We keep facts in the midnight wax

[sovay]

I feel as though I have fallen into a kind of minimally emotional reportage about my days as opposed to any real record of what I am thinking or feeling, but the good things seem to speak for themselves and otherwise neither vitriol nor despondency feels very useful to add to the current state of the world.

I took part last night in a semi-improvisational recording over Zoom and had a wonderful time. Autolycus made a special guest appearance. I was asked to sing the Dies Irae, which was no sweat as I have been known to get it stuck in my head without even rewatching The Seventh Seal (1957), and "Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor on the Bedpost Overnight?" which was actually much trickier since the only person I have ever heard sing it was my grandfather and as important as he was to me, he was not the most tuneful person in the family and therefore I was trying to spot-reconstruct a plausible melody from my childhood memories of him sort of sprechstimming it and I have deliberately not gone looking for a recording of the real thing: I am reminding myself of the polyphony of the folk tradition. I will no doubt be stricken with self-loathing when I get a look at the final edited version, but until then it feels like it went well.

The movie I tried to relax with a couple of nights ago was Gerd Oswald's Crime of Passion (1957), described by Criterion as "a potent noir firecracker with feminist undertones." It starred Barbara Stanwyck and Sterling Hayden and was so chokingly acute about patriarchy and heteronormativity and the economics of marriage and how damn near it kills a cheerfully unsentimental career woman to marry for love in middle age and find herself straitjacketed into a suburban housewife—in other words, this film doesn't have feminist undertones, it has klaxons—that I tapped out after the first act because it had already achieved the classically noir nightmare of the everyday and I just didn't want to see how tragically further the protagonist had to crater from panic attacks in the middle of gender-segregated parties and the powerful sexual current with her sweet, unambitious husband who just wants to make her happy and as soon as he put the ring on her finger pretty much guaranteed he'd never be able to again. I did appreciate the queer vibes of the early scenes, as when one of the protagonist's columns is collectively and appreciatively read aloud by the women of San Francisco, a neglected wife sitting up in bed as her husband snores, one cinema usher to another, one B-girl to another, a pair of butch cabbies leaning shoulder to shoulder against their car: "Let me stand by your side in your fight for justice and compassion in a world made by men and for men." Asked how to reply to a seventeen-year-old letter-writer unhappily stuck on a married man, the protagonist answers, "Forget the man; run away with his wife."

I had much better luck with Peter Ustinov's School for Secrets (1946), which I had wanted to see ever since discovering Ralph Richardson in 2012. It is a sort of popular history of radar in World War II, including Chain Home Low, Gee, and a version of the Bruneval Raid, where as far as I can tell the technical information is reasonably accurate within security constraints of the time and all of the personalities involved are fabricated with the occasional allusion to reality; this approach has met with mixed success with me in the past, by which I mean that the least of the sins for which I do not forgive the pseudo-docudrama about the Manhattan Project The Beginning or the End (1947) is the total waste of Hume Cronyn as Oppenheimer, but either it makes a difference that I know less about radar to object on its behalf or the film's effectiveness as entertainment makes up for its shortcomings as nonfiction. It has a light touch and stacks its deck with character actors from John Laurie and David Tomlinson to Finlay Currie and Hugh Pryse, but it takes the intelligence of its scientists seriously, neither resting its humor on their eccentricities nor oversteering them into infallibility. Most of them are married, even, and most of their marriages work. The whimsical title crawl defines the boffin as if from a scholarly lexicon of the RAF ("Once upon a time the Puffin, a bird with a mournful cry, got crossed with a Baffin, an obsolete Service Aircraft. Their offspring was a Boffin. This bird bursts with weird and sometimes inopportune ideas, but possesses staggering inventiveness. Its ideas, like its eggs, are conical and unbreakable. You push the unwanted ones away and they just roll back"), but the one real weirdo in the bunch is Richardson, which isn't even typecasting so much as truth in advertising. In light of the actor's notorious record as "Pranger" Richardson of the Fleet Air Arm, his character's height-sick nerves feel like a slight joke. His revulsion at the prospect of women in uniform, however, is soundly rebuffed not just by his fellow scientists but by the film itself, which foregrounds WAAFs at work at CH stations and the operations room at Bentley Priory. Ustinov wrote, directed, and co-produced and I kept wondering if he would turn up as some uncredited technician or paper-pusher, but he does not seem to. Now to try my luck with Vice Versa (1948) or Private Angelo (1949). Billy Budd (1962) has been on the list for years for Terence Stamp.

I had the fun this evening of running across an article about the American aversion to mutton and lamb while eating a dinner of lamb chops, which it would never have occurred to me to consider an acquired taste. I disagreed violently with not just the philosophy but the factual claims of this article on the inherently divisive nature of narrative, at the end of which I recognized the title of the author's book from an incredible demolition of a review that has been circling my friendlist, which at least means I am not the only person to find his understanding of story reductive, zero-sum, and apparently absent any awareness of myth, folklore, or the history of literature. ("Classically told stories tend to divide the world into good people (protagonists) and bad people (antagonists), which means they generate a unit of callousness for every unit of empathy." BZZT NO DO NOT PASS GO DO NOT LEARN ANYTHING ABOUT ANCIENT GREEK CULT HEROES.) I am fascinated by this photographer's lighthouse project. I had a lot of the Boston Globe to catch up on.

