Housman, in the early 1920s, re what may have been the first flight taken by an author:

The machine required repairs, having been damaged on the previous day by a passenger who butted his head through a window to be sick.

We should look upon the female state as being as it were a deformity, though one which occurs in the ordinary course of nature.

Determined Aristotle.

Brendan Behan, to a nun caring for him in a Catholic hospital:

Bless you, Sister. May all your sons be bishops.

Starting out, George Gershwin sold his first two songs for a total of twelve dollars.

October 24, 1725, Alessandro Scarlatti died on.

July 23, 1757, Domenico.

The curious theatrical superstition that insists it is unlucky to talk about Macbeth by name — the Scottish play, being how it is usually referred to instead.

King Lear’s wife. Goneril’s mother, Regan’s, Cordelia’s.

How often does it occur to anyone that there is not one remotest allusion to her in the text?

Gravesend, on the Thames, Pocahontas died in.

The last time anyone mentioned Sherwood Anderson.

There are so many ways of earning a living, and most of them are failures.

Wrote Gertrude Stein.

Alice B. Toklas did the cooking.

Moments in which Novelist does something like searching interminably at every hook and hanger in the apartment for his shirt — and only at the point of utter bewilderment realizing that he is wearing it.

Pushkin’s beautiful seventeen-year-old wife Nathalie, whom he married at thirty-one — and whom he said was the one hundred and thirteenth woman he had been in love with.

As a student, Anna Netrebko scrubbed floors in a St. Petersburg opera house.

The word agnostic.

Coined by Thomas Henry Huxley during the early debates on Darwinism.

Norbert Wiener graduated from Tufts University at fourteen.

And owned a Ph.D. from Harvard four years later.

Wonderful news —

Said meringue-brained Bobby Fischer at the destruction of the World Trade Center.

Did Toulouse-Lautrec die from a sequence of strokes — or from syphilitic paralysis?

1922. Ulysses.

1922. The Waste Land.

1922. Reader’s Digest.

The first English novel for adults, Virginia Woolf called Middlemarch.

There are 773,692 words in the King James Bible.

Or 773,746.

The wastepaper basket is the author’s best friend.

Noted Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Wondering by what date the last survivor of the Holocaust will have died.

You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation.

Said Billie Holiday.

I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul. I do not belong to that sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal.

Conversely offered Zora Neale Hurston.

Pietro Aretino died in the midst of a hysterical fit of laughter that apparently turned into an apoplectic stroke.

As had the Athenian comic playwright Philemon — at ninety-nine.

Or one hundred and one.

Lord Byron by the kilo, Dumas père described George Sand’s early romantic novels as.

Renaissance paintings on which Bernard Berenson falsified the attributions — when handed money under the table by the dealer Duveen.

Jude the Obscene, someone called it.

As an apprentice, Claude Lorrain worked with the landscape painter Agostino Tassi — who a few years earlier had earned such small art-world immortality as he possesses by raping Artemisia Gentileschi.

Artemisia. Who is granted only one sentence in Novelist’s two-volume 1962 Everyman’s Dictionary of Pictorial Art — at the end of the entry on her father.

All female artists are sluts.

Quoth Flaubert’s Dictionary of Accepted Ideas.

I leave before being left. I decide.

Said Brigitte Bardot.

Winslow Homer spent his last twenty-seven years on the isolated Maine peninsula of Prout’s Neck.

— My nearest neighbor is half a mile away. I am four miles from the PO and under a snowbank most of the time. Night before last it was twelve below zero.

January 13, 1864, Stephen Foster died on.

Little Friend, Little Friend, I got two engines on fire. Can you see me, Little Friend?

I’m crossing right over you. Let’s go home.

Guido Reni’s abnormally exaggerated terror of witchcraft.

To the extent that the mere sight of an old woman at a market could send him rushing away.

Losing her sight in later life, Constance Garnett arranged to have Russian books read aloud — and then dictated her translations.

A quack, Vladimir Nabokov called Thomas Mann.

A complete mediocrity — D. H. Lawrence.

That total fake — Ezra Pound.

Despicable, loathsome, sick, third-rate — Dostoievsky.

Time is the only critic without ambition.

John Steinbeck said.

The severest test of the imagination — is to name a cat.

Said Samuel Butler.

Schopenhauer’s poodle.

Called Atma.

Picasso’s play, Desire Caught by the Tail — which could be performed for the first time only privately, because of the Nazi occupation of Paris.

But avec Camus, Sartre, Michel Leiris, Raymond Queneau, Dora Maar, Pierre Reverdy, Simone de Beauvoir.

The short story by one Heinz von Lichberg, published in Berlin six years before Nabokov would live there for a decade and a half — about an older man’s obsession with a young girl.

— And entitled Lolita.

There are four chances in 2,598,960 of being dealt a royal flush in a hand of poker.

How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you was?

Asked Satchel Paige.

Baudelaire wrote a poem about Watteau.

Verlaine wrote a poem about Watteau.

Proust wrote a poem about Watteau.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, long since categorically exposed as a fraud.

Nonetheless incessantly reprinted throughout the Muslim world — not to add dramatized on television.

Kant’s father was a saddle maker.

If you are going to make a book end badly, Robert Louis Stevenson once pointed out, it must end badly from the beginning — Such as by mentioning an eighth-story roof in its very first paragraphs.

And which should presumably call to mind Chekhov’s admonition that if a pistol is displayed in a first act, it had damned well better be fired by the last.

Raphael died on his thirty-seventh birthday.

Always young in men’s memories, someone thought to say.

Old. Tired. Sick. Alone. Broke.

Only days before Edna St. Vincent Millay’s birth, her mother’s brother’s life was saved in a New York hospital. Millay’s middle name, those few days later, was taken from the name of the hospital.

Florence Nightingale.

Simply because she was born there.

Canon in D Major for Strings and Continuo.

By Johann Pachelbel.

Does having been six feet eight inches tall make Charles Olson the tallest known poet?

How tall was William Langland, who because of his height was called Long Will?

One half of the children born die before their eighth year. This is nature’s law; why try to contradict it?

Inquired Rousseau.

John Jay Chapman’s conclusion that a visiting Martian would come away with a more critical lesson about life on earth from attending an Italian opera than from reading Emerson.

The lesson that there are two sexes.

September 13, 1506, Andrea Mantegna died on.

Kenesaw Mountain Landis.

Lente currite noctis equi.

Says Ovid in the Amores.

O lente lente currite noctis equi.

Says Marlowe, at the end of Faustus.

Of no significance whatsoever. But the hospital where Dylan Thomas would die, sixty-one years after the fact, was the one after which Edna Millay had been named.