The Last Novel (2007) by David Markson

Author:David Markson [Markson, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: prose_contemporary
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2007-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Jesus. I think.

The frequent blind beggars in Euripides, particularly in plays now lost.

The crutch and cripple playwright, Aristophanes called him.

August Strindberg’s mother had been a barmaid.

The marriage of Roberta Peters and Robert Merrill — which lasted three months.

The Greatest Novel Reader in the World.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning suggested her own epitaph could well be.

Jean-Michel Basquiat died of a heroin overdose. At twenty-seven.

Sir Thomas Bodley, who organized the Oxford library subsequently named the Bodleian, permitted the inclusion of no such idle bookes and riffe raffes — unquote — as writings for the current theater.

Including of course those of his almost exact contemporary Shakespeare.

Allen Ginsberg’s insistence that he was once accosted by the apparitional voice of William Blake — immediately after masturbating.

How now! Whose mare’s dead?

The extraordinary fame of Menander in antiquity — to the point where he is even quoted by Saint Paul.

Robert Graves’ claim that as an infant at Wimbledon he had been occasionally patted on the head by Swinburne — he himself being wheeled by his nurse, Swinburne en route to his pub.

Theodore Watts-Dunton’s wife’s claim that when the monumentally alcoholic Swinburne was finally weaned away from brandy, he initially drank port because Tennyson did, then burgundy because of the Musketeers in Dumas, and at last ale — because of Shakespeare.

What a pleasant party, Plutarch records someone commenting to Timon of Athens.

It would be, if you were gone, Timon responds.

If there is anyone here I have forgotten to insult, I apologize.

Announced Brahms, exiting somewhere — 2,300 years later.

Paul, thou art beside thyself; much learning doth make thee mad.

No battleship has yet been sunk by bombs.

Said the caption on a photograph of the USS Arizona in the program for the 1941 Army-Navy football game — eight days before Pearl Harbor.

Ovid’s banishment from Rome by Augustus — which meant that his books were automatically removed from the city’s libraries as well.

The similar banning of Virgil’s and Livy’s three decades later — by Caligula, who simply did not like them.

May the devil bung a cesspool with his skull.

Requested John Millington Synge, re a dim-witted reviewer.

One of us was once in love for eight days with a woman of fairly easy virtue, and the other for three days with a ten-franc whore. Altogether, eleven days of love between the two of us.

Being Edmond and Jules Goncourt, elucidating their relationships with the opposite sex.

Longfellow published his first poem at thirteen.

Bryant wrote Thanatopsis at seventeen — and after publication several years later was to hear it called a hoax.

No one, on this side of the Atlantic, is capable of writing such verses, insisted Richard Henry Dana.

Never having realized that there originally once was an actual troublemaking Irish family named Hooligan.

Or a military officer named Shrapnel.

The John Cage composition entitled 4'33"

.

In which the performer sits at a piano for four minutes and thirty-three seconds — and plays nothing.

Cervantes was fifty-eight when Part I of Don Quixote was published.

And sixty-eight at Part II.

Finding the earliest hints of a theory of evolution in Anaximander.

In the sixth century BC.

I never knew a writer’s wife who wasn’t beautiful.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.