The TLS blog

A VW Phaeton, in Sunshine Beige please

A web-friend  called  Jessica tells me something I didn't know about the Greek joy-rider, Phaethon, when I posted a blog about him the other day.

Someone has actually named a car after the boy who so famously wrecked his sungod father's chariot and came close to frying  the world.

Why would anyone call a car after a car-crasher, JessicaRulestheUniverse asks.

And not just anyone, but those super safety-conscious folk at Volkswagen.

I looked it up.

According to a scholarly account of the Phaeton on Wikipedia, the designers had to meet various advanced criteria:

"One of them was that the Phaeton should be capable of being driven all day at 300 km/h (190 mph) with an exterior temperature of 50 °C (122 °F) whilst maintaining the interior temperature at 22 °C (72 °F)"

Why the heatshield?

Is that what a modern car really needs? All day at 190 mph?

So global warming.

But the shield  would have been at least a bit of help to a boy careering through the heavens with a hot tank of  hydrogen on his back.

Perhaps the VW bosses weren't trying to make a useful car at all - but proving they could pass their exams in Euripides and Ovid?

Anyway, while I am on the VW Phaeton site, which colour scheme should the classical enthusiast choose for his luxury chariot?

(Definitely HIS not HERS: this is a bit of a boy's machine, I think)

I've looked up these extra decorative  options too.

There are numerous shades of ocean black and blue, 'waterworld-pearlescent' and 'petrol pearl-effect'.

And there is also a wonderful 'sunshine beige'.

I'm going for that one.

Meanwhile the two books that sparked this subject will be reviewed in a future edition of the TLS.

Enemies of the TLS

"Who are your nastiest competitors?", an old friend from a decade ago in the newspaper business asked the other day.

"Who is it that the TLS wants to do over, to do down, to do the kind of things that at The Times we used to try to do to The Daily Telegraph or The Independent?"

I knew exactly what he meant - and more or less the other magazines and papers that he was looking for me to dissect.

The business of literary criticism is traditionally no kinder than that of politics or economic or other elements that make the mass media.

If anything, individual slights and rivalries seem to last longer in the study of mediaeval Westminster than the practices of the same place today.

But in the business of the TLS, the real enemy today (in that loose sense we once saw rivals as enemies) is not any other specific publication but the possibility that at some near future time there may be fewer readers for anyone practising the serious criticism of arts and ideas to a regular audience of readers.

It is good for us all when we all are good.

So, in keeping the TLS true to its best traditions, there is no need, desire or benefit for me to wake up with a general will to do down anyone.

Is there then a danger that we and the New York Review of Books and other fine publications might become, by contrast, cosy and complacent?

The perils from the negligent at the gates are far too palpable for that.

So, in that spirit,  let me register the pleasure in reading a post yesterday by Paul Blezard in praise of the excellent American Scholar magazine - particularly since he discovered the AS from a post I wrote myself about it back in January.

Visitors to British literary festivals will already have experienced the characteristic 'Paul Blezard interview' with an author, gently probing and elucidating, without ego and with a store of knowledge kept as far as possible hidden from display.

Does that description risk sounding 'cosy' too?

It should not.

We are all in our fight together, including The American Scholar - and, when the recession ends, only the best in our business will be fighting the fashion for 'not reading'. 

And probably only the best in my old bit of the newspaper business as well.

But if not Shakespeare, then who?

'The victim of one of the most sensational crimes in English history' is how the hydra-headed polymaths of Wikipedia describe Shakespeare's courtly contemporary, Sir Thomas Overbury (centre).

Let us for once not argue with that.

In a week when the media has been excitedly claiming that a picture restorer's newly 'found' Jacobean portrait (left) represents Shakespeare himself (right), it is good that the news of the much more likely identity will not disappoint.

In this week's TLS Katherine Duncan-Jones reports on researches in the Bodleian cellars which show - clearly enough for me at any rate - that the so-called 'Cobbe portrait' that has filled the newspapers represents the murdered sexual and political intriguer, Overbury, rather than the man who merely wrote plays about such intrigues.

Ovwerbury's  is a complicated story - of poisoning and hangings and social-climbing and passion - and, since I began with some words from Wikipedia, I'll suggest that readers satisfy any further biographical curiosity from that same source.

Not likely, Mr Shakespeare

The international "news" of a "new Shakespeare portrait" was not received with enthusiasm when it first reached us here at the TLS.

Much as I love my former colleagues in the mainstream newspaper business, the mass publicity for a new 'Shakespeare Found' - in this case in the collection of picture-restorer Alec Cobbe - was not much endorsement here.

