After 9/11

I had not believed that I could quite regain my familiar sentimental bearings in Ithaca, New York after 9/11, and within a few days was driving to the Mississippi delta. I spent a few days in Clarksdale, walking the streets aimlessly, drinking vodkas at the Ground Zero Blues Club, and generally feeling more at home, and safe, and myself, than anywhere other than Ithaca. Several people, seeing the license plates on my Saab, would wave or honk: reaching out with sympathy. I now cannot dissociate Clarksdale from well-being, or from Jacqueline Nassar, who must have been then idling around town, in a school. In Oxford, at Faulkner's Rowan Oak home, reverie under the trees is very easy to achieve, as well as the notion that I had read Faulkner's books with more comprehension than I had ever allowed myself to believe, and that I had loved his prose sense with deep recognition. Headed home, I stopped in Jackson at a diner. There I admired America more than I knew, with pride and wonder, appreciating that just days after the horror of 9/11, someone in the United States had taken the initiative
to produce and distribute the bright yellow urinal splash guard with the likeness of Osama bin Laden, onto which I was peeing that morning's two beers.

excerpt from THE BIOGRAPHY OF ROBERT BRIFFAULT

Robert Stephen Briffault (1876-1948), British anthropologist and novelist, was born in London and educated privately in Florence, Italy. He later studied medicine at the University of London. After World War I, Briffault began to establish his reputation as an anthropologist. His most notable anthropological work is The Mothers: A Study of the Origins of Sentiments and Institutions (1927), a controversial attempt to prove that all simply structured cultures are basically matriarchal. Briffault's other anthropological writings include The Making of Humanity (1919; revised, Rational Evolution, 1930) and Sin and Sex (1931).
Robert Briffault is also the author of The Decline and Fall of the British Empire; Breakdown: The Collapse of Traditional Civilization; Mothers: A Study of the Origins of Sentiments and Institutions; Europa: The Days of Ignorance (novel); Europa in Limbo (novel); Marriage Past and Present; and Troubadors.

THE BIOGRAPHY OF ROBERT BRIFFAULT is an iambic dramatic radio play by the current editor of Ulysses' Friezes.
An excerpt:

They had not known death had undone so many.
A marling hook, a rusted spike held pike aloft,
brandished threats for skyward nothing for no men.
How ached the hollow stares cast over flandrin champs,
rods of faces, leagues of worms and rats clutching talis amulets sweat-close,
papers in the muddy brook,
and a word ist spake,
fogged backwards and downwards folded curled,
and lost with skin, lost with eyes, lost with blood will tell,
blood to sing and chant and wail,
how ached the fevers and the dreams,
as Martin called out a hail of supplication,
and knew not dawn from blackest nighttime clots of clay
leavened with the stab’s pour, the rich red draught of breath and breathing,
ye na hafter, childe, there is work to do.

Broken souls in the wrappings screamed,
bloods rushed to lakes, made a mixture rich and gristled,
streaked with bile and renal paste,
then baked by lightning rain and storm,
some afterthought of Judas born,
a modern spirit swells and mashes down the dream of picnics,
cruelly stacks the boys like logs,
bomb-sawed,
swaddled in briny kerosene,
left to brighten and enrich the soil of Ypres,
a long-forgotten stagecraft of primal hells and ever-unpaid debts.

This accident of narcissistic, futile fancy
writ cross flatlands reaching towards the sea,
desert, jungle, woodland, steppe and Transvaal, forest, scapeful cities of the plain;
had not thought but to look up and see the arrows seeking flesh,
had not thought to lay Willie on the charted tables,
or swill his blood from glass bowls.
Threw they spears and hammers, bolts and axes,
swords and daggers, mace and cannon,
lance and pike; pikestaffs, spears, arrows:
throats burst like fountains:
this was the sport of eastern frontmen and western frontmen;
who had milked cows,
and carpentered bridges,
and bartered grapes,
and who had simply minèd other ores.

Rosebushes planted like cemetery crosses in a chosen grove or hillside pierced the ground;
stay fast the dug-men, hold close the walls,
step twelve inches fling the dagger,
keep your own, sump of Manchester, cess of London.
Ripped to pieces by artillery,
shredded like the lamb; mown from grass to chest,
pierced by bullets, sprayed to arching mist gristle red and stringy,
by mortar called home directly true and callous,
in dawnlight Jack and John,
a pink rainbow for your thousand dreams.

