Sideways Station

More bitter still

2012-11-27T22:47:02+01:00

Listen to this (Dinah Washington- This Bitter Earth as she sang it in 1960 )for thirty seconds or so.

Now listen to a few bars of Max Richter's "On the Nature of Daylight".

Now hear how Max Richter combined them. I think you will listen all the way to the end.

And I have nothing to say.

Recipe no. 1 - Sweet and Sour Rememboree

2012-11-19T12:59:00+01:00

Start with the and.
Select a photograph of someone you have
lost or crossed,
shared days then parted ways with
and watch it softly
(think of a gaze on tip-toes),
five minutes for each side,
first at the picture, then
at the picture gone,
turning slowly, clockwise,
like time itself
until you have
a good emulsion in your mind.
Put in a bowl,
add rainbow root,
stir with
a fork in the road
and set aside.

Now for the sweet.
Chop up some thyme,
add mint to it
and store in a dish,
you'll use it near the end.
Pick two or three of your best
good-sized memories;
snip off associations
which may have sprouted with the years
and dust with your favourite colour.
Pour on a glass of
Mozart
(K301 is good ),
slowly
note by note,
until the music is all
taken up.
You'll know it's ready
when you find you're smiling.
Put in a pan with rum and essences of Eden
and cook as gently as you can.
Don't stir, you mustn't change
the shapes.

While this is going you can
make the sour.
Over a big bowl shake
out a dictionary, concise
will do
until you get the hang of it,
and pick out
all the words
you never should have said
if there are any turgid ones
prick with your conscience -
they will deflate a little.
Roll them together with a rolling pin
until you get a paragraph,
shape into a loaf
which you will cut
with your sharpest knife
into accusing finger shapes.
Use biting winter wind
for seasoning.
Add some tart wine or
something equally ungrapeful
and then fry furiously -
two minutes or
until you hear them snap
Drain well. Place in a serving dish
Pour the emulsion on.
Add all the herbs to
the sweet memories and
arrange them around
the side of the dish.
The freshly minted thyme
will make them taste brand new.
Serve straight away.
Unlike revenge it's best
when piping hot.
Then at the table-
on top of everything
toss handfuls
of (almost too much)
rue.

Phillip Hill 2007

Listen to the poem

(This poem is included in my book The Observation Car which is available at http://www.lulu.com/content/2588218)

Around and up and also down

2012-11-14T12:06:19+01:00

Some time ago I posted an article on my liking for random walks, in which I outlined an insanely complicated method to get to places you weren't planning to see. Recently I found another way to go to randomly explore the world, without getting up from my chair.

A few days ago, as I was preparing to leave for Prague, I tried to find some information on the city’s railway station. I can’t remember why, I have been to so many places (at least virtually) since then. I happened on a page with a 360 degree spherical picture of Fantova kavárna or Fanta’s Café, originally the main hall of the station as it was built in 1871 by the architect Josef Fanta. The picture was on a website called 360cities.net which, I have discovered, is a wonderful tool for random travelling.

I soon ended up in other places in Prague, my favourites I think being the Bethlehem Chapel, a medieval crane and the wonderful Strahov library, where the picture is so detailed that I am quite confident that I will one day spot a bookworm about to take a bite out of one of the ancient volumes.

I have found it very difficult to stop travelling on 360 cities and have discovered a lot of places I had never heard of. My suggestion is to start from a city you went to a long time ago or one which you have always dreamed of visiting. Take your time with the pictures, look around and up and also down (count the cigarette butts or see if someone's dropped a coin) and when you have finished go somewhere else in the vicinity by clicking on one of the white arrows you will see. There may be other photos in the vicinity which aren't linked, though. For example, I spent a long time on the square outside the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg without finding an arrow which would take me in, so I had to search for the museum to find pictures of the interior.

When you have seen enough of a place and if, like me, you like random travelling and walking, click on the green globe icon you'll see among the white arrows which will take you somewhere “far far away” and start looking around the new place it lands you at.

