The Last Novel by David Markson

a picture and if a reasonable number of people like your work, it is art.
    Said Norman Rockwell.
    If more than ten percent of the population likes a painting it should be burned.
    Said Shaw.
    Ronald Reagan was a clandestine informer for the FBI when it was investigating so-called left-wing influences in Hollywood in the 1940s.
    Confucius was illegitimate.
    Michelangelo’s passing comment to Raphael, at the Vatican, that there was a young painter in Florence who would bring sweat to his brow — unquote — if he ever fulfilled himself.
    Meaning Andrea del Sarto.
    Michelangelo, who was incidentally eight years older than Raphael — and would outlive him by forty-four.
    And Andrea by thirty-three.
    The paper shit is endless.
    Quoth a 1911 letter of Einstein’s re university teaching.
    Reviewers who have accused Novelist of inventing some of his anecdotes and/or quotations — without the elemental responsibility to do the checking that would verify every one of them.
    Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs.
    Said John Osborne.
    Sein oder nicht sein — ja, dass ist die Frage.
    Reads Schlegel’s translation.
    March 3, 1996, Marguerite Duras died on.
    Simonides once rejected a meager fee to compose an ode to the winner of a mule race, insisting he did not write about jackasses.
    The fee was increased. Wind-swift steeds, the jackasses miraculously became.
    Isamu Noguchi’s sets for Martha Graham.
    Eva Hesse was dead at thirty-four.
    The fact is, I did not eat every day during that period of my life.
    Said André Breton, explaining a possible origin for some of his earliest surrealist writings.
    The Pope may judge all and be judged by no man.
    Said Innocent III.
    Pericles’ mistress Aspasia, who ran a school for courtesans — and was comfortably at home in intellectual discussion with Socrates.
    No different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation.
    Said someone on radio named Rush Limbaugh about American soldiers abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq.
    People having a good time.
    Bovine spongiform encephalopathy.
    On exhibition in a New York gallery in 2005, a portrait of Seamus Heaney — by Derek Walcott.
    Which would barely pass muster in an undergraduate painting class, according to the New York Times.
    Curiously impressed by the fact that Auden paid every one of his bills — electric, phone, whatever — on the same day that it arrived.
    Boccaccio, one of the few intellectuals in the late Middle Ages determined to recover ancient manuscripts — but all too often coming upon them in monastery storerooms never locked, with pages torn out by the fistful, with what remains refuse-strewn and indecipherable. At Monte Cassino grass even grows in the loft where windows stand open.
    Boccaccio bursts into tears.
    Cavafy was forty-one before his first book was published — containing fourteen poems.
    Remembering that in the Iliad, as rife with detailed violence as any war narrative ever written, not one captured Greek or Trojan is ever tortured.
    — And that the only Southerner hanged by the Union during the Civil War was the commanding officer at Andersonville — where inconceivably barbarous conditions had cost 12,000 incarcerated Northerners their lives.
    Teaching at New York University before its graduate art program had been fully established, during Prohibition, Erwin Panofsky sometimes met with students at a Fifty-Second Street speakeasy.
    Juvenile trash.
    Edmund Wilson dismissed the sum of J. R. R. Tolkien as.
    Alicia Markova almost never in her career weighed more than ninety-eight pounds.
    Was it Brigid Brophy who gave up on a certain Virginia Woolf novel when she discovered that Woolf believed one needed a corkscrew to open a bottle of champagne?
    February 25, 1547, Vittoria Collona died on.
    The first time that Ethel Waters sang Stormy Weather, in a show at the Cotton Club, she was given no fewer than twelve encores.
    A Metropolitan