"come on back, so revelant(sic) and clever."
(p1)
A seascape by Henri Matisse was once hung upside down in the Museum of Modern Art in New York--and left that way for a month and a half.
(p1)
Leonardo da Vinci's father had four wives.
Not one of whom was Leonardo's mother.
(p2)
Bertrand Russell was twenty-one years older than Wildred Owen.
And would still be alive fifty-two years after Owen was machine-gunned in France in World War I.
(p2)
Twenty-five years after she broke off their relationship, Charles Dickens had a tryst with Maria Beadnell, his still-remembered first love.
And found her fat and foolishly affected and wholly witless.
(p2)
By his own admission, William Butler Yeats, at twenty-seven, had not yet ever kissed a woman.
(p3)
At thirty-seven, in Key West, Ernest Hemingway badly marked up Wallace Stevens' face in a never fully explained fistfight.
Stevens was fifty-seven when it happened.
(p3)
One hundred and sixteen thousand viewers had strolled past Le Bateau, the upside-down Matisse, without comment, before it was rehung correctly.
(p3)
At the age of seven or eight, Sigmund Freud once deliberately urinated on the floor of his parents' bedroom.
(p3)
Aaron Copland, on listening to Ray Vaughan Williams' Fifth Symphony:
Like staring at a cow for forty-five minutes.
(p3)
Mark Twain forgot Becky Thatcher's name in the eight years between Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. And called her Bessie Thatcher in the later book.
(p3)
Thomas Hardy's anecdote about looking up a word in the dictionary because he wasn't certain it existed--and finding that he himself was the only authority cited for its usage.
(p5)
I can't listen to music too often. It makes you want to say stupid, nice things.
Said Lenin.
(p5)
Tolstoy, to Chekhov:
You know I can't stand Shakespeare's plays, but yours are worse.
(p6)
Nikolay Gogol's possessions at the time of his death were little better than those of a pauper.
But did include a gold watch that had been Pushkin's.
(p7)
I do at least three paintings a day in my head. What's the use of spoiling canvas when nobody will buy anything?
Said Modigliani, penniless in Paris in his mid-twenties.
(p7)
Anna Akhmatova's memoir, fifty-four years later, of her affair with Modigliani in 1911. Sitting in the rain under an unreliable umbrella in the Luxembourg Gardens and reciting Verlaine to each other --unable to afford anything grander.
(p44)
Hobbes. Decartes. Pascal. Spinoza. Locke. Leibniz. Hume. Kant. Schopenhauer. Kierkegaard. Nietzsche. Santayana. Wittgenstein.
Not one of whom ever married.
(p45)
As if written illegally, under fear of the police.
Bertolt Brecht said of Kafka's fiction.
(p45)
Like a naked man among people wearing clothes.
Milena Jesenká perceived him.
-excerpts from Vanishing Point by David Markson
A seascape by Henri Matisse was once hung upside down in the Museum of Modern Art in New York--and left that way for a month and a half.
(p1)
Leonardo da Vinci's father had four wives.
Not one of whom was Leonardo's mother.
(p2)
Bertrand Russell was twenty-one years older than Wildred Owen.
And would still be alive fifty-two years after Owen was machine-gunned in France in World War I.
(p2)
Twenty-five years after she broke off their relationship, Charles Dickens had a tryst with Maria Beadnell, his still-remembered first love.
And found her fat and foolishly affected and wholly witless.
(p2)
By his own admission, William Butler Yeats, at twenty-seven, had not yet ever kissed a woman.
(p3)
At thirty-seven, in Key West, Ernest Hemingway badly marked up Wallace Stevens' face in a never fully explained fistfight.
Stevens was fifty-seven when it happened.
(p3)
One hundred and sixteen thousand viewers had strolled past Le Bateau, the upside-down Matisse, without comment, before it was rehung correctly.
(p3)
At the age of seven or eight, Sigmund Freud once deliberately urinated on the floor of his parents' bedroom.
(p3)
Aaron Copland, on listening to Ray Vaughan Williams' Fifth Symphony:
Like staring at a cow for forty-five minutes.
(p3)
Mark Twain forgot Becky Thatcher's name in the eight years between Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. And called her Bessie Thatcher in the later book.
(p3)
Thomas Hardy's anecdote about looking up a word in the dictionary because he wasn't certain it existed--and finding that he himself was the only authority cited for its usage.
(p5)
I can't listen to music too often. It makes you want to say stupid, nice things.
Said Lenin.
(p5)
Tolstoy, to Chekhov:
You know I can't stand Shakespeare's plays, but yours are worse.
(p6)
Nikolay Gogol's possessions at the time of his death were little better than those of a pauper.
But did include a gold watch that had been Pushkin's.
(p7)
I do at least three paintings a day in my head. What's the use of spoiling canvas when nobody will buy anything?
Said Modigliani, penniless in Paris in his mid-twenties.
(p7)
Anna Akhmatova's memoir, fifty-four years later, of her affair with Modigliani in 1911. Sitting in the rain under an unreliable umbrella in the Luxembourg Gardens and reciting Verlaine to each other --unable to afford anything grander.
(p44)
Hobbes. Decartes. Pascal. Spinoza. Locke. Leibniz. Hume. Kant. Schopenhauer. Kierkegaard. Nietzsche. Santayana. Wittgenstein.
Not one of whom ever married.
(p45)
As if written illegally, under fear of the police.
Bertolt Brecht said of Kafka's fiction.
(p45)
Like a naked man among people wearing clothes.
Milena Jesenká perceived him.
-excerpts from Vanishing Point by David Markson