News stories from museums and galleries, a wonderful source of romantic illustrations, are not knocked off newsroom schedules merely because they are of dubious veracity.

And what could be more romantic than a new, youthful, prosperous and glowing image of our greatest writer?

'Ninety per cent certain', claims an expert.

Hold the front pages.

Once upon a time there used to be a cynical news-editor's adage: 'what is new in this story isn't true and what is true isn't new'.

But such scepticism is not applied so rigorously when a press release contains something so useful, so beautiful, such a pleasant change from financial gloom and doom as a new portrait of Shakespeare.

The Cobbe portrait duly adorned many a newspaper page.

"Too young", said the wise men and women of TLS towers to one another.

"Too well dressed" as well.

Looks nothing like the one, old and not so attractive, image which is attested and everyone knows.

Looks quite like other pictures which are probably not Shakespeare anyway.

'Load of nonsense', grumble grumble, and back to our desks.

And so, according to a highly persuasive piece in the TLS that goes to press tonight, it seems.

But news editors, never fear.

The real identity of the man in the Cobbe portrait is likely to have been a poet and courtier from the Jacobean age whose life, loves and mysterious death would have filled many more newspaper pages in his day than Shakespeare ever could.

His is a story well worth retelling any day.

We'll put it up online tomorrow.

Divine sex and melting icecaps

Husbands were not supposed to be too fussed when their wives became pregnant by gods.

It was supposed to be an honour - for an ancient Greek as it was for Joseph of Nazareth.

But a prudent wife whose son was someone or something else's could never quite be sure.

The tragedy of Phaethon - two versions of which  arrived on the TLS table this week - was the Greek way of working through the issues here.

Writing in around about 420BC, Euripides tells the ever fresh story of a woman who decided to keep her secret and, as an added attraction to the modern reader, caused some early global warming too.

Clymene was an eastern queen who one night took the fancy of Helios, god of the sun.

The resultant handsome son - such liaisons were reliably successful in that way - was the Phaethon who gave the play its name.

This boy thought his mother's husband, Merops, was his father.

The father thought he had a fine upstanding son

All was fine and dandy.

Until, in Euripides's Scene One the mother decides she has to tell her boy who his father really is.

Her delightful semi-divine bastard is about to get married to one of Helios's daughters - and he needs to know.

Only her husband the king need be kept in continued blissful ignorance.

The boy, however, is himself disbelieving of his mother's past exploits. So he goes to asks his newly alleged parent for a gift that only a doting dad would offer - the chance to drive the sun's fiery chariot from east to west for a day.

This ought to have been fine - if Phaethon  had not been like a rock-star's child with a new red Ferrari, scorching off the track, shrivelling crops, turning forest to desert, doubtless melting ice-caps (if the Greeks had known about ice-caps), and only stopping when Zeus called a halt with a well-aimed world-saving thunderbolt.

Phaethon turns in an instant from marriagable tearway to smoking corpse.

Still Queen Clymene thinks she might hide the remains and keep her reputation intact.

Not for long.

Merops confronts her.

There seems to have been a nasty scene.

Her female intuition had been wholly right. Her husband's nature was not of the Saintly Josephite kind. She avoids a nasty death herself only by a second divine intervention in her life.

Unfortunately noone knows exactly how the drama played its way out.

Euripides's play survives only in fragments - which are gathered in a new Loeb edition which also includes lost chunks of his Oedipus and Telephus.

There is enough surviving Phaethon to tempt reconstructors as well as editors.

Goethe had a go once.

And now there is a new complete dramatic version by the poet and translator Alistair Elliot, published by Oberon Classics.

It would be wonderful to see it on stage - a drama doubly for our times.

Observer's Books for ever

Sometimes you know when a book is going to come up in a conversation.

It is hard to go to Grasmere without hearing a word or two about The Prelude - or to Laugharne without something from Under Milk Wood.

Among dear friends of a shared 'certain age', on a visit to the Minsmere marshes in Suffolk this weekend, there was always likely to be a mention of The Observer's Book of Birds.

And so it proved.

The Observer's Books were the staple of childhood for many of us in our fifties today.

Their Book of Birds, first published in 1937 but a best-seller after the war, came with illustrations by  the Scottish artist, Archibald Thorburn.

And Thorburn's Pied Avocet, that tall and graceful wader with its side-swiping beak, was the first Avocet I ever saw - at a time when the real birds lived nowhere even as close as Suffolk.

The Avocet is the 'lawyer bird', black-capped like an ancient advocate, standing no nonsense like a judge, strutting and probing like an expensive QC.

Rare and endangered when I first saw its picture, it parades around the Suffolk marshes today as though it owned the place. In one sense, as the bird chosen to represent the wonderful efforts of the RSPB, it does own the place.

