Tintoretto’s Susanna and the Elders.
In which Susanna looks to weigh in at close to two hundred pounds.
Santayana’s annoyance at the perpetual tremblings and tears and fainting fits in Dante. This shivering and swooning philosopher — unquote.
Wonderful man! I long to get drunk with him.
Says Byron in his journal regarding Scott.
Manzoni was so revered throughout Italy by the end of his life that parents recognizing him in public would ask him to literally bless their children.
Alberto Moravia’s suggestion that a woman’s body is all that modern man any longer possesses of nature.
Verte desnuda es recordar la tierra.
Contributed Lorca.
Aristotle’s conclusion that one could tell how bad a play was by the amount of food eaten in the audience during the performance.
Inverurie, near Aberdeen, Mary Garden died in.
Jules Laforgue died four days after his twenty-seventh birthday. His wife of less than eight months would die a year later. Tubercular both.
Edward Jenner.
In the era of the desert anchorites of fourth-century Egypt and the Near East, one convent is chronicled as having housed 130 nuns — not one of whom ever bathed.
Socrates’ father was a sculptor.
Scott Joplin’s father was a former slave.
Nominative. Genitive. Dative. Accusative. Ablative.
Stop giving instructions to God.
Niels Bohr once told Einstein.
Aposiopesis.
The George Grosz drawing of Jesus, crucified, wearing a gas mask and combat boots, and captioned Shut up and carry out your orders.
Dated 1928.
The Max Ernst painting of the Virgin Mary spanking the infant Jesus.
If anyone pilfer this, may he die the death, be boiled in a cauldron, may epilepsy and fever overtake him, may he be broken on the wheel and hanged. Amen.
Says the Latin inscription on an extant hand-copied twelfth-century church Bible.
For the work of the pen let the writer be sent a beautiful girl.
Says a copyist’s note at the end of a different manuscript from the same period.
But look where sadly the poor wretch comes reading.
The happenstance that Lorca and Hart Crane once met — briefly, during Lorca’s stay in New York. Unfortunately with neither really knowing anything about the other’s work.
Hath the rain a father?
Corona, Queens, Louis Armstrong died in.
Sunnyside, Queens, Bix.
At sixty-seven, Paul Robeson was mugged on a New York street.
He must be some escaped lunatic.
Said an early Boston review of Leaves of Grass.
Getting and spending.
Freud waved his rights to royalties on translations of his work into Hebrew or Yiddish.
The letters of Voltaire take up a total of ninety-eight volumes.
Chamfort’s ironic distillation of the essential attitudes in the French Revolution:
Be my brother or I’ll kill you.
The one experience I shall never describe, Virginia Woolf called her intended suicide.
I have the feeling that I shall go mad. I hear voices and cannot concentrate on my work. I have fought against it, but cannot fight any longer.
The morning’s recollection of the emptiness of the day before.
Its anticipation of the emptiness of the day to come.
The last book Einstein had been reading when he died was Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision.
Blaise Cendrars once played the piano in a silent-movie theater on the Bowery.
Not very many years after Al Jolson had been singing for his supper nearby.
When daybreak came we were zooming through New Jersey with the great cloud of Metropolitan New York rising before us in the snowy distance. Dean had a sweater wrapped around his ears to keep warm. He said we were a band of Arabs coming in to blow up New York.
Terrorists. Which was in fact the literary term chosen to categorize the earliest nineteenth-century female Gothic novelists.
Tchaikovsky. Glinka. Borodin. Mussorgsky.
Who are buried in the same St. Petersburg cemetery.
Pollock. De Kooning. Frank O’Hara. Ad Reinhardt. Jean Stafford. Maggie Oldring.
Who are buried in the same one in East Hampton.
In a more traditional sort of novel, would it be time here for Author to bring back that obscure, lorn creature performing her ablutions at a toilet bowl?
Avec what startling dramatic revelation appended?
Langston Hughes’ request that a particular Duke Ellington composition be played at his funeraclass="underline"
Do Nothing Till You Hear from Me.
Drumcliff churchyard.
All I can do is be kind to my husband and grow up children. Movie is nothing but exhibition dancing. What is the meaning of dancing and songs?
Aristophanes of Byzantium, asked which poem by Archilochos he most admired:
The longest.
Diogenes, asked what sort of wine he preferred:
That which belongs to another.
What a man does is all that counts, not what he intends to do.
Said Picasso.
The friendship of Felix Mendelssohn and Queen Victoria.
The red and roundy sun, John Clare called it.
Milan, Eugenio Montale died in.
Giuseppe Ungaretti anche.
Naples, Salvatore Quasimodo.
No woman ever created a single permanent work of art.
Said Schopenhauer.
Dylan Thomas was asked to be best man at Vernon Watkins’ wedding.
And managed not to get there.
Constantin Brancusi studied under Rodin.
Isamu Noguchi studied under Brancusi.
Anselm Kiefer studied under Joseph Beuys.
El Greco was a pupil of Titian’s.
The younger Pliny’s tale of the reader from Cadiz who so admired Livy that he traveled the full distance to Rome simply to have one view of him in the flesh — and then immediately left again.
Kurt Vonnegut once played chess against Garry Kasparov. And was cunning enough to resign after very few moves.
Even though Kasparov was playing a dozen or more games simultaneously.
Spain sent 130 ships to England in the Armada.
Fifty-four limped back.
Doll Tearsheet.
The only thing that we learn from history — is that we never learn anything from history.
Hegel said.
Gutless swooning full of sapless trees and dehydrated lusts. Reads a Faulkner description of Tennyson.
Thirteen pages in seven weeks. Five days on one page. Three days on eight lines.