Toasted Susie is my ice cream.
Pythagoras’s insistence that in one of his earlier incarnations he had fought in the Trojan War.
In fact that he had been Euphorbus, who in the Iliad wounds Patroclus and is in turn killed by Menelaus.
Borges’ vision of Paradise:
A kind of library.
The long-hoped-for opportunity to meet Byron that Schopenhauer turned away from at the last moment — when the woman he was with evinced far too much enthusiasm of her own about it.
Epi oinopa ponton.
Walter Scott’s novels generally cost him innumerable hours of hunting through reference books.
Which were forever heaped up precariously on the floor below his desk.
In addition to Italian, Leopardi possessed effortless mastery of Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, English, and Hebrew — by the age of sixteen.
October 21, 1969, Jack Kerouac died on.
Romain Rolland never learned which side won World War II.
Wondering how many lifetime scribes and/or manuscript copyists were put out of work in the decades immediately after Gutenberg?
Wondering why the plural of still life is still lifes and not still lives?
Sofa-size.
Simone Weil was dead at thirty-four.
You have reached Ned Klein. Please leave a message after the beep.
When I am eighty, my art may finally begin to cohere. By ninety, it may truly turn masterful.
Said Hokusai. At seventy-three.
Windy humbuggeries.
Mark Twain found in Scott.
A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth-rate in Europe.
Faulkner once called Twain in turn.
The 2005 Vienna exhibition featuring erotic paintings by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele — at which patrons arriving nude or in skimpy bathing suits were admitted free.
Colossal ennui. It seems to me that I could write something like it tomorrow by taking inspiration from the cat walking over the keyboard on my piano.
Said Prosper Mérimée of Tannhäuser.
It is impossible to finish any of his plays, they are pitiful.
Claimed Napoleon re Shakespeare.
A lot of twaddle.
Confirmed George III.
More than sixty percent of the people in the United States do not know what the capitalized word Holocaust in its common contemporary usage stands for.
Assuming that Saul Bellow was aware of the Moses Herzog mentioned in passing in Ulysses?
A desperate Stevie Smith addict.
Sylvia Plath called herself.
April 16, 1958, Rosalind Franklin died on.
Capital punishment is our society’s recognition of the sanctity of human life.
Declared a Utah senator named Orrin Hatch — presumably a former honors student in Logic 101.
Clov: What is there to keep me here?
Hamm: The dialogue.
The Girl of the Golden West, Act III — in which the soprano arrives on stage on horseback.
Renata Tebaldi was petrified.
One of the earliest translations of the Bible in America — into Mohawk.
At one juncture during his years as a customs inspector on the New York docks, Melville was forced to take a cut in salary — from $4.00 to $3.60 per day.
Oscar Hammerstein’s first job in America, in a cigar factory, paid him two dollars a week.
Andrew Carnegie’s, in a cotton mill, had paid $1.50 — for twelve-hour days.
Washington Square, in Greenwich Village, Edward Hopper died in.
Washington Square, in Greenwich Village, Novelist also happens to be typing this last book only short blocks away from.
Lorenzo de’ Medici, who commissioned Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, ca. 1485.
And a dozen or so years later sent Amerigo Vespucci sailing westward.
To cause justice to prevail in the land.
To prevent the strong from oppressing the weak.
To better the welfare of the people.
— Read portions of the Code of Hammurabi — from what may have been as early as 1800 BC.
Anthony Burgess’s bad eyesight.
Which permitted him to once enter a bank in Stratford-on-Avon — and order a drink.
Lloyd George knew my father,
Father knew Lloyd George.
In 1907, Caruso was being paid $2,000 per performance at the Metropolitan.
$2,000 in 1907 currency.
The uncanny sense of atmosphere in certain Constable landscapes.
So that looking at them could make one worry that he might need an umbrella, Fuseli said.
Remembering next to nothing about The Courtship of Miles Standish — except that Longfellow himself was in fact descended from Priscilla and John Alden.
Mozart wrote his Thirty-Sixth Symphony, the Linz, in at most three days.
In the period when artists of stature were called upon to paint likenesses of hunted murderers on the walls of Florentine buildings, Andrea del Castagno’s led to so many captures that he became known as Andrea degli Impiccati — Andrea of the Hanged.
Bach almost persuades me to be a Christian.
Roger Fry said.
January 11, 1966, Giacometti died on.
The Marquis de Sade was at least once arrested for sodomy. And once for severely beating a young woman.
While also being implicated in the deaths of two prostitutes after an overdose of aphrodisiacs during an orgy.
Listen, I bought your latest book. But I quit after about six pages. That’s all there is, those little things?
We evaluate artists by how much they are able to rid themselves of convention.
Said Richard Serra.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it’s been.
Said Wayne Gretzky.
Ivy Compton-Burnett died after a bronchitis attack.
Martin Luther King’s seminary studies — during which he received a grade of C in public speaking.
A street in Nice is named after Marie Bashkirtseff.
Mr. James Joyce is a great man who is entirely without taste.
Said Rebecca West.
He started off writing very well, then you can see his going mad with vanity. He ends up a lunatic.
Added Evelyn Waugh.
Very dirty and completely worthless.
Edith Sitwell called Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
Wholly ignorant.
Waugh called Sitwell.
Wonderful, this death.
Allegedly said William Etty, as it occurred.
Oliver Goldsmith was the oldest member of his graduating class at Trinity College, Dublin.
And the lowest ranked.