Porto d’Ercole. Where Caravaggio died.
Most probably of malaria.
In a tavern.
Georgia O’Keeffe died blind.
I saw Hamlet, Prince of Denmark played, but now the old plays begin to disgust this refined age.
Says John Evelyn’s Diary for November 26, 1661.
With no social themes, i.e., no picture of society.
No depiction of contemporary manners and/or morals.
Categorically, with no politics.
Vulgar and dull, Ruskin dismissed Rembrandt as.
Brother to Dostoievsky, Malraux called him.
For whatever reason, Jean Sibelius did not write a note in the last thirty years of his life.
Kierkegaard died of a lung infection.
Or a disease of the spine.
Karl Barth’s surmise:
That while the angels may play only Bach in praising God, among themselves they play Mozart.
Theophrastus pronounced that flute music could cure sciatica.
Not to mention epilepsy.
Alexander Pope died of dropsy.
John Milton died of gout.
Theophrastus said flute music would have cured that, also.
No one ever painted a woman’s backside better than Boucher, said Renoir.
A novel entirely without symbols.
Robert of Naples: Giotto, if I were you, in this hot weather I would leave off painting for a while.
Giotto: So would I, assuredly — if I were you.
Matthew Arnold died of a heart attack while running for a streetcar in Liverpool.
Among Dickens’ children:
Alfred Tennyson Dickens. Henry Fielding Dickens. Edward Bulwer-Lytton Dickens. Walter Landor Dickens. Sydney Smith Dickens.
Among Walt Whitman’s brothers:
George Washington Whitman. Andrew Jackson Whitman. Thomas Jefferson Whitman.
Elizabeth I, visiting Cambridge University, delivered a lecture in Greek.
And then chatted less formally with students in Latin.
Thomas Mann died of phlebitis.
The likelihood that Anne Hathaway could not read.
Anne Hathaway.
The perhaps less than idle speculation that Columbus was a Jew.
Space is blue and birds fly through it.
Said Werner Heisenberg.
Ultimately, a work of art without even a subject, Writer wants.
There is no work of art without a subject, said Ortega.
A novel tells a story, said E. M. Forster.
If you can do it, it ain’t bragging, said Dizzy Dean.
Xenocrates died after stumbling against a brass pot in the dark and cracking his skull.
Brunelleschi had a temporary restaurant and wine shop constructed in the highest reaches of the Florence cathedral while building his great cupola — so his workmen did not have to negotiate all that distance for lunch.
Maxim Gorky died of tuberculosis.
Or was he ordered murdered by Stalin?
Baudelaire died after being paralyzed and deprived of speech by syphilis.
I was tired and ill. I stood looking out across the fjord. The sun was setting. The clouds were colored red. Like blood. I felt as though a scream went through nature.
Said Edvard Munch.
Can only have been painted by a madman.
Said Munch of the same canvas.
Pico della Mirandola, not yet thirty-one, died of an unidentified fever.
William Butler Yeats died of heart failure.
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
Leigh Hunt once saw Charles Lamb kiss Chapman’s Homer.
Henry Crabb Robinson once saw Coleridge kiss a Spinoza.
Lamb was in fact known to pretend surprise that people did not say grace before reading.
Horse Cave Creek, Ohio, Ambrose Bierce was born in.
Giorgione probably died of plague.
Ninon de Lenclos.
The solitary, melancholy life of Matthias Grünewald. Was he wholly sane?
Is Writer, thinking he can bring off what he has in mind?
And anticipating that he will have any readers?
There is only one person who has the right to criticize me, do you understand? And that is Picasso.
Said Matisse late in life.
Arthur Koestler was an enemy alien in solitary confinement in a London prison at the beginning of World War II when Darkness at Noon was published.
Pope Joan, a.k.a. John VII, 855–858.
Who died when taken by childbirth during a papal procession between St. Peter’s and St. John Lateran.
There is no mention of writing in the Iliad. Any and all messages are passed along verbally.
Indicating incidentally that not one of the Greek warriors, during ten years at Troy, has ever sent a letter home.
Is John 8:6–8 the only place in the New Testament where Jesus is seen writing anything, if only marking on the ground with a finger?
The Salon des Refusés.
Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe.
Joseph Conrad died of a heart seizure.
Does Writer even exist?
In a book without characters?
— And who are you? said he. — Don’t puzzle me; said I.
Says Tristram Shandy VII 33.
Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of all virtue, said Flaubert.
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—
As a sort of mantra, Kant would sometimes recite a list of people who had lived long lives, hoping to match them. He reached eighty.
Gluck’s face was pitted from smallpox.
Haydn’s face was pitted from smallpox.
Mozart’s face was pitted from smallpox.
Ludwig Wittgenstein died of prostate cancer.
My mind and fingers have worked like the damned. Homer, the Bible, Plato, Locke, Lamartine, Chateaubriand, Beethoven, Bach, Hummel, Mozart, Weber are all around me. I study them, I devour them with fury.
Wrote Liszt at twenty.
Obviously Writer exists.
Not being a character but the author, here.
Writer is writing, for heaven’s sake.
Landscape of the Urinating Multitudes, Lorca called one of his New York poems.
Unmarried women should not bathe, said St. Jerome. Ever. And should embrace the most deliberate squalor.
The less to breed temptation in the world.
Sappho was small and dark.
Though is made blond and fleshy by Raphael in his Parnassus at the Vatican.
Horace was short and fat.
Admitting this himself in the Satires.
On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth.