Open up and let the Devil in

The weirdest thing about A Field in England (2013) is not the psychedelic sequence in the last half-hour, justly top-billed as it may be; it's the seventeenth century. The film is a five-character play in an alien world, where religion and magic are so tightly intermixed that the Devil might well be an Irish alchemist and a scholarly clerk knots his hands in shaking prayer, supplicating automatically to God even as he speaks of planets, influences, the celestial bodies that hang above this world and compel it. A man is rooted out of a field like a stubborn stump, requiring the strength of four men and stout rope. Another, put to forcible use as a human dowsing rod, drops to his knees in exhaustion and coughs out runestones like a witch vomiting iron nails or hair. Time is as recursive and uncertain as within a fairy ring, which is in the strictest sense a ring of mushrooms such as surrounds the field. The mushrooms have psychoactive properties. That may not actually explain anything that happens in the film. The world of A Field in England is occult and chaotic, desultory and explosively violent; the film has absolutely no interest in holding its audience's hand, except to give it a shoulder-snapping yank through a brashing thicket and strips of smoke, panting in terror, toward the Devil it thinks it doesn't know.

There is a plot, much good it does any of its characters. Stumbling through that hedge, away from the deafening cannon and drums of the English Civil War, the self-confessed coward Whitehead (Reece Shearsmith) falls in with three deserters whose initial absurdist quest for an alehouse presently metamorphoses into something even more Beckettian and unsettling, digging for treasure in a vast, silent, sun-fogged field that might exist on the other side of time from the earth-raining concussions of battle, though in truth they are as little escaped from it as Whitehead from the ringing of blood in his ears. A sheltered alchemist's assistant who admits that he finds "pages easier to turn than people," he was dispatched from Oxford to find and apprehend a former student of his master's who ran off with important papers. He was happy to escape that task with the death of his contemptuous commander: but like a bad penny or an appointment in Samara, the smiling, malevolent figure that faces him now is that same O'Neill (Michael Smiley), in full Royalist regalia with a better shirt and boots than Whitehead has ever owned, and he wants to use Whitehead's gifts for divination to locate the treasure. And use Whitehead he does—the mushroom-fueled third-act freakout may be the film's most visually stunning sequence, but the most horrifying is the sound of Whitehead's screams from inside O'Neill's tent, from which he emerges with a mad, blind, ecstatic smile, a transfiguring vision in a harness of endless rope. (We never learn what O'Neill did to him. It cannot have been anything as normal as sexual or physical violence. It opens him up; it makes him an unerring instrument; it leaves him hungry.) Increasingly the reality of the field seems to collapse, burning itself out from the center like the black sun of Whitehead's visions, the cold smoky mirror of O'Neill's scrying glass. From time to time, the cast are seen posed in painterly, Greenaway-like tableaux that are never quite still: the men blink, sway slightly; the wind ruffles their hair and capes and cuffs. There may be a Twilight Zone-like twist ending. That might not be it at all.

There are also dick jokes. Good dick jokes. Much of the movie is extremely funny, which I understand is not at all perceptible from the previous summary. Some of it's acid-black existential comedy, some of it is just one guy snapping at his unwittingly stoned companion, "What is it with you and hands?" (I also think that "Your privy parts are doomed, homunculus!" is a hilarious thing to yell at someone.) The hallucinatory scenes are at once powerfully symbolic—a magicians' duel, a psychomachia—and as fragmentary, jump-cut, and detail-obsessing as a real trip. The sound work is extraordinary, pulling together plaintive folk songs with the unrelenting echo of drums and washes of synths and other electronic noise that manage not to feel like screaming anachronism so much as the soundtrack of a mental state. I have one track downloadable from the website and I'm hoping the rest of it is released soon. For that matter, I would own this film on DVD if it comes in the right region. I have rarely seen anything like it, especially in a historical movie. If it's typical of Ben Wheatley, I am really looking forward to his season of Doctor Who now.

An incomplete list of things of which A Field in England reminded me: Jeanette Winterson's The Daylight Gate (2012), Alan Garner's Red Shift (1973), Aleksandr Rogozhkin's The Cuckoo (2002), Peter Strickland's Berberian Sound Studio (2012), the Lyke-Wake Dirge. At least one scene in Greer Gilman's Cloud & Ashes (2009). The music of Belbury Poly, Lal Waterson, and 16 Horsepower. Caitlín R. Kiernan's The Red Tree (2009). At this point the reader of this journal should be able to tell whether this film will interest them or not, although if the reader is ashlyme or greygirlbeast, I'm going to be rather more actively encouraging. The cinematography, while I'm at it, is beautiful. Best black-and-white outdoor photography since Erwin Hillier in A Canterbury Tale (1944).