Three years here, four seasons thrice.
Only minor improvements in military science improved the campaigning.
British tanks crushed hundreds of German installations,
and provided important cover for French and ANZAC, Brit advances.
Strategic Command ruled these enhancements only marginally effective,
and consequently, efforts were returned in full to the tactic of the gruesome trench stalemate
that had gained nothing and nothing and nothing.

Fetishes and talismen, amulets, and photographs
were assembled in bags for sure return or were lost to grave’s mud,
or the conflagration of ignition.
Casualties displayed themselves as outrageous spectacle:
faces burned off, feet and hands,
all the mash of abandon and pity;
mad slashes through the trunk, scooping gouges scattered cuts.
He had waited every minute for the moment,
and when the moment came, he was unaware of time passing
or the edgèd danger askulk.
Some slime had fastened onto his thigh, and his boot was drying cold within,
Rob is asking for...he didn’t hear couldn’t make it out.
Without surcease, ever standing hard by the holes, palm on the wall unwakened,
ever starved for the claiming attestation,
the clamoring for testimony,
fine e’en a word of grace,
the true grains fired and panned for fest,
visioning a danse chere cheer a danse of murrayed grem,
bestirs a fashion of Solent bread,
the lessening shore and the dimming sun betrothed.

Riven souls in the bandages cried,
torrents of mud slurry and bloods coursed as they would,
forgiven their flooding of the deltas,
merged as by an alchemist’s false formule.
Bereft new oversouls dark in the buttered wounds wept,
unmercied ‘pon the scarrèd lands of Flanders rent and fired with scabrous tears,
and men were dried only in the rains’ feeble counterpane itself.

Araby

Henry James as lyrical mosaicist

image courtesy Susanne Urban


The Henry James of the Portrait/Ambassadors/Dove/Golden sentiment.

Awash, sloshing in the seiche, a thousand thousand peels of consideration and distinction and hue and cut, fugal and harmonizing, the reader holds her in his arms, her warm breath is a fog on his lips. Carvings, whittles, shreds, flakes, and shavings are melted into a sort of creamy sorbet; we delect the thousand-flowered hill Henry confects; as to stand before the oceanic wheatfields of the North American prairies, and its eye-endless waves of grains and grains. Henry Senior's Syracuse real estate revenues showered 'pon the boys and Alice centuries of daydreams, one result of which was a European excursion for the Schenectady-shedding Daisy and her wee bruvvo. Seeking respite from the task of sorting through the peelings, one might today drive out James Street, in Syracuse, eventually (and inevitably, in New York State) crossing the Erie Canal. The novelist never visited Syracuse, the uffluffy counterpane beneath which he napped and dreamed for us a thousand thousand stalks of wheat and maize, which you called corn.

Plutocrats barging past me

Indestructible reveries relating to life on the canal, or on the river, perhaps derive from some identification with the good Huck. If the waterway curls around the hills and the trains have ceased to run, it is avian life and chatter one hears, calmative and pure. In a wherry skiff, 1976, from Ithaca to Galloo Island in Lake Ontario: I plied, a dutiful six miles per hour; sleeping on the snaky shores, or tween the seats mid gear. Finnegans wake a ripple merry soft, reeds and cows and swampy grasses verged the limit of a magickal craft. Afternoons and evenings turned to mornings. I love canals, and I feel safe there. No army of Iroquois doubtful arrow fling. I ate a Milky Way. Then

a butler and a chef
threw
old fish
remains
upon
me.

Movie watching within the beneficent form of intentionality

Those of us gathered here, by invitation, at the Tokyo Bar in Montreal (aterraced) will have come to agree that the ideal way to watch a movie is at home, in the dark, severed from the sensate universe (that is to say, not in a barnful of crude masticators and slothy respirators). DOWN BY LAW (Jim Jarmusch) will stand for us, as the paragon of cinematic accomplishment, on the order of "King Lear" or the work of Philip Whalen, because it is a movie; it does not aspire to be a movie, as, shall we say, do all others. All the others, from Griffith to Renoir to Kubrick. We will presume that the root of Modern evil is intentionality --- that is to say, the widest measure of intentionality that is equivalent to suborning, usury, vanity, poaching, and the more well-known perfidies; (we will not speak to the evils that have persisted since pre-history). But the golden temple on the hill and the sun's lance coming to rest at the precise spot aesthetically, are also expressions of that rarer form of intentionality, the one that is still, and peaceful, and slow, and officially transubstantiating, though it shares its name and skin with its creepier form. By one name are known our equanimity and our bedlam. Ulysses is guided home to Ithaca by the truer lighthouses, and by such afternoons as driving or bicycling half-lost along the many roads of upstate New York, among its ravines and hills and lakes and green copses, or by watching a movie in which disarray is quelled by companionship, by the shaking off the bonds of reduction, by an open cookfire, and for one of the fellows, the utterest of deliquescences into the warmest den of love.

