The Last Novel by David Markson

Author:David Markson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Psychological, novel, Psychological fiction, Novelists, General, Literary, recommendation, Fiction - Authorship, Authorship, Fiction
ISBN: 9781593761431
Publisher: Shoemaker & Hoard
Published: 2007-03-16T06:26:11.954000+00:00

One half of the children born die before their eighth year. This is nature’s law; why try to contradict it?

Inquired Rousseau.

John Jay Chapman’s conclusion that a visiting Martian would come away with a more critical lesson about life on earth from attending an Italian opera than from reading Emerson.

The lesson that there are two sexes.

September 13, 1506, Andrea Mantegna died on.

Kenesaw Mountain Landis.

Lente currite noctis equi.

Says Ovid in the Amores.

O lente lente currite noctis equi.

Says Marlowe, at the end of Faustus.

Of no significance whatsoever. But the hospital where Dylan Thomas would die, sixty-one years after the fact, was the one after which Edna Millay had been named.

O run slowly, slowly, horses of the night.

Pandora’s box. Which in the first written version of the tale, in Hesiod, is in fact a jar.

A reference to the good old hearty female stench, unquote.

Which Pound excised from Eliot’s manuscript of The Waste Land.

Sacred Scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, not the earth.

Said Luther, dismissing this fool, Copernicus.

Flat, clumsy, labored, and embarrassingly crude, Isaac Deutscher called Doctor Zhivago.

Which Akhmatova found so intermittently inept that she refused to believe Pasternak had written it all.

Like Benedetto Croce earlier, Ignazio Silone lost both of his parents in an earthquake.

Paul Robeson’s Othello.

With José Ferrer as Iago.

Renée Fleming’s Metropolitan opening-night Desdemona — sung only three weeks after having given birth to a second child.

Because of a promise to his mother, Jorge Luis Borges recited the Lord’s Prayer every night of his life:

Even though I don’t know whether there’s anybody at the other end of the line.

God seems to have left the receiver off the hook.

Once suggested Arthur Koestler — in more general political terms.

And prayers have no power the Plague to stay.

Wrote Long Will.

Montaigne was taught to read and speak Latin before he knew French.

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was reading Plato and Aristophanes, in Latin translations, at the age of eight.

Anton Bruckner, in old age, tells Gustav Mahler that he can readily foresee his coming interrogation by his Maker — Why else have I given you talent, you son of a bitch, than that you should sing My praise and glory? But you have accomplished much too little.

Cosima Wagner’s Jewish great-grandmother.

Egon Schiele was once briefly jailed — but then not prosecuted — on allegations of abducting and molesting a girl of thirteen.

Q. Who is the Buddha?

A. Three pounds of flax.

After a performance, Queen Victoria once ventured to inform Paderewski that he was a genius.

To which: Perhaps, Your Majesty. But before that I was a drudge.

The word nihilism.

Coined by Turgenev, for use in Fathers and Sons.

The next night he did not know where he was, did not feel the cold. The wind blew dust along the ground and into his mouth as he sang.

Nelson, at Trafalgar. Who had a horseshoe nailed to the mainmast of the Victory before the battle.

Niels Bohr — who kept one above a door in his vacation home.

Niels Bohr.

I would rather have a drop of luck than a barrel of brains.

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