Pg. 175 of David Markson’s copy of Joyce: The Man, the Work, the Reputation by Marvin Magalaner & Richard M. Kain:

     On which Markson placed an x and a check in the margins next to the following Joyce anecdote re: something he said to Al Laney (whose name Markson has also underlined):
     “An acquaintance of Joyce in Paris during the early twenties has recalled to the author of the present study an unpublished anecdote, in which Joyce used a similar figure to describe his view of religion. Men, he said to Al Laney, then a correspondent for the Paris Herald, are like deep-sea fish, swimming in water that is mysteriously irradiated with light from above the surface but unable to rise to the surface to see—a characteristic figure in its grotesquerie and its relevance to Joyce’s own limited sight.”

—

     Swimming in water that is mysteriously irradiated with light from above the surface…

     “A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles, and is there one who understands me?”
     From Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.
     From Markson’s The Last Novel. (Pg. 187)

     Unable to rise to the surface to see…

     “Joyce had twenty-five operations on his eyes.”
     According to Markson on pg. 67 of Reader’s Block.

     Its relevance to Joyce’s own limited sight…

     Pg. 101 of David Markson’s copy of The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature by Gilbert Highet:

     On which Markson drew a line in the margin and underlined the following sentence:
     “The first literary translation from one language into another was made about 250 B.C., when the half-Greek half-Roman poet Livius Andronicus turned Homer’s Odyssey into Latin for use as a textbook of Greek poetry and legend.”

—

     This little factoid (with one major alteration) can be found on pg. 74 of Markson’s Reader’s Block:
     “The first translation of major length for purely literary purposes was a Latin Iliad, ca. 250 B.C., by Livius Andronicus.”

     Notice Markson wrote the Iliad was the first translated work, not the Odyssey.

     Surprisingly, Markson got this wrong. Just a little bit of online research seconds Highet’s assertion that it was indeed the Odyssey that was the first translated work.

     A rare Markson mistake.

     Pg. 161 of David Markson’s copy of Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy by William Barrett:

     On which Markson placed two checks in the margins:
     The first check is next to a Nietzsche quote:
     “In the end one experiences only oneself.”
     The other check is next to William Barrett’s assertion that “hence the best introduction to him may be the little autobiographical book Ecce Homo, which is his own attempt to take stock of himself and his life.”
     (Markson also underlined the words “autobiographical book.”)

—

     In Markson’s “autobiographical books”—or semi-autobiographical books—that make up his tetralogy, The Notecard Quartet, Markson likewise attempts to “take stock of himself and his life,” through cataloguing and arranging little tidbits of information on the lives of other great artists and quotes from their great works.

     One such quote used in Markson’s Reader’s Block is the Nietzsche axiom checked in the above scan.
     On pg. 192 of that book, as one of the final lines, Markson writes:
     “In the end one experiences only one’s self.
     Said Nietzsche.”

     Pg. 340 of David Markson’s copy of Forces in Modern British Literature: 1885-1946 by William York Tindall:

     On which Marksonunderlines the names “Bruno” and “Vico,” making lines out to the margins that connect:
     Bruno with “Opposites.”
     And Vico with “Cycles.”

—

     The theories of Bruno and Vico, and their relation to Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, are explored by Samuel Beckett in his early defense of Joyce’sWork in Progress titled “Dante…Bruno. Vico..Joyce.”

     “Dante…Bruno. Vico..Joyce.” was published amongst a number of other defenses of Joyce’s Work in Progress / Finnegans Wake in the book Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (the title of which is mentioned on pg. 183 of Markson’s Reader’s Block).

     Simplified, as Markson’s notes make it in the margins, Bruno’s theories can be represented by “opposites,” or contraries, and Vico’s by “cycles.”

     Joyce plays with opposites and cycles, as Markson does in his writing a well.

     Yet, as Beckett says in the beginning of that defense of Joyce:
     “The danger is in the neatness of identifications.”

     As Markson noted on pg. 13 of The Last Novel:
     “He is not writing about something; he is writing something.
     Said Samuel Beckett re Joyce.”

     The full quote from Beckett goes something like this:
     “You cannot complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something. It is that something itself.”

     It is to be looked at and listened to.

