Homeric beer drinking, Brahms was credited with.
A stupid man’s report of what a clever man says is never accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.
Said Russell.
Flowing with milk and honey, the Old Testament promised the Promised Land would be.
Utterly barren, Strabo found it.
Heidegger was buried in the same small-town German cemetery he had passed every day on his way to school eight decades before.
Rémy de Gourmont’s perception that there are two kinds of writers:
Writers who can write and writers who cannot.
Edward I banished all Jews from England in 1290. None were allowed back until 1655, under Cromwell.
Shakespeare found Shylock where?
His books are to be eradicated from the memory of man. Said the Edict of Worms re Luther.
1915. The first use of poison gas in battle, at Ypres on the Western Front. By the Germans.
1939. The first use of gas chambers for the execution of civilians, commencing with experiments on retarded children. By the Germans.
Boccherini. At one point so influenced by Haydn that he was spoken of as Haydn’s mistress.
Samuel Beckett was awarded the Croix de Guerre for his work with the French Resistance in World War II.
Leopold Bloom is five feet nine and one-half inches tall.
Dasein.
Einsatzgruppen.
Monteverdi was seventy-five when he wrote The Coronation of Poppea.
Vienna, Schrödinger died in.
Jim should have stuck to music instead of bothering with writing. To think he was once on the same platform with John McCormack.
Said Nora.
Was The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction the most frequently cited critical essay in the second half of the twentieth century?
Howland Island. July 2, 1937.
Catullus, dead at thirty, was wealthy enough to have owned a custom-built yacht.
What did you bring that book I didn’t want to be read to out of up for?
Absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence.
La Jolla, California, Amelita Galli-Curci died in.
As did Raymond Chandler.
As did Leo Szilard.
How many Cy Young Awards would Cy Young have won?
But now the garret is a thing of the past. A good writer is a rich writer, and a rich writer is a good writer.
Proclaimed an awesomely cognizant, incomparably discerning magazine editor named Lewis Lapham ca. 2001.
And burbled as it came.
At least once, Descartes was involved in a duel with swords over a woman.
Arnold Schoenberg, who had converted to Christianity, deliberately reaffirmed his Jewishness in formal ceremonies in Paris after having had to flee the rise of Hitler.
Marc Chagall stood as witness to the reconversion.
David Hockney’s rationalization that because he himself could never draw like an Old Master, most of the Old Masters really could not either, but gained an edge by manipulating images via optical devices.
The fact that Thomas Wolfe was the only significant American novelist of his time more drawn to Munich or Berlin than to Paris.
His unappetizing politics.
Watson, you idiot, somebody stole our tent.
Nobody comes. Nobody calls.
Marat’s skin disease — which could be salved by soaking in warm water.
Explaining why Charlotte Corday found him in his bath.
Jacques-Louis David, who had visited him at his same bath only a day earlier — ergo the realism in the canvas of the murder.
615 Cahuenga Building.
Hollywood Boulevard.
Earlier versions of the myth of Troy — predating the Iliad—in which Hector is still alive when Achilles lashes him to his chariot and drags him around the walls.
Guarneri was a pupil of Stradivari.
The Guarneri that Heifetz had used was appraised after his death at six million dollars.
Mistinguett.
One hundred and eighty different plants are referred to in Shakespeare.
There’s fennel for you, and columbines.
Every bride is beautiful, Hillel said.
The myth that Dionysus invented wine.
On Mount Nysa.
In Libya.
I know a bank where the wild thyme blows.
Nietzsche’s insomnia. Jorge Luis Borges’.
God-almighty rubbish, Leo Stein called Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.
Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse — who through fifty years of correspondence continued to greet each other as Herr Mann and Herr Hesse.
Gertrud Kolmar was at forced labor in a Berlin factory until transported to her death in Auschwitz in 1943.
Eglantine.
The original manuscript of I Stood Tip-toe upon a Little Hill—which Cowden Clarke cut up into a dozen or more fragments for admirers of Keats who wanted keepsakes.
Alice B. Toklas survived Gertrude Stein by twenty-one years.
But was buried beside her in Père Lachaise.
Reno, Nevada, Dizzy Dean died in.
El Greco ended his days the equivalent of bankrupt.
While living in twenty-plus rooms.
John Huss is said to have chanted hymns as he was being burned alive.
Auden’s conviction that Beethoven was homosexual.
Joseph Brodsky and a friend were asked to select Akhmatova’s burial site at a Leningrad cemetery.
And could locate only drunken gravediggers to deal with.
It is not disorderly and slovenly carriage which makes us sages.
Said Spinoza, even in poverty always formally dressed.
The runners return to their respectable bases.
Hon. John M. Woolsey.
The likely presence of Laurel and Hardy in the background of Waiting for Godot—is the notion Hugh Kenner’s?
The Aegean, Callas’s ashes were scattered in.
According to Tacitus, Petronius slept all day. And some-way lounged into fame in spite of profoundest indolence.
D’où venons nous?
Que sommes nous?
Où allous nous?
Someone once actually gave Picasso credit — in print — for the discovery that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points.
The only difference between myself and a madman is that I am not mad.
Said Dali.
The friendship of Strindberg and Gauguin.