This Is Not a Novel by David Markson

Author:David Markson [Markson, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: General, Fiction, Literary Collections, Literary, Literary Criticism, American, Psychology, Experimental Fiction, Characters and Characteristics in Literature, Creative Ability
ISBN: 9781582431338
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2001-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Tantum religio potuit suadere maloram, Lucretius said.

Such are the evils that religion prompts.

Emotion recollected in tranquility.

The best words in the best order.

Vivaldi died of no one knows what. Of internal fire, the 1741 Vienna church registry having poetically settled for.

A social and moral pervert, Theodore Roosevelt called Tolstoy.

Roosevelt on Henry James: A miserable little snob.

On Thomas Paine: A filthy little atheist.

Spinoza’s tomb. At the Nieuwe Kerk in The Hague.

It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried.

S. Y. Agnon died of a heart attack.

Dostoievsky’s second wife, Anna, adding a note of charm to a recollection of Dostoievsky pawning something:

He sat there for over an hour—my poor, poor Fedya. So sweet, and so brilliant and altogether fine, and he had to sit and wait among a lot of Jews.

Stuck-groove music.

When the canvas is on the floor, I feel closer to it. Said Jackson Pollock.

Marie Corelli was Charles Mackay’s daughter. Marcia Davenport was Alma Gluck’s.

Robert Penn Warren died of prostate cancer.

Joshua Reynolds died blind.

After having been deaf through most of his life.

Only when the world itself is destroyed will the verses of Lucretius perish. Said Ovid.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan died profoundly in debt. Yet was granted a spectacular Westminster Abbey funeral.

Moliere died after bursting a blood vessel in a convulsive tubercular coughing fit and choking on his own blood.

Panta rei, ouden menel

It is very difficult to understand and appreciate the generation that follows you, Matisse said.

I only know that summer sang in me A little while, that in me sings no more.

The candle-end was flickering out in the battered candlestick, dimly lighting up in the poverty-stricken room the murderer and the harlot who had so strangely been reading together in the eternal book.

The friendship of Byron and Stendhal.

According to Herodotus, Xerxes literally ordered that the Hellespont be given three hundred lashes when a storm washed away a bridge he had only then constructed for his invasion of the West.

And as an incidental afterthought also ordered his chief engineers beheaded.

Gary Cooper died of lung cancer.

Wilhelm Reich died in Lewisburg Penitentiary.

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin died after giving birth to the infant girl who would one day marry Shelley.

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin died after giving birth to the infant girl who would one day write Frankenstein.

Fanny Brawne’s mother died in an accident in which her clothing caught on fire.

Things from which one would avert one’s eyes even in a brothel.

Said Aretino in a letter to Michelangelo condemning The Last Judgment.

Which at least three different popes subsequently came close to having removed.

Rarely remembering that it was Congreve who said Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast.

Rarely remembering that it was Congreve who said Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. In the same play.

People none of whose business it is repeatedly excising the Hughes from the Yorkshire gravestone inscribed Sylvia Plath Hughes.

Moses Mendelssohn died of a stroke.

Felix Mendelssohn died of a stroke.

Slabtown, Tennessee, Grace Moore was born in.

If on a winter’s night with no other source of warmth Writer were to burn a Roy Lichtenstein—qualms?

Qualmless.

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