The TLS blog

LITHE MEN TAR UP

How many lines of poetry can you make out of the letters THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT?

The Scottish poet, Edwin Morgan, who has been much mourned since his death two weeks ago, once produced twenty six - although the work in question seems to have disappeared from view until our TLS diarist, JC, rediscovered it for this week's issue.

There are some fine juxtapositions in the tradition of the concrete jeu d'esprit.

Like:
 
ST. PLINY HIM RE-TART SLUM

Particularly enjoyable for a classicist reflecting on the one called the Younger Pliny, the prudish, slightly pompous, do-gooder and torturer of christian women in imperial Rome.

And:

TEN TEETH LIP MALTER SUP MISERY

A neat evocation of the sort of long Scottish night on which one might be encouraged to take on such a task as Morgan's.

And:

LITHE MEN TAR UP 

And:

SHE TITTUPS ELEMENTARY RIMPLE

Of which we can all make what we will. 

There is a magnificent finale as we reach our destination. The full version, first published in the TLS of August 6, 1964, is below.

SIMPLE MYTH LITERATURE PEN SET

LENT EMS TUP HARPY LETTERS EIMI

MUTE TRIM LENS EPISTLE THERAPY

PLENARY MIRTH UP MISLET SETTEE

MERRY THESPIS TILT APU ELEMENT

ELI SETTLEMENT HUMS TIPPERARY

TUNE LIT PRETTY MELISMA SPHERE

LITHE MEN TAR UP STEEPLY MITRES

TRIPY TEAMSTERS UNPILE HELMET

YEAR SPELLS PUT THEM INTERTIME

ST. PLINY HIM RE-TART SLUM TEEPEE

SUPPLY SARTRE ME/THEE NET LIMIT

APPLE SLEUTH MIMES TRITE ENTRY

HIS ARE REPEL-TUTTY IMPLEMENTS

RE-PEEL PLUMS IS TINY TART THEME

SALTPETRE TEETHES IN RIMY LUMP

LITMUS ENTRÉE THRAPPLE STYMIE

TEN TEETH LIP MALTER SUP MISERY

MINT PEAS MYRTLE THISTLE PUREE

SUPPER THEME IS TRY LITTLE AMEN

PLUMP THEL MEETS SET ITINERARY

SHE TITTUPS ELEMENTARY RIMPLE

HAMLETT ENEMY-PITIER SPLUTTERS

HE TIMES SUPPLEMENTARY LITTER

THEY SLIT RARE TIME SUPPLEMENT

THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

George Woodpecker Bush

If I'm caught by some electronic tracker in the perverse-seeming act of googling  "Peter Stothard and "woodpecker", it is not because I'm suffering from ornithological egomania. My aim last night was simply to track any communication relating to recent blogs on a probably (but not absolutely definitely) extinct bird from Louisiana.

This search, I can report, ended with nothing much more about the lost, picky-eating woodpeckers of the American southern swamps but did produce a different, always attractive rarity, a perceptive, entertaining and favourable review of one of one's own books which, by carelessness or failure to follow bird-calls on the web, the author has hitherto failed to spot.

Back in 2003 I wrote a diary of thirty days I had spent on a magazine assignment with Tony Blair and George W. Bush during the Iraq War. Some reviewers liked it and others thought that I had failed sufficiently to rifle the Downing Street wastepaper baskets for evidence of manufactured WMD reports and wilful war crimes.

Thirty Days had merely the modest aim of recording what one reporter heard and saw as a 'fly on the Prime Minister's wall' at a very strange time in our history. It has been much milked since for clues and colour by those analysing the war itself. But this piece in the Australian Book Review by the excellent author and publisher, Richard Walsh, catches better than anyone did what the book as a whole was about. The 'woodpecker' which led me to it last night was one (not a rare variety) originally seen in Camp David on March 27, 2003 on the roof of Laurel Cabin, the rural shack in Maryland from which presidents can peacefully fight their wars.

Ivory-billed woodpecker - the movie

 Clayton Burns has sent the following after my last post about the lost woodpecker of Louisiana whose bodies I once saw laid out in such numbers in a laboratory desk drawer. 

"There’s an entity that I dearly wish existed, for its presence would bring me solace and wonder.  Alas, it’s elusive.  There are rumors that it is actually present in the world, but, sadly, these never pass empirical scrutiny.  A few people have had personal experience of this being, but these haven’t confirmed by others.  Much as I would like to live in a world inhabited by this being, I must reluctantly conclude that it doesn’t seem to exist.

I am an a-woodpeckerist.

About five years ago, biologists were all abuzz with a sighting and a brief and fuzzy video clip suggesting that the Ivory-billed woodpecker was still alive in the Arkansas swamps.  There were later sightings from Florida.  This was dramatic news, since the Ivory-bill (Campephilus principalis), America’s largest woodpecker, was thought to have been extinct since the mid-1940s.  The “resurrection” of an extinct and iconic species gave all biologists and bird lovers a new spring in their step.  How magnificent it would be to see this bird again after 60 years!