Comments

[ethelmay]

I hit a paywall on the sheep v. cow meat article, but I recall a discussion with effjayem about tbe topic a while ago, in which I argued that the beef>>>>lamb prejudice in the US was very regional, and in many parts of the country people ate lamb chops and so on quite a lot.

[sovay]

I hit a paywall on the sheep v. cow meat article

I'm sorry. Copy-pasted:

"Americans are among the world's top consumers of beef, pork, and poultry and near the bottom when it comes to sheep. In 2020, according to the US Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service, on average Americans consumed less than one pound of lamb or mutton—the meat from a mature ram or ewe—per capita. Why does lamb make only seasonal appearances on the American table, as it might have done on yours at Christmas? Why do Americans prefer other meats to lamb? And why, in a famously dynamic country, has this preference lasted for hundreds of years?

"The Spanish conquistadors brought the first sheep to North America in the 16th century, when they arrived in present-day New Mexico. In the early 17th century, English, Dutch, and Swedish settlers brought sheep to the East Coast and from there brought sheep elsewhere in North America. Sheep met the settlers' immediate needs for wool to weave into fabric for cold-weather wear, as well as for meat. Sheep were eaten seasonally in the spring and summer on the farms where they were raised. Beyond that there was little or no market for mutton in the United States.

"In the early 19th century, sheep farming developed into a larger industry because of an increased demand for wool in both national and international markets. By 1830 the wool-manufacturing industry occupied an important place in the American economy. This resulted in increased meat output, as sheep were slaughtered at the end of their wool-producing years. At that time, the meat industry was locally concentrated: Farmers sold the animals to nearby butcher shops. For many more years, however, meat was a secondary product to wool.

"From the 1860s on, as the nation industrialized, urbanized, and grew wealthier amid a wave of European immigration, demand for mutton rose.

"Midwestern meatpackers relied on sheep meat when other meats were scarce. Meatpackers sent buyers to the western states—including California, Texas, and New Mexico—to secure castrated male sheep for slaughter.

"Sheep meat markets developed in major cities such as Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. Mutton and lamb, more expensive than other meats, were more appealing to the upper classes, so for much of the 19th century, sheep meat was a rich person's meal.

"In the 1880s and 1890s, young lamb meat gained some popularity as a festive food among the upper classes. An industry, known as a 'hothouse,' developed on the East Coast and in the Midwest for young lambs, which reached the market by Christmas. Most were slaughtered by early spring. It was a prosperous business that remained seasonal.

"Greater production reduced some costs and lowered prices, making sheep meat more affordable for low-income households. But beef and pork production also increased, and those meats became cheaper, too. Beef sold the best. The large meatpackers that had come to dominate the industry after the development of refrigerated railcars focused on beef cattle.

"Lamb and mutton's cachet among the wealthy didn't last long. Americans came to see mutton as an inferior substitute for beef and pork—you ate it only when there was nothing better available. In popular culture and media, sheep meat was described as unpalatable animal waste. 'Many people settled down to the belief that mutton was poor food,' an 1897 article in Ranch and Range informed readers.

"Sheep also came to be seen as a meat for immigrants, especially those from Southern and Eastern Europe. American Indian tribes, the Navajos in particular, also embraced lamb. These social and ethnic associations with sheep meat cemented its outsider status. Meanwhile, the meatpacking industry promoted beef as quintessentially American.

"The social bias against sheep meat was exacerbated by reports of meatpackers marketing lower-grade mutton and old ewes. Early in the 20th century, some butcher shops passed off gamier goat meat as lamb and mutton. Several sheep-disease outbreaks during the 1890s and early 1900s deepened fears about the safety of eating sheep.

"During the First World War, an 'eat no meat' campaign in 1917 discouraged eating sheep that were needed for wool. The mature sheep slaughtered during wartime meat shortages didn’t help sheep's reputation—they had a strong flavor and a tough texture.

"Americans' aversion to lamb and mutton persisted. After the war, the average per capita consumption of sheep meat in the United States was only five pounds per year, versus 67 pounds of beef and 71 pounds of pork. A century later, lamb remains an acquired taste in America, making only seasonal appearances at Easter and Christmas—while wool socks and sweaters remain a gifting staple."

Which was altogether fascinating to me, since my family has always eaten lamb year round when we can get it and never for Christmas or Easter. I never thought of it as a seasonal meat, just one where I look out for sales so that I can afford it. And we don't exchange wool socks or sweaters, but that's because of the allergies.

in which I argued that the beef>>>>lamb prejudice in the US was very regional, and in many parts of the country people ate lamb chops and so on quite a lot.

I would be willing to believe it. Which regions?

[ethelmay]

The discussion started with https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheep_Wars . I think propaganda by cattle ranchers was likely effective in many areas, especially Texas and the southwest, and I think, but am not sure, that sheep farming never was big in the southeast. But by the time my parents were growing up in the upper midwest, lamb was not uncommon, though a bit of a luxury. I certainly remember a lot of references to lamb chops in books. By my childhood (in Seattle) it had gotten very expensive for a large family, and we had it almost solely at Easter (and subsequent curried leftovers).

[ethelmay]

And now I find myself reading scintillating literature like this (it is rather fascinating in a way): https://books.google.com/books?id=7c48AAAAYAAJ
Homemakers' Preferences for Selected Cuts of Lamb in Cleveland, Ohio
Daniel Bernard Levine
U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Marketing Service, 1956 - Consumers' preferences - 44 pages