Slim

Well, we can't let the birthday of Slim Pickens (1919) go unmarked. Born Louis Burton Lindley Jr, Slim adopted his stage name when he was a teenage rodeo rider - an activity of which his father strongly disapproved. When the manager of a rodeo told young Louis that there would be 'slim pickings' for him that day, he entered the competition as 'Slim Pickens' (and won himself $400). He was a rodeo rider for 20 years before his film career began, and he immediately became a ubiquitous support actor in westerns - one who could do his own horse-riding stunts. As the archetypal cowboy sidekick (with a Texan-Oklahoman drawl that belied his Californian origins), he appeared in countless horse operas and oaters - but he is chiefly remembered for two comic roles: in Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove, as Major T.J. 'King' Kong, riding a falling atom bomb, whooping and waving his hat rodeo-style - and in Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles, literally breaking the fourth wall in this classic scene.  On close examination some might detect an element of political incorrectness in Brooks' portrayal of the French Mistake dance troupe and its director (the great Dom DeLuise)...

Looking Up

After a promising start, my butterfly year (and I don't think I'm alone in this, at least in the Southeast) turned seriously disappointing through the late spring and early summer months. I've never known a June with fewer butterflies - even Whites - on the wing, except when skies have been grey and rain siling down. No such weather this year - rather the Southeast has been unusually dry, with plenty of sunshine. However, there have been cold winds blowing stubbornly from the Northwest or Northeast for much of the time, so that it has seldom really warmed up. I guess then - I hope - that the low temperatures are sufficient explanation for the low numbers of butterflies around.
 However things finally seem to be looking up now, with winds from the warm South and a heatwave promised. After a glorious day yesterday, it was cloudy but fairly warm this morning when I took my regular stroll around our little local nature reserve - and was delighted to find the grassy places alive with freshly-emerged Ringlets, those sable beauties that (along with Meadow Browns - also present) are among the few butterflies happy to fly - or rather, in the Ringlets' case, dance - under cloudy skies. And that was not all: as I paused by the lake, a Painted Lady in all its glory flew down and settled on a reed, close enough to touch. I remember, across six decades, my father pointing out to me the extraordinary lapidary beauty of a perching Painted Lady's underwings... A little later, back in the present, it started to rain.

Sentence of the Day

[From Samuel Beckett's The Calmative, one of three nouvelles written around the same time as the Trilogy. A startled stranger asks our narrator, understandably, what is the matter with him...]

'I tried to look like one with whom that only is the matter which is native to him.'

Max's Savonarola

I've been rereading Max Beerbohm's Seven Men and Two Others. It's a book I've quite often dipped into for a spot of elegantly written good cheer - the adjective 'delightful' could almost have been invented for Max, a great delighter in life and a great passer-on of delight. Seven Men being a collection of short stories, mostly about (imaginary) marginal literary figures of the 1890s, it's a natural for dipping into - but this time I read it right through. I'd forgotten just how funny the last story - 'Savonarola' Brown - is.
 Brown (whose actual Christian name was Ladbroke, taken from Ladbroke Crescent, where his parents lived) devoted his entire creative life (such as it was) to writing a verse drama about Savonarola - a subject chosen entirely for the metrical music of the name. Brown's research on Savonarola was limited to reading an encyclopaedia article on the Florentine firebrand - and far too many other verse dramas - and he kept his poetical labours very much to himself, making slow progress and offering only cryptic clues to what the finished work would be.
 At last Brown achieves four acts, but has no idea how his hero is to die. This rather takes Max (who is present in all these tales) aback. Surely, he insists, 'in a tragedy the catastrophe must be led up to, step by step. My dear Brown, the end of the hero must be logical and rational.'
 'I don't see that,' he said as we crossed Piccadilly Circus. 'In actual life it isn't so. What is there to prevent a motor-omnibus from knocking me over and killing me at this moment?'
 At that moment, by what has always seemed to me the strangest of coincidences, and just the sort of thing that playwrights ought to avoid...'
 Well, you can guess what happened next.
 And so Max inherits the manuscript of Savonarola, and decides to present it to the world in all its unfinished four-act glory, putting as generous a gloss on Brown's efforts as he can.
 It turns out to be a hilarious, quite mad melodrama revolving around the tempestuous relationship between the eponymous fire-breathing monk and the seductive Lucrezia Borgia. It's written in a scrupulously correct iambic pentameter that carries on, never missing a beat, through thick and thin, from exposition

 'Savonarola love-sick? Ha, ha, ha!
  Love-sick? He, love-sick? 'Tis a goodly jest!
  The confirm'd misogyn a ladies' man!
  Thou must have eaten of some strange red herb
  That takes the reason captive. I will swear
  Savonarola never yet hath seen
  A woman but he spurned her. Hist! He comes...'

to would-be emotional outpourings

 '..... Spurn'd am I? I am I.
 There was a time, Sir,  look to't! O damnation!
 What is't? Anon then! These my toys, my gauds,
 That in the cradle - aye, 't my mother's breast -
 I puled and lisp'd at, - 'Tis impossible,
 Tho', faith, 'tis not so, forasmuch as 'tis.
 And I a daughter of the Borgias! -
 Or so they told me. Liars! Flatterers!
 Currying lick-spoons! Where's the Hell of 't then?'

and walk-on appearances by the likes of Dante, Leonardo and Francis of Assisi

 '..... Hush, Sir! 'Tis my little sister
 The poisoner, right well-belov'd by all
 Whom she as yet hath spared. Hither she came
 Mounted upon another little sister of mine -
 A mare, caparison'd in goodly wise.
 She - I refer now to Lucrezia -
 Desireth to have word of thee anent
 Some matter that befrets her...'

