DNA

I wonder if the name Colin Pitchfork means anything to anyone reading my DNA blog. The possible early release from prison of violent offenders is a hot topic at the moment and although Pitchfork (now aged 66) was originally sentenced to imprisonment for 30 years in 1988, he is still behind bars 38 years after his conviction, and was last denied parole by a review board in 2025.

His crimes? The rape and murder of two schoolgirls, Lynda Mann and Dawn Ashworth, in Leicestershire in the 1980s, plus two other counts of sexual assault on young women, and an attempt to pervert the course of justice.

The real significance of his case? It was the first ever conviction secured on the basis of DNA evidence.

Colin Pitchfork

He nearly got away with it, for when the police arranged for 9,000 men in the locality between the ages of 16 and 34 to report in and give blood for DNA sampling, he sent along a friend of his with a fake passport purporting to be Pitchfork, a ruse that was only discovered after an overheard conversation in a pub. When Pitchfork finally provided a sample, his DNA was a match for that found on both murdered schoolgirls. Professor (now Sir) Alex Jeffreys of Leicester University was the scientist who helped the police with that investigation and whose pioneering work on techniques for genetic fingerprinting and DNA profiling became standard practice worldwide.

I was intrigued by a book review in New Scientist a couple of months ago. That book is 'The Secrets of Our DNA ' by Turi King. (It's currently on order.) One anecdote in particular intrigued me, so I will share it in full with you:

"In 1993, a 62-year-old woman in Idar-Oberstein in Germany was found strangled. DNA on a coffee cup suggested that two people were present besides the victim, and that one of the apparent killers was a woman. In 2001, the suspected female murderer's DNA turned up again in Germany, this time on the body of a 61-year-old man in Freiburg. Then her DNA started appearing at crime scenes in Austria and France as well.

"In 2007, the mysterious woman hit the headlines when two police officers were shot, one fatally, in their car in the German city of Heilbronn, and her DNA was found in the back seat. This sparked a major hunt for the 'Phantom of Heilbronn' as she became known. But the phantom proved elusive, despite being linked to forty-one crimes via her DNA. In some cases, her accomplices were caught, but they denied that any woman was involved. Police started to consider the possibility that the criminal was transgender.

swabbing for human DNA

"It wasn't until 2009 that the 'Phantom of Heilbronn' was finally identified - as a woman who worked in a factory that made swabs for DNA testing! Contamination in the production process had been the problem and the police had wasted years on the trail of a non-existent killer. The 'Phantom of Heilbronn' really was a phantom."

While the majority of convictions based on DNA are sound, the example above and a few notable miscarriages of justice mean that DNA 'evidence' has to be interpreted very carefully, as crime scenes are often complex and the process of collecting materials for DNA profiling can give rise to cross-contamination, the unintentional transference of DNA evidence from one item or location to another.  

DNA is omnipresent in the animal world. There is no living, reproducing organism that doesn't have DNA as the genome. In fact all animals share some DNA with human beings - probably dating back to the origins of animal life on earth in the hot vents of underwater volcanoes in the planet's oceans.

We know there were various versions of human beings (hominins) back along our evolutionary road, maybe as many as thirteen different types over eight million years since we diverged from chimpanzees (whose DNA is 98.4% identical to human DNA). Nowadays only one exists, Homo sapiens. We know about our ancestors mainly thanks to fossil remains and DNA analysis.

There are also only two types of alligators alive today of the ten species that are known to have existed, from fossil remains and DNA analysis, and one of those, the Chinese alligator, is on the critically endangered list. In the wild, it lives only in about a 5km square region of freshwater ponds in the Anhui province of south-western China. Its close cousin, the American alligator is in much better shape, being widespread though the freshwater wetlands of the southern United States. It is thought that alligators originated in North America some 37 million years ago and that the Chinese branch migrated to Asia across the Bering land bridge some 20 million years ago. They are, of course, the template for the Chinese Dragon of myth and legend.

swabbing for alligator DNA

Why did I want to introduce alligators into this blog about DNA? It's not as though they kill people and need tracking down. That's much more in the nature of crocodiles, who are vicious predators. Alligators by contrast are quite shy and peaceable creatures. No, I had a poem about alligators and thought I might as well use it here.

