Lit – Page 3 – Reading Markson Reading

The first page of David Markson’s copy of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson by Camille Paglia:

     On which Markson has written as an inscription:
     “Markson
     East Hampton – 1990”

—-

This post is my 200th scan of Markson marginalia that I’ve put on this tumblr Reading Markson Reading!
(So far they’ve all been from the Markson books I found at the Strand and personally own, but I would be more than happy to feature scans of books other people picked up during the Markson Treasure Hunt. My intent wasn’t to just make this a catalogue of my personal collection, but a place for Markson marginalia to be seen by all, for leisure reading and research purposes.)

I chose a rather boring scan today—just one with an inscription—so that I could delve into a specific topic that arose recently in the comments to my blog. The topic is quite pertinent to what I discuss on this blog and how I discuss it.

The other day I received a comment reminding me that when I am constantly mentioning Markson’s tetralogy, I am, in some way, going against Markson’s wishes.
Or at least going against the wishes of the semi-autobiographical Novelist (of Markson’s The Last Novel).

In that novel Markson wrote:
“Wondering if there is any viable way to convince critics never to use the word tetralogy without also adding that each volume can be readily read by itself?” (Pg. 161).

In answer to your question, Mr. Markson (since you did phrase that in the form of a question): No.

It unfortunately isn’t really plausible for critics to mention every time they use the word tetralogy in describing your tetralogy that “each volume can be readily read by itself.”

Of course, it is true that the books can be “readily read” individually and don’t need each other to make sense or be enjoyable, but I would argue that though obviously each book can stand alone and be “readily read by itself,” when viewed together they each grow. To let these four texts play off each other only deepens their meaning, and their context in Markson’s entire ouevre.

Of course, each novel in the tetralogy is quite different, even if on the surface level they appear rather similar. But they do belong together.

     So…
     Sorry to Mr. Markson, and to the commenter who brought this to my attention, but I cannot help but keep talking of them as a tetralogy.
     Or as a quartet.
     (My name for them is actually The Notecard Quartet.)

     And I am not alone, Mr. Markson…
     Your friend and fellow novelist, Ann Beattie, when introducing you for a reading at the 92nd Street Y, called them a quartet.
     Qualmless then.
     Françoise Palleau-Papin, who you gave your blessing to write the first full book-length study of your work, also continually makes mention of the books together, calling them—what else?—a tetralogy.
     Qualmless then.
     Catherine Texier’s New York Times review of your final novel, which you called “a lovely review,” says The Last Novel could be considered “the coda to the trilogy.”
     Qualmless then.
     Even you, Mr. Markson, thought of these four novels as going together:
     “After the first one, Reader’s Block, anything I read I would read in a normal way, but I would say, ‘I didn’t know that about Chaucer. Or Rembrandt. Or Spinoza.’ The next thing I knew I had three more books.”
     Said in the Conjunctions Interview.
     And you admit that the four books also concern the same character with different names in each:
     “My one character, who in this book is called Novelist.”
     Said at 92nd Street Y of The Last Novel.

     My guess, which admittedly is just an educated guess, is that you are actually fine with them being seen as a tetralogy or a quartet.
     After all, in the above quote from The Last Novel you don’t tell critics not to call them a tetralogy, but rather that they should, when doing so, always tack on that they can be “readily read” individually.
     Something I try to explore as well: I think all Markson’s books can be read individually and stand alone, but also the entire oeuvre, not even just the tetralogy, benefit from being seen and studied together.

So yes, the four final books (Reader’s Block, This Is Not A Novel, Vanishing Point and The Last Novel) are as individually enjoyable as any of Markson’s earlier fiction.
But they also form a tetralogy or quartet.

A Notecard Quartet.
If you will…

Pgs. 66-67 of David Markson’s copy of His Exits and His Entrances: The Story of Shakespeare’s Reputation by Louis Marder:

     On which Markson placed two checks next to the following two sentences re: Shakespearean actor Edmund Kean:
     “Before the sun of Kemble had set, Edmund Kean (1789-1833) had already begun to take his place in the Shakespearean firmament.”
     And:
     “Every emotion was rendered naturalistically by Kean, about whom Coleridge made his famous comment that seeing him act was like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning.”