But intensive searching by biologists and laypeople over the past five years has failed to turn up the Ivorybill, and I sadly conclude that it’s really truly extinct. If there were an unambiguous sighting, with good video, I would of course change my mind, but for now the species is an ex-woodpecker, singing in the choir invisible.

As PLos Biology reports this week, a new movie on the search for the Ivorybill, Ghost Bird, opens in September.  The movie is reviewed by Jerome Jackson, an ecologist at Florida Gulf Coast University and author of In Search of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker.  It’s a nice review that summarizes all the brouhaha around the “rediscovery” of the woodpecker, somewhat resembling the hype about the “ancestral primate” Darwinius.  Although Jackson once thought the Ivory-bill was still alive, he’s now a skeptic.  He gives the movie an emphatic thumbs-up.

Ghost Bird reveals this process and the myriad of impacts it can have.
It is a film that will produce a more sophisticated citizen with a better understanding of how science works. While in many ways it is a fun film, a fascinating window on science and the interfaces of science, media, and the general public, ultimately, it tells the story of the tragic extinction of an iconic species and our collective and probably unfounded, yet seemingly inextinguishable hope that maybe, it might still exist. Science can prove that the Ivory-billed Woodpecker still flies. It cannot prove that it does not. With the efforts that have been made since 2004, it has become increasingly likely that it is extinct. But… the truth is still out there.

Sort of like God, isn’t it?

Ghost Bird will be publicly screened in 20 American cities, but only for a short time.  You can find the showings at the movie’s website."

Arise again, Sir Walter

 There is a characteristically fine report by Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian this morning about the debt the English owe to Sir Walter Scott, the novelist who for many years of the Romantic age was the biggest selling author by far, possibly the biggest selling author of all time in comparison with his peers, but who is now, she rightly says, almost wholly unread.

The piece caught my eye because, until my holiday trip to the Orkney and Shetland in the past two weeks, I too was a member (though not a proud one) of the 'hadn't read any Scott since a long ago attempt on Rob Roy'  school. After touring Britain's northern isles with his 1821 Waverley novel, The Pirate, in my hand, I now recognise how much pleasure there is still to be had.

The Pirate is a great island tale. No traveller here should be without it although, as Higgin's piece suggests, it might be advisable to take a library copy with you and not to rely on buying one in the bookshops full of TV-tie in otter books.

 I knew I was going to enjoy it when Chapter Five began: "We can only hope that the gentle reader has not found the latter part of the last chapter extremely tedious". Scott's picture in Chapter Four of a subsidiary character called Triptolemus Yellowley, the mainland 'improver' with a doomed mission to reform island ways of agriculture in the late seventeenth century with careful reference to the Italian lore of Virgil and Columella, had been so magificent that, with this winning addition of authorial modesty too, I was enslaved to The Pirate for the whole holiday.

Almost very tourist destination has a few pages - from St Magnus's Cathedral in Kirkwall to the ruins of Jarlshof near Sunborough and the Stennis Stones. Jarlshof (pictured above)  is an extraordinary site where visitors can see houses occupied by humans in various different ages from the neolithic, 5000 years ago, through the iron and bronze ages, Picts, Vikings and terrorising, Norse-beating Scottish lairds. But its name is the one given to it in the opening pages of The Pirate where it serves as the dwelling of the mysterious recluse whose identity is not revealed until the end.

If there is another such site in the world, of such archaelogical importance, that gets its name today from its borrowing by a nineteenth century novelist, I should like to know of it. Meanwhile, as though to greet me back to the day-to-day TLS, there is a new Oxford Classical Text of Columella, the agriculturist of the first century AD whose advice on planting and ploughing would have been so useful, Triptolemus Yellowley thought, for the uselessly independent, bloody-minded, stubbornly Nordic peasantry.

This new edition, it is said, has been 'freshly constituted, upon the 'solid recension of pioneering Swedish scholars'. If Triptopolemus had been able to claim that virtue to the pro-Scandinavian, anti-English-and-Scottish farmers of his time, he might perhaps have fared better than he did.

To my own chickweed

 We regularly applaud the peculiar immortality of poets who perform and die young but the achivement of youthful botanists had eluded me until I tiptoed around Thomas Edmondston's eponymous chickweed last week.

On the northernmost bit of Britain, the roof of the Queen's realm, are the serpentine rocks of Unst where the Edmonston Chickweed uniquely grows.

It does not grow very big, or very bright, but at this time of the year, when the puffins have departed and the otters are somewhat grumpy, its little rusty leaves (the picture above is of the plant in Spring plumage) have at least the virtue of being a tourist attraction required to stay in place.

The precocious Thomas, it seems, produced the first list of Shetland flora in 1836 when he was only 11. His flying start may have been helped by his staus as son of a local laird but a glorious career awaited after his appointment as Professor of Botany in Glasgow nine years later. Then in 1846, on a South African foraging tour for which he reported to Charles Darwin, he was killed in a shooting accident, leaving his memory for the reflection chiefly of holidaymakers who find their way to the final British moonscape before the North Pole.