma Hamilton died in poverty.
Archaeological evidence for the historical reality of Susan Sontag.
St. Catherine of Siena was illiterate.
Kafka was a vegetarian.
The English think soap is civilization.
Treitschke said.
Theodore Roethke died of a coronary occlusion.
At least one Boston newspaper suggested in all seriousness that Whitman should be horsewhipped for Leaves of Grass.
Charlotte Salomon died in Auschwitz at twenty-six.
Pavel Friedman died in Auschwitz at nineteen. Or younger.
Would Moe Berg really have shot Heisenberg?
Góngora died of apoplexy.
Balzac wrote more than two thousand characters into his Comédie humaine.
There are 260,430 words in Ulysses.
Calvin died of hemorrhages of the lungs.
Oswiecim.
Exeunt.
Molière was never elected to the French Academy.
Balzac was never elected to the French Academy.
Was it John Searle who called Jacques Derrida the sort of philosopher who gives bullshit a bad name?
I love the smell of napalm in the morning.
Josquin des Prez.
It took ten years after her suicide for Jeanne Hébuterne’s family to allow her remains to be reburied beside Modigliani’s in the Jewish section of Père Lachaise.
Adelaide Procter. Mrs. Henry Wood.
Géricault died after a fall from a horse.
Hindemith died of a stroke.
Nebuchadnezzar. Who razed Jerusalem.
And went mad.
And ate grass.
Cardinal Spellman of New York once sent Pope Pius XII a Cadillac automobile with solid gold door handles.
Wyatt Earp died of chronic cystitis.
Because night is here and the barbarians have not appeared.
Charles Lamb’s insuperable proclivity to gin, Carlyle termed it.
Frobisher. Hawkins. Drake.
Hitler typed with two fingers.
Mencken typed with two fingers.
Beethoven washed excessively.
Penthesilea.
The speculation that Dante spent time in Paris.
Or even at Oxford.
The possibility that on a political mission that took him to Florence, Chaucer met Boccaccio.
Charlotte Corday was a great-grandniece of Corneille.
And devoted the morning to reading Plutarch at his bloodiest before stabbing Marat.
Or a treatise on the nature of man, if Writer so labels it.
He had catched a great cold, had he no other clothes to wear than the skin of a bear not yet killed.
Said Thomas Fuller.
Potatoes were not known in ancient Rome.
Tomatoes were not known in ancient Rome.
Oranges were not known in ancient Rome.
Hume died of what was probably colon cancer.
Edgar Degas never learned which side won World War I.
Piet Mondrian never learned which side won World War II.
Flicka von Stade.
Manet died of tertiary syphilis.
Truman Capote died of heart disease complicated by drug abuse.
Marianne Moore taught stenography at the Carlisle Indian School, in Pennsylvania, when Jim Thorpe was a student.
And fifty years later would remember that he held a door for her.
Debussy’s first wife shot herself.
As had a mistress, earlier.
Caedmon was illiterate.
The rue Descartes, Paul Verlaine died in.
Avenue Émile Zola, Paul Celan’s last Paris address was on.
A calle in Madrid was renamed in honor of Vicente Aleixandre while he was still living there.
Herman Melville Boulevard is where, in Manhattan?
Twelve blocks north from the wishful-thinking intersection of Mark Rothko Road and Hart Crane Place.
The poetical fame of Ausonius condemns the taste of his age, Gibbon said.
But specially his wife lay sore upon him to attempt the thing, as she that was very ambitious, burning in unquenchable desire to bear the name of a Queen.
— Adding up to the sum total of what Shakespeare found in Holinshed from which he created Lady Macbeth.
The friendship of Paula Becker and Clara Westhoff.
Claudia Muzio was illegitimate.
Jenny Lind was illegitimate.
Voltaire’s second wife was his own sister’s daughter.
A passing thought of Kurt Vonnegut’s, re Princess Diana:
Do we know if she ever read a book?
Title of an unfinished composition by Charles Ives:
Giants vs. Cubs, August 1907, Polo Grounds.
Ives died of heart disease compounded by diabetes.
Well, Bourrienne, you too will be immortal.
Why, General Bonaparte?
Are you not my secretary?
Tell me the name of Alexander’s.
Hm, that is not bad, Bourrienne.
Haydn’s father was a wheelwright.
The legend that Donatello almost supernaturally refused to die until his commonplace crucifix could be replaced by one carved by Brunelleschi.
But go, and if you listen she will call.
Eight people appeared at Robert Musil’s funeral.
F. Scott Fitzgerald died of a sequence of heart attacks.
His most recent royalty statement showed seven copies of The Great Gatsby sold during the preceding six months.