—-

Markson mentions Edmund Kean, and Coleridge’s assessment of him on pg. 33 of his novel(?) This Is Not A Novel:
“Watching Edmund Kean. Like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning, Coleridge said.”

Pg. 189 of David Markson’s copy of The Spirit of Tragedy by Herbert J. Muller:

On which Markson wrote “F.D.” in the margins next to the sentence:
“The passion of the tragic hero is always likely to verge on madness.”

—-

I would assume that the “F.D.” stands for “Fyodor Dostoevsky,” a writer greatly admired by Markson, and whose writing is perfectly described by that line:
“The passion of the tragic hero is always likely to verge on madness.”

Dostoevsky, whose name can be spelled a number of ways—Markson always spelled it either “Dostoievsky” or “Dostoievski” (with an “i” in the middle, and an “i” or “y” on the end)—was one of Markson’s favorite writers, and one who had quite an influence on him.

Donald Hogin wrote in “Markson’s Progress”:
“Lowry was undeniably one of the significant influences upon Markson’s own creative life, the most obvious others being Joyce, Dostoyevski and Faulkner.”

As Françoise Palleau-Papin wrote in her This Is Not A Tragedy:
“Dostoyevsky’s influence on Markson is clear in Going Down, but the homage to the master is not an imitation.” (Pg. xxx).

     Or in his own words:
     “The Dostoievsky novel I cared about most is The Possessed, sometimes translated in English as The Devils. The first 200 pages can be a bore (a satire on Turgenev)—but after that I was always overwhelmed. And just incidentally, Crime and Punishment may have been the first book ever to suggest to me how stunning an experience literature could be.”
     As told to Françoise Palleau-Papin, and relayed in her This Is Not A Tragedy (pg. xxix).

     “The Shakespeare of the lunatic asylum.
     An early French critic called Dostoievsky.”
     – The Last Novel, pg. 29.

The passion of the tragic hero is always likely to verge on madness.

Last week I made a post about madness in Markson’s tetralogy.

In that post, I mentioned Markson’s Bookslut interview where he was asked whether or not “there is something about people at the edge of sanity” that appealed to him, and he responded:
“No, not at all, it’s just inviting. What the hell, craziness is a lot more dramatic to handle than sanity. Which Dostoevsky proved all those years ago—trying to write a book about a perfectly good person and it’s the one volume among all his major works that’s a total botch. Unlike all his others, filled with lunacy and suicide and murder, et cetera. Or think about ninety percent of all the literary protagonists we find most memorable—Ahab, Heathcliff, Stavrogin, even all the way back to Don Quixote—every one of them is certifiable.”

The passion of the tragic hero is always likely to verge on madness.

Pg. 37 of David Markson’s copy of The Failure of Criticism by Henri Peyre:

     On which Markson placed two checks next to the following two sentences:
     “‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’ did not receive the humble honor of one allusion in any text printed in Milton’s lifetime.”
     And:
     “Not a single contemporary apparently praised or even mentioned Lycidas.”

—-

In his novel Vanishing Point, Markson reminds us of this:
“Evidently not one word was said in print in Milton’s lifetime about Lycidas, L’Allegro, or Il Penseroso.” (Pg. 114).

     Rejection.
     Specifically the rejection of great works of art.
     And of the artists that make such great works.
     A common theme in Markson’s tetralogy.

Pg. 296 of David Markson’s copy of Crack-Up by F. Scott Fitzgerald:

On which Markson put a bracket around a letter that Francis Scott Fitzgerald sent to his daughter Frances Scott Fitzgerald:
“I wonder if you’ve read anything this summer—I mean any one good book like The Brothers Karamazov or Ten Days That Shook the World or Renan’s Life of Christ. You never speak of your reading except the excerpts you do in college, the little short bits that they must perforce give you. I know you have read a few of the books I gave you last summer—then I have heard nothing from you on the subject. Have you ever, for example, read Pere Goriot or Crime and Punishment or even The Doll’s House or St. Matthew or Sons and Lovers? A good style simply doesn’t form unless you absorb half a dozen top-flight authors every year. Or rather it forms but instead of being a subconscious amalgam of all that you have admired, it is simply a reflection of the last writer you have read, a watered-down journalese.”

