Have you ever tried a date?  They are deliciously sweet.  It is thought that the date palm originated in the area that is now Iraq many, many years ago:  in fact, this tree of the desert is the oldest plant cultivated by people.  We have plenty of evidence to show that the date was consumed and used in rituals all the way back to the beginning of the Dynastic Period in Egypt, and even before.  Today, Egypt is the top producer of dates in the world.  The tree, which can grow for up to 150 years, is valuable for its timber, its leaves, its stalks and its seeds–but of course the fruits are the most valuable.  A single tree, reaching as high as 23 metres in height, can yield more than 40 to 80 kilograms of dates; one bunch can contain up to 1,000 dates.  This ‘bread of the desert’ is so called because it is a staple for the Bedouins of the desert (who, in fact, make bread with the dates).  The date tree has since antiquity been a source of nourishment in the desert, and, through harvesting, for the people of Egypt.  Pharaohs would eat them for desert, and drink their juice infused in wine and beer.  The palms featured in gardens; the fruits were left as offerings at tombs and temples.  They were also used in medicine, to relieve swelling and alleviate coughs.  Dates aren’t just delicious; they’re healthy, full of potassium, B vitamins, and various minerals.  They give you an excellent boost if you are suffering from tiredness.  You can eat simple dried (or fresh) dates, and across the world you’ll find different fillings, from nuts to candied orange, marzipan to tahini, and different coverings, from sugar syrup to–very tasty–chocolate.  The Americans make date nut bread; the Moroccans add dates to tagines; the British use dates in sticky toffee pudding and traditional Christmas puddings.  https://hannahfielding.net/date-tree-egypt/  The “land of milk and honey” refers to honey from dates, not bees.  In Dubai, there’s an artificial island shaped like a date palm.  Smithsonian magazine Nov.-Dec. 2022   

Botanical historians believe that ancient people on the subcontinent of India were the first to domesticate a plant now identified by the scientific name Indigofera tinctoria. The deep blue dye they extracted from its leaves was dried into a powder or small cakes and exported to the east and to the west.  Two thousand years ago, the Romans called this product indicum, and that name formed the root of the later English spellings, indico and indigo.  Early trade routes like the Silk Road brought indicum to Medieval Europe, but professional trade guilds actively resisted the introduction of Indian indigo into Europe for many generations.  Since ancient times, Europeans had cultivated the woad plant (Isatis tinctoria) to produce a very similar blue dye for textiles, and woad farmers and dyers wanted to protect their traditional trade.  As indigo production shifted to the New World colonies in the late sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, however, Europeans eventually discovered that indigo was cheaper and more colorfast than woad, and that traditional market declined.  Indigo was grown in early South Carolina to produce blue dye that was exported to England for use in the British textile industry.  Indigo formed a significant part of the South Carolina economy for approximately fifty years, from the late 1740s to the late 1790s.  During that period, indigo (or, more specifically, indigo dyestuff) was South Carolina’s second most valuable export, behind rice.  The cultivation and production of indigo also involved the labor of thousands—perhaps tens of thousands—of people in the South Carolina Lowcountry.  For this reason, the cultural memory of indigo is heightened among members of the African-American community along what is now called the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.  https://www.ccpl.org/charleston-time-machine/indigo-fabric-early-south-carolina#

Cormac McCarthy (born Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr., 1933) is an American writer who has written twelve novels, two plays, five screenplays and three short stories, spanning the Western and post-apocalyptic genres.  For purposes of his writing career, McCarthy changed his first name from Charles to Cormac to avoid confusion, and comparison, with ventriloquist Edgar Bergen's dummy Charlie McCarthy.  Cormac had been a family nickname given to his father by his Irish aunts.  Other sources say he changed his name to honor the Irish chieftain Cormac MacCarthy, who constructed Blarney Castle.  Random House published McCarthy's first novel, The Orchard Keeper, in 1965.  He had finished the novel while working part-time at an auto-parts warehouse in Chicago and submitted the manuscript "blindly" to Albert Erskine of Random House.  Erskine continued to edit McCarthy's work for the next 20 years.  Upon its release, critics noted its similarity to the work of Faulkner and praised McCarthy's striking use of imagery.  The Orchard Keeper won a 1966 William Faulkner Foundation Award for notable first novel.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cormac_McCarthy   

Nov. 9, 2022  It’s been 16 years since Cormac McCarthy released “The Road” and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, cementing his reputation as a master American novelist.  Plenty of time, then, to write two books for fans to savor in 2022.  The first, “The Passenger,” is out now, and while it has that traditional McCarthy style (spare prose, few commas and adjectives, scant apostrophes, and no quotation marks to tell you who’s talking), it is nothing if not original.  It’s difficult to summarize the plot, but the protagonist is a guy with a great name, Bobby Western.  (“Stella Maris” is the name of the companion novel to be published on Dec. 6, 2022.)  Rob Merrill https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/books/cormac-mccarthy-returns-with-cryptic-the-passenger/    

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2600  December 5, 2022