Two Briffault venues

One is the Breakfast Room at the Meurice Hotel, Paris.
Another, from THE NEW LIFE OF MR. MARTIN
The kasbah stood on the brow of the mountsain. At a distance below could be seen, above a screen of foliage, the palm groves fringing a sprawling wad'. Beyond the plain was a great spur of mountains, rugged in outline and red in hue; and beyond them again, a pale rose haze - the desert - misting into the violent violet-blue of the sky.
Dream or awakening, her surroundings invited Sheila to bask in their pleasantness and luxury. The windows of the room opened upon a fairy garden, Moorish beyond mistake, with raised green-tiled paths, a fountain with square basin, sunken beds of exquisite and strange exotic flowers, and peaceful cypresses.
When later they took coffee in the garden, above which a bright crescent glittered in the turquoise sky, Sid Harun returned to the mood that had been evoked. "Do you know the Arabic word horm?" he asked.
"It means something like 'sacred' or 'tabu,' does it not? The approaches to a mosque are horm, protected against desecration," Sheila replied.
"Excellent!" he exclaimed with pleased laughter. "You are, I see, a genuine student. But the connotation extends, as with many Arabic words, much farther than can be expressed in translation. Every person also has his or her horm - privacies, that is, of life and mind, rather than, as with us, of the body, which are acknowledged and respected. One great virtue the Islamic barbarians have: politeness. We laugh at the florid formulas of Oriental civility. They are, we hold, but hollow conventions. Those verbal ramparts extend to the privacies and intimacies of life. All this may seem ludicrous, but it preserves each human horm inviolate. The flowery politeness is, to my thinking, less barbaric than the heartiness which claps you on the back and calls you Charlie."

Reynolds Price and Theresa Duncan

I had been reading Reynolds Price novels years before we became email acquaintances; we call each other "cousin" based on a shared middle name. (He had ordered a tile of the Chandos Shakespeare. Guillaume Jacque's Pere might have believed that his grandfather came from Loudeac or Carhaix or Fougeres or Paris.)
Before her death, Theresa Duncan's culture blog assumed rich and dear value in a day in which I would chase sticks with Hellhound the sheepdog, eat apples and oranges, make tiles, read books, and pass an hour or two concentrating on marveling that pharmaceuticals had altogether expunged from my life delusional paranoia and spatial hallucinations, and that technicians at the Cleveland Clinic had fiddled their knives in some judicious carving along the contours of the muscles of my heart. For some years prior to these revelations, I had wage-slaved in archives and historical repositories, and had consequently come to form rather strong feelings of pity and derision for those otherwise kind persons who preferred to find in what they erroneously called genealogy values they might be able to detect in themselves. A dispassionate observation of such self-replicating sketches reflexively formed in me the opinion that all that truly could be drawn from the outlines of the lives of one's progenitors was a dim genetic recollection of the stories that attached themselves to those pre-folk, which might as well have been told by a wine-sloshed but good-natured goof sitting around a campfire. My paternal grandfather was born in Jewel, Kansas in 1876, and then traveled by prairie schooner to Kansas City, and by train to upstate New York. My nerves and breath did something else.
One of Theresa's last posts quoted Price:

"A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens--second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence; the opposite of silence leads quickly to narrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the small accounts of our day's events to the vast incommunicable constructs of psychopaths."

Bill Callahan

Until the very fine day when Amy Goodman assumes her rightful space at NPR, we shall be grateful that the organization possesses the wisdom to employ the staffperson whose quite grand idea it was to lay before us the eminent Bill Callahan.
I have elsewhere remarked my admiration for Bill's work, and became so attached to a previous album, that it obscured for a moment the greatness of his current.
He is presently touring with Bachelorette, to the usual incisive and dedicated reviews.
Cheers to Drag City, label of saints.

Kangxi Dictionary Conference and Seminar

Inamorata La Vogdesa is presently attending the Kangxi Lexicography Conference in what is currently called "China." (Is there anything worse than presenting your paper on the third day of a five-day conference?)
The organizers appear to have felt that a few images of a previous conference would assuage any fears newcomers might have. Conferences always have that factitious aura of too-intentional creepiness, but these images fill me with relief that I am remaining in Ithaca, where the scene is altogether, and quite naturally, more informal. I do not imagine that V, as I think I do, has the need to contravene the order! being imposed on the conference's guests by shifting the chairs out of their symmetries, for while I catch myself still and forever expecting individualization to somehow squeak out of any regimented personality, she long ago learned to "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown."

