This is Not a Novel Read Free Page A

miglior fabbro.
Byron knew no music.
Pope knew no music.
Johnson knew no music and very little of art, either.
    Ernest Hemingway once challenged Hugh Casey to a boxing match. Casey knocked Hemingway down repeatedly. Hemingway kicked Casey in the groin.
On an ancient sundial in Ibiza: Ultima mvltis.
The last day for many.
    Fayaway.
    Much of what we have of Aristotle was not strictly speaking written by Aristotle at all. But would appear to be classroom notes taken down by others.
    Both of Verdi’s parents were illiterate. Like Abraham Lincoln’s.
    Elegies to the Spanish Republic.
    From Herodotus, on Thermopylae: It chanced that at this time the Lacedaemonians held the outer guard and were seen by the spy. Some of them engaged in gymnastic exercises, others were combing their long hair. At this the spy greatly marveled.
The Spartans on the sea-wet rock
Sat down and combed their hair.
    Roman Jakobson, when Mayakovsky once read him his newest poems: Very good. But not as good as Mayakovsky.
    For that matter Writer also has backaches.
    As did Shelley.
    A poet is a waste-good and an unthrif t, in that he is born to make the taverns rich and himself a beggar. Said Robert Greene.
    But to speak plainly, I think him an honest man. Greene also said.
    One of Robert Frost’s daughters went insane. One of his sons killed himself.
    Christopher Marlowe, a stage direction: The Pope crosses himself, and Faustus hits him a box on the ear.

    Puccini, sipping coffee, once told Lucrezia Bori that her costume was too neat for the last act of Manon Lescaut, in which Manon is destitute. And dumped the coffee on her gown.
    Verses of Propertius were found copied out on walls in Pompeii.
    The seemingly authentic report that a doctor performed an autopsy on the Abbe Prevost after a stroke-to discover that only the autopsy had killed him.
    He who wrote that painting is a higher art than sculpture was as ignorant as a maidservant, said Michelangelo. Meaning Leonardo.
    Chopin died of tuberculosis.
    Salvador Dali once gave a lecture in London while wearing a diving helmet. And nearly suffocated.
    Thomas Gainsborough, while painting Sarah Siddons: Damn your nose, madame! There’s no end to it.
    Katherine Anne Porter died of Alzheimer’s disease.
    Palestrina’s tomb, once in St. Peter’s, for obscure reasons no longer exists.
    Musicae Princeps, it had said. Prince of music.
    Would Emily Dickinson have been aware that Lord Jeffrey Amherst arranged for blankets infected with smallpox to be set out for ill-clothed Indians to come upon during the French and Indian War?
    The case for William Davenant having been Shakespeare’s illegitimate son.
    A Novel Without a Hero. Being the subtitle of Vanity Fair. Though there, at least in part, meaning only that the book has a heroine instead.
    Catullus once wrote a poem criticizing Caesar. And was invited to dinner.
    Osip Mandelstam once wrote a poem criticizing Stalin. And died in the gulag.
    Martin Heidegger, in 1933: The Führer, and he alone, is the sole German reality and law, today and in the future.
    Henry Miller died of cardiovascular failure.
    B. Traven died of prostate cancer and sclerosis of the kidneys.
    If Stephen Crane had in fact lived on an additional forty-plus years, how different might the hierarchy of American letters have been in that period?

    No water-drinker ever wrote a poem that lasted. Says Horace in the Epistles.
    Un livre, c’est la mort d’un arbre. Said St.-John Perse.
    If you find this work difficult, and wearisome to follow, take pity on me, for I have repeated these calculations seventy times.
    Wrote Johannes Kepler.
    Italo Calvino died of a cerebral hemorrhage.
    There is no description of Helen’s beauty anywhere in the Iliad.
    Strangely like is she to some deathless goddess to look upon, being all that is said.
    Though the Trojan elders do acknowledge that no one could be blamed for having endured a war because of her.
    Calderon de la Barca was once arrested for molesting