Free Reader's Block by David Markson Page A

publishers.

    Gilles Deleuze committed suicide.

    Factoryville, Pennsylvania. Donora, Pennsylvania. Gretna, Louisiana. Van Meter, Iowa.
    Quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante.

    Gabriele D’Annunzio lost an eye in combat with the Italian air force in World War I.

    Thrushcross Grange.

    Lautréamont was born in Montevideo. Jules Laforgue was born in Montevideo. Jules Supervielie was born in Montevideo.

    Once more before I die I will read Don Quixote, said Gissing.

    Graham Greene was an anti-Semite.

    I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me.

    O yes! I am poison’d; mother, make my bed soon,
    For I’m sick at the heart, and I fain wald lie down.

    Born with the gift of laughter and the sense that the world was mad, and that was his only patrimony.
    Has Reader made note of enough women for Protagonist’s background? Considering all the years involved?

    Remembering any number of others who could readily be appropriated.

    Though leaving the critical question for Protagonist’s situation still.

    Why this solitude now?

    Where the Catherine Earnshaw or the Maggie Tulliver or the Sara Monday for these denatured days?

    Rabbi Akiba was flayed alive.

    Valéry, to Gide: Do you know anything more boring than the Iliad?

    William Sidney Porter became O. Henry while sitting out three years in jail for embezzlement.

    Muschg.

    Skoonj.

    El Caballero de la Triste Figura.

    Gerard Manley Hopkins is buried in Prospect Cemetery, Glasnevin. As is Maud Gonne.

    As is Paddy Dignam.

    Mrs. Maj. John MacBride.

    Remembering a Rachel and an Anne and a Lisa and an Irene.

    And an Andrea and a Judith.

    And a second Susan.

    Among more.

    Kay Sage committed suicide.

    Andre Chénier died on the guillotine.

    Come un bel dì di maggio.

    Walafrid Strabo drowned in the Loire.

    Siger of Brabant was stabbed to death by a deranged scribe.

    Either it is raining or it is not raining.

Habitually, Protagonist brings a newspaper or a book when he eats at the restaurant. Although he is no more intruded upon here than at the saloon.

    There being only a lunch counter and several booths in any case. Normally an indifferent short-order cook and one graying waitress. Protagonist will puzzle at how they remain in business.

    The mirror crack’d from side to side;
    The curse is come upon me, cried
    The Lady of Shalott.

    Saint John Chrysostom was an anti-Semite.

    And insisted that Jesus had never laughed.

    Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Nine volumes in the Loeb Classical Library.

    Philip Freneau died after becoming lost in a snowstorm. On his way home from a tavern.
    Milton was paid five pounds for Paradise Lost.

    Yeats once asked Hardy how he coped with the endless copies of his books sent to him with requests for inscriptions.
    Hardy led Yeats to a back closet. Piled from floor to ceiling.

    Even with the idea of feeble stolen electricity at the gatehouse dismissed, Reader remains locked in on a nighttime image of only the faintest glow from a single bulb beyond one shaded downstairs window.

    Protagonist squinting beneath the dimmest of reading lamps.

    The restaurant in the same Hopper wintry-sun mode as the saloon, however.

    Isabel Rawsthorne.

    According to Kenneth Tynan, a corrida with Antonio Ordonez was more stirring than any other performance by any other sort of artist he might name.

    Ernst Ludwig Kirchner committed suicide.

    Los Pasos Perdidos.

    Rosalba Camera was blind in the last years of her life. Mary Cassatt was blind in the last years of her life.

    Chidiock Tichborne. Who may have been as young as eighteen when he was executed at the Tower for plotting against Elizabeth in 1586.
    And was disemboweled before he was extinct, as the Tower’s report had it.

    Jean Francois Champollion.

    Hayim Lenski died of starvation in a Soviet labor camp. Sent there for having written poems in Hebrew.

    Die Zauberflöte.
    Der Zauberberg.

    For a certain period in his mid-twenties Vincent Van Gogh could not pass a church