Here are a few of the places and situations I wasn't looking for but ended up looking up and liking:

A lovely tree in France,

Casa de los Azulejos - Mexico City

Monterosso in the Cinque Terre - Italy

A dog watching a goose cooking somewhere in Germany

A bay with fishing boats in Vietnam

The night sky in Chilean Patagonia

The forest of ten thousand peaks, Guizhou, China

Someone's greenhouse in Texas

A storm brewing over the Himalayas in Nepal

Something entitled "Hotel Ship Wreck Dance Hall" in Szeged, Hungary - (not quite sure what happened here)

Coral reef fish in New Caledonia

http://www.360cities.net/image/h-tre-pleureur-jardin-botanique-de-bayeux#371.10,-0.39,84.7

http://www.360cities.net/image/casa-de-los-azulejos-mexico-df#765.00,14.60,39.4

http://www.360cities.net/image/monterosso-al-mare-view-to-the-divided-town-liguria-italy#-338.84,-22.39,70.0

http://www.360cities.net/image/dogtv#1507.73,6.98,86.7

http://www.360cities.net/image/fishing-boats-in-the-mui-ne-bay-vietnam#378.09,1.60,10.0

http://www.360cities.net/image/torres-del-paine-at-night#823.15,-88.92,56.8

http://www.360cities.net/image/guizhou-xingyi-wanfenglin-5the-forest-of-ten-thousand-peaks-guizhou-province#357.21,12.66,90.0

http://www.360cities.net/image/my-greenhouse#539.85,-5.01,98.6

http://www.360cities.net/image/brewing-storm-over-the-himalayas-nepal#168.44,-18.84,62.1

http://www.360cities.net/image/szoke-tisza-hotel-ship-wreck-dance-hall-szeged#20.72,4.18,32.1

http://www.360cities.net/image/coral-reef-fish-new-caledonia#491.38,23.50,28.5

Softly her tower crumbled - Ada by Nabokov

2012-11-05T10:47:00+01:00

I remember a Russian once telling me that when he read Nabokov in Russian it felt like he was eating words. I have since found that imagining that you are doing just that is one of the best ways to read (and imagining that you are dealing with single words may be one of the best ways to eat). Nothing is tastier or takes its place more interestingly in the mouth than the opening paragraph of Lolita :

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palette to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

But the book of Nabokov's which I most relished was Ada, surely pronounced "Ah-da", otherwise how would Van's verse quoted below sound right. Later I discovered that some people detested this book. But I have always felt some special kinship of spirit with those who particularly liked it. The following passage is among the most marvellous writing I have ever encountered. I underlined this passage the first time I read it and it has never quite left my mind.

From Ada - Part One, Chapter Twelve

He would fall asleep at the moment he thought he would never sleep again, and his dreams were young. As the first flame of day reached his hammock, he woke up another man—and very much of a man indeed. "Ada, our ardors and arbors"—a dactylic trimeter that was to remain Van Veen’s only contribu tion to Anglo-American poetry—sang through his brain. Bless the starling and damn the stardust! He was fourteen and a half; he was burning and bold; he would have her fiercely some day!

One such green resurrection he could particularize when re-playing the past. Having drawn on his swimming trunks, having worked in and crammed in all that intricate, reluctant multiple machinery, he had toppled out of his nest and forthwith endeavored to determine whether her part of the house had come alive. It had. He saw a flash of crystal, a fleck of color. She was having sa petite collation du matin alone on a private balcony.Van found his sandals—with a beetle in one and a petal in the other—and, through the toolroom, entered the cool house.

Children of her type contrive the purest philosophies. Ada had worked out her own little system. Hardly a week had elapsed since Van’s arrival when he was found worthy of being initiated in her web of wisdom. An individual’s life consisted of certain classified things: "real things" which were unfrequent and priceless, simply "things" which formed the routine stuff of life; and "ghost things," also called "fogs," such as fever, toothache, dreadful disappointments, and death. Three or more things occurring at the same time formed a "tower," or, if they came in immediate succession, they made a "bridge." "Real towers" and "real bridges" were the joys of life, and when the towers came in a series, one experienced supreme rapture; it almost never happened, though. In some circumstances, in a certain light, a neutral "thing" might look or even actually become "real" or else, conversely, it might coagulate into a fetid "fog."

