According to medieval legend, his pupils stabbed John Scotus Erigena to death with their pens. (96)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #ThisIsTheEndMyFriend

Could one, actually, rewire the connections of a streetlamp in that manner? (97)
#Reader/Protagonist

Salvador Dali’s perception of Jackson Pollock. Fish soup. (98)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #GreatsOnGreats

On a shelf beside Reader’s desk: a human skull, a reproduction of Giotto’s portrait of Dante, two small rough orange stones. (99)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #Reader/Protagonist 

Hrotsvitha van Gandersheim. (100)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

In his late sixties, Herman Melville took a four-year-old grandaughter to a park and then forgot her there. (101)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons
Collector is from a family of academics. Oddly, this is relatable.

Hospitals, Protagonist will have been in. (102)
#Reader/Protagonist

And grows older. (103)
#Reader/Protagonist

Dulcinea del Toboso. (104)
#DMCastofCharacters #DMBookshelf

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Boethius was executed by having a thong inexorably tightened about his temples. (88)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #ThisIsTheEndMyFriend

As a boy, Tennyson could recite all 103 of Horace’s odes from memory.
Montaigne claimed he knew those and the rest of Horace as well. (89)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #GreatsOnGreats #Numbers

No life back there at all.
What life here, now? (90)
#Reader/Protagonist #Markson Mysteries 

John Donne posed for a painting in his own shroud. And kept it beside his bed during a long final illness. (91)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #ThisIsTheEndMyFriend

Why is Reader always mildly incredulous at remembering that the decimal system arose from counting on one’s finger? (92)
#Reader/Protagonist #Speculation

Several ancient oaks, also within the grounds, partly obscure the house. At night, the single bulb beyond one shaded downstairs window is extremely faint. 
There are wire mesh fences, in jagged disrepair.  (93)
#Reader/Protagonist

Käthe Kollwitz lost a son in World War I and a grandson in World War II. (94)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

Let us read Little Dorrit again. There are passages in that book I can never hear without the temptation to weep. (95)
#DMquotations #DMBookshelf

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George Bernard Shaw was an anti-Semite. (81)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #Bigotry

Protagonist first seen poised abstractedly amid a kind of transitory disarray? Cartoons heaped and piled
Innumerable books, Reader presumably means? (82)
#Reader/Protagonist

The name Kierkegaard translates from the Danish as church-yard. (83)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea. (84)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

Dickens, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Maxim Gorky never finished grade school. Sean O’Casey and Alberto Moravia did not either. 
O’Casey, at forty-three, was working with a pick and shovel when his first play was produced. (85)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

Where precisely would Protagonist live, if near a derelict cemetery? Possibly some sort of structure just within the grounds themselves?
That building abandoned also? Protagonist possibly stealing electricity through wires connected to the base of a streetlamp outside?
Reader sees a red brick building, in fact. Fairly small and falling into ruin, but of two stories. (86)
#Reader/Protagonist

None of John Milton’s daughters was given an education, though two of the three were taught to read to him in his blindness. 
In languages of which they did not understand one word. (87)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

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Knut Hamsun was once a horse-car conductor in Chicago. (73)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DM Map

Throughout the Middle Ages, often no more than a single manuscript of certain classics existed. One leaking monastery roof and the Satyricon could have been lost forever, for instance. (74)
#DMBookshelf

Mallarmé learned English specifically to read Poe (75)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #GreatsOnGreats

Walter the Penniless. Peter the Hermit. (76)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

During the four years that Dostoievsky spent at hard labor in Siberia for political conspiracy, the only book he was allowed was the New Testament. Though once in a prison hospital he found Pickwick Papers and David Copperfield. (77)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMBookshelf 

Deus Vult (78)
#DMquotations

Raymond Chandler lived with his mother until her death when he was thirty-five. And then almost immediately married a woman seventeen years older than he was. (79)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #parents
🎵 He loooooved his mother

An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.
Said Henry James. (80)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #GreatsOnGreats

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Albert Camus’ father was killed in the Battle of the Marne when Camus was only months old. His mother was an illiterate charwoman. (66)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons 