     At the end of his study on Lowry, Malcolm Lowry’s Volcano: Myth Symbol Meaning, Markson has a reminiscence of Lowry as an appendix.
     In it one finds this gem re: Lowry:
     “He shakes his head wistfully over a copy of Finnegans Wake: ‘I did not give this as much time as I should have.” (Pg. 226)

     Not enough looking at and listening to?

     He is not writing about something; he is writing something.

     Pg. 343 of David Markson’s copy of Forces in Modern British Literature: 1885-1946 by William York Tindall:

     On which Markson underlined parts of the following sentence about Joyce’s Finnagans Wake:
     “Its subject is what is most important: man, woman, love, and children, death and resurrection, sin and repentance, sleeping and waking, and the preoccupations of modern man, time, space, relativity, flux, and the unconscious.”

—

     “A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles, and is there one who understands me?”
     A quote from Finnegans Wake.
     That appears in Markson’s The Last Novel on pg. 187.

     As Markson (on pg. 13 of his The Last Novel) describes Beckett describing Finnegans Wake:
     “He is not writing about something; he is writing something.
     Said Samuel Beckett re Joyce.”

     Markson on Finnegans Wake in his study of Lowry (Malcolm Lowry’s Volcano: Myth Symbol Meaning, pgs. 3-4):
     “Joyce more than one remarked, for example, that his identification with of Leopold Bloom with Odysseus occurred because the latter is literature’s ‘complete man.’ Yet Bloom is not Odysseus solely; almost as if in afterthought he is equated with the ghost of Hamlet’s father, or again with Christ. And it was through these ‘incidental’ parallels that Joyce took a clue from himself, as it were, in establishing the far more inclusive mythic scheme of Finnegans Wake. There we have no single predominating mythic analogy. The dreaming H. C. Earwicker is the legendary Irish figure Finn MacCool to be sure, but by deliberate extension he is an incalculable number of others from Moses to Dean Swift—‘Here Comes Everybody,’ as his initials proclaim. The concept remains immensely provocative: Any man’s myth increases me, for I am ‘Mankinde.’
     But was Earwicker’s improbable dream necessary? Foregoing traditional chronology, much of contemporary writing demands to be read as we look at a mural: where individual stanzas or even lines may bear no immediate relationship to those nearest them, they hold their decisive, reflexive place in the whole when viewed spatially. Yet with a volume the length of Finnegans Wake, such perception requires a kind of intellectual peripheral vision. A perspective can certainly be achieved, nor does it cost that lifetime of dedication Joyce half-seriously asked of the ideal reader. Nonetheless Joyce’s own shifting focus begs the question: if the ‘multimythic’ richness of Finnegans Wake is what the novelist is after, must he cease to be novelist? Can this wealth of prototypal allusion, which after all evokes nothing if not the essence of man’s creative tradition—which is man—be integrated into a fictional form that is itself traditional?
     After Joyce, it can.”

     Markson, on pg. 140 of his novel Reader’s Block, mentions Finnegans Wake in a reference to an explanation as to what the book (Reader’s Block) might be:
     “Also in part a distant cousin innumerable times removed of A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake?
     Obstinately cross-referential and of cryptic interconnective syntax in any case.”

     Markson later says of This Is Not A Novel, on pg. 185 of This Is Not A Novel, when listening things that book might possibly be:
     “Or even his synthetic personal Finnegans Wake, if Writer so decides.”

     “It cannot be disguised from the reader that, however light and gay, this book is difficult.”
     The above scan says before the part Markson underlined.

     A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles, and is there one who understands me?

     Pg. 188 of David Markson’s copy of Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy by William Barrett:

     On which Markson placed two checks next to and underlined the phrase:
     “In his greatest book, Sein und Zeit (Being and Time)”

     And on which underlined another phrase:
     “The excitement over Heidegger’s dramatic and moving descriptions of human existence—of death, care, anxiety, guilt, and the rest.”

     And, lastly, on which he placed a line in the margin next to the following sentence:
     “And on the very first pages of Being and Time he tells us that this task involves nothing less than the destruction of the whole history of Western ontology—that is, of the way the West has thought about Being.”

—

     This monumental book by Heidegger, Being and Time, “his greatest book,” is mentioned by Markson, in it’s original German title, on pg. 100 of his novel Vanishing Point:
     “Sein und Zeit.”

     Interestingly, though perhaps not surprisingly, soonafter, on the following page of the same novel, Markson makes mention of another book title, also in its original language:
     “L’être et le néant.”

