Said Allen Ginsberg in an anthologized interview.
Tonstant Weader fwowed up.
Said Dorothy Parker, about something else altogether.
When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain.
I have now done nothing for fifty years but earn and spend money, and it has become clear to me that spending money gives more pleasure than earning it.
Said Lorenzo de’ Medici.
Titian. Tintoretto. Veronese. Bellini. Giorgione. Canaletto. Piazzetta. Guardi. Longhi. Verrocchio. Antonello da Massina.
All deaths in Venice.
Beethoven. Brahms. Gluck. Haydn. Mahler. Mozart. Schubert. Strauss. Vivaldi. Wolf. Bruckner. Berg.
All in Vienna.
That malignant deity criticism, Swift named it.
Florence Foster Jenkins was seven when she made the recording.
Charles Demuth’s I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold, from the William Carlos Williams poem.
Which Williams wrote at the corner of West Fifteenth Street and Ninth Avenue in Manhattan.
The used dressing gown of Flaubert’s that Sacha Guitry bought at auction in 1930.
A tacky raincoat of Jack Kerouac’s, did Author read something similar about?
Take care, you who call yourself my judge. Take care what you do. For the truth is that I have my mission from God, and you put yourself in great danger.
Said Joan of Arc to her chief Inquisitor.
Perchance you who pronounce my sentence are in greater fear than I who receive it.
Said Giordano Bruno to the several of his.
No man at all can be living for ever, and we must be satisfied.
Says a peasant woman in Synge, after a last son has been drowned.
A critic once told Whistler that one of his paintings wasn’t good. Whistler told the critic he shouldn’t say it wasn’t good, only that he didn’t like it:
And then, you know, you are perfectly safe.
It has also been adopted by the Freudians as the supreme glory of their dirty and degraded cult—
Noted an early London article re Ulysses.
Now Barabbas was a book reviewer.
Rarely did any friend or other person eat at his table. Says Vasari of Michelangelo.
Spinoza’s queer insistence that he found it almost impossible to believe he had ever been a child.
An obnoxious squeak, Charles Lamb heard in Shelley.
A latrine, Baudelaire called George Sand.
Frederick Delius for a time taught music in Jacksonville, Florida.
Cicero’s ironic view of philosophers who preach that men should repudiate ambition — but who sign their books.
Roger Clemens was discarding that splintered bat.
William Wycherley’s seven years in debtors’ prison.
A great mind unequaled anywhere, Goethe said of Scott.
While of Byron:
Only Shakespeare and the Ancients his superior.
The realization that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all wrote between forty and seventy years after the events in question.
Cavafy worked for the Ministry of Public Works in Alexandria for thirty years.
Anthony Trollope worked for the British Post Office for thirty-three.
Jeanne la Pucelle.
Dickens, in America, met Kate Douglas Wiggin, then twelve.
The Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment.
Crucifixion, for example.
Woodland Hills, California, Buster Keaton died in.
Emily Sarah Sellwood.
Cyril Connolly once snuffed out a cigar in his chocolate mousse at the New York apartment of Diana and Lionel Trilling. Diana Trilling took it as a deliberate affront.
What high rooftop could who have shouted this from, that Author knows it all these years later?
The friendship of Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin.
Puella.
Thomas Nashe, informing Gabriel Harvey of Robert Greene’s drinking habits:
In one yeare he pist as much against the walls, as thou and thy two brothers in three.
Theo van Gogh died within six months of Vincent.
August 6th, 1916, Officer previously reported died of wounds now reported wounded, Graves, Capt. R., Royal Welsh Fus.
The greatest artist who has ever written, George Eliot called Jane Austen.
A prose Shakespeare, agreed Macaulay.
Without poetry — Charlotte Brontë’s dissent.
How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?
Asked Johnson of the American Revolution.
The Wandering Jew was claimed to have been seen in Munich in 1721.
The extent to which Aristophanes quotes or parodies Euripides — so that he appears to know much of the work by heart.
The extraordinary implication that the audience is thus assumed to know it too.
Lenin saw Sarah Bernhardt in La Dame aux Camélias—and admitted that he wept.
Stephen Crane, on horseback. Happiest there, said Conrad.
The legend that Bucephalus whinnied at sight of himself in a painting by Apelles that Alexander did not like.
Your Majesty’s horse knows more about art than you do, the artist is said to have said.
Attila could not read or write.
A madman, a charlatan, and a miserable fool. Being Rousseau, via Voltaire.
Seventy-two virgins.
Brahms was twice offered an honorary degree by Cambridge and twice declined.
For fear of crossing the Channel, friends suspected.
From Nightwood:
Pray to the good God; she will keep you.
From The Recognitions:
Just ask God, baby, She’ll protect you.
Chet Baker died on a sidewalk in Amsterdam. Almost surely from drugs.
Poetry must be as well written as prose.
Said Pound.
Seventy-two white raisins?
Modernsky, Schoenberg mocked Stravinsky as.
The infantrymen who during combat took time to set up a marker where Ernie Pyle was killed in the Pacific in 1945.
Wondering idly how many people who live in Rochester — have read Rochester.
One hundred and fifty carriages followed Washington Irving’s funeral procession in New York in 1859.
Apelles’ explanation for his mastery:
Knowing when to take his hand from the picture.
To know when to stop is of the same importance as to know when to begin.
Said Paul Klee, twenty-two hundred years later.
Missa Papae Marcelli.
The computer analysis that says readings in modern high school senior honors classes are less difficult than those used by people Author’s age when they were in the eighth grade.