—-

I absolutely love those last two lines:
“A good style simply doesn’t form unless you absorb half a dozen top-flight authors every year. Or rather it forms but instead of being a subconscious amalgam of all that you have admired, it is simply a reflection of the last writer you have read, a watered-down journalese.”

Great wisdom to impart to your daughter. And to your readers, by way of Crack-Up.

     It is also interesting to know what books Fitzgerald suggests to his daughter.
     Ones mentioned in the above letter:
     The Brothers Karamazov
     Ten Days That Shook the World
     Life of Christ
     Père Goriot
     Crime and Punishment
     The Doll’s House
     St. Matthew
     Sons and Lovers

     A similar letter from Markson to his daughter Johanna, which I was able to get a sneak peak of at the Markson Memorial last year, speaks of novels he recommends she read.
     It says:
     “Dear Johanna—
     I can’t make you a list of my 100—or even 50—top 20th-Century novels. It would take me a month.
     Instead here are just some of those that have meant the most to me—or which I’ve truly enjoyed. (I take them from a list I’ve actually scribbled into the back of an old Faulkner novel + added to over the years—though the original includes some older stuff—Dostoievsky, etc.—that I’ll leave out.) These are not in any special order.
                                                                                          xxx Dad
     Joyce – Ulysses
                 Finnegans Wake
     Lowry – Under the Volcano
     Gaddis – The Recognitions
     Djuna Barnes – Nightwood
     Hemingway – The Sun Also Rises
     West – Miss Lonelyhearts
     Cary – The Horse’s Mouth
     Camus – The Stranger
     Barth – The Sot-Weed Factor
     Grass – The Tin Drum
     Duras – The Lover
     Carpentier – The Lost Steps
     Faulkner – Light in August
                      The Sound + the Fury
                      Absalom, Absalom
                      As I Lay Dying
     Beckett – Malloy
                    Malone Dies
                    The Unnamable
     Hesse – Steppenwolf
                 Magister Ludi
     Celine – Journey to the End of the Night
                  Death on the Installment Plan
     Donleavy – The Ginger Man
     Rhys – Good Morning, Midnight
     Rushdie – Midnight’s Children
     Conrad – Lord Jim
                    Heart of Darkness
                    The Secret Agent
     PS—You’ll notice that Salman’s is the only one less than 20 yrs. old, alas. Forgive.”

A good style simply doesn’t form unless you absorb half a dozen top-flight authors every year. Or rather it forms but instead of being a subconscious amalgam of all that you have admired, it is simply a reflection of the last writer you have read, a watered-down journalese.

The epigraph of the first book in Markson’s tetralogy, Reader’s Block:
“First and foremost, I think of myself as a reader.”

“I have characters sitting alone in a bedroom with a head full of everything he’s ever read.”
Markson explained of his tetralogy in his portable-infinite interview.

Pg. 187 of David Markson’s copy of The Failure of Criticism by Henri Peyre:

On which Markson put a vertical line in the margins next to a paragraph about the prevalence of madness, illness, drug addiction and homosexuality in great artists, or “great creators,” as the paragraph specifically calls them.

—-

     These are all important fascinations of Markson in his tetralogy:
     – Artists’ sanity
     – Artists’ health
     – Artists’ drug use
     – Artists’ sex lives

The one I’d like to explore in this post is the first:
– Artists’ sanity

Artists that went mad are mentioned quite often in Markson’s tetralogy…

“Mussorgsky died raving mad from drink.” (Reader’s Block, Pg. 22).

“Camille Claudel spent the last thirty years of her life in an insane asylum.” (Reader’s Block, Pg. 24).

