Jim Farrell.
Jim Agee.
Naomi Ginsberg’s lobotomy.
Rosemary Kennedy’s.
The wagon train moved slowly westward.
William Empson: You could do that with any poetry, couldn’t you?
I. A. Richards: You’d better go off and do it, hadn’t you?
The reaction when sudden sunshine on a late winter afternoon brings with it a first unanticipated hint of spring. At Dachau.
Al Naharot Bavel.
I see only a heap of white clothes, like a snowdrift. O God, she moves her arm!
Tertullian’s father was a Roman centurion.
Silver Spring, Maryland, Rachel Carson died in.
Garden Spring Valley, Maryland, Rosa Ponselle.
We Italians are irreligious and corrupt above others.
Concluded Machiavelli.
I was once in Italie myself, but I thanke God my abode there was but IX days. And yet I saw in that litle tyme, in one Citie, more libertie to sinne, than I ever hard tell of in our noble Citie of London in IX years.
Added Roger Ascham, in 1563.
A country of fiddlers and poets, whores and scoundrels.
Being Horatio Nelson’s subsequent two cents’ worth.
Ted Hughes writes the kind of stuff I throw away.
Said James Dickey.
I did greatly enjoy the first few years of Act I.
Said Alexander Woollcott of an operetta by Rudolf Friml.
The title for Vanity Fair came to Thackeray when he was almost asleep. And sent him literally bounding around his bedroom in delight.
The Republicans are as wicked as they are stupid, which is saying a great deal.
Said Bertrand Russell after a visit.
What Balzac would make of a novel of Author’s.
Bill de Kooning.
On Lucas Cranach’s tombstone: Pictor Celerrimus, the fastest painter.
Camilo José Cela fought on the side of the fascists during the Spanish Civil War.
Who is it that can tell me who I am?
Macedonian barber: How would you like your hair cut?
King Archelaus: In silence.
Ariosto spent twenty-six years writing and revising Orlando Furioso.
Frank, the Francis Beaumont of Beaumont and Fletcher was known as.
Charley Dickens, to Wilkie Collins and others.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poem about having seen an older man in the Copenhagen airport who was the very image of Hemingway.
And only later learning that it was.
Luciano Pavarotti and Placido Domingo made their Metropolitan Opera debuts within eight weeks of each other.
Acute lymphocytic leukemia, José Carreras recovered from.
Hadrian, at fifty, climbed Etna to watch the sunrise. Goethe climbed Vesuvius twice.
Wondering if youngsters still read Beau Geste.
Actually, more than his persistent tiredness, what has started to distress Author lately is the way he has found himself scuffing his feet when he walks.
But also the singular small missteps he sometimes unexpectedly takes. As if his Adidas have whims of their own.
Literature is what gets taught, Roland Barthes said.
Ridgfield, Connecticut, Geraldine Farrar died in.
Jimmy Whistler.
Opera is opera, symphony is symphony—
Said Verdi, in an ultimate judgment on Wagner.
Author is likewise not particularly gladdened by the several times in recent weeks that he has tripped at a curb. Or at the outside steps of his apartment building.
The Norman Rockwell of the intelligentsia, Robert Hughes called Alex Katz.
Liber scriptus proferetur,
In quo toturn continetur.
The Wandering Jew was claimed to have been seen in Newcastle in 1790.
And in London in 1818.
Farinelli was at one period commissioned to sing to Philip V of Spain every evening for a decade.
Giambattista Tiepolo was buried in Madrid, in a church that would later be destroyed.
The whereabouts of his remains having been unknown ever since.
They were overjoyed when the first plane hit the building; so I said to them: Be patient.
The sky will burn at forty-five degrees. Fire approaches the great new City. In an instant a huge scattered flame leaps up.
Why, with few exceptions, is the average painter so much more literate than the average actor?
Vaughan Williams went through life supported by a private income.
William Burroughs had a regular monthly allowance from his parents for twenty-five years after graduating from Harvard.
Where the last stand was made, the Long Hair stood like a sheaf of corn with all the ears fallen around him.
Said Sitting Bull.
From a description in Plutarch of a drinking bout:
As if one were laying in provisions for a siege.
Linares, Granada, Andrés Segovia was born in.
Linares, Granada, Manolete died in.
I feel like I’m solidly in the high-art literary tradition — unquote.
What news on the Rialto?
Realizing only after the fact that Miss Lonelyhearts’ real name is never mentioned.
Mademoiselle Côeur-Brisé.
Considering her inordinate reclusiveness, who then walked Emily Dickinson’s huge dog?
What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.
Said Johnson.
Major Marcus Reno. Captain Frederick Benteen.
Or yet again, Author simply passing casually through his apartment — with one foot or the other now and then not quite touching down where it should.
And was it yesterday that Author’s right shoulder thumped into the corridor wall just outside his bedroom?
A passage he has normally navigated ten thousand times without a second thought?
There was a crooked man, and he went a crooked mile.
Drawing unsatisfactory.
Say Hitler’s records at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts — where he failed the admittance exams.
Was Chardin the greatest still-life painter ever?
In the meanwhile another of the actors conquers Poland.
Southey’s several old-fashioned epic poems which Richard Porson suggested would be read after Homer and Virgil were forgotten:
But not until then.
Empson’s uncounted misquotations.
Stanley Kunitz delivered the eulogy at the funeral of Mark Rothko.
After Nero arranged the murder of his own mother, Seneca shamelessly wrote the letter to the Senate for him declaring that she had committed suicide.
Eliot’s ashes were buried at East Coker — though there is a cenotaph at Westminster Abbey.