May 30, 1593. Eleanor Bull’s Tavern, Deptford Strand.

Three weeks passed before Virginia Woolf’s body was found after she committed suicide by walking into the River Ouse.

Has Reader ever seen the Ouse named in any other regard, anywhere, except in Anna Livia Plurabelle?

Not one of Thomas Hardy’s first three novels sold more than twenty copies.

Skeres. Poley. Ingram Frizer.

In fact all of the women in Protagonist’s life, from whenever. Should he remember?

Shouldn’t he?

Chronometrical and Horologicals.

Alma-Tadema.

Sir Thomas More was beheaded at the Tower of London. The Earl of Surrey was beheaded at the Tower of London. Sir Walter Raleigh was behead at the Tower of London.

Thou sayest it.

Protagonist’s obsolescent phonograph. And scarred long-playing records, never surrendered for compact discs.

Nor will there be a VCR.

Can Protagonist think of a single film that interests him as much as the three-hundredth best book he ever read?

École Normale Supérieure.

May 30, 1431:

Rouen, Rouen, O thou, my last dwelling place!

The devious-cruising Rachel.

Pierre Reverdy spent thirty years as a lay brother in a Benedictine monastery.

Though with his Poems in Frank O’Hara’s pocket.

From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.

David Markson, Reader’s Block