Sideways Station

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.

My life is the gardener of my body - Yehuda Amichai

2011-03-14T18:18:43+01:00

One day I walked into a bookshop, asked for the poetry section and pulled out a book because I liked the colour of it or its title, Open Closed Open. I don't remember. On the back cover was a sentence by Octavio Paz, one of my favourite poets, which said "Once one has read (Amichai's) poems, one can never forget them - there can be so much life and truth in sixteen lines."

That would have convinced me in itself. But then I opened the book and I read this, the first section of a longer poem called "I Wasn't One of the Six Million: And What is My Life Span? Open Closed Open" :

My life is the gardener of my body. The brain - a hothouse closed tight
with its flowers and plants, alien and odd
in their sensitivity, their terror of becoming extinct.
The face - a formal French garden of symmetrical contours
and circular paths of marble with statues and places to rest,
places to touch and smell, to look out from, to lose yourself
in a green maze, and Keep Off and Don't Pick the Flowers.
The upper body above the navel - an English park
pretending to be free, no angles, no paving stones, naturelike,
humanlike, in our image, after our likeness,
its arms linking up with the big night all around.
And my lower body, beneath the navel - sometimes a nature preserve,
wild, frightening, amazing, an unpreserved preserve,
and sometimes a Japanese garden, concentrated, full of
forethought. And the penis and testes are smooth
polished stones with dark vegetation between them,
precise paths fraught with meaning
and calm reflection. And the teachings of my father
and the commandments of my mother
are birds of chirp and song. And the woman I love
is seasons and changing weather, and the children at play
are my children. And the life my life.

I would like to have something more intelligent to say about this, but for the time being the only thing I can think of is what I thought that day. Read on.

(Open Closed Open by Yehuda Amichai, Harvest Books, translated from the Hebrew by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld).

Pop-tarts and Gutisk

2011-01-16T22:57:48+01:00

One of the most attractive things about Wikipedia is its magmatic nature. Here is Nicholson Baker discussing the vicissitudes of just one of its pages:

The Pop-Tarts page is often aflutter. Pop-Tarts, it says as of today (February 8, 2008), were discontinued in Australia in 2005. Maybe that’s true. Before that it said that Pop-Tarts were discontinued in Korea. Before that Australia. Several days ago it said: “Pop-Tarts is german for Little Iced Pastry O’ Germany.” Other things I learned from earlier versions: More than two trillion Pop-Tarts are sold each year. George Washington invented them. They were developed in the early 1960s in China. Popular flavors are “frosted strawberry, frosted brown sugar cinnamon, and semen.” Pop-Tarts are a “flat Cookie.” No: “Pop-Tarts are a flat Pastry, KEVIN MCCORMICK is a FRIGGIN LOSER notto mention a queer inch.” No: “A Pop-Tart is a flat condom.” Once last fall the whole page was replaced with “NIPPLES AND BROCCOLI!!!!!”

Another reason, among the hundreds there are, why I love Wikipedia is the amazing number of languages it has embraced, including some like Bishnupriya Manipuri which only shows up as বিষ্ণুপ্রিযা় মণিপুরী in my browser or Gutisk, which I see as a row of empty boxes.

If you go to Wikipedia's front page http://www.wikipedia.org/, there is a list of languages, which starts with the top ten in terms of number of entries. I was surprised to see Polish there and even more surprised that there were more articles in Polish than in Russian (766,000 vs. 650,000 when I looked). I thought it might be interesting to try and develop a Wikipedia Linguistic Productivity Index and see how many native speakers it took to write one Wikipedia article.

Having analysed the figures from some of the languages at the top of the table, I can tell you that while it takes only 32 native Dutch speakers and 52 Polish speakers to put together a Wikipedia entry, you need 221 people for Russian, 266 for Portuguese and 468 for Spanish ! If you are a native Spanish speaker you should submit an article now, you have a lot of ground to make up.

The list goes down to Tshivenḓa • isiXhosa • Zeêuws • isiZulu , all with more than 100 entries, but in actual fact, if you click on "other languages", you get a new page which lists all of the 278 languages used and ends with almost perfect neatness with Afar (6 entries), Kuanyama (5), Hiri Motu (3), Muscogee (2), Kanuri (1) and Herero (0). I was interested in finding out what the article in Kanuri was about but I couldn't find my way there. But it must have been hotly discussed. The information provided tells us "1 article, 4,388 edits, 123 active users. Even more interesting is what the non-existent article in Herero might have been about (4,314 edits).

I haven't worked out a Linguistic Productivity Index for all the languages yet, but I found that on Wikipedia they have already made a similar calculation entitled Wikipedia articles per population. It works on the basis of the total number of speakers, not just native speakers. I am not sure whether that includes people who have read books like Learn isiXhosa overnight or not. At the top of this table, is the amazing result of the artificial language Volapük, which has produced 118,799 articles with only 25 total speakers. Something is not right in that, surely. Volapük was invented in 1880, can it only have 25 people who are able to speak it? And that is almost the same number of articles as are listed for Arabic (125,000).That would mean that on average each volapukist has written 4,751 articles. If they have that much energy, surely they should be doing something else, for example knocking on people's doors like Mormons or Jehova's Witnessses and converting the world.