“Mary Lamb stabbed her mother to death. She was in and out of an institution all her life.
When a new fit of madness seemed imminent, Charles calmly led her back into custody.” (Reader’s Block, Pg. 43).

“Hölderlin was insane, if harmlessly so, for more than thirty-five years. Frequently he improvised odd tunes at the piano for hours, or sang in what seemed an indecipherable combination of Latin, Greek, and German simultaneously.” (Reader’s Block, Pg. 46).

“Nietzsche played the piano endlessly in his own eleven years of madness. Once, at least, with his elbows.” (Reader’s Block, Pg. 46).

“David Gascoyne spent two decades in mental hospitals.” (Reader’s Block, Pg. 68).

“Nietzsche lost his reason because he thought too much. I do not think and therefore cannot go mad.
Said Nijinsky, mad.” (Reader’s Block, Pg. 79).

“Robert Walser spent his last twenty-seven years in a mental institution.” (Reader’s Block, Pg. 86).

“Jonathan Swift left his money to found a hospital for the insane.
And died mad.” (Reader’s Block, Pg. 115).

“Louis Althusser spent four years in a psychiatric hospital after strangling his wife.” (Reader’s Block, Pg. 134).

“Lucia Joyce, institutionalized, when told of her father’s death:
What is he doing underground, that idiot?” (Reader’s Block, Pg. 171).

“The solitary, melancholy life of Matthias Grünewald. Was he wholly sane?” (This Is Not A Novel, Pg. 11).

“Christopher Smart died mad. And in debtors’ prison.” (This Is Not A Novel, Pg. 23).

“Ivan Goncharov was essentially deranged in the last thirty years of his life.
And insisted that every word Turgenev published has been stolen from him.” (This Is Not A Novel, Pg. 40).

     “No great talent has ever existed without a tinge of madness, Seneca says Aristotle said.
     All poets are mad, Robert Burton corroborated.
     A fine madness, being how Michael Drayton read it in the case of Marlowe.” (This Is Not A Novel, Pg. 67).

     “Nebuchadnezzar. Who razed Jerusalem.
     And went mad.
     And ate grass.” (This Is Not A Novel, Pg. 110).

“Edward MacDowell died mad, probably from syphilis.” (This Is Not A Novel, Pg. 150).

“Jones Very spent time in the same Boston insane asylum where Robert Lowell would be a patient a century later.” (This Is Not A Novel, Pg. 155).

“Maurice Utrillo was in and out of insane asylums repeatedly, commencing as early as at eighteen.” (Vanishing Point, Pg. 12).

“January 1889, in Turin. Nietzsche, weeping, throws his arms around the neck of a mare being beaten by a coachman and then collapses in the street. Essentially the point of no return into his final madness.” (Vanishing Point, Pg. 18).

“At certain moments in his madness, John Clare was heard to hold conversations with Shakespeare.” (Vanishing Point, Pg. 63).

“Paul Morphy died insane.
Buddy Bolden también.” (Vanishing Point, Pg. 109).

“Géricault’s portraits of the mad. Done at Salpetrière asylum and elsewhere—via special permission.” (Vanishing Point, Pg. 112).

“They said I was mad, and I said they were mad, and, damn them, they outvoted me.
Said Dryden’s sometime collaborator Nathaniel Lee, upon being confined to Bedlam.” (Vanishing Point, Pg. 139)

“The only difference between myself and a madman is that I am not mad.
Said Dali.” (Vanishing Point, Pg. 165).

“Antonin Artaud spent nine of his last eleven years in insane asylums.” (The Last Novel, Pg. 32).

“Gérard de Nerval, in some of the milder moments of his madness—known to toss such money as he possessed into the air for anyone’s taking in restaurants and coffeehouses.” (The Last Novel, Pg. 61).

“Quentin de La Tour, harmlessly deranged in his later years—and frequently seen talking to trees.” (The Last Novel, Pg. 74).

“Delmore Schwartz, in his disturbed final years, hearing voices—and insisting that they were directed at him from the spire of the Empire State Building.” (The Last Novel, Pg. 113).