Wallace Stevens, our repose

In this way "Sunday Morning" descends upon us, visible a little.
We seem to have been remembering.
Ashflakes on the moon, in that windless portion of gravity, and silently.

Music One: Bill Callahan, Chloe Sevigny, and Angela

Persons who wander the Seine at dawn without ever thinking of the word 'Paris' or 'Seine' may wish to replicate an experience of profound rhapsodic bliss that I am able to convince myself I achieve by listening to Bill Callahan's song "You Moved In" forty times. This may take an afternoon, or a few beers. Repetition is access.
Also: consider this short film.

Longing, longing, I would be tribbling over with bobbling thanks if you were to encounter him and lay at his ears of awareness that I wait in the darkning shadowed trees of the Bois de Boulogne with my melangio sweet paramour; speaketh the plaint, hight the microline, pull forward the bright silver lightedges of the rainclouds, Angel and I nay desir do twest dola retourna, jest 'im.

Richard Hugo

In conversation, Richard Hugo left me reeling; a sense that I'd become involved with a lyric libretto. In discussion, his anecdotes - about flying in the War, or strange mountain towns in Italy - formed a circle one hadn't noticed was being made. Elements of the intangible world were things to hold in his hands.

from Death Of The Kapowsin Tavern

A damn shame. Now, when the night chill
of the lake gets in a troller's bones
where can the troller go for bad wine
washed down frantically with beer?
And when wise men are in style again
will one recount the two-mile glide of cranes
from dead pines or the nameless yellow
flowers thriving in the useless logs,
or dots of light all night about the far end
of the lake, the dawn arrival of the idiot
with catfish--most of all, above the lake
the temple and our sanctuary there?

Michael Pitt advances American film

Ham-headed marketeers titled Alice Denham's wonderful book disgracefully, but did not altogether obscure a wise remark she makes about the three male foundations of movies in America: Brando (brilliant) was stagy, while Dean (brilliant) and Clift (brilliant) played the character. Michael Pitt cradles a role in his hands and heart, then pours over it essences of Pitt, so that the acting craft is not quite the character and not the actor, but the character trying to conform itself to the contours of Michael Pitt. This vector of energy from the screenwriter's character to the actor reduces to almost nothing the bleak and crippling spectre of intentionality that has so plagued the colossal crusaders' march of American moviemaking.
(And isn't it just like the University of Toronto to take Alice seriously?)

Joyces

This tree in our backyard (in the hills and ravines of Ithaca): stillness.
Forthcoming, an iambic appreciation of Passchendaele and Robert Briffault.
Joyce Kilmer's living went STOP at the Battle of the Marne, in 1918.
There is imagining that at the moment the bullet vaporized his cranialia he wast rewriting the poem of arboria by which he was vaporized by rebuke and doggerel, perhaps to speak of a more carnal form of love; perhaps to think of its eighteen blackbirds.
Gulley Jimson's perishing blows into his wits a blood-pink vision of white walls, carrying into the darkness a last kiss of beginning.
Nora speaketh "yes," because by that point James Joyce had realized that the grammar of Dublin could not be spoken, as so he had hoped, as so in a way he had seen the ways in that city words work to build harmony.

Patrick Leigh Fermor

Absinthe-equivalent 'sublime prose' is always so for the person partaking. If everyone spoke well, there would be eternal prosperity. But instead of ‘tell it slant’ and such beautiful expressions, we had ‘bombs away!’ and such nattering. Patrick Leigh Fermor was poised at the most elegant moment of travel writing. Disaffected at school, Fermor walked and pondered deeply from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople in 1933-1934. The Time of Gifts. Between the Woods and the Water.

Intramural romances spring up and prosper in places of learning, but some exotic psychological fluke directed my glance beyond the walls and, once more, out of bounds. It was a time when one falls in love hard and often, and my aesthetic notions, entirely formed by Andrew Lang’s Coloured Fairy Books, had settled years before on the long-necked, wide-eyed pre-Raphaelite girls in Henry Ford’s illustrations, interchangeable king’s daughters, ice-maidens, goose-girls and water spirits, and my latest wanderings had led me, at the end of a green and sweet-smelling cave set dimly with flowers and multicoloured fruit and vegetation – a greengrocer’s shop, that is, which she tended for her father – to the vision of just such a being. The effect was instantaneous. She was twenty-four, a ravishing and sonnet-begetting beauty and I can see her now and still hear that melting and deep Kent accent.