When the joy and the joyless happened to be intermixed, simultaneously or along the ramp of duration, one was confronted with "ruined towers" and "broken bridges."

The pictorial and architectural details of her metaphysics made her nights easier than Van’s, and that morning—as on most mornings—he had the sensation of returning from a much more remote and grim country than she and her sunlight had come from.

Her plump, stickily glistening lips smiled.

(When I kiss you here, he said to her years later, I always remember that blue morning on the balcony when you were eating a tartine au miel; so much better in French.)

The classical beauty of clover honey, smooth, pale, translucent, freely flowing from the spoon and soaking my love’s bread and butter in liquid brass. The crumb steeped in nectar.

"Real thing?" he asked.

"Tower," she answered.

And the wasp.

The wasp was investigating her plate. Its body was throbbing.

"We shall try to eat one later," she observed, "but it must be gorged to taste good. Of course, it can’t sting your tongue. No animal will touch a person’s tongue. When a lion has finished a traveler, bones and all, he always leaves the man’s tongue lying like that in the desert" (making a negligent gesture).

"I doubt it."

"It’s a well-known mystery."

Her hair was well brushed that day and sheened darkly in contrast with the lusterless pallor of her neck and arms. She wore the striped tee shirt which in his lone fantasies he especially liked to peel off her twisting torso. The oilcloth was divided into blue and white squares. A smear of honey stained what remained of the butter in its cool crock.

"All right. And the third Real Thing?"

She considered him. A fiery droplet in the wick of her mouth considered him. A three-colored velvet violet, of which she had done an aquarelle on the eve, considered him from its fluted crystal. She said nothing. She licked her spread fingers, still looking at him.

Van, getting no answer, left the balcony. Softly her tower crumbled in the sweet silent sun.

(Here you can find an online, partly annotated version of Ada.)

(Zembla is a website devoted to Nabokov.)

Kora, Griot, Diabate, Sissoko, Kairaba Jabi

2012-10-30T16:17:03+01:00

I met a guy playing the kora on the street last night. It is such a beautiful instrument to look at and to listen to. Here's a description.

I asked the musician whether he was a griot. He pointed to the card in front of him with his name and said "My father was a griot and so was my grandfather. Diabate is a griot surname. Like Sissoko."

Other griot names, I found out on this page are Kouyate, Traore, Susso/Suso and Tounkara.

It always makes me happy to see and hear a kora, so I thought that I would share my favourite kora song from my favourite kora album, entitled Kairaba Jabi with Dembo Konte and Kausu Kuyateh. I could listen to their conversations, because that is what it sounds like, for hours. It's also the kind of music that makes you want to set out on a 10,000 mile journey.

Baristi d'Italia (re-post)

