David Markson - David Shields

7/31/2019 David Markson - David Shields

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READER'S BLOCK. A novel. (1996)

If forced to choose, Giacometti once said, he would rescue a car from a burning building

before a Rembrandt. p.10

Saint Augustine said his first teacher was also de first person he ever saw who could

read whithout moving his lips. p.11

Politics in a work of literature is like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert. p.25

The vocabulary in Shakespeare's plays includes 29,066 different words. There are

29,899 different words in Ulysses. p.32

Every word she writes is a lie, including andand the.

Because we were young and drunk and twenty, and could never die. p.49

Maribrbola and Nicolasito. p.59

Except for Aquinas and the Bible, Descartes almost never read a word. He called the

classics a waste of time. p.63

Dostoievsky's father was the resident physician at a hospital for the poor. But treated his

own serfs so abusively that a group of them ultimately murdered him. p.68

I have a narrative. But you will be put to it to find it. p.78

The first time Elgar's Pomp and CircumstanceMarch No.1 was performed in London, in

1901, the audience literally stood up and cheered. The orchestra played it again and the

same thing happened. It had to be played yet a third time before the program could go

on. p.84

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0PHWKRFgZ0

Raphael, Caravaggio, Watteau, Van Gogh, and Toulouse-Lautrec each died at thirty-

seven. p.94
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The pen describes what has happened, the other what might. hence poetry is

something more philosophical and serious than history. p.97

Does one know today with whom Colombus sailed when he discovered America? Said

Freud after his break with Jung. p.99

October 12, 1942. At 2 A.M., the lookout on the Pinta. Name Rodrigo de Triana. p.99

Leonard Warren collapsed and died, on stage, during a performance of La Forza del

Destinoat the Metropolitan Opera. p.99

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsyCTGe4FcA

Born with the gift of laughter and the sense that the world was mad, and that was his

only patrimony. p.102

Nields Lyhne. Which Loyce, Ibsen, Hesse, Mann, Strindberg, Rilke, Freud, were all

profound admirers of. Rilke calling all of Jacobsen's work as indispensable to him as the

Bible. p.125

http://www.eldritchpress.org/jpj/niels_lyhne.htm

The bass arias of Sarastro in The Magic Flute. Which Shaw called the only music that

would not sound out of place in the mouth of God.p.140http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rejHPz1NrWg

Literate people who can spend hours in one's house whiteout a single glance at the

titles on the bookshelves. p.141

O lente, lente currite, noctis equip! (O, run slowly, slowly, horses of the night!) p.156

The name Salome translates from the Hebrew as peaceful. p.158

Joyce died of a perforated ulcer. p.162

I guess maybe there are two kind of writers, writers who write stories and writers who

write writing. Said Raymond Chandler. p.163
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I think you're more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I

prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged. p.178

Quelqu'un vit sur cette plage.

Alguien vive en este playa. p.178

And can you not understand that having told you all this, I shall forever despise you for

having heard it? p. 183

Van Gogh shot himself in the chest.

And then walked home and took two days to die. p.189

A street in Paris, the late 1980's.

Madame Melba, you don't know who I am? I'm Oscar Wilde, and I'm going to do a

terrible thing. I'm going to ask you for money. p.189

VANISHING POINT (2004).

A seascape by Henri Matisse was once hung upside down in the Museum of Modern

Art in New York - and left that way for a month and a half. p.1

By his own admission, William Butler Yeats, at twenty-seven, had not yet ever kissed awoman. p.2

Karl Marx never in his life saw the inside of a factory. p.3

I can't listen to music too often. It makes you want to say stupid, nice things.

Said Lenin. p.5

Tolstoy, to Chekhov:

You know I can't stand Shakespeare's plays, but yours are worse. p.5

Basic research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing.

Determined Wernher von Braun. p.5

Among the graffiti at Pompeii: Samius, Cornelio, suspender.


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Samius to Cornelius - Go hang yourself. p.11

How many thing there are in this world that I do not want.

Said Socrates, strolling through a marketplace in Athens. p.15

The friendship of Picasso and Stravinsky. p.18

A volume of Sherlock Homes, which fictional Leopold Bloom has borrowed from a

Dublin library and which is thirteen days overdue on fictional June 16, 1904, was listed

as missing by the actual library in 1906. p.18-19.

Emily Dickinson left behind 1,775 poems.

