Reader's Block

Reader's Block by David Markson Page B

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Authors: David Markson
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cross-referential and of cryptic interconnective syntax in any case.

    And as an incidental personal challenge, letting none of its intellectual mishegaas be material Reader has ever used anywhere else.

    Lector Ludens.

    Henry Purcell was Gerard Manley Hopkins’s favorite composer.

    Bricolage.

    Yeats could never finish reading Ulysses.

    Poetry is not written with ideas, Degas, it is written with words.

    Mohammed was an anti-Semite.

    Literate people who can spend hours in one’s home without a single glance at the titles on the bookshelves.

    F. R. Leavis was so severely shell-shocked as a stretcher-bearer in World War I that for a time he was incapable of speech.

    Gypo Nolan.

    Ite, missa est.

    You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.
    Said Charles Darwin’s father.

    Robin Hyde committed suicide.

    Evelyn Waugh was found dead on a bathroom floor.

    Protagonist having come upon his own name on one of the graves, though with meaningless remote dates?

    And?

    Wastebasket.

    The Lord of the Flies was rejected by twenty-one publishers.

    The first time I saw Wystan Auden his socks didn’t match.

    Herophilia, the Sibyl at Cumae, who lived a thousand years. And wished to die.

    As Eliot discovered in Petronius.

    Though how is Reader aware that while Cumae no longer exists the Sibyl’s cave still does?

    Where Aeneas visited it. Northwest of Naples.

    Johan Emanuel Schikaneder.

    Spatial Form in Modern Literature.

    Protagonist’s friends. From that life that was.

    And among those who had moved to distant places and one had gradually ceased to hear from even then?

    At Protagonist’s age, how long before one begins to suspect that some of them, also, are even now dead?

    We are now able to suggest an explanation for the proverb There are many Manii in Aricia.

    Hemingway: I just called to tell you I got that thing.
    General Buck Lanham: That thing? What thing?
    Hemingway: That Swedish thing, you know?

    That Swedish thing. The Nobel Prize for Horses’ Backsides.

    Voltaire was illegitimate.

    Late in her career, Kirsten Flagstad recorded a Tristan und Isolde in which the high Cs she had been missing repeatedly on stage were all reached magnificently.
    Having been sung by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and dubbed in.

    August Heat.

    At Protagonist’s age, how long before one realizes that more of the people one had ever known anywhere are in fact now dead than alive?

    Mary Powell.
    Katherine Woodcock.
    Elizabeth Minshull.

    A title for all this, has Reader by chance yet given any thought to?

    Thomas Heggen committed suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills.

    I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail.

    Tess Durbeyfield.

    Mr. Flood’s Party?

    Not Waving but Drowning?

    The Shrine of the Little Flower. Royal Oak, Michigan.

    The Temptation to Exist?

    In 1666, a committee in the House of Commons was ready to call both the Plague and the Great Fire God’s retribution against England for harboring an atheist such as Thomas Hobbes.

    Who played tennis until he was seventy-five.

    Jung was an anti-Semite.

    Antony threw himself on his sword after the defeat at Actium and the subsequent desertion of most of his troops.

    Go faster, Jesus, why dost thou linger?
    I indeed am going, but thou shalt tarry till I come.

    Right Views.
    Right Intentions.
    Right Speech.
    Right Conduct.
    Right Livelihood.
    Right Effort.
    Right Remembrance.
    Right Contemplation.

    Avicenna studied Aristotle’s Metaphysics so exhaustively and for so long that when he believed he finally fully understood it he handed out gifts to the poor in celebration.

    Joaquin Rodrigo was blind from the age of three.

    Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

    Now and again, an image, still, flitting into Protagonist’s consciousness? Tanaquil Le Clercq, Ravel’s La Valse?
    At thirty-nine, when his first wife died,

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