John James Audubon painted the Avocet too. In an early drawing, included in a new book from Harvard, it stands square and still, both copper-sulphate legs on the sand, its beak high and upturned, not scavenging like Thorburn's or the birds of Minsmere this weekend, but bolder and prouder under the sky.

Audubon's specimen, the editors say, came from France. They describe what the visitor to a bird sanctuary cannot see, even in the nesting season which is not quite on us yet: how the female are adept at 'egg dumping', the art of adding an egg to the nest of another Avocet, and how 'adoption' too is an Avocet skill, the exchange of chicks between those mothers with too many and those with too few.

Right now these icons of the RSPB  are jostling for the space to begin these battles of life. Our guide, Paul Green, a man with more obvious joy in his work than anyone I've met for years, shows us the scraps we might otherwise have missed.

On all the islands of the shallow marshes, there are other birds with a sense of their entitlements and equally thuggish and lawyerly skills.

There are some of those most densely coloured of sea-birds, Mediterranean Gulls with their deep black cap and blood-red bill of executioners, puffing and rolling against allcomers.

And overhead early in the morning a Marsh Harrier, its wings held up in its distinctive funnelled V, its legs stretching up and down in flight in practice for future kills.

Both these species too were rarities when we all, our younger guide too, began to learn from studying our Observer's Book of Birds.

Ravines of Tenerife

In a place whose history has long seemed obliterated a pioneering hotel has just brought  back some of the past.

San Blas is a southerly spot on Tenerife, one of the Canary Islands, not a holiday destination best known for archaeology, environmentalism or tourism of the cultural type.

But in the past few weeks visitors to the Sentido's Reserva Ambiental have been walking out of their bedrooms into mysterious twisted ravines, volcanic shafts and caves where men and women prayed for rain, paddled for fish and pounded their corn meal, probably for 2000 years.

The Canaries have a classical history shrouded in more than the usual degree of mist.

Were they the original 'Islands of the Blessed' hymned by poets, the winterless home of the happy dead? Or was that some other set of Atlantic rocks?

Did Juba the Carthaginian visit, conquer or merely make some marks on the ocean map?  It is not easy to say.

The modern history of the Canaries is misty too.

The fate of the local Guanche peoples when their stone-age ended in the fifteenth century, is not one that anyone else has much wanted to remember. As the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1911) puts it, 'The Guanches, who occupied the Canaries at the time of the Spanish invasion, no longer exist as a separate race, for the majority were exterminated and ther remainder intermarried with their conquerors'.

As to precisely whose fault that was, you can read on amid tales of squabbling Castilians and Normans and not be much the wiser.

There is no sign left either of the giant dogs - the canines that may or may not have given the place its name.

Civil war, famine and mass emigration was the rest of the miserable story - with a brief economic boom from the export of tomatoes.

The first British tourists to colonise the south of Tenerife in the package-holiday boom of the sixties were not much interested in history either. Any 'winterless home' four-and-a-half hours from Luton was fine.

If some of these visitors looked themselves very much like the 'happy dead' - zimmering from fish-and-chip shop to tea-bar - what did they care? The mugs were the ones who spent their Februaries back home in Manchester.

In the last decade Tenerife has tried to put behind it this piece of colonial history too.

But the replacement has been by golf courses - environmental horrors on an island where water has always been scarce - and chintzy five-star old Canarian resorts.

And there is still a long way to go even here:  wonderful old fishing villages are to be found but you need to take care  when finding them

The Sentido has its five stars too - and every facility of the sort that wins them.

But its burnt-umber rooms and tufa-grey paths are a rebuke to garish glare. It saves power and water rather than spreading it over greens.

The Sentido chimes more closely with the bobbing boats and fish restaurants of the local Los Abrigos port than with those other Locals, the Nineteenth Holes and the Coronation Street bars.

In past visits to San Blas for my own 'winterless sun', I had watched the Sentido grow - and heard about the reserve too, never quite knowing what it would be when it was complete.

And now it's ready - for the hawks and falcons overhead and for the first trickle of walkers on the ground.

There is an irrigation dam that recalls the tomato trade - and a threshing floor from more ancient times.

In the innermost part of the ravines there is a large round black rock, propped against a small one, spanning a snake-like trench, a miniature version of the dried river bed itself.

Maybe 2000 years ago, maybe five hundred years ago, it was carved from the volcanic earth and used for rituals that we no longer know.

None of this might be worth reporting from Italy or Greece or the Americas.

But in the land of the winterless sun it is a welcome sign of forgotten worlds returning to new minds

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