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twenty-seven years in a papal dungeon for heresy.
    An information bureau of the human condition, Theodor Adorno called Kafka.
    Shelley, at nineteen, was sent down from Oxford for publishing a pamphlet on atheism. Landor, at the same age, was expelled for shooting a fellow student in a political argument.
    Two hundred and forty-three people die in the Iliad who are named by name.
    One hundred and forty-seven separate wounds are mentioned.
    The Graham Sutherland portrait of Winston Churchill. Which Clementine Churchill cut into pieces and then burned.
    Exsultate, Jubilate. K 165. Maria Stader.
    Writer’s tendency to forget that there were two other Bronte sisters, scarcely older, who died when Charlotte and Emily and Anne were eight and six and four.
    Consumptive, the brood.
    Boris Pasternak evidently died of lung cancer that had spread to the area of his heart.
    Peredelkino.
    I have never heard of any old man forgetting where he had hidden his money, Cicero said.
    Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror: 1524, Parmigianino’s version dating from.
    Philip of Macedon: If I reach Lacedaemon, not one stone will I leave upon another. The Spartans: If.
    Enrico Fermi died of stomach cancer.
    John von Neumann died of cancer of the brain.
    Haworth Parsonage.
    Shakespeare’s Sonnets /Never Before Imprinted. A small quarto, 1609: Sixpence.
But on a May morwening upon Malverne hilles
Me bejel a ferly, of fairye me thoughte.
    Jenny Lind died in the Malvern Hills.
    My work is not a prize composition done to be heard for the moment, but was designed to last forever. Said Thucydides.
Pierre Bonnard and Wassily Kandinsky were nearsighted.
As were Samuel Johnson and Tennyson.
And Nietzsche.
    And Maria Callas.
    Marshall McLuhan died of a stroke.
    Robert Lowell once punched Jean Stafford in the face and broke her nose. Which he had broken two years earlier by drunkenly smashing a car into a stone wall.
    Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.
    Bach and Handel, born twenty-six days apart. And never once meeting.
    Beethoven was left-handed.
    Rembrandt worked so slowly, especially in his later years, that it became ever more difficult for him to find sitters. In good part explaining the hundred-odd self-portraits.
    Luisa Tetrazzini died penniless.
    Tolstoy, asked if he had read a recent play by Maurice Maeterlinck: Why should I? Have I committed a crime?
They who write ill, and they who ne’er durst wrote,
Turn critics out of mere revenge and spite.
—Said Dryden.
    Ten censure wrong for one who writes amiss. —Added Pope.
    He was being called Papa Haydn well before he was thirty.
    Jacopo. Gentile. Giovanni.
    Not to add sister Nicolosia, who married Andrea Man-tegna.
    Was Liszt the greatest pianist who ever lived?
    Planning his Balzac, Rodin went so far as to search out a tailor the novelist had used forty years before—and had a suit made to the dead measurements.
    Birgit Nilsson’s debut at the Metropolitan Opera, as Isolde, was reviewed on the front page of the New York Times.
    I am not overly fond of poetry and I do not read it willingly. In my reading, poems take up a very small space. Said Ingeborg Bachmann.
    Rodin died of pulmonary congestion.
    Anabasis.
    Your last novel was a flop. You’ve got two wonderful children depending on you. Don’t you think it’s time to consider doing something more financially responsible in your life?
    This is also even an autobiography, if Writer says so.
    Come away ; poverty’s catching. Wrote Aphra Behn.
    Anni 68 Cenzza Ochiali, Canaletto signed a drawing in 1766.
    At age sixty-eight, without spectacles.
    Handel died blind.
    Gaddo. Taddeo. Agnolo.
    Lodovico. Agostino. Annibale.

    Liszt sat down and played at sight what the rest of us toil over and in the end still get nowhere with, Clara Schumann said.
    Or John Bellini, as Ruskin insisted on calling him.
    Maria Malibran died at twenty-eight after being thrown from a horse.
    Has time pardoned Paul Claudel?
    Ruskin