     L’Être et le Néant, aka Being and Nothingness. By Sartre.
     Another book which, in its way, “involves nothing less than the destruction of the whole history of Western ontology—that is, of the way the West has thought about Being.”

     Sein.

     Être.

     Being.

     Pgs. 194 & 195 of David Markson’s copy of Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy by William Barrett:

     On which Markson has underlined a number of mentions of Heidegger and Dasein:
     First: “Existence itself, according to Heidegger, means to stand outside oneself, to be beyond oneself.”
     Soon after: “my Being, rather, is spread over a field or region which is the world of its care and concern.”
     Further on down the page: “Heidegger calls this field of Being Dasein. Dasein (which, in German, means literally Being-there) is his name for man.”
     Then on the following page: “That Heidegger can say everything he wants to say about human existence without using either ‘man’ or ‘consciousness’ means that the gulf between subject and object, or between mind and body, that has been dug by modern philosophy need not exist if we do not make it.”

—

     Markson on pg. 160 of Vanishing Point tosses in that Heideggerian term:
     “Dasein.”

     “A word that certainly did catch my attention was the word Dasein, however, since it seemed to appear on practically every page I opened to.
     Martin Heidegger himself remaining somebody I know no more about than I know about Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, on the other hand.
     Except for now knowing that he was certainly partial to the word Dasein, obviously.”
     Wrote Markson via Kate on pgs. 167-168 of Wittgenstein’s Mistress.

     A couple pages later, on pg. 170 of the same book:
     “Although what one might now wish one’s self is that Wittgenstein had been in the basement with me yesterday, so as to have given me some help with that Dasein.”

     “Wittgenstein was five months older than Heidegger.”
     Can be found in another Markson book, This Is Not A Novel (on pg. 44).

     And later in Wittgenstein’s Mistress (on pg. 180):
     “Now heavens, how weary I have gotten of looking at that word Dasein and having no idea what it means, one can surely imagine one of these people finally deciding.”

     Just after tossing in the word “Dasein” in Vanishing Point, on pg. 160, Markson writes:
     “Einsatzgruppen.”
     (Which were SS paramilitary death squads.)

     “The inner truth and greatness of Nazism, Heidegger spoke of.”
     - Markson, Vanishing Point, pg. 19.

     “Martin Heidegger, in 1933:
     The Führer, and he alone, is the sole German reality and law, today and in the future.”
     - Markson, This Is Not A Novel, pg. 28.

     “Martin Heidegger was an anti-Semite.”
     - Markson, Reader’s Block, pg. 38.

     Einsatzgruppen.

     Dasein (which, in German, means literally Being-there) is his name for man.

     Now heavens, how weary I have gotten of looking at that word…

     The first page of the Table of Contents of David Markson’s copy of The Complete Greek Drama: Volume One by Various (Ed. Whitney J. Oates & Eugene O’Neill, Jr.):

     On which Markson underlined (and placed a line in the margin next to) the following passage from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon:
     “His death ye know: she as a dying swan
     Sang her last dirge, and lies, as erst she lay,
     Close to his side, and to my couch has left
     A sweet new taste of joys that know no fear.”

—

     Those lines are from a speech by Clytemnestra re: the deaths of Agamemnon and Cassandra.

     “Still, lurking at such a window is exactly where one is apt to visualize Cassandra after Agamemnon had brought her back as one of his spoils from Troy, as a matter of fact.
     Even while Clytemnestra is saying hello to Agamemnon and suggesting a nice hot bath, one is apt to visualize her that way.
     Well, but with Cassandra also always able to see things, of course. So that even without a window to lurk at, she would have soon known about those swords near the tub.
     Not that anybody ever learned to pay attention to a word Cassandra ever said, however.
     Well, those mad trances of hers.”
     - David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress, pg. 44.

     She as a dying swan sang her last dirge.

     Well, those mad trances of hers.

     Pg. 111 of David Markson’s copy of Forces in Modern British Literature: 1885-1946 by William York Tindall:

     On which Markson underlined the sentence:
     “Eliot is after heretics again in After Strange Gods (1934), which, by references to racial homogeneity and ‘free-thinking Jews,’ falls into a familiar pattern.”

—

     “Eliot was an anti-Semite.”
     - Markson, Reader’s Block, pg. 51.