The Kingfish

Born on this day in 1893 was the great populist Governor of Louisiana Huey Long, aka 'The Kingfish', whose life was cut short by his assassination in 1935.
This is the perfect pretext for playing not one but two songs from Randy Newman's classic Good Old Boys album, complete with vinyl crackle. Here is Kingfish –

And here is Every Man a King, Huey Long's theme song, which he co-wrote with Castro Carazo, band director of Louisiana State University –

Again, with Differences

A year ago today, I put up a post about an end-of-season visit to my favourite Surrey hillside in search of late-flying butterflies. I could repeat that post almost word for word to describe my visit yesterday, in uncertain sunshine, to that same hillside. The differences were that there were rather fewer Meadow Browns and Small Heaths, and I saw two fewer Silver-Spotted Skippers (but to see any of those heat-loving sun-seekers was good going). However, the abundance of Adonis Blues was even more spectacular than last year, and the numbers of Brown Arguses were simply astonishing. Everywhere I looked was the celestial blue of male Adonises and the paradoxically silvery dazzle of Arguses in flight. A butterfly fancier of the Nabokovian type could have taken two or three of each at a single sweep on the net.
  It's chilling to recollect that Nabokov – who wrote so beautifully about the ecstatic joy of being among butterflies – had his net always in hand, and would kill any specimen he wished to keep by pinching its tiny thorax, folding back its wings and slipping it into a piece of folded card for safe keeping.

Found at the Fair

Yesterday was the day of the Environmental Fair, when wizened hippies, folkies, musoes, Lefties, Greenies and representatives of countless other tribes make their annual descent on Carshalton Park to mingle with the locals. I always rather enjoy it, but chiefly for the opportunity to scour the abundantly stocked second-hand book stalls.
  This year's finds were the jolly little threesome (all three are pleasingly compact volumes) pictured above. Sonnets from the Portuguese is a beautifully presented volume published by the Peter Pauper Press of Mount Vernon, New York, printed in Janson types on excellent paper, with woodblock decorations on every page. La Grande Thérèse, a spin-off from Hilary Spurling's life of Matisse, tells the story of Thérèse Humbert and 'the scandal that nearly destroyed the French Third Republic'. Barbara Comyns's Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead is an earlier novel by the author of the extraordinary The Vet's Daughter, which I enjoyed a few years ago. 
  All this lot for £1.40. Not bad, eh?

Modern Baptists

'He was very, very funny,' said the BBC man, wrapping up an obit piece on Neil Simon (who died yesterday), 'but he could be much deeper than that too.'
  Well, it's the standard line on comic and 'serious' writing. Only the latter can carry the 'deeper' truths and meanings. Hence the general undervaluing of comic writing and writers in our literary culture. A case in point is James Wilcox.
  I had never heard of James Wilcox until, a week or so ago, my eye alighted on one of his novels in a local charity shop. It was a Penguin Classic with the curious title of Modern Baptists. I noted a puff from Anne Tyler on the back – 'Wilcox has real genius. He is a writer to make us all feel hopeful' – and of course I bought it.
  James Wilcox, I learned, has spent his writing career accumulating rave reviews but never selling enough books to make a living. He doesn't have the kind of self-promoting chutzpah that is so important to a modern literary career; being something of a one-off, he cannot be easily classified – always a handicap; and, worst of all, he writes comic novels, and no one's going to take them seriously (except the more discerning critics and fellow writers). All the same, Modern Baptists  – his first novel, published in 1983 – found its way into Harold Bloom's The Western Canon.
  Having now read it, I'm inclined to agree with Anne Tyler: Wilcox does have a measure of comic genius. Modern Baptists is one of the funniest and most deftly executed comic novels I've come across in recent years. It's set in Louisiana (Wilcox's birthplace), but in a very particular corner of Louisiana, among the panhandle parishes that were never part of the Louisiana Purchase and so are less French and more Baptist.
  In the small town of Tula Springs, Mr Pickens, an unprepossessing middle-aged man, works at the Sonny Boy store and tries to cling on to respectability and lead a regular life. Under the impression that he's dying of a skin cancer, he invites his reprobate half-brother, F.X., to come and stay with him when he gets out of jail. This is his big mistake, the one from which all else follows, though there's another one – a silly prank he plays on a workmate, Toinette – that also has dire consequences. Toinette unfortunately falls for the handsome F.X. on sight, just as Mr Pickens finds himself falling in hopeless love with her. He is himself the equally hopeless love object of chunky checkout girl Burma LaSteele.
  From this initial scenario, the comedy grows, drawing in more characters, confusion, chaos and confrontations as it builds into a fine comic imbroglio that mingles satire, slapstick and farce, while remaining true to its characters. Modern Baptists is at the same time a vivid evocation of life in a small town in a particular corner of Louisiana, and a convincing psychological account of one man's increasingly desperate struggle to do the right thing.
  As for the title, the phrase 'modern Baptists' first occurs in a scene in which Mr Pickens (Bobby) and Burma are sitting by the canal, talking over the latest hair-raising developments in the F.X.-Toinette saga.