Alligators

There are two types of alligators.

They are known as

type 1 alligators and type 2 alligators

and it is perfectly possible 

to catch either but not both of them.

Type 1 alligators can quite often

be caught during pregnancy

or at birth. DNA might suggest 

a pre-disposition for getting caught,

and life for type 1 alligators

is fraught  from an early age

which seems particularly unfair.

Type 2 alligators generally

get caught later in life 

and it's mostly their own fault

for being somewhat fat and lazy

because it's not as though

they haven't been warned

what might befall them.

As a result of being caught,

both type 1 and type 2 alligators

are awkward customers

prone to spiky, insulting

and moody  behaviour and need

careful handling to keep them

from becoming life-threatening.

What? Sorry, my mistake.

I meant diabetes, not alligators.

That makes much more sense.

Thanks for reading, S ;-)

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Lancashire Dead Good Poets' September Open Mic Night

Here's notice of our September open mic night on zoom...

Everyone is welcome - to read and/or listen in. It's free and early booking is advised. To secure a slot, email: deadgoodpoets@hotmaul.co.uk

Steve ;-)

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DNA

Free flowing, attractive and attacking football is in the DNA of Birmingham City FC. 

There are quite a few inaccuracies in that statement. But not to worry as the term DNA has now been used as a marketing gimmick or metaphorical shorthand for a few years now.

Let’s get the basic bits out of the way:

DNA stands for Deoxyribonucleic acid and it is the only molecule capable of reproducing itself. DNA is present in almost all living cells of all living things. Only DNA, and no other molecule, carries the ability to copy and then pass heritable information to subsequent generations.

The famous double helix structure consists of two strands of DNA combining a bit like a spiral staircase. Sugars and phosphates make up the sides and base pairs make up the middle or rungs. Base pairs are the compounds adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T). Crucially, adenine (A) pairs only with thymine (T), and cytosine (C) only pairs with guanine (G). Only the pairs of either A:T or C:G fit as rungs between the two siderails.

The difference between human DNA and tomato DNA is the sequence of DNA base pairs A, T, C, and G. A common analogy used in introductions to this subject is that two different recipes in an English language cookbook may use the same 26 letters to make words but differ in the exact sequence of those same 26 letters, resulting in different recipes.

The differences, although small, can have dramatic consequences. Your DNA sequence determines your basic blood type (A, B, AB, or O), hair and eye colour, whether your earlobes dangle, and whether you can roll your tongue.

But where to go after that very brief overview? Just a couple of weeks ago I was reading this by Alison George in the New Scientist:

Ancient human DNA found on cave art for the first time. DNA from ancient humans has been found on a prehistoric cave painting and on cave walls, demonstrating the potential to one day identify individual artists and resolve the debate over Neanderthals' artistic abilities. She was writing about samples from 5,000 to 17,000 years ago.

Police now use DNA to identify long forgotten cold cases but the first use of DNA in an ongoing investigation occurred in Britain in 1986. Professor Alec Jeffreys was assisting the British police in solving two separate rape-murders and was able to prove that the man arrested was not guilty.

Historians use DNA to identify the remains of lost soldiers, from WWI infantry missing in action at Vimy Ridge to King Richard III under a car park in Leicester.

The popularity of DNA is reflected in the rise of direct-to-consumer DNA testing. For a relatively small fee, several companies will conduct a DNA analysis from the cells in your cheek swab or spit sample. However, these DNA tests are not 100 per cent accurate.

Molecular geneticists have learned not only how to read the information carried by a DNA strand, but also how to edit or supplement it. These innovations allow development of a number of commercial products such as insulin and cheese.

Much of the above was taken from an article on the BBC Science Forum by Dr Alan McHughen published on October 18, 2020.

I do feel there should be a bit of romance in DNA. This was written a few years ago.

Anniversary Road
(for the Horrocks family)

Back home
the kids probably think
you’re settling for tea
and a nice gateaux
in the boring café
of another boring gallery.

And if they were around
they’d be right,
mostly,
a touch of your fingers
hidden from a groan
of embarrassed teenagers.

