ITT: We write a David Markson novel

>Despite the central role of television in enabling JFK's electoral victory, and the historic occasion of Robert Frost reading at his inauguration, no recording survives of the poet's performance.

>Marianne Moore's life-long love of baseball was rewarded when the Yankees invited her to throw the ceremonial first pitch of their 1968 season.

A doctor told Clive James he would be dead of cancer within two years.

In 2010.

William Faulkner once wrote an article about a hockey game for Sports Illustrated. It's called An Innocent At Rinkside.

Vonnegut took a job at Sports Illustrated that lasted for one assignment. He was to cover a horserace in which one horse crashed over the inside rail. The one sentence he wrote was:
"The horse jumped over the fucking fence.''

If not for catching tuberculosis, Camus would have pursued a professional soccer career.

>2010 was the year that David Markson did die. Alone at his apartment in New York. In his bed. Much as he said he would in The Last Novel.

At this early first juncture, Novelist is hoping that someone visits Veeky Forums who knows who David Markson was, and who maybe even has read This Is Not A Novel, or The Last Novel, or even Wittgenstein's Mistress.

And that they see this thread.

And that maybe they want to join in.

Somerset Maugham, who wrote Ashenden about a English spy, was himself an English spy. Ian Fleming wrote Quantum of Solace as a tribute to Maugham's style, which was roundly mocked as non-existent during his lifetime.

"When do the atrocities begin?"

Said Thomas Wolfe, to illustrate his attitude if anyone in Hollywood ever offered to buy a film option on any of his books.

Hart Crane's last words were "goodbye everybody" before drowning himself

Ian Flemming, was, also, of course, an English spy.

Thank you for the manuscript. I shall lose no time in reading it.

Was Disraeli's standard reply note to anyone sending him one for his opinion of it.

Trelawney was well known to be prone to exaggeration and deceit, so when he says he plucked Shelley's heart from the funeral pyre, it is worth thinking twice about the factual authenticity of his involvement.

Though nobody doubts that Mary carried it around with her for the rest of her life. Everyone agrees it was well wrapped up. But still.

Nikolay Gogol wrote extensively in his (as yet unpublished) journals about the joys of autoerotic asphyxiation.

When informed that the Athenians condemned Anaxagoras to death in abstentia, he replied, "Nature has long since condemned them and me."

>blew his own brains out in the middle of a phone call
So there was a second half of the phone call after he blew his brains off?

"Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six."

Said Tolstoy on his death bed when implored to reconcile with the Orthodox Church.

Thompson's wife continued to listen to the other end for some moments, and called his name into her end for some moments more before she realized what might have happened and raced to where Thompson was.

Are all David Markson's novels like this? I've only read Reader's Block (and loved it).

"He would never have been seen dead in it."

Said a friend of Dylan Thomas about the flamboyantly ill-chosen funeral attire chosen for Thomas' body.

Marfkson started off as an experimenter, but gradually developed this style after the success of Wittgenstein's Mistress.

Which is not purely episodic and non-narrative, but his character thinks like this.

Is where it came from.

Thanks. What else do you recommend by him? I find this style very relaxing and endearing.

These:
are what he will be remembered for, for inventing this form. I love them and think they should have a higher profile than they do.

People talk a lot about Springer's Progress, because it's bawdy. He also wrote three crime novels, for the money.

"I would like to be so popular, so well-liked, so celebrated, so famous, that I could fart in public and everybody would think its perfectly natural."

Said Balzac before a gathering of guests.

The most heartbreaking last words are those of Pancho Villa. As the Mexican revolutionary was about to be shot, he found himself suddenly lost for words. He begged some journalists who stood nearby: “Don’t let it end like this! Tell them I said something!” Yet this time the journalists, instead of making something up, as is their usual practice, soberly reported the failure of inspiration in all its naked truth.

That we can attribute the "timeless" maxim "Show me a young Conservative and I'll show you someone with no heart. Show me an old Liberal and I'll show you someone with no brains" to François Guizot.

Who said it in 1830s France.