2012-10-28T23:35:31+01:00

Sometimes arriving time-zonked, tweedle-kneed and nearly dumb
in Frankfurt or in London or in some other airport
where people seem to have been stranded many
months ago on strangely molten furniture,
I stumble into a counter which claims that it provides
espresso. As I go grimly inching up the North Face
of my jet lag I pay for one and then I grimace
through the blizzard in my head for two or three
hundred seconds until I come upon a patch of clearish-
mindedness from where I see them frownandfumbling
with the filter basket and realize my coffee is
beyond the rocks, beyond the trees, beyond the hairpin bends,
beyond the chiming of regret, among those rainy clouds,
still miles along the path to the slippery future.
Back home in Rome, any barista worth his sugar
would have turned out a metric dozen by this time,
all the while keeping three conversations bouncing
in the air behind him with his heels, catching
the knifesharp orders thrown at him from every angle
with all the conjugationals of coffee: long, short, in a glass,
with a shot of aniseed or grappa, stained cold, stained hot;
or cappuccino – frothy, dark, light, boiling hot or
hot-but-not-too-warm-please.
Try as you might there is no way to make them
skip a beat, unless perhaps one was to ask for
“a latte”-
at which
the spiders would fall startled from the ceiling
and then sound, time, motion and faces
all would freeze because
there's no such thing.
It means “a milk” (and who knows whether
in a glass? A cup ? Or warm ? Or cold?)
In any case no coffee anywhere in sight.
.
But then life would resume
and they'd go back to whooshing
blasts of caff and tossing spoons, and
cups and saucers into the sink and stirring
frenziedly making the clutter brattle, crash and clatter.
I don't know why this must be done,
but never mind, they're marvels of co-ordination.
If we could think up how to make a spacecraft
based on percolation each one of them would
an astronaut. They'd move in bursts across
the skies, each time they pulled their levers,
exploring black interstellar space and milky ways
leaving long trails of steam and foam.
And when the stars came out, you would wake up,
look up into the night and then you'd smell the smell
which coffee has when it curls round you tight
and presses hard against your cheek then tries to make you tango.
And, grabbing at a tree, a farthest cousin, a no parking sign
or else a passing penguin, perhaps you almost even might.

Phillip Hill 2007

Listen to the poem

(first posted in 2008)

(This poem is included in my book The Observation Car which is available at http://www.lulu.com/content/2588218)

Signs for Pause

2012-10-22T16:08:31+02:00

I read a lot and when I don't have a book, I find it hard to avoid reading any of the signs and labels in my vicinity. Sometimes I come across one which makes me pause.

Here are a few examples

Dementia Bar

I spent a couple of nights in a room on the 3rd floor just below the Dementia Bar. Unfortunately, I can't tell you much more about it because I never set foot in it. On the other hand, would I remember if I had?

Attila Hairdressing

The sign reads as "Attila Coiffeur". Just a burn and slash today? I doubt whether they get many foreign customers, although Attila (and Atilla) are completely normal names in Hungary and Turkey and there are a number of names we don't worry about which were borne by people who were just as murderous as Attila. For example, you wouldn't bat an eyelid if your hairdresser was called Alexander, or Julius (like Caesar) or Oliver (like Cromwell).

Death by Dog Leash

The Italian town of Perugia has an admirable system of transportation to the city centre called the Minimetrò. The most intriguing thing about it though is the warning it gives to passengers.

It is of course the 3rd notice I am referring to. Why, out of an entire universe of hazards, did they single out dog leashes? I have always been very careful to avoid them when exiting and am rather disappointed never to have seen any. Reasonable and rational people I know suggest that something must have happened once. Perhaps they were sued. But even if someone tripped over a dog leash once, that doesn't make it more likely to happen again than slipping on a banana skin, skidding on a discarded skateboard or stepping on a spilt puddle of olive oil.

If we are going to warn people about everything that has ever happened once, then I need a sign on every street which says CAUTION LAMP-POSTS, because I walked into one once. Isadora Duncan was famously strangled when her scarf got caught in the wheels of the car she was travelling in. Shouldn't scarves have safety notices too. I once saw someone trip over a pigeon in the street in Chile. How about that? And Shanghai should definitely tell pedestrians about the washing lurking around the corners. Look at this photo.

It is true that dog leashes can be a bother, particularly those extendable ones which stretch out and out forever. Although to be a bother they also need a special kind of dog-owner wielding them. The kind that walks down one side of the pavement entirely focused on the conversation they are having on their mobile phone while their dog goes unheeded down the other side of the pavement and the leash trawls everything and everybody in the four yards in between.

Which points to the only really logical explanation I can think of. It wasn’t just one person who tripped over but dozens, waves and waves of people who were all brought down by the same extendable dog leash as they were rushing to get out of the doors as soon as they opened. A dog leash tsunami.