But not this year
this aisle of months
leading away from silver
this is for you
twenty six years

and a letter from every one.

Amsterdam was holding hands
keeping out the cold
on the Keizersgracht Canal.
Bruges was kissing
under the tartan blanket
of a horse-drawn carriage.

Calais is a secret
that only two can share
arms linked by a window
a double helix in a single room
a bond that’s for life
discussing Dundee or Dresden.

First published in ‘away’, 2010.

Thanks for reading, Terry Q.

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DNA - Who Am I?

 

DNA is the abbreviation of deoxyribonucleic acid.

I admit to getting out of my depth trying to research this. Science was never a strong point and even now, with an interest in the subject, I’m literally blinded by science. This description is what I found online, in terms I could understand,

“DNA is the special molecule inside your cells that holds the genetic code. This code tells your body how to grow, look and work. In shape, it looks like a twisted ladder called a double helix. The rungs of the ladder are made of four chemicals, Adenine, Thymine, Cytosine and Guanine. You get half of your DNA from each parent.”

It reads as if aimed at KS2 primary level children and it is as much as I think I need to know.

There is a saying, ‘It is a wise child that knows his own father’. It is in Homer’s Odyssey and also in William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. It means, as we know, ‘One can never be sure of one’s paternity’.

This was something in the back of my mind. Remarks were made when I was in my teens, but I didn’t pay much attention because I didn’t want to give any satisfaction to the person trying to get under my skin.

I’ve used Ancestry and similar online sites to help grow my family tree for a long time. It’s one of those things I dip in and out of, usually when something new grabs my interest. When Ancestry introduced DNA tests, I considered it for ages. What I’d kept in the back of my mind came into the forefront and I spent hours of ‘what if’ self-counselling. I didn’t apply straight away, but when the cost was reduced on a special offer, I decided to go ahead. The results didn’t throw up anything unexpected. Those remarks, intended to make me doubt the foundation of my existence, had no substance and up to now, no surprises.

I found a couple of poems on Poetry Soup,

A Dash of DNA

A dash of DNA decides
The colour of our eyes
And probably our hair and skin
And possibly our size.

Genetics, though, is just a part
Of who we grow to be,
For many other factors count,
Each one to some degree.

Our family life, our neighbourhood,
Our friends, religion, schools,
All help determine how we’ll use
Our inborn molecules.

We learn from our experience;
So much of it holds sway
That over all it counts more than
That dash of DNA

by Ilene Bauer


Finn’s Lament in Two Parts, Limerick

Finn boasted he was all Irish,
A DNA test he would relish.
When Danes showed up
He got lost in his cup
And said DNA was all rubbish.

Finn’s kids never did care
That they had bright blond hair,
But still he was wrought
At the very thought
That Danes were everywhere.

by Peter W Iversen


Thanks for reading, Pam x

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Compulsion

"Patient 'B' is an interesting case study," said my friend the psychiatrist over a pint of the finest and a large white wine at a pub near Lancaster Moor Hospital (formerly the Lancaster County Lunatic Asylum). I'd told her I was researching compulsion and she'd agreed to share some details of three individuals with me, in complete anonymity of course. This was back in the 1990s. Lancaster Moor Hospital closed before the millennium and my psychiatrist friend is no longer with us.

She was right. Of the three, Patient 'B' was by far the most interesting. A long term inmate since their teens, they exhibited multiple personalities, all of them obsessed in some way with the world of popular music, a condition which first manifested itself simply as a compulsion to invent names for rock groups (their school exercise books were covered in such inventions) but which proliferated remarkably within the confines of the institution.

As DJ Half Life they hosted a regular hits show on Radio Therapy, the pirate station founded and owned by another of their personalities, Ronan O'Reality, which broadcast nightly from a ghost ship moored somewhere off the Lancashire coast. DJ Half Life only played tracks by groups signed to SKL Records, the label of another of their personalities, rock impresario Stephen Kirkby Lonsdale, and published by More Than Songs. 