Excerpt 2: 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.
Briffault served as a physician at Gallipoli and Passchendaele (Ypres 3rd)

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

O! might Callisto pine, and ever hight the microline!
the sheets are washed and washed again, once again, and once again,
to enwrap displacèd gores, misshapen skins,
the flaming rags and bones,
the farting heart which flat plops still,
while other boys wait for the dawning of dawn’s first light,
by which means of transport this one will perish and this one will see supper,
and this one will only know of living throbbing and grief
and the surest grasp of absent clemency,
three sorts of souls afried and poached,
and slurried off the table meal.

The songs came up from Spain,
in which crucible of contested courts of love
black gentlemen pled to sing of blackbirds and blooms,
the merry delights of unsophisticated gathering,
drinking, singing, and joys unnamed.
Night for days, festal feast of visions, bread and wine,
a russeted claret, the croissant,
crescented barged across the Mediterranean Sea.
Now the season leans to dimming,
and the leaves scape to earth;
the slanted sun steals light from sported vespers,
gloom hushes birdsong song and whistles,
we can but rest,
we can but convalesce,
we can but wake to snowy bullets raining.
We muse in gape and stupor,
that they have arms enough and man for drawing to the maelstrom,
for falling in the tempest,
and for laying out the casks of bleaching ire,
wrapped embalming,
bitt’rest blood.

1955: the antepenultimate present tense

Photograph of Miles Davis in Montreal,
achieved by Anton Corbijn (b. 1955)
for which we are all grateful

In 1955 a not particularly unprecedented yet stunning concordance of starlit events occurred. (The next timespan that would have such luminosity and present tense was 1968-1969, and there has not been one since: date 2009.)
In 1955 Charlie Parker and James Dean and Wallace Stevens died, and Emmett Till was murdered.
At that time it struck me that motor racing drivers possessed transcendental glows; Bill Vukovich and Alberto Ascari were killed. Later I got to know John Fitch who was Pierre Levegh‘s co-driver at Le Mans when Levegh’s crash killed himself and 86 spectators.
We lined up for Salk vaccine, reverently led to believe that God was touching us.
Berners-Lee and Jobs were born.
Lolita was published, in Paris.
Miles Davis played at Newport and heard the wide expanse of his future.
In Ithaca, there was the probability that on one afternoon within a few stonesthrow of each other passed Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon, Richard Farina, Suzanne Guerlac, Barbara Hodes, Paul Fucking Wolfowitz, Judy Hamilton, Vicki Boynton, and me.
In Greenwich Village, scuffling in dusty streets and dim flats and bars of breathtaking possibility and animation, artists and writers plotted the ways in which they could portray that the next years would roll over the safe cave of freedom the mighty mossy stone of crushing derivatives and the foetid holocaust of received ideas and inheritance.

Henry James' unborn women

Alice's shallower and vainer brothers

Daisy, Kate, Isabel, Catherine, Maria, Charlotte. Henry James' women (many from upstate New York, many possessing the means of imagination to write for the New York Review of Books, or to solo circumnavigate the oceans, or to dance with complete and intuitive appreciation for Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev) stand half-lost among the stars at the dawn of Modernism, yet too long before the challenges to governance and inheritance that took the form of blurring and then challenging gender-assignment roles, and in this way they portray themselves portraying themselves, never quite saying, held back from acting out, stillborn dreams of that thing that is sometimes called Post-Modernism (with which, I have no quarrel, for in that spinning weave of beauty and beast toil and sing those who implicitly believe in the Iroquois dreams or the Aboriginal dreamtime, though perhaps I am getting away from myself, after a fashion, teleporting myself into their company, those frozen elfs and stilled wraiths, the wisps of promise and might and wisdom that call themselves Daisy and Kate). Breath and blood essences out of time, crafted from the shapes of the night's clouds, perhaps even with some small measure of debt to Henry, and yearning to hear the "swing" of which oarsmen speak, yearning to feel the "souplesse" that cyclists seek, or yearning to complacently fix tea in the cabin of a canalboat driftsting and boobling along almost nameless canals in golden-gulled Provence. A commonplace for us to have learned: that instead, they hauled bolts of dust-catching cotton around like longshoremen, mummified themselves with scriptures of many make, and pickled themselves with the burps and poops of Alice's shallower and vainer brothers.
Until you get to Nicole Diver.

