Andrew Jackson was twelve years old when he enlisted to fight in the Revolutionary War.
I will not believe that a woman can draw so well.
Said Degas at his first view of a Mary Cassatt.
Andreas Baader. Gudrun Ensslin. Ulrike Meinhof.
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were Brooklyn Dodgers fans.
Oscar Wilde’s lecture tour of the United States — which brought him to St. Joseph, Missouri, only one week after the shooting of Jesse James.
That dirty little coward
Who shot Mister Howard
And laid poor Jesse in his grave.
Irving Berlin had no schooling after the fifth grade.
Thomas Edison had only three months of actual classroom time.
Agatha Christie had none whatsoever.
One would like to curse them so that thunder and lightning strike them, hell-fire burn them, the plague, syphilis, epilepsy, scurvy, leprosy, carbuncles, and all diseases attack them. Ignorant asses.
Being Luther, in a contemplative mood re the papal hierarchy.
Frida Kahlo’s amputated leg.
Mikhail Bakhtin’s.
The last words of Mr. Despondency were, Farewell night; welcome day! His daughter went through the river singing, but no one could understand what she said.
Dr. Donne’s verses are like the peace of God; they pass all understanding.
Said James I.
Among those mailing an order to Shakespeare and Company, in Paris, for an earliest copy of Ulysses — Winston Churchill.
July 17, 1974, Dizzy Dean died on.
Emerald eyes, Dante says Beatrice had.
While never telling us the color of her hair.
A writer of something occasionally like English — and a man of something occasionally like genius.
Swinburne called Whitman.
A man standing up to his neck in a cesspool — and adding to its contents.
Carlyle called Swinburne.
Jane Welsh Carlyle died a virgin.
The avant-garde. A kind of research and development arm of the culture industry, the critic Thomas Crowe called it.
It is utterly impossible to persuade an editor that he is nobody.
Said William Hazlitt.
Galen’s astonishingly voluminous medical knowledge — much of it acquired while working as the surgeon at a gladiatorial school.
Pontormo’s diary. Which generally concentrates more on the state of his bowels than on anything of interest in art history.
Among the worst books ever committed to paper.
An Archbishop of Canterbury called Tess of the d’Urbervilles.
A child’s introduction to Nietzsche and Jung.
The Yale Review categorized Hesse’s novels as.
The year lost to tuberculosis early in her career by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf — probably contracted in dank World War II Vienna air-raid shelters.
Mallarmé, never well-off, who nonetheless possessed works by Whistler, Monet, Berthe Morisot, Gauguin, Odilon Redon, and Rodin — all personal gifts.
Of contemporary literature, philosophy, and politics he appeared to know next to nothing.
We are told by Dr. Watson about Holmes.
Karl Marx died sitting at his desk.
Antonin Artaud, sitting up at the foot of his bed.
People who actually believe that Christo’s tangerine-colored bedsheets fluttering about in New York’s Central Park had something even remotely to do with art.
Oranges and lemons,
Say the bells of St. Clement’s.
Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin only because a bacteria culture with which he was experimenting became contaminated — by accident.
Chesterfield’s definition of the word illiterate, as a noun, 1748:
A man who is ignorant of Greek and Latin.
Matthew Arnold’s of philistine, ca. 1869:
A person who believes his greatness is proved by being rich.
Barbarous, Samuel Pepys called Hamlet.
Jessica Lange was once a waitress in the Lion’s Head.
Eve Ensler was once a waitress in the Lion’s Head.
And yet it was impossible for me to say to men speak louder, shout, for I am deaf.
Mark Twain’s pronouncement that the personages in a novel should be alive, except in the instance of corpses — and that the reader should be able to tell the corpses from the others.
Unfortunately not the case in Fenimore Cooper, he determines.
When I was boy, the Sioux owned the world; the sun rose and set on their land.
Said Sitting Bull.
When I was young I walked all over this country, east and west, and saw no other people than the Apaches.
Said Cochise.
Once I moved about like the wind. Now I surrender to you and that is all.
Said Geronimo.
Noting that the first word of English that Robinson Crusoe teaches his man Friday — after the name Friday itself — is Master.
Nathanael West once applied for a Guggenheim fellowship with recommendations from Scott Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson, and Malcolm Cowley.
Guess.
Novelist’s own Guggenheim applications, plural, with references equally as impressive.
Guess — six or seven times.
Comedy aims at representing men as worse, tragedy as better, than in actual life.
Says Aristotle.
Marco Polo died three years after Dante.
Horace Greeley died insane.
Future generations will regard Bob Dylan with the awe reserved for Blake, Whitman, Picasso and the like.
Said an otherwise seemingly rational writer named Jonathan Lethem.
D. H. Lawrence and Susan His Cow.
The 1940s network radio broadcast of La Bohème in which Toscanini could be distinctly heard humming along with Licia Albanese and Jan Peerce as he conducted.
Karl Popper claimed he had written the 480-plus pages of The Open Society and Its Enemies more than thirty times.
We did not ask you white men to come here.
Said Crazy Horse.
A heart attack while swimming, Theodore Roethke died of.
The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government, said Martin Luther King.
In 1967.
Georges Rouault was born during a bombardment in the Franco-Prussian War — in a Paris cellar.
Bob Dylan, as poet:
Sophomoric and obvious, said Ned Rorem.
Bob Dylan, as composer:
Banal and unmemorable, Rorem aussi.
April 21, 1924, Eleonora Duse died on.
For no reason whatsoever, Novelist has just flung his cat out one of his four-flights-up front windows.