Read random notations in Flaubert’s letters re progress on Madame Bovary.
Moritzburg, near Dresden, Kaethe Kollwitz died in.
One of the influences on Dvořák’s New World symphony was Hiawatha. Which Dvořák had no less first read in Czech.
Children, be comforted. I am well.
Being Haydn’s last words.
Mahler’s — singular — in a context which made no sense:
Mozart.
I hate to see him eating so many dinners and writing so few books.
Said William Dean Howells, of the extent to which Mark Twain was celebrated in his later years.
A complete absence of aesthetic feeling — unquote — Tolstoy found in Shakespeare.
Ernest Jones and Stefan Zweig spoke at Freud’s funeral.
Donatello died paralyzed.
Donatello.
The illusion that Deep Blue was somehow thinking.
Armageddon. At the hill of Megiddo — in the plains of Jezreel.
In southern Galilee.
I have traveled a good deal in Concord.
Raphael appears to have painted a total of exactly fifty Madonnas.
Has anyone ever identified manna?
Et in Arcadia ego.
Chopin was buried in concert dress.
Delacroix was one of his pallbearers.
Solon, hearing a new poem of Sappho’s, saying he wished to memorize it:
Once I possess it fully, I can happily die.
The Leucadian Rock.
The Tarpeian Rock.
And it was like coriander seed, white, and the taste of it was like wafers made with honey.
George Moore’s assertion that he had in effect invented adultery.
Which he said had not occurred in any English novels before his own.
Sunt apud infernos tot milia formosarum.
Said Propertius: Among the dead there are thousands of beautiful women.
Thomas Mann’s claim that everything Bertolt Brecht wrote adhered far too predictably to the Communist party line.
Brecht’s response that Mann was a half-wit.
Auden’s response when asked if he believed in capital punishment:
That he would definitely approve of it in regard to Brecht.
Diderot, writing art criticism, and finding fault with a nude of Boucher’s:
All the same, just let me possess her as she is, and I do not think I shall waste time complaining that her hair is too dark.
Black Drop. Four ounces @ eleven shillings.
Being the brand of opium most favored by De Quincey and Coleridge. By Byron not infrequently also.
At one’s local apothecary.
Bert Brecht.
A faint sound to the praise of God, Hrotswitha von Gandersheim described her Latin comedies as.
Evidently wholly unaware of their sexual connotations.
Tomis, on the Black Sea, Ovid died in.
Cristoforo Colombo. Cristóbal Colon.
Sprawling, ignorant, indecent, unmelodious, seldom metrical.
Robert Graves called Pound’s Cantos.
A barbarian loose in a museum, Yvor Winters called Pound himself.
Shepherd of adulterers, a heretical older Tertullian called the pope.
Wittgenstein’s Vienna. Wittgenstein’s Nephew. Wittgenstein’s Ladder. Wittgenstein’s Poker.
Ferdinand and Isabella, los reyes católicos.
The former of whom had Jewish ancestry.
The likelihood that Torquemada did also.
Bah! For me it is simply allegro con brio.
Said Toscanini about critics reading politics into the Eroica.
Le Douanier Rousseau, who insisted he served with troops sent to Mexico to aid the Emperor Maximilian and actually saw those jungles.
But lied.
We killed him,
signed,
Morty.
Rubens attended Mass seven days a week.
Miroslav Holub and Zbigniew Herbert died within days of each other.
Author’s continuing sometime missteps.
His awareness that he probably ought to see a neurologist about same.
Crooked man, crooked mile.
Conversely, Author is still essentially willing to dismiss all of that as no more than age, the problems with his balance as well as the damnable obstinate weariness.
A Portrait of the Artist as an Alter Kocker.
Indeed. Old enough in fact to remember when Ted Williams was not the last baseball player to bat.400, but merely the most recent.
For that matter old enough to remember when the last player to bat.400 was Memphis Bill Terry.
Camden, New Jersey, Walt Whitman died in.
Given pause by the coincidence of the Declaration of Independence having been signed in the same year as the publication of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Carlyle once sent Edward Fitzgerald a copy of his latest book — with a note suggesting he should either read it or use the pages for lighting his pipe.
From far back in dimmest childhood he had been my ideal Elder Brother, and I still, through the years, saw in him, even as a small timorous boy yet, my protector, my backer, my authority and my pride.
Said Henry James, at the death of William.
The letters of Hélöise and Abélard. Forgeries or no?
Without music, life would be a mistake.
Said Nietzsche.
Music is neither good nor bad — to the deaf.
Said Spinoza.
Voltaire’s corpse had to be secretly driven out of Paris — sitting upright in a carriage — to be given a Christian burial.
Sartre’s impression that there was once an English author named Foe — who wrote such books as Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders.
Weimar, Nietzsche died in.
The black bat, night.
I have never killed a man. But I have read many obituaries with a lot of pleasure.
Said Clarence Darrow.
The friendship of Monet and Clemenceau.
A little plain woman with two smooth bands of reddish hair and a face with no good feature.
Being Emily of Amherst, as seen by Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
Selah, which marks the ends of verses in the Psalms, but the Hebrew meaning of which is unknown.
And probably indicates no more than pause, or rest.
Why does Author wish it implied more — or might stand for some ultimate effacement, even?
The 1953 Victor De Sabata La Scala Tosca, with Callas, Giuseppe di Stefano, and Tito Gobbi — is it the greatest single opera recording ever made?