As John Lemon, one half of the famous and successful song-writing partnership Lemon & Lime (they were also Barry Lime), they wrote a constant flow of song lyrics for the SKL roster of groups to perform. The hits kept coming. There was even talk of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

In addition, as Stella North they acted as SKL publicist, writing sleeve liner notes, constantly drafting press releases, creating pen portraits of many of the group members in the various bands within the SKL empire, and even writing two full music biographies, one of Joe Cockermouth and the other of the pop combo Brian Blackpool & the Coasters.  

Finally, as Van Ordinaire, they were the visual artist for the constantly evolving and expanding roster of talent on SKL Records. They designed all the groups' LP covers as well as their tour posters and a variety of promotional materials, from badges to t-shirts. 

My psychiatrist friend showed me one sample, the latest LP from SKL's current most popular group.

Remarkably, patient 'B' couldn't sing (except out of tune) nor could they play a musical instrument, but that hadn't stopped them from concocting an alternative music industry reality within the confines of Lancaster Moor, the perpetuation of which imaginative feat took all of their waking hours and mental powers. 

I was impressed. I asked my psychiatrist friend if 'Patient B' understood they were mad (a clumsy question, I know), or if they might have been able to use some of their obvious talents in the music industry out in the real world. She said she didn't think so, on either count.

Here, my hearties, is a swashbuckling new poem (in progress) about compulsion... 

The Midnight Disease

Tossed for some time on a ship of dreams

I wake with a scream echoing in my head

as midnight chimes its dozen doomy bells.

'Pieces of fruit! Pieces of fruit!'  My parrot,

damnable bird, proposes a healthy option

as I walk the plank into insomnia, eyepatch

slipping, limbs shivering with nightmarish

sweat. I rip wide the fridge to plunder a tub

of rum and raisin Cornish ice-cream, salve

for yellow feverish thoughts. Xavier, pirate

cat, scrutinizes with a disdainful expression

as I gulp huge cooling spoonsful. Only then

can I settle to compulsive re-drawing of my

treasure map: the island to which you lured

me, the beach on which I was wrecked, the

shady grove wherein twin hearts lie buried,

marked, from memory, with a bright red X.

Every night the same, every night the same.

Thanks for reading, S ;-}

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Compulsion

I’ve written before about sitting down at my desk faced with a blank A4 piece of paper, pencil and rubber and no idea what to write about. A common enough feeling for writers of all types. But until I started to look up stuff about compulsion I had never heard of the opposite of this concern.

Hypergraphia is a behavioural condition characterized by the intense desire to write or draw. Hypergraphia is not mere journaling, nor is it the careful crafting of prose. It is a flood, a torrent, a demand from the brain to put words to paper without pause. The writer may fill pages upon pages, notebooks upon notebooks, barely stopping to eat or sleep. The compulsion is not always cathartic; sometimes, it is simply uncontrollable.

Alice W. Flaherty

Alice W. Flaherty, a neurologist and author of 'The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain ', describes it as a condition driven by abnormal activity in the temporal lobe, often seen in epilepsy, mania, or intense grief.

The above was taken from an article in Psychology Today written by S. Fenella Das Gupta Ph.D., MFT. She goes on to explain that:

Hypergraphia exists on a spectrum. At one end, it is a deep, reflective practice, allowing words to give shape to emotions through a rhythmic pulse. For some, grief is turned into poetry, essays, and even books, giving purpose to their pain. In this way, hypergraphia becomes a bridge, not just for the writer, but for others who have suffered in silence. On the other, it is an overwhelming force, entangled with mental health struggles such as bipolar disorder, severe anxiety, and sometimes psychosis.

The article discusses the underlying problems in some depth and I don’t feel able to précis this enough to do the subject justice.

I would like to continue by looking at how Hypergraphia has affected people. For instance:

Hypergraphia was one of the central issues in the 1999 trial of Alvin Ridley for the imprisonment and murder of his wife Virginia Ridley who had died in bed of apparent suffocation and who had remained secluded in her home for 27 years in the small town of Ringgold, Georgia, United States. Her 10,000-page journal provided evidence that she had remained housebound of her own will and was instrumental in the acquittal of her husband.

Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov famously said "The only thing about myself that I consider to be severe enough to warrant psychoanalytic treatment is my compulsion to write ... That means that my idea of a pleasant time is to go up to my attic, sit at my electric typewriter (as I am doing right now), and bang away, watching the words take shape like magic before my eyes." He wrote or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards.

