This skull is Helen.
Divinités du Styx.
Art which is not propaganda is not art, said Diego Rivera.
Writer’s arse.
Edgairpo.
For a time as young men Delacroix and Bonington shared a studio.
Tony Lazzeri died in a fall down a flight of stairs during an epileptic seizure.
Early in the morning I go to the rear blackboard and draw a small dollar sign. No one notices. The janitor who washes the blackboards every night must surely guess why it’s there.
Rachel Carson died of breast cancer.
St. Perpetua. Requesting a pin to fasten her hair — before guiding the gladiator’s sword to her throat in the arena at Carthage.
Thomas More. Jesting on the scaffold and lifting aside his beard — before being beheaded.
Was Bede the first historian to date events BC and AD?
Lotte Lenya died of abdominal cancer.
Teresa Stratas had essentially camped out at her bedside for weeks, so that she would not die alone.
I shall not cease to fear Carthage until I know it is utterly destroyed, Cato said.
A son of Ring Lardner’s died fighting with the Lincoln Brigade in Spain in 1938.
A son of Ring Lardner’s died as a correspondent when his jeep hit a mine in World War II.
Sibelius died of a cerebral hemorrhage.
Pauline Viardot. Who sang the first performance of Brahms’ Alto Rhapsody.
And may have had an illegitimate child by Turgenev.
Johann Uhr, the Royal Armorer.
Ford Madox Ford died of heart failure.
The Cartesian Soul of Frank Sinatra.
Having been the subtitle of an actual academic paper delivered at Hofstra University in 1998.
Dear God! the very houses seemed asleep.
A daughter of Theodor Herzl’s died in Theresienstadt.
A daughter of Theodor Herzl’s.
One of Edvard Munch’s sisters went mad.
Hogarth died of a ruptured artery.
I owe the discovery that I was a Jew more to Gentiles than Jews, Einstein said.
A public meeting was held in Florence in 1504 to decide on the placement of Michelangelo’s David. Detailed minutes still exist showing that Leonardo, Piero di Cosimo, Filippino Lippi, Sansovino, Botticelli, Lorenzo di Credi, and Perugino all had something to say.
The decision was finally left to Michelangelo.
A blessed thing.
Said Elizabeth Barrett Browning, of opium.
Half in love with easeful Death.
Vaslav Nijinsky died of kidney failure after decades of insanity.
O. Henry died penniless.
The North Sea, Karl Marx’s ashes were scattered in.
Djuna Barnes Drive. Anne Sexton Street.
Calcutta, Thackeray was born in.
Bombay, Kipling was.
Gaspara Stampa died of what may have been cancer of the womb.
Ovid left twice as much work as any other Roman poet.
And said he had destroyed endless pages more, as unsatisfactory.
Henry Purcell died of consumption.
Francis Thompson died of consumption.
Richard Savage died in debtors’ prison.
The volume of Sophocles from Shelley’s pocket when he was drowned is in the Bodleian Library at Oxford.
The Keats was burned with his corpse at Viareggio.
The Keats had been borrowed from Leigh Hunt.
Alejo Carpentier died of throat cancer.
Kant was never in his life in the vicinity of a mountain. It appears probable that he never saw the ocean either.
Venus clerk, Ovyde,
That hath ysowen wonder wyde
The grete god of Loves name.
Marilyn Horne’s tale that the first time she was asked to sing Semiramide the only way she could get her hands on a score was to steal it from the Los Angeles Public Library.
In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?
Asked Sydney Smith in 1819.
Melville’s father died mad.
Schopenhauer’s father jumped out of a window.
The long martyrdom of being trampled to death by geese, Kierkegaard called reading one’s reviews.
Berchtesgaden.
Juden raus!
The God that holds you over the pit of Hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked.
Milo of Crotona.
The greatest painter of our era, Magritte called Giorgio de Chirico.
Unsurprisingly.
Jacob Epstein died of heart failure.
Carl Gustav Jung died of heart failure.
Every morning the author of Faust and Werther kisses me. In the afternoon I play for him for about two hours.
Noted Felix Mendelssohn, at twelve.
Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!
Eftsoons his hand dropt he.
Derek Lindsay was who?
Longfellow died of peritonitis.
Frank Norris died of peritonitis.
Selma Lagerlöf died of peritonitis.
Es inevitable la muerta del Papa.
Béla Bartók died of leukemia.
Charles Péguy was killed leading a charge in the first battle of the Marne.
Alexander, young, broke Bucephalus — whom no one else could sit — simply by perceiving that he balked at his own shadow and riding him into the sun.
Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.
Self-evident enough to scarcely need Writer’s say-so.
Obstinately cross-referential and of cryptic interconnective syntax.
Here perhaps less than self-evident to the less than attentive.
Ulrich Friedrich Richard von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf.
Laurence Sterne died of pleurisy, after years of lung hemorrhages.
Rousseau died of a stroke.
The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft.
Gilles de Rais. Who was a marshal of France at twenty-five.
And fought by Joan’s side at Orleans.
And.
Baudelaire often wore pink gloves.
Martha Constantine, a handsome young woman, was treated with great indecency and cruelty by several of the troops, who first ravished, and then killed her by cutting off her breasts. These they fried, and set before some of their comrades, who ate them without knowing what they were.
Records Fox’s Book of Martyrs.
Clausewitz died of cholera.
The Prince, the King, the Emperor, the God Almighty of novelists.