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.