Still, if the Minimetrò people want to play it really safe and cover themselves against bananas and meteorites as well, I would advise them to rephrase the warning thus. Watch out for everything. Always. Everywhere.

Take this ad with you

As far as I know I don't have any fetishist tendencies (although, as we have seen, anything can happen), but the following ad attracted my attention.

Inside the blue circle it says "Take a pic with you and this ad and receive a free gadget with your purchase".

Well, it's hard to resist a free gadget, but now let's look at the ad in its entirety.

It would be nice if there were six or seven people (one of whom owned a pneumatic drill) who would be willing to dig out the ad from the pavement and take it down to the shop. It might be difficult getting it inside the door, but it would be interesting to see what happened.

Anise and Tomtom

Not a bucolic novel, but two small things. The first, the irresistible label on a packet of star anise which I bought. The second, Captain Tomtom Street in Istanbul. I don't know much about Captain Tomtom, but I assume he was a great navigator.

Reciprocating Soup - The Tantalising Cuisine of Google Translate

2012-10-01T12:56:14+02:00

They look harmless, but watch out for avalanches

The last time I went to Istanbul I had supper at Çiya Sofrasi, a restaurant which is by now famous (a long article about it appeared in the New Yorker and it has also been mentioned by the New York Times). It serves traditional food from distant Turkish provinces which is so different from the standard fare of Istanbul that the locals I was with couldn’t figure out what we were eating.

The restaurant has a website with a huge list of dishes but, unfortunately, only in Turkish. So I thought it would be a good opportunity to use Google Translate to find out what was actually served. What I found instead was that I was transported across a mental ocean into a new world of uncharted cuisine.

Admittedly, quite a lot of the dishes came out of the translation sounding normal, for example Pear Kebab - Eggplant, Ground Beef, Pomegranate Molasses, Garlic, Tomato Sauce.

Others make it through almost to the end before coming out in surreal blotches: Olive bean salad – crushed green olives, parsley, green onions, walnuts, pomegranate olive oil, painful or painless.

Some of the ingredients might grow in a fantasy novel. For example, one dessert has Never Figs, which sounds to me like a fruit as elusive as the Holy Grail and is perhaps the favourite food of unicorns.

Another dessert calls for the use of Indeterminate Tomatoes, not an easy thing to ask your greengrocer for.

Other things you may find on your plate are joinery eggplant, ulcer, new spring and cardiomyopathy.

The dish entitled Appetizers and Salads I contains Pepper, Wrapped inside, Crowbar, Tattoo. Perhaps you need the crowbar to get to the Wrapped Inside.

Appetizers and Salads II is even more intriguing and involves Chisel, Stuffed, Blind meatballs, hummus, blessed thistle, sempervivum, Donkey Salad and Mahammara.

If you are looking for something really substantial why not try the Pistachio Kebab (Zirk, chopped pistachios, big shot put) ? But if, on the other hand, you are in urgent need of a quick fix of carbohydrates order the Rice Intrabdominal.

My favourite Google Translate dish of all is Reciprocating Soup, which, I suppose, tries to eat you while you are eating it.

There is also Self-Soup (try to turn up already marinaded if you intend to have that), Helical Soup and the somewhat scary Suspended Soup.

If you are feeling a little queasy and need something to settle your stomach how about Pavement – Onion, Olive oil, paving, grass

Hard work, but worth it, is Mortice Chisel Yogurt Soup with Yogurt, hatchets, splitting wheat.

If, however, thrills are what you are looking for, you can't beat the Smoked Meat and Pumpkin Landslide, although do be warned that you can never tell which direction it is going to come from.