“Horace Greeley died insane.” (The Last Novel, Pg. 130).

“I too have written some good books.
Said Nietzsche, overhearing someone’s reference to literature in a fleeting moment’s lucidity during his final madness.” (The Last Novel, Pg. 188).

These are just a few of the many, many mentions of madness in Markson’s tetralogy…

And madness is not just found in the tetralogy, but two of his other novels deal specifically with their main characters losing their sanity: Going Down and Wittgenstein’s Mistress.

When Markson was asked about this in his Bookslut interview, and specifically asked whether or not “there is something about people at the edge of sanity” that appealed to him, he responded:
“No, not at all, it’s just inviting. What the hell, craziness is a lot more dramatic to handle than sanity. Which Dostoevsky proved all those years ago—trying to write a book about a perfectly good person and it’s the one volume among all his major works that’s a total botch. Unlike all his others, filled with lunacy and suicide and murder, et cetera. Or think about ninety percent of all the literary protagonists we find most memorable—Ahab, Heathcliff, Stavrogin, even all the way back to Don Quixote—every one of them is certifiable.”

The first page of David Markson’s copy of Picasso Drawings by Maurice Jardot:

On which Markson wrote as an inscription:
“—Markson, London 1967”

—-

     Seeing that this is a book specifically of drawings by Picasso, I thought I’d post this scan with a quote of Picasso’s re: drawing (as retold on pg. 2 of Markson’s This Is Not A Novel):
     “When I was their age I could draw like Raphael. But it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like they do.
     Said Picasso at an exhibition of children’s art.”

Because it is Easter, I thought I’d include a Picasso drawing of the crucifixion to show how after a lifetime he could “draw like they do”…

Also, since it is Easter today, I thought I’d add to today’s post a line from Springer’s Progress (one of my favorite Markson novels which I discussed a bit yesterday):
“Writing one more poem too. Happy Easter, dear keester.” (Pg. 82).

I am not a religious man, but I do wish all my fellow readers (of Markson reading) a sincere happy holiday:
Happy Easter, dear keester.

Pg. 426 of David Markson’s copy of James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism by Various (Ed. Seon Givens):

     On which Markson placed a check next to an explanation of Joycean punning in Finnegans Wake:
     “In another instance it uses the same devices to convert a religious line (the first line of the Confiteor) into a disguised sexual reference:
     mea culpa mea culpa
     May he colp, may he colp her
     mea maxima culpa
     may he mixandmass colp her!”

—-

May he colp her?

“Mea culpa. Anyway, what’s your news?”
Says Springer in Springer’s Progress. (Pg. 109).

Springer’s Progress: A novel in which Markson writes many of the same kind of playful sexual lines that Joyce does in the above scan—to the point where, because of such wordplay, it is often described as “Joycean,” even though it has a style all its own.

“Joycean wordplay,” Les Whitten said it contains.

And the New York Times wrote of it:
“An exuberantly Joycean, yes, Joycean, celebration of carnality and creativity—and everything-goes, risk-taking, maniacally wild and funny and painful novel.”

Though it is often overshadowed by Wittgenstein’s MIstress and the Notecard Quartet (my name for the tetralogy: Reader’s Block, This Is Not A Novel, Vanishing Point and The Last Novel), Springer’s Progress is no less breathtaking.

It is what I would call a sex story, rather than a love story.
Or as it is called on the back of the book: “a mature love story.”

It is one of the best novels about sex (and specifically a protracted sexual affair) in existence.

     “Springer at least cognizant of the signal themes in that giglot manuscript of his, is he?
     Indubitably. Uno: he ever going to make Jess come again? Dos: how’s she really feel about all this bilge?
     Anything else perhaps subordinate and/or ancillary yet permeative?
     Indubitably. Whatever happened to that south slope and the Sherpa porters?
     Any titles pending which allude to or insinuate the foregoing, preferably in corresponding sequence if so?
     Indubitably. The Once and Future Orgasm. Cornfroy’s Complaint. Sometimes a Great Keester.” (Springer’s Progress, Pg. 217).