>Norman Mailer got the shit beat out of him on video by Rip Torn.

That this little piece of spin has continued not only to tick, but to actually infect people separated from his target by two hundred years.

Upon a time when Burbage played Richard the Third there was a citizen grew so far in liking with him, that before she went from the play she appointed him to come that night unto her by the name of Richard the Third. Shakespeare, overhearing their conclusion, went before, was entertained and at his game ere Burbage came. Then, message being brought that Richard the Third was at the door, Shakespeare caused return to be made that William the Conqueror was before Richard the Third.

>The wine dark sea

Now suggested by actual historians to be evidence that the ancient Greeks literally could not perceive the color blue.

Historians presumably ignorant of the usage of words such as 'cobalt' or 'azure' in the rest of the Odyssey

where is this from

Alas, author bemoans the late coming invention of Google, which admittedly upset his usual scheme

“There is no fellowship inviolate,
No faith is kept, when kingship is concerned;”

Said Ennius

Isn't there a similar story about Moore mentioned by Markson? I can't remember exactly...

Thanks, user. I think you're doing a great job pastiche-ing the work of your idol. He deserves a but more recognition here (and not just here). He was recommended to me on Veeky Forums years ago but I've seen very little mentions of him since.

I remember Reader's Block as relaxing to read but heartbreaking in the end. I'll get on to Wittgenstein's Mistress next.

In another wording of this anecdote, the ending is "William the Conqueror came before Richard the Third."

Whatever else may be said of Lord Byron, by way of judgement, he held a deep-seated love of dogs, and to Novelist's way of thinking that forgives many sins.

im the opposite but my experience has been exactly the same. wittgenstein's mistress was fantastic but sad. got my copy of reader's block next on the chopping block.

No matter whether Wittgenstein threatened Popper with a red hot fire iron, or did not, or only was holding the iron during a moment of pique, or pointed it at Popper, Wittgenstein would find the complete lack of agreement on the events to be a completely satisfying validation of his side of the argument.

Or so Novelist would like to think.

Kek, nice one.

Any more Markson-like snippets, op?

If you know both that Evelyn Waugh once tried to kill himself by swimming out to sea but turned back when he ran into a swarm of jellyfish, and also that he eventually and willfully drank himself to death, it is hard not to conclude that he just wanted to make sure it didn't hurt.

Novelist concludes that he too is less concerned with the fact of his death than with the manner in which it will occur.

"Old. Tired. Sick. Alone. Broke.
All of which obviously means that this is the last book Novelist is going to write."

Wrote David Markson in his last novel, titled The Last Novel, at which time he was old, sick, tired, alone, and broke.

The primary emotion experienced by all three Waugh children, according to them, upon hearing of their father's death was:

Relief.

"There are two equally serious reasons why it isn’t worth any adult reader’s attention. The first is that it is dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion. The second is that it is repulsive.”

Said Orville Prescott of Lolita in 1958.

In the New York Times.

"This is a penny dreadful tricked up in fancy language and given a specious depth by the expert manipulation of a series of eccentric technical tricks."

Said The New Yorker's Clifton Fadiman.

Of Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom.

"I feel, however, that the problem is one of illiteracy, not Marxism. Therefore I enclose a small contribution to the Beadle Bumble Fund that I hope will be used to enroll the Hanover County School Board in any first grade of its choice.”

Said Harper Lee when they banned To Kill A Mockingbird.

John Updike won every major literary award there is, except the Nobel Prize, but the one that most amused him was the Bad Sex In Fiction Lifetime Achievement Award from the UK's Literary Review.

Which tells us something about the nature of literary awards and writing about sex.

Though Novelist is not quite sure what that something is.

"She said nothing then, her lovely mouth otherwise engaged, until he came, all over her face. She had gagged, and moved him outside her lips, rubbing his spurting glans across her cheeks and chin. He had wanted to cry out, sitting up as if jolted by electricity as the spurts, the deep throbs rooted in his asshole, continued, but he didn’t know what name to call her."

Wrote Updike, in the Widows of Eastwick.