Meaning a fraction less than one per week from every week of her adult life. p.22

How can I tell what I think until I see what I say? p.22

Billie Holiday sang with an Artie Shaw band in a New York hotel ballroom in 1938.

And was not only not allowed in the hotel dining room, but made to come and go

through the hotel kitchen. p.23

Shakespeare's Two Gentelmen of Verona, in which characters deeper Verona by ship -

when the city is nowhere near the sea. p.25

When in Rome, do as the Romans do.

Said Cervantes, in Part II of Don Quixotein 1615.

Said Robert Burton, in The Anatomy of Melancholyin 1621. p.26

Picasso, in his seventies, discussing form and structure in art.

Then tossing aside a ink-stained desk blotter with the comment: Jackson Pollock. p.27

In 1827, an earliest Paris production of Hamlet, in English. With Hugo, Dumas, Eugne

Delacroix, Berlioz, Alfred Vigny, Sainte-Beuve, and Grald de Nerval all know to have

attended. p.27-28.

Clemenceau, to a new private secretary.

Certain letter you will have to draft yourself. Now listen: a sentence consist of a noun


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and a verb. If you want to use and adjective, come and ask me first. p.28

Women, in ancient Greece, were not permitted to do the shopping. p.28

For some years, Marcel Duchamp was the second-ranked chess master in France. p.29

There are always more fools in the majority than in the minority.

Said Anatole France. p.31

O, what a number of lies this young man has told about me.

Said Socrates, the first time he heard Plato read one of his dialogues.

Says a legend recorded by Diogenes Lartius. p.32

The Marquis de Sade, a century and a half before On the Road:

Writing One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodomon a single continuous forty-five-foot

roll of paper. p.32

Where they burn books, they'll end up burning people, said Heine.

In 1821. p.38

Thanks to God, I have always remained an atheist.Said Luis Buuel. p.40

The correspondence between T.S. Eliot and Groucho Marx.

Initiated by Eliot. p.40

Forks were first introduced in England in 1611.

Which is to say, about the time Shakespeare was writing The Winter's Taleand/or The

Tempestand repairing to retire to Stratford. p.41

Phoenix , Arizona, Frank Lloyd Wright died in. p.49

27, rue de Fleurus. p.51

http://bandofthebes.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cc27e53ef0168e8b4971a970c-580wi
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Remembering that the Chinese invented moveable type well before Gutenberg.

As did the Koreans. p.51

Writing in bed, Mark Twain preferred. p.51

There were 945 booksellers in Paris in 1845. p.53

For the first several centuries, the Mass in the Roman church was conducted in Greek,

not Latin. p.56

A half-bottle, Toulouse-Lautrec called himself because of his own stunted growth. p.57

There's nothing to say that hasn't been said before.

Says Terrence in the Eunuch.

We can say nothing but what has been said; the composition and method is ours only.

Says Burton in the Anatomy. p.63

9 ridge Road.

Rutherford, New Jersey. p.69

https://reader009.{domain}/reader009/html5/0428/5ae3d68b0c03f/5ae3d68f183eb.jpg

Beethoven. Schubert. Liszt.

All pupils of Salieri. p.69

A mere trifle consoles us, a mere trifle distresses us.

Said Pascal. p.69

Hermann Hesse was at one time a patient of Jung's p.69

One should always read with a pen in one's hand.

Says Delacroix in the Journals. p.79

Verdi wrote Il Trovatoreand La Traviatain less than a month each. p.79

Was Walter Benjamin the first to point out that where every home once possessed room
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after room in which people had died, in today's world virtually everyone dies somewhere

else? p.83

Leopold Bloom is not circumcised.

And has not had a bar mitzvah. p.87

Braque's father was a housepainter. p.90

Joyce said he spent twenty thousand hours writing Ulysses. p.91

The standard Italian translation of Moby Dickis by Cesare Pavese. p.96

The announcement at the Metropolitan Opera on December 11, 1956, that the

evening's Lucia di Lammermoorwould be sung by one Dolores Wilson and not, as

schedule, by Callas - which led to a virtual riot in the lobby. p.97

God does not inhabit healthy bodies.

Said Saint Hildegard of Bingen. p. 97

Supose one woke and found oneself a fraud?

Ask Virginia Woolf's Diary. p.98

Erasure is as important as writing.

Said Quintilian. p.99

Woolsthorpe. Where Newton did or did not have his attention caught by an apple falling

from the branch. p.100

I prefer to think in torment than not to be able to think clearly.