Once, at dinner, with great delicacy Brahms told Tchaikovsky that he did not approve of his work.
With equal delicacy Tchaikovsky told Brahms that he did not approve of his. (67)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #GreatsOnGreats

After Byron and Leigh Hunt and Trelawny burned Shelly’s body on the beach at Viareggio, they got drunk. Boisterously, shouting and laughing and even singing.
Then again, they had been dealing with remains already five weeks bloated and decomposed. Bryon had at least once turned sick. (68)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DM Map #ThisIsTheEndMyFriend

Ah, did you once see Shelley plain? (69)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMBookshelf

In Königsberg, where he spent his entire life, Immanuel Kant had several sisters and a brother and did not see any of them for a quarter of a century. At one point he had a letter from the brother and did not answer it for two and a half years. (70)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DM Map

Nonlinear? Discontinuous? Collage-like? (71)

An assemblage? (72)
#Reader/Protagonist

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Bohemia. A desert country near the sea. (58)
#DM Map #DMquotations #DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMBookshelf 
Rule: Read any work mentioned by name, quotation, or character.

In 1911, an Italian house painter named Vincenzo Perruggia who had been working at the Louvre managed to remove the Mona Lisa from its frame and walk out with it under his overalls. 
And to go unsuspected until he tried to sell it two years later. (59)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DM Map #DMGallery #DMTimeline 

Before Sylvia Plath turned on her oven to commit suicide, she left bread and butter and milk in the bedroom where her two children were sleeping. (60)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons
Always a bit confused on the mechanics. Is it the heat or gas of the stove that is lethal? The heat seems improbable. If it is the gas, why aren’t the children dead?

Leibniz: Why is there anything at all rather than nothing? (61)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #Speculation

When Daumier was sixty, destitute and almost blind, Corot bought the house Daumier was renting and gave it to him. (62)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

Der Untergang des Abendlandes. (63)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMBookshelf

Protagonist living near a disused cemetery, perhaps? (64)

A sense somehow of total retreat? Abandonment? (65)
#Reader/Protagonist

Despite decades of self-analysis, Freud was forever so anxiety-ridden about missing trains that he would arrive at a station as much as an hour ahead of time. (48)

Freud. (49)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons 

Joseph Beuys was a Stuka pilot in World War II. (50)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

Monet, visiting London:
This brown thing? This is your Turner? (51)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #GreatsOnGreats #DM Map

René Descartes was born in a hayfield. (52)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons 

Ultimately, Emily Dickenson would even hide from visitors at her house itself. (53)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #PoorMadDirtyDrunkAlone 

Reader and this notion of his. (54)

Reader and his mind full of clutter. (55)

What is a novel in any case? (56)

Or is he in some peculiar way thinking of an autobiography after all? (57)
#Reader/Protagonist

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Tolle lege, tolle lege. (43) 
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMquotations

Wherever conquest led him, Alexander the Great made it a point to have botanical specimens sent back to Aristotle, who had been his tutor. A copy of the Iliad that he carried in a jeweled chest contained emendations in Aristotle’s handwriting. (44)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMBookshelf 
If still extant, one can’t even imagine how much this copy of the Iliad would be worth. 

Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young. (45)
 #DMquotations #DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMBookshelf

Leonardo’s notebooks indicate that he knew the sun did not move before Copernicus did. (46)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons 

Nobody came. Nobody called. (47) 
#Reader/Protagonist

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Giorgione and Titian were pupils of Giovanni Bellini’s in Venice together. Giorgione was dead in his early thirties, in 1510. Titian was still painting sixty-six years later. (36)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMTimeline #DM Map

What has happened? It is life that has happened; and I am old. (37)

Said Louis Aragon. (38)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons 

If an ox could paint a picture, his god would look like an ox. 
Said Xenophanes. (39)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons 

26 Piazza di Spagna (40)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons  #DM Map

More Keats.

Laurence Sterne’s corpse was sold to a medical school by grave robbers. It had been almost completely dissected before someone chanced to recognize it. (41)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

How much of Reader’s own circumstances or past would he in fact give to Protagonist in such a novel? (42)
#Reader/Protagonist

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Nobody comes. Nobody calls. (33)
#Reader/Protagonist
This is not the Collector’s first collection.