May he colp her?

Oh, yes! Oh, yes! Oh, hold me anyway, try to!

Pg. 102 of David Markson’s copy of Heroes and Heretics by Barrows Dunham:

     On which Markson has placed multiple marks (checks/lines/underlines) next to a quote by Lucretius from Book I of his De Rerum Natura:
     “Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.”
     Which translates to:
     “So great the evils to which religion could prompt.”

—-

     Markson utilized this quote of Lucretius on pg. 94 of This Is Not A Novel:
     “Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum, Lucretius said.
     Such are the evils that religion prompts.”
     And I utilized his utilization of said quote in a previous post in which I listed a bunch of instances in his novel Vanishing Point where he emphasized the “evils that religion prompts.”

This time I thought I’d list some such instances from the other three novels of Markson’s tetralogy…

“Savonarola was burned at the stake in the Piazza della Signoria in Florence in 1498. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in the Campo de Fiori in Rome in 1600.
Savonarola was granted the kindness of being hanged beforehand. Bruno was alive and conscious.” (Reader’s Block, Pg. 32).

“The Second Commandment was taken so literally in the Lithuanian ghetto when Chaim Soutine was a boy that he was physically beaten when he tried to draw.” (Reader’s Block, Pg. 38).

“Auschwitz. Dachau. Treblinka. Maidanek. Sobibor. Chelmno. Mauthausen. Ravensbrück, Birkenai. Belzec. Theresienstadt.” (Reader’s Block, Pg. 58).

     “Dante situates Mohammed in the ninth chasm of the Malebolge for having sown division in the Church. He is seen slashed open from his chin to his anus and with his innards spilling out.
     In retaliation, Muslim fundamentalists in the early 1990s threatened to blow up Dante’s tomb in Ravenna.
     Seven hundred years after the fact.” (Reader’s Blocks, Pg. 68).

“Plato finished the Laws in his late seventies, among other things sanctioning the death penalty for those who question the state religion.
Did he stop to remember how and why Socrates has died fifty years before?” (Reader’s Block, Pg. 81).

“In 1666, a committee in the House of Commons was ready to call both the Plague and the Great Fire God’s retribution against England for harboring an athiest such as Thomas Hobbes.” (Reader’s Block, Pg. 144).

“Pietro Torrigiano took a hammer to a Madonna he had sculpted in Seville when he was not paid what he anticipated.
And was jailed by the Inquisition for sacrilege.” (Reader’s Block, Pg. 172).

“One of the ennobling delights of Paradise, as promised by Thomas Aquinas:
Viewing the condemned as they are tortured and broiled below.” (This Is Not A Novel, Pg. 7).

“Tommaso Campanella spent twenty-seven years in a papal dungeon for heresy.” (This Is Not A Novel, Pg. 49).

“Hypatia, who was battered to death by Christian fanatics.” (This Is Not A Novel, Pg. 94).

“Basically every justification for persecution on the part of the Inquisition was at hand in St. Augustine.” (This Is Not A Novel, Pg. 115).

“Burn down their synagogues. Banish them altogether. Pelt them with sow dung. I would rather be a pig than a Jewish Messiah.
Amiably pronounced Luther.” (This Is Not A Novel, Pg. 156).

“Pope Leo XII. Who in the 1820s issued an edict forbidding the waltz in Rome.” (The Last Novel, Pg. 41).

“Be informed, Christian, that after the devil thou hast no enemy more cruel, more venomous, more violent, then the Jew.
Proclaimed Luther.” (The Last Novel, Pg. 42).

“Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God.
Pronounced the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem—well before a State of Israel existed.” (The Last Novel, Pg. 42).

“There is no indication whatsoever of anything even remotely resembling a State of Israel on the maps in most contemporary Arab schoolbooks.” (The Last Novel, Pg. 64)

“In the late spring of 1944, at the height of their efficiency, the forty-six ovens in the crematoriums at Auschwitz were incinerating as many as twelve thousand corpses per day.” (The Last Novel, Pg. 68).

