Wilkie Collins called Walter Scott.
Robin Vote.
Vom Kriege.
Walter Benjamin and Gertrud Kolmar were cousins.
Monet dropped from the skies on me with a collection of magnificent pictures. I am now lodging two impecunious artists, for Renoir is also here. It’s like a nursing home. I love it.
Said a letter of Frédéric Bazille’s — four years before he was killed at twenty-nine in the Franco-Prussian War.
Joe Tinker died of diabetes.
Johnny Evers died of a cerebral hemorrhage.
Frank Chance died of tuberculosis.
The population of Athens at the height of its accomplishments was at best two hundred and seventy-five thousand.
The population of Dante’s Florence was probably forty thousand.
Abbotsford.
Piero della Francesca’s St. Agatha. Tiepolo’s. Zurbarán’s.
Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s.
Mary McCarthy died of lung cancer.
Hermann Prey died of a heart attack.
A double play gives you two twenty-sevenths of a ball game.
Pointed out Casey Stengel.
Harold Bloom’s claim to the New York Times that he could read at a rate of five hundred pages per hour.
Writer’s arse.
Spectacular exhibition! Right this way, ladies and gentlemen! See Professor Bloom read the 1961 corrected and reset Random House edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses in one hour and thirty-three minutes. Not one page stinted. Unforgettable!
Parisian brothels. The only place where one’s shoes were ever properly shined.
Said Toulouse-Lautrec.
Dryden, to a publisher:
I find all your trade are sharpers.
Was Plutarch the first writer ever to counsel kindness to animals?
The William Wordsworth Funeral Home, in Hollywood, F. Scott Fitzgerald was buried from.
Leonardo played the lyre.
So astonishingly well that his patron the Duke of Milan initially admired him more for that than for his art.
Modigliani and Soutine were once living in such penury that they shared a single cot.
Sleeping in shifts.
A second-rate mind, T. E. Lawrence ranked Shakespeare’s as.
What’s this? Can’t spare an hour and a half? Wait, wait. Our matinee special, today only! Watch Professor Bloom eviscerate the Pears-McGuinness translation of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus — eight minutes and twenty-nine seconds flat! Guaranteed.
Mine eyes have seen the glory
Of Rabindranath Tagore.
Paul Celan’s visit to Todtnauberg.
Galileo died blind.
Journalist: May I see Georgia O’Keeffe?
Georgia O’Keeffe: You have.
Samuel Johnson, on criticism:
A fly, Sir, may sting a stately horse and make him wince, but one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still.
Gentes and laitymen, fullstoppers and semicolonials, hybreds and lubberds!
Louis Sockalexis was an epileptic.
Alfred Stieglitz died of a stroke.
The Samuel Butler who wrote Hudibras died in poverty.
A Latin translation of Marco Polo once belonging to Christopher Columbus is extant in Seville. With seventy marginal notes in Columbus’s handwriting.
Mainly in regard to the whereabouts of treasure.
Jim Thorpe died of a heart attack.
Allowed out of his steel military cage at Pisa for exercise, Ezra Pound sometimes swung a broom handle as if it were a baseball bat.
Who do you make believe is pitching to you, Uncle Ez?
Can’t you see Dizzy Dean out there, soldier?
From Suetonius, a description of Vespasian:
Habitually wearing the expression of someone who is straining at stool.
Meyer Lansky was a subscriber to the Book-of-the-Month Club.
Photography is not an art.
Writer talking to himself again.
As did Hölderlin, in addition to Yeats.
Writer suspects Hesoid likewise, even if long beyond any possibility of verification.
I bring you back Cathay!
Edwin Hubble died of a stroke.
Sir Alexander Fleming died of a heart attack.
The editor of Novy Mir began to read a prepublication copy of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in bed.
And then found himself so impressed that he not only got up but put on a suit and a necktie to finish with what he felt to be the requisite respect.
The Samuel Butler who wrote Erewhon died of pernicious anemia.
There seems to me too much misery in the world, said Darwin.
Cortés. 1519–1526:
Three hundred and fifteen soldiers. Sixteen horses. Seven cannon.
Of all books extant in all kinds, Homer is the first and best, Chapman said.
The sovereign poet, Dante called him.
Without being able to read Greek.
That fiery splendour of narrative which seems almost to have died out of the world when the Iliad was complete, Gilbert Murray talked of.
Irving Berlin’s father was a cantor.
Al Jolson’s father was a cantor.
Berlin died at one hundred. Of age alone, evidently.
George Santayana died of stomach cancer.
Having spent his last years attended by Irish nuns at a convent in Rome.
Will scholars of relatively recent English literature have any idea three or four centuries from now how differently the names Yeats and Keats were pronounced?
Suzanne Valadon’s affair with Puvis de Chavannes.
He fifty-seven. Valadon seventeen.
One of Wordsworth’s brothers died in a shipwreck.
Another became master of Trinity College, Cambridge.
A brother of Walt Whitman’s died mad.
Another was a lifelong imbecile.
Fragonard died of a cerebral hemorrhage.
Chardin died of dropsy.
Cavendish, Vermont.
A pansy with hair on his chest, Zelda Fitzgerald called Hemingway.
Ninety percent Rotarian, supplied Gertrude Stein.
George Bernard Shaw died at ninety-four of complications after breaking a hip.
Valadon died of a stroke.
Brian Moore died of pulmonary fibrosis.
Papal censors in 1817 refused to allow the heroine in Rossini’s Cinderella opera to show her bare foot. The libretto had to be rewritten without the glass slippers.
Conchita Supervia. Teresa Berganza. Cecilia Bartoli.
Rarely remembering that it was Menander who said Whom the gods love die young.