If you discount Volapük then as well as Ido and Interlingua, two other international languages which come in second and third, the first natural language is Aragonese with its own amazing result of 22,947 articles from a speakership of 21,000 obviously hard-working people. That is over one each.

A famous saying goes: "A language is a dialect with an army" and I was about to attribute the prize for a language with an army to Icelandic, except that Wikipedia tells me that Iceland doesn't have a standing army. It will have to make do with winning in the "Language with a Coastguard" category. With 300,000 speakers Icelandic has produced 28,220 articles, which means on my scale that it takes 10.6 Icelandic speakers to produce a Wikipedia article.

When I complete my research I will give you my full results. Anyway the purpose of all this was really to tell you that, if you like Wikipedia as much as I do, do read the complete article Nicholson Baker wrote about it for the New York Review of Books in 2008 here. It is truly excellent.

Rome's New Traffic Plan ?

2011-01-13T22:57:45+01:00

I keep on walking past this hoarding half-way down via Giulia, in the one ugly spot on one of Rome's most beautiful streets. I always wonder, "Is this Rome's new traffic plan?" Because that's what it says at the bottom: Rome - Traffic and Mobility Action Plan.

And I wonder “When is this going to start? It looks exciting. Am I ready for it? What is going to happen?”

On and on it goes. Yards and yards of fancy dresses and solemn notices.

It's only when you get right to the end, you discover what is happening. It’s just two different messages one on top of the other. The top says "The Friends of Via Giulia Association Wishes You Happy Holidays".

But they fit together so neatly for 95 percent of the way that I am still tricked every time I walk by. And since fate has put this combination into our hands, perhaps we could do something with it. I still think it would be a brilliant traffic plan. I am not sure how it would be implemented in full. But I can imagine the first morning, with everyone got up like that. Surely traffic would be smoother if everyone was dressed so. The cats, the dogs, the pigeons and the seagulls would stop to watch as well.

Smiles in my pockets

2010-12-27T12:15:50+01:00

Very often I find stuff in my pockets. Usually it's receipts or old tickets. Sometimes I extract a crumpled piece of paper I can no longer decipher but which I know is a now unidentifiable idea which I tried to jot down while tripping over a dog or avoiding a motorcycle.

There are pockets in my mind as well. Mostly I find junk there too, but every now and then I come across something which makes me smile mysteriously while I am waiting to cross the road or just as they announce that my flight has been delayed again.

For example there are three or four haikus by Kobayashi Issa which I keep on coming across again and again:

Pissing in the snow

outside my door--

it makes a very straight hole.

The holes in the wall

play the flute

this autumn evening.

In a dream

my daughter lifts a melon

to her soft cheek

Visiting the graves

the old dog

leads the way

I first encountered Issa's poems while reading an anthology of Haiku edited by Robert Hass (The Essential Haiku), so when I noticed a clip of him reading some of his translations of Issa I thought I would share it with you. Perhaps some of them will end up in your minds' pockets too.

(here's a link to the video in case you can't see the embedded version.)

If you want to read more Issa, there is a website with all of his poems http://haikuguy.com/issa/

The ubiquitous subversiveness of 'h'

2010-12-13T17:19:55+01:00

A few days ago in the city of o in the country of n a prize was given. The city wasn't Stockholm or Copenhagen. The country wasn't Sweden or Denmark.

The recipient of the prize wasn't allowed to be at the ceremony by his country, c, and so the prize was placed on an empty h. h was not a table or a bed. c isn't Sweden or Denmark either.

Later I read that the country of c had prevented people from posting comments on the Internet which contained the words "empty h" or which mentioned the city of o. Pictures of h's were also removed, though no specific action seems to have been taken to prevent people from seeing pictures of the city of o.

Then I came across a story which said that, in the country of c, people had been leaving h's out on the street. Hundreds of empty, old and broken h's, the article claimed, had appeared lined up along the streets like a silent weaponless army. The police didn't understand what was happening at first but then they managed to grasp the link and they cleaned up all the h's. People who were questioned as to why they had put h's on the street said that they simply didn't need them.

I haven't been able to find any other reports of this event so I am wondering whether it ever took place, but if it did it could raise a significant problem for the authorities. Once you have banned virtual h's, either in written or visual representation, it seems inevitable that you will have to prohibit any display of dissidence expressed through real empty h's. But h's are common household objects. They are everywhere and many of them are going to be empty quite often.

Some of them may be displayed empty in protest and some of them will be set out somewhere with no special political purpose in mind. But how are you going to tell these two kinds of empty h's apart? And even if an h has been put down empty somewhere with no subversive intent it is possible that it may be spotted by someone passing by who has a potentially subversive mindset and who might, subjectively, interpret it as being a subversive statement such as to re-inforce his views, which will convert the h into an objectively subversive object. (You may need to read that sentence again). So it would seem that once you have decided that a few empty h's are subversive, they all become potentially subversive.