Said Freud, rejecting drugs while enduring the cancer that slowly took his life. p.100

Was Andreas Mantegna's Padua fresco The Martyrdom of Saint James, destroyed by a

bomb in 1944, perhaps the greatest single loos to art in World War II? p.103

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c1/Andrea_Mantegna_088.jpg

Umberto Eco, asked about the impulse behind writing The Name of the Rose.
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I felt like poisoning a monk. p.105

Frozen music, Schelling called architecture.

At the memorial Mass for Beethoven a week after his death, the music chosen wasMozart's Requiem. p.105

During his first half-dozen years in New York, Jasper Johns worked as a window

dresser. p.107

Art is not truth. Art is a lie that enables us to recognize truth.

Said Picasso. p.108

White does not exist in nature, said Renoir. p.109

Heisenberg, why have you been dancing all evening? Why not, Dirac? The party is filled

with nice girls. How did you know they were nice before you danced with them? p.109

Adolf Eichmann read Lolita while awaiting trial in Jerusalem.

And was indignant over what termed its unwholesomeness. p.110

Thales of Miletus, asked why he never become a father.Because I love children. p.111

I have never seen a situation so dismal that a policeman couldn't make it worse.

Said Brendan Behan. p.113

When Chagall paints you do not know if he is asleep or awake. Somewhere or other

inside his head there must be an angel.

Said Picasso. p.115

Guido of Arezzo. Who gave the names to the first six notes of the scale.

Ca. 104 A.D. p.116

Always acknowledge the gift of a book before there has been time to read it, said Eliot.

If you wait you will have to commit yourself to an opinion. p.117


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Apelles' explanation for his mastery:

Knowing when to take his hand from the picture.

To know when to stop is of the same importance as to when to begin.Said Paul Klee, twenty-two hundred years later. p.125

How ofter, if ever, pausing to remember? -

Museum, i.e., place of the muses. p.126

Proust deathbed photo. By Man Ray. p.127

http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?artobj=53333&handle=li

The fact that Socrates wrote nothing.

The fact that Jesus wrote nothing.

The fact that Buddha wrote nothing. p. 128

Decades before it become commonplace, Joyce was generally most comfortable in

tennis shoes. p.131

Simone de Beauvoir was one inch taller that Sartre. p. 133

Albert Camus was having lunch in a Paris restaurant when he was informed he had won

the Nobel Prize. By his waiter. p.133

The pretense in speaking of second-rate 1940s Hollywood melodramas as film noir

classics. p.133

Saussure's doctoral dissertation: On the use of the genitive case in Sanskrit. p. 134

Diogenes, explaining why people give to beggars, but not to philosophers:

Because they think it possible that they themselves might become lame or blind, but

they do not expect to turn out philosophers. p.135

The uncle of Kafka's was the director general of the Spanish railway system. p. 137
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What might Johannes Kepler have been allergic to, that his nose ran eternally? p. 141

At twenty-nine, Toscanini conducted the world premiere of La Bohme.

And conducted it again on its fiftieth anniversary. p.144

The first occasion on which the word shitappeared in the New Yorker:

Quoting Richard M. Nixon. p. 144

Who is that can tell who I am? p. 147

Macedonian barber: how would you like your hair cut?

King Archelaus: In silence. p.147

William Burroughs had a regular monthly allowance from his parents for twenty-five

years after graduating from Harvard. p.150

Billie Holiday's bank balance at her death registered a total os seventy cents.

Though hospital attendants found $750 taped to her leg. p.157

Do you lack anything?

I do. That you stand out my sunlight a little. p.157

Was The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproductionthe most frequently cited

critical essay in the second half of the twentieth century? p.161

Absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence. p.161

Watson, you idiot, somebody stole our tent. p.162

Verte desnuda es recordar la tierra. p. 166

Aristotle's conclusion that one could tell how bad a play was by the amount of food

eaten in the audience during the performance. p. 166

Terrorists. Which was in fact the literary term chosen to categorize the earliest

nineteenth-century female Gothic novelists. p. 169


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What a man does is all that counts, not what he intends to do.

Said Picasso. p. 170

Kurt Vonnegut once played chess against Gary Kasparov. And was cunning enough toresign after very few moves. Even though Kasparov was playing a dozen or more game

simultaneously. p 171

Cristoforo Colombo. Cristbal Coln. p. 174

Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage. p. 180

No one truly believes in his own death.

Said Freud. p. 184

I like a view but I like to sit with my back to it. p. 189

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David Markson - David Shields