Other artistic figures reported to have been affected by hypergraphia include Fyodor Dostoevsky and Robert Burns. 'Alice in Wonderland ' author Lewis Carroll is also said to have had the condition having written more than 98,000 letters in various formats throughout his life. Some were written backward, in rebus, and in patterns, as with "The Mouse's Tale" in Alice.

Eleanor Alice Burford, whose pen-names included Jean Plaidy, Victoria Holt, Philippa Carr, Eleanor Burford, Elbur Ford, Kathleen Kellow, Anna Percival, and Ellalice Tate, described herself as a compulsive writer. Naomi Mitchison wrote over 90 books of historical and science fiction, travel writing and autobiography, has been described as a compulsive writer.

Compulsion

my Oxford English
defines the word as
an irresistible urge
to behave in a certain way

but what I need is
a word to describe
resistible urges
that I hardly ever resist

Thanks for reading, Terry Q.

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Trial & Error

Not exactly trial & error on my part, but this is my third shot at today's Saturday blog. Take one was going to describe my ongoing attempts to painstakingly rebuild the complex decorative coving in Adele's front room ceiling. It had been hacked into by previous owners who had installed hardboard arches into alcoves. The restoration is nearly complete, though it has taken ages. You'd be bored.

Take two was inspired by my recent reading of 'The Amateur ' by Robert Littell. It's a literary cold war thriller about a backroom CIA cryptologist who turns rogue assassin to avenge the murder of his girlfriend by a red brigade faction in Europe, because the CIA refuse to act even though they know who the culprits are. The grieving cryptologist succeeds by trial and error, but that's only a fraction of the story. (You'll also find out how he discovered that Francis Bacon wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare.) If you like cryptology, espionage and brilliant writing, I highly recommend it.

Which leaves us with take three, all about fat narcissus and the reflecting pool, which also happens to be the title of my latest poem. (We'll get to that in a while.)

Donald J Trump is well known for wanting to put his odious and overblown personal stamp on various institutions and symbols of American civic life. First of all there is the ballroom under construction at the White House. Then he tried (and failed) to get both New York's Penn Station and Washington's Dulles International Airport renamed after himself. He did however succeed in getting Palm Beach International Airport renamed President Donald J Trump International Airport. Emboldened, he then renamed the US Institute of Peace the Donald J Trump US Institute of Peace and temporarily added his name to the Kennedy Centre for Performing Arts, though that has since been removed by order of the courts.

Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool

His campaign of tasteless self-aggrandisement didn't go quite so far as renaming the Lincoln Memorial after himself, though he did have plans for redesigning the iconic Reflecting Pool to his taste ready for the recent 250th Anniversary of US Independence celebrations.

The Reflecting Pool, which holds four million gallons of water and was last renovated in 2012 at a cost of $34m, was not to Trump's liking. Specifically, he didn't approve of the grey stone it was constructed from. In April of this year he commissioned a transformation. "The original gray stone was never good. It never had the color people wanted, but now it’s going to have a great color.” (People? What people?) That colour was going to be "American flag blue", like a Mar-a-Lago swimming pool.

The administration initiated a 'fast-track'  no-bid project to to drain the pool, seal seams and coat the basin bottom in “American flag blue”. The plan envisaged a one-to-two-week timeline and costs were estimated at $1.5m-$2m. Contracts went to companies whose owners were neighbours of Trump in Florida and donors to his presidential re-election fund.

Work was delayed while legal challenges were made on the grounds of lack of competitive tendering and concerns about historic conservation, but the project ground on through May. Once the blue lining was in place, Trump's motorcade even drove through the drained, coated basis to show off the magnificent new hue. The Pool was then refilled  with another four million gallons of water.

It wasn't long, however, before problems began to show themselves. The blue liner began to peel and bubble. Algae started to bloom and cloud the water. Maintenance crews poured in hydrogen peroxide to try and clean up the problem. A nanobubble ozone technology water purification system was installed. The costs of the makeover climbed to $16m (eight times the original estimate) and the water was still scummy green.