High regard for Helen Miranda Wilson

I will expect and do quite fear an urgent e-bulletin:

Helen Miranda Wilson regrets that she cannot tolerate extravagant appreciations from persons unknown to her.

Nonetheless...
(note: images and text used with appreciation and without permission)

At the end of Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, the pugnacious urchin Linda rejects the promise of treasures she has inherited (stultification in a grim boarding school, and the possible flushing of the liberty of her own life down into the sewers of social respectability and security) and instead walks off into a more dangerous unknown, in the company of an even more pugnacious girl... let us say to rough out the years remaining to her in rowdy cities, with alcohol, jazz music, petty crimes, and a beat trail to Hollywood, where she writes stories and scripts for movies that will not be published or produced until their visionary truth is recognized, many years after she succumbs to the various ravages of life lived as misadventure.

Which is to say: independence. So difficult to muster.

A fashion of an autobiographical note by HMW:
I used to live in New York City. Now, I live in Wellfleet, MA, the town I grew up in. I paint. I draw. I show. Sometimes it sells. My parents are dead. I have no children. I own the house I grew up in. I don't have a mortgage. I am a public servant, specializing in land use. In the last nine years, I have served on the Zoning Board of Appeals, the Planning Board, the Water Issues Advisory Committee, the Housing Authority, two Affordable Housing Task Forces, the Shellfish Advisory Board and the Selectboard, all in Wellfleet. I am a beekeeper, with five colonies. I keep chickens. I grow a lot of our vegetables and fruits. I am a member of the International Magnolia Society. I like to spend time reading in bed with cats. I have enough money to go to the movies, anytime I want and to buy as many tree peonies as I want. This was not always the case. I have good fortune. My mother loved me but she died in 1979. Her kindness informs my life. Half my family, on her side, is Russian or German. She grew up in Europe. She painted when she was young but then she stopped. Studied with Hans Hoffman in Munich when she was 17. b. 1948

Some reviews:
New York Times
By JOHN RUSSELL
Published: February 11, 1983

THE evident speciality of Helen Miranda Wilson, whose new paintings can be seen through Feb. 26 at the Monique Knowlton Gallery, 19 East 71st Street, is the small domestic interior. To be more precise, it is the very small domestic interior - the size of a jumbo postcard, a paperback novel or the pocket of a country coat.
But ''small'' in this instance is not a disparagement. Miss Wilson does not think small. She thinks big, and condenses. There is more to her tiny paintings than to most of the huge, rambling, overblown ''realist'' paintings in which we can count the stitches on the rug and read the small print on the telephone bill.
To begin with, she is a consummate editor. Nothing is there that doesn't need to be there. Next, she is very good indeed at what is now called miniaturization. With just a patch of color and a nicely judged contour she can tell us something important about where people live and how. We know who lives alone, who is expecting a lover, who is fanatical about the placing of every least object in the room and who is letting things drift for a while.
The sense of place is particularly exact in the metropolitan scenes. Miss Wilson is great on the distant industrial views that New York has to offer in profusion. Even if they are sometimes hideous in themselves, those views are ennobled by the scale, the light and the almost palpable irritability of Nature as she tries out one kind of weather after another and can't make up her mind which one to stick with.
In the country, Miss Wilson's touch seems to be not quite so sure. Possibly it is because the subject of the New Yorker set free for the summer has been so well and so often treated by others. Possibly it is because she is so absolutely right about metropolitan life that we rather begrudge the change of scene. Possibly it is because her figures - so exact and tender when encountered in the city - get a little stiff and emblematic when she puts them out of doors.
Be that as it may, her interiors are a continual delight - for her precise and unrhetorical way with the brush, her subtlety of color and her command of complicated psychological situations for which there is no one easy resolution. Imagine early Vuillard distilled and clarified by an understated but fearless imagination, and you will not be too far from the impact of these little paintings.