Here are a few other interesting dishes:

Ace of Arab (Pan Arab also available)
Baked New Button
Ballpoint sherbet
Bean Puzzle
Clean and Jerk
Cunning Mushroom
Decrease of the biceps (contains tattoos, interestingly)
Denominator
Egg spokes (those who appreciate spokes can also order Spokes Casserole)
Getting Stuffed
Has Bell
Mud Heaven
Multiplier Bean Salad
Nervous Leaf Rolls
Oven Handlle
Over-Vaccination
Pan Arab
Pumpkin Seating
Rash Crap
Rubbish Pan
Spokes casserole
Stuffed Additive
Suppression of Artichoke
Tattooed trotters soup
Tightening of meatballs
Vaccination garlic (if this is not strong enough for you, try Over- Vaccination)
Water disposal

All that needs to be done now that we have this menu is to write a Google Translate Cookbook with equally exciting recipe instructions. I have taken out an accident insurance policy and am working on the Landslide chapter.

Giant Steps, Steps by Step

2012-09-23T18:51:12+02:00

It is John Coltrane's birthday today, 23rd of September. Here is a step-by-step depiction of his playing on "Giant Steps" which I found on a Youtube channel http://www.youtube.com/user/dancohen?feature=watch which also has an animated transcription of Miles Davis's "So What" and two or three Charlie Parker pieces.

Mozart's starling sang G sharp. An invasive story.

2011-04-07T00:47:05+02:00

I can't say I ever appreciated starlings much before I discovered that Mozart kept one as a pet for three years. My impression of starlings was formed by the experience of having multitudes of them descend on Rome in autumn behaving like a million drunken football fans.

Their formation flying is pretty impressive, you can't deny that. They soar up high in the sky and fill it like an aerobatics team with a thousand jets . They expand, contract, make sharp turns, ascend, descend, branch out, regroup. You can't predict what they will do. It resembles a frenzied motor-driven kaleidoscope with just one colour: black.

The problem is when they come down and settle on a couple of trees. Settle is the wrong word. The collective noun for starlings is a "murmuration" but whoever invented that was deaf or was in bed, half-drunk, with a cushion on his head and the starlings were five miles away when he heard them. I would suggest "obstreperation", "altercation", "stridulation" or "riotation". They don't settle on trees, there are always countless numbers swarming around them in a state of great excitement shrieking and shitting on everything. I have always wondered whether they are shitting because they are excited or whether they are excited because they are shitting.

There is a place near the river where they gather next to a traffic light. If you are walking you get about ten seconds to cross the road but you can't stand on the kerb when the starlings are doing their stuff. You have to huddle in a doorway about twenty yards away and then run as fast as you can, dodging their bombardment, before the cars start trying to get you.

But Mozart had a starling. Which changes everything. It is a well-known fact that Mozart had a starling but I didn't know until I read this poem entitled K 453 by Karl Kirchwey which was on the website of the New York Review of Books for National Poetry Month.

On May 27, 1784,
   as he followed Vienna’s back streets home,
Mozart paused, startled, by a pet shop door
   and listened to the allegretto theme

from his own piano concerto in G-Major
   repeated by a starling in a cage.
He’d written it only five weeks before—
   had God given them both the same message?

He counted out thirty-four copper Kreutzer.
   Pleasure was like the iridescent sheen
in the dark plumage: an imagination livelier,
   perhaps, more fecund and ready than his own!

He entered this in his new quarto accounts ledger,
   but where the price should go, he wrote the tune
instead—transcribed it a second time, rather—
   and then, in his small hand, wrote Das war schön.

Das war schön - that was beautiful. Some people have suggested that Mozart had taught the starling the tune in previous visits to the shop and then bought when it performed it properly. I suppose it depends what you prefer to believe in. The tune the starling sang was the opening theme to the third movement of Mozart's Piano Concerto no. 17, K 453.

That was Mozart's version. The starling's version (at the top of this post) was slightly different because it sang the two G's at the end of the third bar sharp instead of natural, making things slightly more dissonant.

I haven't been able to find a performance of the starling's version or even of a starling doing Mozart's bird-catcher's aria, which would have been nice, but here is a starling whistling a bit from Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony.

As you can hear the starling mixes Beethoven in with quite a number of other sounds. The way starlings imitate music is wonderfully described in a very scholarly article by Meredith J. West and Andrew P. King entitled "Mozart's Starling" which was published in American Scientist.