“Sacred Scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, not the earth.
Said Luther, dismissing this fool, Copernicus.” (The Last Novel, Pg. 94).

“Teilhard de Chardin was forbidden by the Jesuits to publish any of his philosophical writings while he lived.” (The Last Novel, Pg. 113).

“The first Crusade fought its way into Jerusalem in July of 1099. Some seventy thousand surviving Muslims—the majority being women and children—were methodically slaughtered. Such Jews as remained were burned alive in a synagogue.
All this being God’s will, the Crusaders’ motto reassured them.” (The Last Novel, Pg. 125).

“One would like to curse them so that thunder and lightning strike them, hell-fire burn them, the plague, syphilis, epilepsy, scurvy, leprosy, carbuncles, and all diseases attack them. Ignorant asses.
Being Luther, in a contemplative mood re the papal hierarchy.” (The Last Novel, Pg. 126).

“Billy Graham’s anti-Semitic exchange with Richard Nixon as preserved on White House tapes.” (The Last Novel, Pg. 136).

“We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant.
Pointed out the disaffected Muslim Wafa Sultan in 2006.” (The Last Novel, Pg. 167).

Such are the evils that religion prompts…

     “Christianity must be divine, since it has lasted seventeen hundred years despite the fact of being so full of villainy and absurdity.
     Voltaire said.”
     Wrote Markson in The Last Novel on pg. 63.

Villainy and absurdity…

     “Men never do evil so completely and so cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
     Said Pascal.”
     According to pg. 94 of Markson’s Reader’s Block.

Evil so completely and so cheerfully…

     “Human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind.
     Tom Paine called religions.
     Senseless and criminal bigotry.
     Nehru saw in them.”
     Wrote Markson in The Last Novel on pgs. 20-21.

Pgs. 10 & 11 of David Markson’s copy of Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature by L. D. Reynolds & N. G. Wilson:

     On which Markson placed a check next to the information that Aristarchus “produced complete editions of both Iliad and Odyssey,” and then Markson also placed a line next to the entire paragraph where there is discussion of the marginalia signs used by Aristarchus in ancient copies of his Homeric texts.
     He then also numbered the six different signs used in the Aristarchus system:
     1) obelos – “indicated the verse was spurious”
     2) diple – “indicated any noteworthy point of language or content”
     3) dotted diple – “referred to a verse where Aristarchus differed in his text from Zenodotus”
     4) asterikos – “marked a verse incorrectly repeated in another passage”
     5) asterikos in conjunction with an obelos – “marked the interpolation of verses from another passage”
     6) antisigma – “marked passages in which the order of the lines had been disturbed”

—-

     Markson himself has six main signs he uses in the margins of the books he owned (many of which I now own) which I have gotten quite used to (yet I still don’t know exactly what they mean necessarily):
     1) checks – generally checks seem to be for anything of note (often things he then used in his tetralogy, but not always)
     2) lines – vertical lines in the margins (sometimes just one, sometimes two or more) appear to highlight major passages in a text (they usually don’t have anything to do with things that appear in his tetralogy, unless there are also checks next to them)
     3) dashes – dashes tend to be found in tables of contents next to, it seems, certain essays/chapters/stories/sections that Markson found important (or liked best)
     4) xs – xs are hard to figure out—at first I thought they might be things he disagreed with, but I no longer think that and now wonder if it is just an alternative to the check?
     5) underlines – when Markson underlines something it is usually a specific short passage in an otherwise marked up passage (with either lines, checks or xs).
     6) squiggles – a somewhat rare marking, and one that is even more enigmatic than the x.

There are also some other random things that are much less used by Markson—sometimes brackets appear, and then there are just random markings that show up here and there.

And, of course, the greatest marginal treats for Reader (of Markson Reading) are the notes, where he writes specific comments on the text (sometimes humorous, sometimes angry, sometimes unsure, sometimes disappointed, sometimes contrarian, etc.)…

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