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."

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.

My Dinner with Chowder

bakst

The noble and wonderful Chowder wonders why I am reading JADIS. A re-read, actually, though it is one of those books one is never quite not reading, so persuasive and so new are the visions. I am reading several novels just now that obey my primary rule of art, that the novel sits before one as a novel, and does not show itself trying to become a novel. (I do not know where this leaves Proust.) In another such work, Robert Briffault's NEW LIFE OF MR. MARTIN, one finds the epigraph by Arthur Symons: "We have no longer the mental attitude of those to whom a story was but a story." Lucidity, force, ease. Briffault's Martin lives among the Moors, another culture one can speculate as displaying the first twinkle of satire. I'll keep looking.

Obama, Muslims, Moors, Briffault

Alvar Sunol

Walker Percy, in THE MOVIEGOER, describes an experience of time-and-place/being dislocation (not unpleasant) familiar to many persons. Binx Bolling sits in a theater watching a movie the setting of which is the theater's neighborhood in New Orleans. Our art gallery (Magpie, child of Loudeac Tile Studio) is on Dryad Road, Athene (near Acadamae Avenue), perhaps twenty steps from Guido's Grill, in the book I was reading, there, today. BEEN DOWN SO LONG IT LOOKS LIKE UP TO ME - Richard Farina, Ithaca, Johnny's Big Red Grill, et seq. Today, young Obama extolled in Egypt the merits and glory of the Muslim world, a point that Robert Briffault made ceaselessly ceaselessly ceaselessly in his career as a cultural anthropologist, novelist, and scholar. If there were a thousand souls listening to my thoughts, they would, over the years, have heard me aching and trying to quote Briffault:

It was under the influence of the Arabian and Moorish revival of culture, and not in the fifteenth century, that the real Renaissance took place. Spain, not Italy, was the cradle of the rebirth of Europe. After steadily sinking lower and lower into barbarism, it had reached the darkest depths of ignorance and degradation when the cities of the Saracenic world, Baghdad, Cairo, Córdoba, Toledo, were growing centres of civilization and intellectual activity. It was there that the new life arose which was to grow into a new phase of human evolution. From the time when the influence of their culture made itself felt, began the stirring of a new life.

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.