Reflecting Pool after Trump's 'Renovation'

Trump was furious and pilloried mercilessly by his detractors. He blamed 'vandals' for the shocking state of the Reflecting Pool, even citing one individual, 67 year old former US Olympian canoeist David Hearn, as being a ringleader. Hearn was arrested and charged but pleaded not guilty.

As Independence Day celebrations approached, anti-algae and clean-up efforts continued apace but the problems persisted. In the event, soon after the July 4th celebrations, the Pool was emptied again and then it was revealed that the root cause was  “a rushed and flawed installation process, with repeated failures of the lining during the installation process, and extensive peeling of the lining throughout the Reflecting Pool”. (Read for that - a cost-cutting project with inadequate materials and sub-par contractors.) The government conceded that the damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism as initially represented by the interior department. 

It is a huge embarrassment for the administration. The Reflecting Pool remains unfinished, the costs continue to rise, and attorneys for Hearn have said the government “owes Mr Hearn an apology” for falsely accusing him of criminal damage. As for Donald J Trump...

Trump plumbing the metaphorical depths

... here's that poem, based on a Greek myth, by way of Ovid, in which Narcissus fell in love with himself on seeing his reflection in a pool of water, giving us narcissism - a self-centred personality disorder, marked by grandiosity, excessive need for attention and admiration, and an impaired ability to empathize. I've subverted, obviously.

Fat Narcissus And The Reflecting Pool

Oi Ovid! Some modern metamorph this is.

See fat narcissus, more bloated ogre 

than handsome toga'd praetor, kneeling

by his scummy algae-covered pool, cursing

vandals or goths - he doesn't know

the difference, doesn't care - for a loss of face.

Of course the restoration

which was meant to glorify Trump

and the Nation on its big anniversary

was a dumb, cheapskate plan

given without tender to a bunch 

of his out of state cowboys, 

riding roughshod over all concerns,

executed without due diligence 

and ending in expensive disaster.

Yet all the orange buffoon can make out,

as his simple brain tries to plumb

the metaphorical depths 

of his repair gone wrong,

is that someone, not him, 

must have fucked up and yet

he's the one looking like a clown 

in the ripples of green scum.

It's been a giant cock-up for the Pres.

and it's being whispered 

in the corridors of the Capitol

by senators of a back-stabbing bent

that he's less Narcissus poeticus

and more Amorphophallus titanum, 

one of the smelliest plants on Earth -

also nicknamed the corpse flower

for its stench of death.

Thanks for reading, keep resisting. S ;-)

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Trial and Error

Trial and error is pretty much the basis for most forms of activity but as this is a site based around poetry let’s stick with the writing of a poem. I don’t know what the ratio of poets starting a new work on a computer screen or with a blank piece of paper, pencil and rubber are, but I’m of the latter persuasion. A4, Lamy mechanical 0.7 mm lead and rubber.

But, obviously, not a choice that could be made a hundred and more years ago, although I’ve just thought of typewriters. Surely not for poems?

Back to the subject. I reckon there are two methods of addressing trial and error. The first is by oneself and the second by an input from another’s perspective. With the presumption that one knows there is an error to be taken care of in the first place. Not necessarily the case.

I’m starting with Walt Whitman, one of my heroes, and his collection entitled ‘Leaves of Grass ’. He self published the first version in 1855 when it contained a mere twelve poems and then spent the rest of his life altering and expanding the collection until he died in 1892, when the collection contained over four hundred poems.

Among the poems in the early Leaves of Grass editions (albeit sometimes under different titles) were "Song of Myself", "Song of the Open Road", "I Sing the Body Electric", "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking", and "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry". Later editions would contain Whitman's elegy to the assassinated President Abraham Lincoln, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd".

The only known extant manuscript page of the first edition of 'Leaves of Grass ' shows the trial and errors needed to get to this:

The pure contralto sings in the organloft.
The carpenter dresses his plank. . . the tongue of his foreplane whistles its wild ascending lisp,
The married and unmarried children ride home to their Thanksgiving dinner,
The pilot seizes the king-pin, he heaves down with a strong arm, . . .