At the age of seven, Giambattista Vico fell from a ladder and fractured his skull so severely that his parents were told to anticipate feeblemindedness. (34)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

Where, this isolation? (35)
#Reader/Protagonist

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Severn, lift me up, I am dying. (27)
Don’t breathe on me, it comes like ice. (28)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMquotations #ThisIsTheEndMyFriend 
Both 27 and 28 are deathbed utterances by John Keats as recorded by friend and hospice nurse Joseph Severn. 

The world is my idea. (29)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMquotations
The opening proposition to Arthur Schopenauer’s The World as Will and Idea.

Saint Augustine said his first teacher was also the first person he ever saw who could read without moving his lips. (30)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons
Always confusing: Aquinas and Augustine.

Saxo Grammaticus (31)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

 It is not impossible that the young actress Molière married when he was forty, and with whose family he had been closely connected in the theater for years, was his own illegitimate daughter. (32)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

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Protagonist? (25)

Perhaps someone from a shop Protagonist had stopped in at, a clerk? Or merely someone in a friendly mood in passing? (26)
#Reader/Protagonist

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His life evidently static. Alone, seemingly without occupation or achievement, his means meager.
Emptiness. (23)
#Reader/Protagonist

Anthony Trollope said he had read Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie at least three dozen times. (24)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMBookshelf #GreatsOnGreats
The Vespertilius Horribilis Americanus

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Fighting with his wife, drunk, Paul Verlaine once threw their three-month-old son against a wall. (19)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #Drunk

Thumbed pages: read and read. Who has passed here before me? (20)
#Reader/Protagonist

Saint Thomas Aquinas was an anti-Semite. (21)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #Bigotry 
The first of many.

Only Bianchon can save me, said Balzac, near death.
Bianchon being a doctor in Le Père Goriot. (22)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMCastofCharacters #DMBookshelf #ThisIsTheEndMyFriend
How’s our Mandarin?

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Gray’s Elegy is 128 lines long. Gray spent seven years writing it. (15)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMBookshelf #Numbers

If forced to choose, Giacometti once said, he would rescue a cat from a burning building before a Rembrandt. (16)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #Fires #GreatsOnGreats

I am growing older. I have been in hospitals. Do I wish to put certain things down? (17)

Granted, Reader is essentially the I in instances such as that. Presumably in most others he will not be the I at all, however. (18)
#Reader/Protagonist

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Anna Akhmatova had an affair with Amedeo Modigliani in Paris in 1910 and 1911. Late in life, not having left Russia again in a third of a century, she would be astonished to learn how famous he had become. (11)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMTimeline #DM Map
Rule: read the wiki article of any person mentioned.

In 1579, when Shakespeare was fifteen, the population of Stratford would have been little more than fifteen hundred. Is it a safe assumption that he knew the woman named Katherine Hamlet who fell into the Avon that summer and drowned? (12)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMTimeline #DM Map #Speculation

Emily Dickinson became so extravagantly reclusive in the second half of her life that for the last ten years she did not once leave her house. (13)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #OnlyTheLonely

Even among the most tentative first thoughts about a first draft, why is Reader thinking of his central character as Reader? (14)
#Reader/Protagonist

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I have come to this place because I had no life back there at all. (7)

I have, Reader has? (8)

Reader has come to this place because he had no life back there at all. (9)
Miffed, I was to be Reader.

Someone nodded hello to him on the street yesterday. (10)
#Reader/Protagonist

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Church bells were already ringing, to announce the Armistice in November 1918, when word reached Wilfred Owen’s family that he had been killed in battle one week before. (4)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMTimeline #ThisIsTheEndMyFriend

Picasso made Gertrude Stein sit more than eighty times for her portrait. 
And then painted out the head and redid it three months later without having seen her again. (5)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMGallery

Pablo Casals began each day for more than seventy years by playing Bach. (6)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

Check out other posts from the Markson Project here.

Someone nodded hello to me on the street yesterday. (1)

To me, or him? (2)

Someone nodded hello to Reader on the street yesterday. (3)

#Reader/Protagonist