The only character excused pentameter is the Fool, who talks in incomprehensible prose when not breaking into hey-nonny-nonny song - until he is fired and turns up again as a Gaoler:

 'Unfortunately I have been discharg'd
  For my betrayal of Lucrezia,
  So that I have to speak like other men -
  Decasyllabically, and with sense.'

'Remember, please, before you formulate your impressions,' pleads Max at the end, 'that saying of Brown's: "The thing must be judged as a whole."' In the absence of Brown's fifth act, Max attempts to provide one himself - one that will make sense of the previous four and bring them to a satisfying conclusion. Oddly, he fails.

Derbyshire in Three Drinks: If Johnson were a beer...

Returning from a few days in Derbyshire, I find my piece on a monument in Ashbourne church reprinted on today's Dabbler.
 Ashbourne was not on the itinerary this time, and we were based in Derby, a potentially very fine city hideously marred by Seventies-style ring road-based 'planning'. The skyline is dominated not by the cathedral tower but by skyscraper hotels and office blocks, and vast, curiously blank and opaque boxes of various shapes and colours occupy far too much of the understorey. Many of these no doubt looked wonderful on the drawing-board and duly won awards, but they sit in the Georgian-medieval-Victorian townscape like alien obtrusions. Happily, however, Derby has its river - the wondrous and lovely Derwent, a 'world heritage site' in itself - and enough of the city has survived the planners' attentions to afford some enjoyable urban rambling. But enough of Derby...

 Farther along the Derwent, in Belper, I came across a thoroughly delicious bottle of Falanghina in an Italian restaurant. This distinctive Italian was a few years ago expected to become the discerning budget drinker's alternative to Pinot Grigio and the all-conquering Sauvignon Blanc - but somehow it never happened, and that crown went rather to Picpoul de Pinet. Which was no bad thing, but if you come across a bottle of Falanghina do try it - you might well be in for a pleasant surprise.

In a pub near the vast man-made Carsington Water, I was delighted to spot a beer pump with the unmistakable features of Samuel Johnson (from the Reynolds portrait) on the handle. This was Dr Johnson bitter, brewed by the Leatherbritches brewery - not, alas, of Lichfield (or Ashbourne), but of Smisby in Leicestershire. I had never seen this beer before and had to have a pint - followed by another. I can report that, if Johnson were a beer, this is the beer he would be. It is described as 'a rich juicy malty beer with a nutty taste, a little fizziness on the tongue, with bitterness and a fresh clean taste'. We raised a glass to the Great Englishman.

The Barley Mow in Kirk Ireton, part of a fine 17th-century house, is one of the least 'improved' pubs I've ever set foot in - essentially a front parlour and a couple of rooms off, one of them upstairs, all sparsely furnished and looking virtually unchanged since the house was built. The 'bar' is a counter behind which are ranged four barrels of guest ales, the till is a wooden drawer, ale is drawn in jugs, and there are absolutely none of the trappings of a modern pub. Three of the tables are topped with sections of the slate bed of a billiards table. But the place is positively modernistic and go-ahead compared to what it was under the previous landlady, who refused even to take decimal money. The present landlady and her husband bought the house and pub nearly 40 years ago. The husband was a very distinguished local architect - but happily he was not responsible for any of Derby's architectural eyesores.

Flatt Day

I missed the centenary last year, so today let's mark the 101st birthday of the great bluegrass guitarist, mandolin player and rich-voiced vocalist Lester Flatt (d. 1979). Here he is in action on the Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs TV show. Bluegrass doesn't get much better than this -  enjoy...

Ekphrastic Porter

A Portrait by Giulio Romano
by Peter Porter

Dear long-dead lady,
what was it like in the world
of Aretine's postures?
The highlights of your beauty
are a blond tombeau
but you are in a cage.

Your white skin and your red
velvet dress - the uniform of love!
They have shaken out boxes
before your eyes, they have formed
letters on your lips, and held
your legs apart for the state.

We are wrecked on red dreams.
Eloquence is quickness,
the flying to extremes -
your pose and prettiness
are to keep off endings,
the highmindedness of hell.

The portrait of Dona Isabel de Requesens, vicereine of Naples, was formerly attributed to Raphael, who did indeed have a hand in it. It's a portrait rich is sensuous textures and colours, and the pose is extraordinarily provocative, not least in the placing of the hands and the fact that the knees are parted and the gaze unflinchingly fixed on the spectator. Yet it has an air of intense melancholy, a sense of a doomed situation in which the beautiful sitter is imprisoned. Porter's fine short poem, I think, captures all that and more.
['Aretine' is Pietro Aretino, pioneer of literary pornography.]