Helen Miranda Wilson at DC Moore - New York
Art in America, Dec, 2002 by Joe Fyfe
There's something almost medieval about Helen Miranda Wilson's small, carefully detailed paintings of the contemporary world. The human presence seems momentarily silenced by God's vast works, whether evidenced in distant vistas or in humble objects. Wilson anoints these moments: how the sky looked on a particular day (Clouds, Early Afternoon, July 1999, oil on wood, 11 by 14 inches), what was on her desk on another (Tooth, November 1999) or what it's like at the town dump (At the Transfer Station, Wellfleet, Ma., 1999). This diaristic exhibition, a gathering of improvised and sustained projects, included interior still lifes oppressively framed in glossy black wood as well as a series of sumi ink drawings of nasturtiums and honeysuckle, and some pencil drawings that seem to be studies for parts of paintings. Then there were the landscapes, which seem to communicate Wilson's vision of the world most directly. These unframed outdoor scenes of Cape Cod and rural New York State reveal a kind of tremulously peaceable kingdom.
One aspect of many of the inland scenes recalls Martin Johnson Heade, the 19th-century American artist who specialized in landscapes poised ahead of approaching rain. Wild Apple, from the Top of Mt. Rascal, Argyle, N. Y., an 11-by-11-inch oil-on-wood painting, for example, depicts an apple tree in the foreground of rolling mountainside fields interrupted by lines of dark green trees. The deep blue sky above is heavy with weather, and the distant mountains are almost completely obscured by moisture-laden air. The view feels simultaneously antique and immediate, as if you were looking at the distant landscape in a Brueghel and recognized the Catskills. There is also remarkable depth to Wilson's painted skies, and from a few feet away they almost seem to come alive.
Being the daughter of the novelist and literary critic Edmund Wilson may account for her seemingly innate trust in the power of description, the area where the visual and the verbal most comfortably overlap. Unlike her poetic-realist contemporaries, Wilson doesn't appear to require a specific psychological manner.


Helen Miranda Wilson
by John Yau
In these paintings Wilson moves into a territory that is all her own. The paintings are color sensations in which a complex range of feelings and possible readings are evoked. It used to be, or so some people claim, that when a painter did something new and different, others would notice it. Except in the case of very few artists, this hasn’t been the case in years. Wilson doesn’t care, and that is to her credit. She has persistently gone her own way for nearly forty years, and never made a single concession to the marketplace or to stylistic trends. That, to me, is heroic.

Unrhetorical? Consummate editor? Lucidity, force, ease.

Art in Review; Helen Miranda Wilson
By GRACE GLUECK
Published: October 21, 2005
DC Moore Gallery
724 Fifth Avenue, at 57th Street
Through Nov. 5

In what seems like a radical departure from her previous painting, which focused recognizably on the natural world, Helen Miranda Wilson shows oil-on-panel geometrical abstractions composed entirely of small colored squares, rectangles and parts thereof. Each of these ''calendar paintings'' refers to events in her life about the time they were painted; each unit of color represents a day.
The switch in her work to this kind of shorthand, she explains, has occurred because of a busier life. Having moved back to the Cape Cod town where she grew up, she has become an elected official and a beekeeper. So the patches of color, neatly laid out but with a handmade look -- edges that bleed slightly, drips of primer material -- represent a diminution in her desire ''to work from observation.''
Although there is no recognizable subject matter in the panels, they do have titles, like ''Tom's Salad, Thanksgiving Day,'' in which the patches, not uniformly aligned and occurring in intense colors modified by silvery grays and blacks, could conceivably celebrate a salad blitz made for a large company. And some have dates for titles, one being ''February 19, 2004,'' in which a bright red rectangle (a red letter day?) stands out among more sedate hues. Other visual stimuli include flags, quilts and honeycombs.
The softness and eccentric placement of the patches leavens the severity of their geometrics, giving the panels a folksy quality that reminds me of the painter Al Jensen's garrulous (and far more complex) schemes, minus their philosophical underpinning.


Observations of her father:
From THE FIFTIES
1952 In New York she developed a tummy-ache one morning in a way that suggested she did not want to go to school. Later she ate a large candy, and when they said they thought she was sick, she answered, “That piece of candy was weeping to be eaten.”
1953 Helen – about to play in a mud puddle: Mud is my heart’s desire.
When I asked her to pick things up: Am I the housemaid? We couldn’t make out where she had heard of housemaids.
July 1953. Helen was ill and had to go to bed just before the 4th of July. She said, “Put an ad in the paper and say, ‘No fireworks till the little girl is well.’”
Helen at Talcottville: “Little girls like lemon drops, and fathers understand, because they like lemon drops too – but mothers resist lemon drops.”
At Flat Rock, paddling – sitting around in the shallow water: “Oh, this is so enjoyable!”
1955 Helen has learned a little German. She likes to say “Genung!” and makes a quite mature gesture with her hand when the waiter is helping her to something
Talcottville: Helen, dictating a letter, wanted to say it was “very dull here”: when I remonstrated with her a little, she said, “Well, make it dullish.”
Helen said, as she was leaving for school: “I want to come back to a warm house, permeated with the smell of cookies.”
1956 Helen, when she wakes up in the morning, tells her mother her dreams. This morning, she said that she had dreamed that she had become very small, so that the cats were much bigger than she was: There were those great furry things, and I was quite tiny! Light Ginger had begun to claw at her, and she had said to her, Stop that! I’m still your mistress. Then she added to her mother: This is partly fiction.

