The Last Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

the back of William Gaddis’s headstone.
    The true/untrue/pleasant-in-either-case tale that Salvador Dalí had been noticed gazing in almost hypnotic fascination at a melting wedge of Camembert on a dinner table not long before painting the limp watches in The Persistence of Memory .
    I am extremely happy — until further notice.
    Says a letter of Berlioz about his romance with Harriet Smithson.
    An alcoholic is someone you don’t like who drinks almost as much as you do.
    Said Dylan Thomas.
But I’m not so think as you drunk I am.
    Suggested J. C. Squire.
    The seeming likelihood that Pythagoras is implying that the world is round — in the mid–sixth century BC.
    He had not escaped the common penalties of transgressing the laws of strict purity, wrote Alexander Thayer re Beethoven.
    Which is to say — he had syphilis.
    Guillaume Apollinaire authored a considerable amount of art criticism, particularly as an early champion of Cubism.
    While at the same time being incapable of distinguishing a Rubens from a Rembrandt, Braque commented.
    Thales of Miletus, when his mother begged him to marry: It is too soon.
    After she permitted him some delay: It is too late.
    Once, watching a ceremonial procession near the Vatican, Samuel Morse failed to remove his hat — and had it roughly knocked off by a papal guard.
    And became vociferously anti-Catholic thereafter.
    June 7, 1843, Friedrich Hölderlin died on.
    Be informed, Christian, that after the devil thou hast no enemy more cruel, more venomous, more violent, than the Jew.
    Pronounced Luther.
    World War II — started by sixty kikes.
    Pronounced Ezra Pound.
    Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God.
    Pronounced the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem — well before a State of Israel existed.
    While also citing Adolf Eichmann as both gallant and noble.
    To sit for John Singer Sargent, Yeats appeared in a velvet coat and a billowing bow tie — and then carefully arranged a lock of hair to fall across his forehead.
    All this to remind himself of his importance as an artist, Sargent said he said.
    The last time anyone mentioned William Saroyan.
    Eleusis, Aeschylus was born in.
    Colonus, Sophocles.
    Salamis, Euripides.
    T. S. Eliot missed military service in World War I because of a hernia.
    Pound had astigmatism.
    Andrea del Castagno’s masterwork, a last supper, was painted at the Convent of Sant’Apollonia in Florence in 1447.
    And was not seen by other artists for four hundred years — because of the convent being closed to laypersons.
    The state should keep me, Schubert once suggested. I have come into the world for no purpose but to compose.
    Now that a certain portion of mankind does not believe at all in the existence of the gods, a rational legislation ought to do away with the oaths.
    Wrote Plato — 2,310 years before an act of the United States Congress added the phrase under God to the Pledge of Allegiance.
    Suddenly taking a moment to wonder — does anyone any longer make use of Morse code?
    I pay well. But the wenches are all whores and pigs.
    Says a Michelangelo letter about a servant problem.
    André Malraux had reached Spain within two days of the start of the Civil War in 1936.
    Living the classic impoverished artist’s life while a student in Milan, Giacomo Puccini was once forced to pawn his overcoat — as he allows one of his characters to do in La Bohème .
    In El Diario de Madrid, February 1799, a first advertisement for prints of Goya’s Caprichos:
    On sale at No. 1 Calle del Desengaño, the perfume and liquor store.
    Beatrix Potter had to pay to publish The Tale of Peter Rabbit.
    I am hungry. I am cold. When I grow up I want to be a German, and then I shall no longer be hungry and cold.
    Wrote a Jewish youngster in the Warsaw Ghetto.
    Not long before his death, Toulouse-Lautrec spent several months in a mental institution, being released only in care of a guardian whose portrait he then painted.
    My keeper when I was mad, he inscribed