The tendency to sing off-key and to fracture the phrasing of the music at unexpected points (from a human perspective) was reported for seven birds (no information on the eighth). Thus, one bird whistled the notes associated with the words "Way down upon the Swa-," never adding "-nee River," even after thousands of promptings. The phrase was often followed by a whistle of his own creation, then a fragment of 'The Star-spangled Banner," with frequent interpositions of squeaking noises. Another bird whistled the first line of "I've Been Working on the Railroad" quite accurately but then placed unexpectedly large accents on the notes associated with the second line, as if shouting, "All the livelong day!" Yet another routinely linked the energetically paced William Tell Overture to "Rockaby Baby."

You can get the pdf version of the article here if you want to acquire an encylopaedic knowledge of how starlings produce and imitate sound.

By the way, the starling whistling Beethoven seems to be from the United States. There would never have been any starlings in America if not for Shakespeare. Shakespeare wouldn't have done it on his own but if wouldn't have happened if he hadn't written the following lines in Henry IV, Act I, Scene 3 for Hotspur who is furious that the king has forbidden him to plead for the ransom of Mortimer from the Welsh or even mention him to him:

Nay, I will; that's flat:
He said he would not ransom Mortimer;
Forbad my tongue to speak of Mortimer;
But I will find him when he lies asleep,
And in his ear I'll holla 'Mortimer!'
Nay,
I'll have a starling shall be taught to speak
Nothing but 'Mortimer,' and give it him
To keep his anger still in motion.

If Hotspur had thought of another bird there wouldn't be any starlings in America because the reason there are, it is claimed, is that an organisation called the American Acclimatization Society had the idea of introducing into America all the birds which had been mentioned in Shakespeare's works. It is certain that in 1890 they released a number of starlings in Central Park (the numbers I have seen vary from 60 to 200). Now the birds are considered an invasive species and it is estimated that there are 200 million of them in the United States. I don't know whether they succeeded with all the others, you would have to check against the list below:

Blackbird - Bunting - Buzzard - Chough

Cock (Rooster) - Cormorant - Crow - Cuckoo

Dive-dapper (Little Grebe) - Dove and Pigeon - Duck (Mallard)

Eagle - Falcon and Sparrowhawk - Finch

Goose - Hedge Sparrow (Dunnock) - House Martin

Jackdaw - Jay - Kite - Lapwing - Lark

Loon - Magpie - Nightingale - Osprey - Ostrich

Owl - Parrot - Partridge - Peacock - Pelican

Pheasant - Quail - Raven - Robin (Redbreast)

Snipe - Sparrow - Starling - Swallow - Swan

Thrush - Turkey - Vulture - Wagtail - Woodcock - Wren

which comes from a page entitled the Birds of Shakespeare which provides a number of quotations for all these birds, so you can become an expert on shakespearean ornithology as well.

I was wondering whether there have been any other attempts to transfer selected content categories from Shakespeare wholesale. I know there are Shakespearean gardens but has anyone tried to collect all the other animals he mentions? Has there ever been an orphanage which decided to give its children the names of all the characters in Shakespeare ? Or has anybody ever tried to provide the Czech Republic with a seashore, in view of the well-known fact that The Winter's Tale gives Bohemia a seacoast ?

The Winter's Tale also has the famous stage direction Exit, pursued by a bear and is interesting for other things I would be tempted to explore but this post itself is spreading out in all directions, perhaps it will become as invasive as starlings are and colonise all the other articles on this blog, so I shall stop here. Almost.

Because you can't talk about birds and music without mentioning Olivier Messiaen, the French composer who spent years transcribing bird song and putting it into his music including Réveil des oiseaux ("Dawn chorus"), Oiseaux exotiques ("Exotic birds"), Catalogue d'oiseaux ("Bird catalogue"). So here is Messiaen talking about some birds.

Thanks to Mozart I now think of starlings more as singers than shitters, Scheiss has given way to schön.