Walt Whitman and Leaves of Grass revisions

For someone who looked for advice from someone else then it’s hard to escape from the influence of Ezra Pound on T S Eliot and the writing of The Wasteland.

He advised Eliot to cut the original draft of around eight hundred lines to 433 plus he told him to change the title from ‘He Do the Police in Different Voices ’ which came from a Dickens character in 'Our Mutual Friend ' who was noted for his ability to imitate the voices of the police in crime reports. Eliot thought it was brilliant. Pound insisted it was cut.

Here’s an image showing revisions made by Pound and Vivienne, Eliot’s first wife, to The Wasteland's  "On Margate Sands" stanza.

I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
(ll. 300–02)

revisions to Eliot's On Margate Sands stanza in The Wasteland

And in the note accompanying the information it states that "After straining one of his hands rowing while at graduate school, Eliot preferred to write by using a typewriter where possible".

Pound told him to chuck an entire opening section set in a Boston saloon with stuff like:

First we had a couple of feelers down at Tom’s place,
There was old Tom, boiled to the eyes, blind,

and start with this:

I. The Burial of the Dead

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

TS Eliot and Ezra Pound

Thanks for reading, Terry Q.

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Abracadabra!

It's a mystical phrase, a magical incantation beloved of conjurers and illusionists the world over, but what is its true origin? Nobody actually knows. There are theories, claims and counter-claims, but nothing definitive. Let's look at a few possibilities.

There was a suggestion that it might derive from Aramaic (a Semitic language that originated in Syria and quickly spread to Mesopotamia, Levant, Sinai, Anatolia, the Caucasus, and Eastern Arabia), meaning "I create like the word" (אברא כדברא).However, that is refuted by Aramaic linguist Steve Caruso.

Claims have been made for it stemming from Greek, where ΑΒΓΔ (alpha-beta-gamma-delta) are the first four letters, or from Greek language Gnostic Christian bible texts, where Abraxas (Ἀβράξας) is a term for the great creator of the universe. There might be something in that.

Then there is the theory that it might stem from the Latin word abecadarius (itself derived from Greek), essentially meaning “alphabetical order,” in which case it might once have implied putting everything magically back in its correct place. Ingenious but contrived?

However, I think the likeliest source, based on sound alone, is Hebrew. Historian Don Skemer suggests that it might originate from the Hebrew phrase "ha brachah dabarah" (name of the blessed). I'll go with that, but feel free to take your pick.

What is certain is that it was an incantation with supposed magical properties. The first accredited appearance of the word  abracadabra is in the writings of the second century AD Roman physician Serenus Sammonicus in his book 'Liber Medicinalis ', where it appears in connection with treatments for fever (most likely malaria). He prescribed the wearing of an amulet with the word written as an inverted triangle (see below), to ward off the sickness - and by extension, many other afflictions, palsies and plagues.

Quite how abracadabra came to be used by magicians is as shrouded in mystery as the origins of the word itself. They appear to have adopted it by the early 19th century, as an aid to their art, invoking abracadabra to magically assist them in their tricks, in much the same way that a feverous patient would once have called on it to assist them in their recovery.

For evidence, I cite a play by W. T. Moncrieff that was being staged at London's Olympic New Theatre in 1819. In act two, scene three of 'Rochester; or, King Charles the Second's Merry Days ' we find the following: 

"Well then, if you won’t tell our fortunes for us, suppose we tell you yours, our art is very potent - we've studied under Zoroaster and Agrippa! Hey presto pass! Abracadabra!—By the lines of your face, I can perceive... [etc.]"

Used by conjurors and magicians as an exclamation imparting supposed magical power, as when performing a trick, it has come more generally since to be used as an exclamation accompanying any seemingly remarkable feat or occurrence. So there you have it. 

And finally, I'm sure you're expecting a magic new poem. So.... "Abracadabra!" I create like the word...😉

Disillusionist

Wonder while you can.

Once you know it's sleight of hand

Innocence is damned.

Thanks for reading, Steve :-)

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Lancashire Dead Good Poets' August Open Mic Night

Coming up on Thursday. Book now.

Everyone is welcome. You don't have to be from Lancashire! 

Steve ;-)

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