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.