In the meantime, sleep.

A mameligele, a pastramele

I wanted to make Indian pudding this weekend. I had cornmeal and spices; I needed molasses and milk. Some shopping errands took care of this discrepancy, as well as things like wanting to visit Porter Square Books in advance of my mother's birthday tomorrow. (Also getting chased out of J.P. Licks because the fire alarm went off and fire trucks showed up, which was considerably less satisfying.) Not having a family recipe to work from, I ended up combining two off the internet—one was straightforward with too little cornmeal, the other too busy with everything else—and it turns out that corn pudding is not at all difficult to make. The results were delicious and ample. Someday I will learn how to make dessert for two people rather than a party.

Nothing Traumatic Happened This Time, I Just Felt Like Making Corn Pudding in My Toaster Oven Corn Pudding

Preparation:

Thickly butter a 9-by-9 glass baking dish. Preheat the oven to 325°F. If your oven is a toaster oven, ignore this second step until right before the pudding goes in; seriously, it takes five minutes.

Pudding:

5 1/2 cups whole milk
2/3 cup cornmeal
1 cup molasses, see note
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon nutmeg
1 teaspoon ginger, see note
dash of ground clove
dash of vanilla extract

Whisk together all ingredients except vanilla in heavy large saucepan. Simmer over medium-high heat until mixture thickens, which it will do abruptly and somewhat unnervingly between the 8- and 10-minute marks. One moment you're stirring a pot of hot milk with a floating skim of spices on top and a swirling sediment of cornmeal at the bottom, the next, bam, you've got porridge. Continue to stir until it has achieved a heavy cereal consistency, about 15 minutes total; the pudding should be pourable at the end of this process, but require a spatula to get the last out. Think oatmeal or grits. If we're still talking gruel, keep it on the fire until we're not. The color will be an attractive light spice-flecked brown. Turn off heat, stir in vanilla, turn out into baking dish.

If you want to eat the pudding at this stage, that's perfectly acceptable; what you have created is a hasty pudding, so called because it took about 15 minutes. Fair warning, though: it becomes substantially more entertaining if you bake it.

Baking:

90 minutes at 325°F. I set the timer in half-hour installments, checking each time to make sure it wasn't going to overcook because I am paranoid about that sort of thing, especially when a lot of sugar or milk is involved. The pudding is done when the center no longer quivers if the baking dish is shaken. It doesn't have to be sliceable, like mămăligă, just cohesive. Long before then, the other person in the kitchen with you may or may not peer in through the glass and remark, "It's breathing!" because while the body of the mixture is still quite liquid, the surface has formed a milky, caramelized skin as if on a custard, which is now inflating and deflating gently as air pockets rise and break from the boiling cornmeal. It will continue to do this for the entire hour and a half. You may be reminded of lungs or at least a practical effect imitating them. I have no idea if this is usual for Indian pudding, but it was hypnotically fun to watch. By the time the pudding was done, the skin had turned the color of candy-crack caramel and was thick and tensile enough that a spoon dug into it more than it cut. It was sweet, chewy, and delicious, clearly the next evolutionary step on from the skin that forms on the top of boiling milk. The pudding underneath is also very tasty, however, so I recommend removing the dish from the oven, letting it stand on a trivet just long enough to avoid scalding, and then serving yourself as much as feels like a good idea. If you happen to have ice cream in the house, or if you've made a point of going back to J.P. Licks several hours after the fire alarm incident in order to purchase some ordinary vanilla ice cream for your husband and some coconut-milk vanilla ice cream for yourself, a scoop on top is a great idea.

Note:

Once I equalized the proportions between the two, the recipes from which I was working wanted about half a cup of molasses to the two-thirds of cornmeal. Rob and I tasted the pudding shortly after the initial porridge stage and determined it did not have nearly enough sweetness or flavor and added about another quarter-cup by judicious scraping-out of the Pyrex measure and the occasional spoon-dip back into the jar. On tasting the finished pudding, we thought it might have needed still more (and perhaps a little dark brown sugar to stabilize). Ditto ginger, which we did not have in the house at all, but which it clearly wanted. What I am recording here, therefore, is a combination of the recipe used tonight and the recipe as we believe it could be improved. If you want to replicate tonight's pudding, use 3/4 cup of molasses and delete the ginger. Everyone's different! You might prefer it!

Either way, enjoy. Oh, also, now you have enough corn pudding for a week or four guests, whichever shows up first.

P.S. I did not buy Vladislav Khodasevich's Selected Poems (trans. Peter Daniels) at Porter Square this afternoon, but as soon as I'd read this poem it was a close thing.