'"Bobby, do you think you drink too much?''
''I guess so.''
''And we're Baptists.''
''Modern Baptists can drink. It's only stuffed shirts like Dr McFlug who don't.''
''Well, I guess I"m a modern Baptist, then.'' She was still looking at the sky. ''Want to get drunk?''

The definition is expanded later, after Mr Pickens, with his life falling apart around him, decides he's going to be a preacher.

'Mr Pickens knew that once be got his preaching diploma, he would open a church for modern Baptists, Baptists who were sick to death of hell and sin being stuffed down their gullets every Sunday. There wasn't going to be any of that old-fashioned ranting and raving in Mr Pickens's church. His church would be guided by reason and logic ...'

Unsurprisingly, Mr Pickens never does get to be a preacher, though he does, on one occasion, get to rant and rave with the best of them...
  I'm glad to have found this book and discovered James Wilcox. I'll certainly be looking out for more titles by him.

Creatures of Consensus

Another fine post on Stephen Pentz's wonderful First Known When Lost blog. This one is about what he identifies as 'the current form of puritanism', i.e. the 'liberal', right-on, virtue-signalling form, in all its self-righteous, repressive glory. Among the luggage unpacked in the Norman MacCaig poem he quotes we could now include Diversity, Inclusivity, Tolerance (and its mirror image Zero Tolerance), Multiculturalism, etc.
  But is it, quite, puritanism? Marilynne Robinson would say not. In her essay Puritans and Prigs, she mounts an eloquent defence of historical puritanism against the common charges levelled at it, and carefully distinguishes puritanism from another phenomenon that she thinks more characteristic of our times – priggishness.
  Noting the modern 'liberal' antipathy to morality – 'a repressive system to be blamed for all our ills' – she identifies priggishness as an irresistibly easy substitute:

we have priggishness at hand, up-to-date and eager to go to work, and it does a fine imitation of morality, as self-persuaded as a Method actor. It looks like morality and feels like it, both to those who wield it and those that taste its lash.

True morality tends to quietism, self-interrogation and empathetic understanding of the failings of others, whereas

 priggishness makes its presence felt. And is highly predictable because it is nothing else than a consuming loyalty to ideals and beliefs which are in general so widely shared that the spectacle of zealous adherence to them is reassuring. The prig’s formidable leverage comes from the fact that his or her ideas, notions or habits are always fine variations on the commonplace. A prig with original ideas is a contradiction in terms, because he or she is a creature of consensus who can usually appeal to one’s better nature, if only to embarrass dissent. 

And priggishness has now reached such a pitch that it does more than embarrass dissent – it positively forbids it, often by legal or quasi-legal means.
  The behaviour of prigs, being (in their eyes) inherently good, can only have good consequences (and if they are shown to be otherwise, the intention was still good, and that is all that counts). They are in effect blind to the consequences, and, as Robinson notes, 

People who are blind to the consequences of their own behaviour no doubt feel for that reason particularly suited to the work of reforming other people. To them morality seems almost as easy as breathing.

The hardest thing becomes the easiest. No wonder this new priggishness is so universally popular among the hard of thinking and the easily led.

Meanwhile...

Over on the Pooky website (fine lighting for the quality), I take a tour of Knebworth House.
Here's the link...

Birthday

Born on this day in 1862 was the great French composer Claude Debussy.
Here is Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli playing Reflets dans l'Eau, from the first volume of Images. Enjoy.