Fred Exley, three books

We must, of course, toss Jonathan Yardley our three-quarter wilted bouquet of roses for the only biography of Fred Exley (“Misfit”) we are ever likely to have. We shall assume that his research accurately corroborated the details of Exley’s life that Fred’s sister Frances provided, and that the University of Rochester archivists had cataloged and made available the whole of Exley’s papers. Points of discussion probably should not be known as disputations, but countless readings and long thoughts can’t have been worth nothing to me, and so I venture a quatrain of estimations.
1) Yardley’s adherence to his theorem that Exley wrote only one good book is tenacious to the point one might wonder what is the thing of which he is afraid of admitting to the discourse. At the end of a long telephone conversation with Frances, I hastened to add that I was sorry for us all, that Yardley had despoiled that opinion upon the books, for I was certain that the sorts of elegant phrasings that illuminate so much of A Fan’s Notes are evident enough in the second and third books of the trilogy. Frances somehow managed to suggest a sort of pity for me, that I had had to bear Yardley’s assertion that Pages From a Cold Island, and Last Notes From Home were essentially dismissible, since it seemed to cause me such pain; she assured me that I was not alone, and other reputable readers shared my view.
2) A Fan’s Notes’ previously-unsuspected surfacing is attributed by Yardley to little more than “reading well and practice,” which rather shortchanges a possible discussion that suggests sources more deeply rooted, as in the literature gene that may have coursed through his progenitors’ narratives, and in the innate perfect pitch for harmonies of content and expression that are more usually assigned to such freaks as Mozart. Critics and readers have remarked several themes that draw them to the book in ways that propose the allure of their souls’ magnetic north - by way of not saying cult - (most notably the way in which persons of a certain disposition can identify the inherent and awful way in which they are sanctioned forever to be marginal spectators and eternally immunized against virtuosity), but I read the books as truth and beauty crystallized in the harmony of the perfectly composed English sentence. That is to say: perfect. For we can admit that such a thing is possible in prose, just as no Ride is imaginable more fulfilling or more improved upon than in Die Walküre. Fred stops near the stone house in Talcottville and contemplates the eagle within, but the nature of that hallowing proximity is rather to the dictum from within the house drenching the scene of American writing: lucidity, force, ease.
3) Fiction and memoir: quoth the Yaryardles: ‘good writing doesn’t amount to much unless it says something.’ The latter books are evolved phrasings, usually matured, of the first. Those readers who have been conjugally suborned to paraphrasability and plotlines will feel comfortable with cliché and hackney coaches, but may have lost the ability to deduce the grandeur that derives from exquisite prose.
4) The wound. Remorse permeates many of Exley’s several broken moments, and all are sourced to his confidential original sin. This is Cass McIntyre. The books are retrospective. Time is indefinite. The Watertown lad had glimpsed what English could be. He then realized that Cass in her glory was no means of pertinent transport, and his life fulfilled in such romantic arms was rendered ever afterwards impossible.

The Richard Yates frieze

Many writers have shared my experience: within the first hour (quite literally true) at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, 1969-1971, I correctly foresaw that my mediocrity would be instantly swamped by the gifted and the skilled and the ambitious folk around me. Consequently I had two years to see what being an adequate critic was all about. In the second year I attended Richard Yates' fiction seminar; hours of smoking and coughing, but also the idea of literary reverence I have carried with me since. [Whither those in that room? David Milch, for one. And diverse narratives of grandeur and woe for the rest.] Gatsby was read. Discussions followed that were less tentative than they might have been. Then Yates' spoke, hushing the room with eloquence about the book he dared call the finest in all of literature (a phrase keenly avoided in that setting, where teaseling out the last bit of imperfection was the vernacular); he explained why he'd said that. I remember the room being especially stilled, as if we knew that Yates talking about Fitzgerald was the sort of moment of which we'd have too few in the years to come; now I see that we were witnessing a thing rarely seen: a man in love.
With which compare: attending a Susan Sontag lecture some years later. Four hundred greedies in room with three hundred seats. She first gained favor and applause by denigrating the term "post-modern." (Cheers! We confused and lazy are not alone!) Followed a long long train of coal cars, each a slightly nasty and enlisting remark, the sole purpose of which was to confect a room of temporary acolytes whose eager giggling would drown the truth that she didn't have much to say, really.

Richard Yates