A one-word inquiry Reader discovers on a notesheet, its meaning now lost to him completely: Dead?
* * * * * * *
In The Tempest, there are four characters who are wrongly believed dead, leading to astonished encounters in the latter Acts.
In The Comedy of Errors, there are six.
Too much of a good thing? Writer began to worry when he started filling shoeboxes with notecards for #2.
Chronicles. Being the last book of the Hebrew Bible.
Tradi-tion!
& the Individual Talent
(Here Comes Everybody)
Beethoven’s Tenth.
Ville-Evrard. Antonin Artaud died in. August of 1939. According to Antonin Artaud later that same year.
Northanger Abbey. 2666. The Master & Margarita. A Confederacy of Dunces. Austerlitz. The Aeneid. Billy Budd. The Canterbury Tales. The First Man. Delta of Venus. The Original of Laura. The Will to Power. A Defence of Poetry. A Moveable Feast. All published posthumously.
Housman published a volume entitled Last Poems in 1922.
And lived until 1936.
Cotard’s Syndrome. A condition in which one believes oneself dead. Named for the neurologist Proust based his Professor Cottard on.
One takeaway from A Moveable Feast is that Ezra Pound was a generous and faithful friend. No mention of whether he was for or against the extermination of the Jews.
Reviewers that protest that Novelist has lately appeared to be writing the same book over and over.
What are you doing, Dave? HAL 9000 wanted to know.
All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare. Borges insisted.
The Consul, Geoffrey Firmin. Protagonist of the novel In the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Which Sigbjørn Wilderness–narrator of Malcolm Lowry’s posthumous Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid–contemplates having written.
Sigbjørn being a thinly veiled version of Lowry himself reexamining the Lowry who wrote the thinly veiled version of himself for Under the Volcano.
You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Ezra Pound was Yeats’ best man.
Proust was Henri Bergson’s.
A rose is a rose is a rose.
Pythagoras once asked someone to stop striking a puppy because he recognized the voice of a dead friend in its yelping.
Greenwich Village. Novelist died in. June 4, 2010.
What a maze of complicated suffering and interrelated nonsense everything is. Sigbjørn’s wife, Primrose, remarks in Lowry’s Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid.
There is one story and one story only
The romantic disease. Wyatt calls “originality” in The Recognitions.
A very pretty poem, Mr. Pope. But you must not call it Homer.
Ithaca. Birthplace of David Foster Wallace.
Maiden name?
Shakespear.
Ezra Pound’s fiancé would have answered the clerk filling out the marriage license.
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.
Proust got off watching rats fight.
And here comes the neurotic titter again.
Primrose Wilderness. Being a character name one doubts even Dickens could offer up with a straight face.
You make good use of the name…Your own name is strange enough. I suppose it explains your fantastical humour. John Eglington remarks to Stephen Dedalus.
Contrary to trending theories, the Earth is not flat. Though it seems the Universe is.
What do you make of that, Watson?
Blazes Boylan.
Brahms’ Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel, Op. 24.
Admittedly I err by undertaking
This in its present form
Having been James Merrill’s opening concession for The Changing Light at Sandover.
Author, for the record, would not need a supernatural rationale for asking someone to stop striking a puppy.
Caden Cotard. Played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York.
1939-1943. The deceased Artaud composed posthumous spells written in blood and ink.
Reports of the death of the author have been greatly exaggerated.
La Chanson de Roland
Mark Twain had a cat named Bambino.
Wittgenstein eating powdered eggs every day of his adult life.
Too much of a good thing? Author can’t help but go on wondering.
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. Pronounced the best man at The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
Being de trop in the world. Wittgenstein “had a hint of”. According to David Pinsent.
For long stretches, Hans Wittgenstein would pretend his little brother Ludwig did not exist, which drove the latter to distraction.
April 1, 2020. Inspired by a publisher’s April Fool’s Day gag about a lost (found) Herman Melville manuscript, Author got the shoeboxes out of storage, dusted off the old Olympia portable and began work on his next book.
Why not? That’s why.
The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl were not written by Henry James. They were spoken by him. Someone else typed them out.
The Chronicles narrative begins with Adam, Seth, and Enosh, tracing the genealogy to the first Kingdom of Israel.
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
Perhaps William Gaddis is not B. Traven after all, or J.D. Salinger, Ambrose Bierce, or Thomas Pynchon. Perhaps he is me. William Gass hypothesizes in his introduction to The Recognitions.
I’m in words, made of words, others’ words. Narrator of The Unnamable comes to understand.
Greenwich Village. Philip Seymour Hoffman also died in. A few years after Novelist.
Little Cousins, Called back, Emily.
Intercessor: Widow Camus. To you who will never be able to read this book.
The dead I love. Being who John Berryman (né John Smith Jr.) said he wrote for.
“For some reason I made a rather important character of mine live in that blasted tower over there. And…one of the most important scenes in the book takes place in it,” Sigbjørn said, “a scene where my hero has to choose, to put it rather stupidly, between life and death…And now I’m living in the thing myself.”
In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street.
[name of author] lives in [major metropolitan area] where he [academic post, marital/family status and/or wry biographical tidbit]. He is the author of [titles] and his work appears in [various periodicals].
minor literature[s] 