Hemingway THE GARDEN OF EDEN

Every few years or so I try to read some stories by Carver or Auster or Tom Wolfe or John Gardner so that, upon closing the paperback, I may fling it from the outdoor porch of my home, where I read in good weather, and watch it sail across the lawn where I take pleasure in knowing that it will have there flopped and would remain through several rainshowers. Those boys represent Crusade's legions of writers who stick their faith to the notion that criticism before or after the danse of inheritance-shucking (that which follows the criticism that is called post-modern) has something to say. In THE GARDEN OF EDEN I revel in the epistemology of haircuts and the grace of driving a Bugatti in Provence, and the way a woman demonstrates souplesse riding a bicycle. Of a fashion for which one might have not dared hope, a certain haircut is described as like a Bugatti.

Most stars form no agreed-upon constellation

I was back east when Gary Snyder visited friends of mine in Iowa City who were staying at my house. As a courtesy, he left behind for my absented hospitality an autographed SIX SECTIONS, which one day a few years later in an exchange more gentle than it sounds was given to a poet friend who left behind for me a Bill Puka LP. The friend in Iowa City had preceded me there by a year; two years before I had returned to my leafy green upstate New York undergraduate college from a summer in Ithaca to find that she had made a rather frightening erotic impression on two of my friends who did not then know each other; each told about the same tale of fearsome realization that this new force would be inflecting our dinners and lives and coquetteries throughout our last year in the village. As so surely she did. After leaving Iowa she changed her name to Kathy Krishna, and then to Shivanii. My friend Allan is a professor of botany in Israel, and he has lately remarked to me that, though he is a most sensitive reader of poetry, he didn't ever naturally have feelings for what everyone else recognizes as what we shall call the awful depth and peaceful wonder in Snyder. In Philip Whalen's exceptionally rich novel YOU DIDN'T EVEN TRY, some of the characters have for one another the same sort of respectful and intrigued fear that my friends had for Kathy, and from which I have never - but to look - wholly escaped. In the way that Pound called ULYSSES an end, not a beginning, so Snyder's work might be understood to embody a last farewell to the possibility that the earth might have survived the variegated pestilences of people, parallel to the spirit of man that was forever broken in the trenches of Verdun and Passchendaele, and the invention, sometime in the 1920s, of a range of literatures and musics that perfected our vision of a sky filled with stars only clowns and deadbeats could convince their minds dead with boredom hid little bears and dopey crosses. What are the things I have to pretend to be to make her spend the night with me?

David Markson SPRINGER'S PROGRESS

It would have been useful, thought some of the crafters of stone circles not far from Loudeac, in Brittany, if Pi were exactly 3, instead of the cumbersome 3.14 insisted upon by more pragmatic Celts. So these adventurers tried to make circles that were perfectly round, yet with a Pi of 3. Some of these imperfect perfect circles remain.
Markson's prose fictions have a Pi of 3, and among such wiggly coils of stones the reader who takes the author into his heart will have a merry afternoon.
Markson never perjures, never dupes; never tricks his reader. The novels repose before the reader and the reading sentiment like compleat anglers, perfect jewels of typewritten manuscripts, unmediated, authentic prose. There will be delicious potato salad with relish, lush green grapes; turkey sandwiches, vodka and lemonade, luscious crisps, pagan discussion, naps, much tongueful kissing, and dreamy vistas of the golden glowing sylvan horizon. Context is everything. We are safe here. Lucien has gathered breath from the books he's read, and hears the trumbling course of his veinblood purr within his memory, a willing victim of the fairs, every glass is in its place in this bar, motes in the slanting sunbeams ring, singing out his faith, the true calling of Lucien reciting aloud, declaiming lyrics from the book that was written before he put pen to paper, and had he worked straight through, there's springer sauntering through the wilderness of this world, beasts and bugs tamed by the melody of prose made by Markson.