Amalgamating Mince Pies and Wales and Indiana

I did not go to Payless as planned. I calculated the time I would be gone and the time for MW's arrival. I worked on the following post and a few others until she did show up. We had lunch and dealt with our business. She dropped me off at Payless. I caught the bus home, which was around 3 pm. About an hour ago, I walked down to The Attiic Window and bought some cutlery and plates for Monday. Just in case CC does show up.

I will be staying in for the rest of the night. I doubt there will be any work done on "Love Stinks".

 My Great-Aunt Elsie made a mince meat pie for our Christmas dinners when we were kids. She died in 1986 and cooked our last Christmas dinner in 1983. I have not seen a mince meat pie since, and according to Why Don’t Americans Eat Mince Pies? they are out of fashion.

Americans continued to make mince pies through the 1950s—they were included in home economics class curriculums and also fed to Allied Forces during World War II—but no one knows exactly when or why mince pies fell out of favor in the United States. Was it an aversion to dried fruit, a consequence of Prohibition, or just a branding issue? I posed the question to British cookbook author Nigella Lawson. “I think,” Lawson posits, “maybe mince pies need to be explained differently: Perhaps describing them as miniature pies filled with seasonal, spiced dried fruit preserves or compote conveys more accurately what they are.” She suggests calling mincemeat Christmas jam, or even holiday preserves.

I never liked them as much as a pumpkin pie (also a Christmas dinner staple), so my now feeling a loss feels a bit odd. If I ever get a proper kitchen, I will make one.

Will Hermes reviews David Keenan's Lou Reed biography for the Literary Review.

Reed worked out in public what most of us wouldn’t give ourselves permission to work out, even in private. He took all that was difficult and dark and destructive in what it is to be human, and he said yes to it. His life wasn’t some kind of flip calvary towards becoming ‘someone good’; it was the life of a flawed human being struggling to alchemise all of it – ‘not some of it’, as he sang on 1992’s Magic and Loss – into something beautiful. And he did. An awkward love letter to the 20th century with added apologia, The King of New York is the perfect biography of Lou Reed for 2023, and will likely remain that way.

The Literary Review republished the late A S BYATT's review of a collection of Alice Munro's short stories.

And, finally, there is the story of the young woman violinist, widow of a brash ‘war hero’ (killed in a training crash), whose baby is taken over by her dotty sister-in-law, whose life is turned upside down by the same mix of impulsive sex and everyday disaster. She gives the baby a mere sliver of a sleeping pill. It could have killed the baby. Consider the effect, as you read this comic, moving and wild tale, of the choice of the baby herself as narrator, describing the dead show-off and the obsessed artist stopped in her tracks. Who but Alice Munro could have made the moral and the drama of a tale turn on the choice made by a speechless infant lost under a sofa, and made the reader feel that something had been achieved and understood, against the odds?

Two great writers meeting, I thought I learned much of Munro (of whom I have read little and am in awe - she deserved her Nobel Prize for Literature) from Byatt's review.

I want to see the movie Poor Things, as I consider myself a fan of Alasdair Gray. This review, Furious Jumping: Yorgos Lanthimos’s “Poor Things” by Kenneth Dillon, helps, too.:

Call it entertaining, call it beautiful, call it funny, call it sexy; in every respect you would be correct. One case for Poor Things goes something like this. Lanthimos offers a very particular depiction of sex that neither rises to eroticism nor descends to pornography. By portraying the physicality of curiosity with such great detail and candor, Stone can say more by raising her eyebrow and letting out a gentle gasp than another actress could in soliloquy. The film then is a critique of the prudent, repressive culture which, despite incremental advances in civil liberties and kink-friendliness, still has a long way to go. If this cinema of sex positivity veers into glib snark, it does so with righteous temerity. Even short of that broad aim, the ensemble cast have created a picaresque girl-boss monster movie. In their vibrant, faux-Victorian camp costumes, their bold, sharp playfulness delights us even while mocking our diffidence. Jerskin Fendrix completes the thrilling scandal with a manic admixture of screeching strings that repurposes the typical horror score without its tired form. The result is an enticing portrait of Bella. Most viewers won’t mind that it leaves little room for anyone or anything else; they’ll be content to feel their way through a version Alasdair Gray’s thought experiment, if not perform it themselves.

Another item from the Literary Review: Unlimited Dream Company. Wherein Joanna Kavenna reviews Selected Nonfiction, 1962-2007 by J G Ballard (Edited by Mark Blacklock). Ballard is a writer I know more from movie adaptations than his novels; I think I have found one of his short stories. He interests me, I circle him, and cannot find the time to reach him.

Like Dick, Ballard was (oddly) castigated by some critics for the unrealistic nature of his portraits of fictional reality. In turn, he suggested that the social-realist novel was dead and that only science fiction and fantasy could express the fantastical character of the 20th century. He also argued, perhaps inevitably, that in a ruined reality the distinctions between fiction and non-fiction must be ruined as well. This bestows an inescapable element of paradox on any attempt to select and publish Ballard’s non-fiction, as the editor Mark Blacklock (a novelist and cultural historian who teaches at Birkbeck, University of London) acknowledges in his clear-sighted introduction to this wonderful edition. Until now, the only collection of Ballard’s non-fiction was A User’s Guide to the Millennium (1996), which contains a selection of reviews published between 1962 and 1995. Blacklock has chosen works written over the entirety of Ballard’s prolific and varied career and arranged this vast oeuvre into loose categories: statements, manifestos, lists, captions, glossaries, commentaries, reviews and articles. This works well as it acknowledges Ballard’s resistance to orthodox categories without engendering chaos. It is ‘high time’ such an edition was published, adds Tom McCarthy in his lucid foreword, in which he gently bemoans the fact that so many of his students find Ballard’s fiction revolting, badly written or both. (Such responses, however, are mild compared with the reaction of an employee of Jonathan Cape in the 1970s who, after reading the pre-publication manuscript of Crash!, reported that ‘the author is beyond psychiatric help’.)

I think I would rather have been an archeologist, certainly I should have been a historian. The law has its attractions, one was the promise of a better income. Promises are often illusions.

Iron Age: How Wales was ruled from hillforts pre-Romans

Mediterranean traders would have found complex societies, he said, with "sophisticated timber buildings" atop imposing stone hillforts that projected power over defended farms in the valleys below, in effect, "owning the landscape".

"We've got to wake up to how incredible Wales was before the Romans arrived. It was a devastating, brutal campaign.

"The Romans changed everything and very quickly, but through archaeology we can unlock that period of Welsh history."

Picts' exotic origins a myth, say researchers (maybe it is the influence of Robert E. Howard but the Picts are an interest of mine).

The research team said the Picts were one of the most mysterious of Britain's ancient peoples, but added it was myth they originated from Thrace north of the Aegean Sea, or Scythia in eastern Europe, as suggested by medieval writers.

Dr Adeline Morez, a visiting lecturer at LJMU said: "Our findings support the idea of regional continuity between the Late Iron Age and early medieval periods and indicate that the Picts were local to the British Isles in their origin, as their gene pool is drawn from the older Iron Age, and not from large-scale migration, from exotic locations far to the east."

About Indiana is this commentary from The Capital Chronicle: My Christmas wish list for Indiana. For the record, I agree with this list.

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