Reader's Block

You might say, if you look at the number of books Goodreads lists me as "currently reading" that I suffer from reader's block but I am not really suffering and it's just that I tend to start new books before finishing the old ones. Sometimes all I read for days at a time is the World Wide Web. Therein, at any point one can continue or follow a link and be reading something else, likely with links of its own to follow or not follow as one wishes.

Reader's Block is like this, only you have to supply your own links to follow up on what it offers. Someone should fix this!
But meanwhile, I am cutting and pasting what it offers into a search engine. Not always--sometimes I already understand the reference and other times am too lazy or simply don't care. Is this a novel or just a novelty? Maybe it is a kit from which a novel can be built. Maybe it should say on the cover "Some assembly required."

Why this lists of factoids? Is it because "Tout, au monde, existe pour aboutir à un livre."? (Mallarmé said that.)
At one point he says: "I have a narrative. But you will be put to it to find it" But it turns out this is just a quote from the novel [b:Nightwood|53101|Nightwood|Djuna Barnes|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1298480120l/53101.SY75.jpg|828739]. (Thank you Google.)

It has a protagonist, named Reader. Reader is, or wants to be, a writer and the work he plans has a protagonist named Protagonist who is a reader. Reader may or may not be speaking. That is, the book may or may not be in the first person. Certainly it's often unclear who is speaking and whether he is or is not actually quoting someone else--even quoting someone else quoting. Or, as Heidegger, an anti-semite, says (or thought) "We do not come to thoughts. They come to us." What he actually said (in German) has been so translated. Or has it? Best I can find on the internet is that a book about Heidegger paraphrases his thought with that sentence (in German.) The book's author knew Heidegger but lived twenty years longer. Markson points out that biographies that end with the death of their subject don't allow the other characters in the story to "live on" in this way. Or so I am paraphrasing him.

I have now obtained the book about Heidegger. That's how it works with this "novel." I am following the links. There are many artists/writers/musicians mentioned/quoted/referenced within. And scientists and philosophers and generals and performers and so on. I counted 86 such people that Markson says are anti-semites. Wikipedia tells me that Markson was born a Jew. The Jewish Review of Books tells me that Robert Lowell, who Markson lists as anti-semitic, was not particularly so, unlike the rest of Lowell's family. In fact he was one eighth Jewish, but perhaps that's that just shows the kind of anti-semite he is. Karl Marx is listed though he is against all religions. Still I'm following the links. After all, I see no virtue in being uninformed. (That being a quote from Gandhi that appears in the book.)

The artists and scientists, etc are all suffering humans.

"Napoleon and Karl Marx had hemorrhoids.
As did Wordsworth.
As did Tennessee Williams."
"Milton suffered from constipation."
"Moses spoke with a stutter. As did Virgil.
And Somerset Maugham. And Philip Larkin."

They love each other, they have contempt for each other, they were underpaid for their work--or paid to have it published, have no sex or a whole lot, and suffer from mental illnesses. They are distant (or close) relatives of each other. They committed crimes or were the victims of it. They died in non-ordinary ways, commonly suicide or murder. It's almost like Reader is evaluating himself (as a writer, as a human) by comparing himself to these notables. Or collecting details for the life he will give his protagonist. We are presumably being invited to evaluate our own lives. In the end, they are amazing or amazingly horrible. If there's a theme, that's it. So why bother? Or, equivalently, why not bother? There's much to be gained. Hemingway got that Swedish thing (what he called the Nobel prize). Wallace Stevens's wife Elsie was the model for the face on the United States dime and half-dollar.

Reader decides that his Protagonist has pretty much withdrawn from life to live in an disused cemetery.

Recommended for reading during a pandemic.