You might say that all you have to do is to put a sticker on innocently displayed empty h's stating that they are simply objects and have no symbolic significance. But if you do that you are calling attention to them. You might even find that someone who has no knowledge of the prize in o and the empty h might start to ask around what all this is about. Or you might find people wondering whether this, implicitly, means that the doors, the windows and the tables that they see do have some symbolic meaning, since you haven't labelled them. This strategy therefore, unless you label everything, would not seem to work.

If I were responsible for dealing with the empty h crisis I would be debating three possible policies.

1- Hardline policy: All real and virtual h's are a threat. Therefore abolish all h's and remove the characters for h from the dictionary.

2 -Middle-of-the-Road policy: Each citizen will be allocated one h at birth for their personal use. Children will take their h's with them to school. As they grow they will be allowed to apply for larger h's. Adults will take their adult h's to work and to any public place which involves seating. h's are personal and non-transferable and should not be left unattended.

3- Progressive policy: People are allowed to own as many h's as they want as long as they do not take them out of their homes. Places which now have h’s set out such as cafés and restaurants shall keep their h's in storerooms. When a customer enters such an establishment he will be given a h at the door for his personal use during his stay. This way there will be no (visible) empty h’s at any time. Customers wishing to use the washrooms shall not abandon their h's but take them with them or arrange for someone else (employee or passer-by) to sit on them. Chairs shall be returned on departing the establishment. Premises and vehicles which have fixed seating pose a special problem. In aircraft, at least, it will not be advisable to unscrew all the seats. Therefore it is suggested that in such situations whenever a seat is vacant a dummy shall be placed upon it. N.B. Smiling dummies recommended.

But Soundly Sailing

2010-11-25T09:38:23+01:00

Listen to the poem

Click here

Last night, down in the street, the kids were there
till after three, singing and shouting till
they’d had too much to drink and disappeared.
Not near enough to keep me up, the noise
lapped at my bedclothes all the time, tugging
so that I felt I wasn’t quite in bed
but with one leg still stranded on the floor.
At four o’clock upon the roof just six
or seven paces through the air from where
I lay, my nearest neighbours, the seagulls
which have vikinged up the river to feed
upon the town, woke up and started to cavort—
it must be mating season. And through the night
I bobbed upon the surface of my sleep,
not wholly in or out, and all the time
eyes open or eyes closed, I dreamt I was
upon that boat I took in Finland long ago,
the floors and furnishings all lavishly
adorned with sprawled, disjointed passengers,
besotted, sozzled, soaked with aquavit.
The crew was nowhere to be seen, perhaps
we were just drifting. The only lively
sight the action-painting gulls as they went
stirring up the liquid sky and flying
like a band of whooping, circling Indians
in an ancient Western film and steering us
exultantly past silent dawnswept houses
deep into Stockholm’s golden watery morning heart.

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

Ninety Train Rides

2010-11-16T14:20:19+01:00

When I was a child, my family used to travel from Britain to Italy most summers to stay with my Italian grand-parents. Every time we crossed the Channel I was sick. I was given all kinds of advice, sometimes from other passengers, and I tried hard to apply their methods. I remember "stare at the horizon and don't look at the waves" and "bend your head to the right every time there is a swell". There was a different method every time but none of them worked. There was never a ferry on which I wasn't sick. Once I thought I had succeeded in making the crossing unscathed but I threw up when we were only about fifty yards out from the harbour.

Perhaps this is why I became so fond of trains. Getting on in Calais or Boulogne was salvation. I fell in love with the sounds, the rhythm, the wild swinging as you passed from carriage to carriage. And I remember how much I liked the landscape of the North of France. And the grime and soot of the Gare du Nord in Paris. And the prospect of buying a soft drink called Pschitt! from a platform vendor. (In French it is supposed to suggest the sound made when you open a fizzy drink bottle, but to the ears of a very young English boy it sounded much more excitingly outrageous).

Since then I have been on trains on four continents and a lot of those trips have been among my best travel experiences.So I was delighted to come across an article in Salon magazine entitled "The Irresistible Appeal of the Train Movie" , which discussed the best film sequences with trains. Number one on the list was Days of Heaven, a film I liked a lot, but to be honest I didn't remember the opening sequence below.

There are nine more films discussed in this article but it didn't mention my favourite sequence, so my first reaction was: what? no Renoir! La Bête Humaine with Jean Gabin as an engine driver of a French (!!!) train running from Paris to Le Havre! I was going to comment and then I saw that there were already 78 comments from other people all insisting they knew of a better train film.

One of them suggested Dziga Vertov's 1929 film The Man with a Movie Camera saying to watch the train from 0.55 but it is a pity not to watch the clip from the start with the opening windows and the trams and people in, I think, Odessa. I particularly like the bicycle mail cart.

There is not much train in it but I was completely mesmerized by Vertov as always. Whenever I look at any of Vertov's films he just seems to carry my mind off into the screen with him. I realise I am smiling and then after ten minutes I think: what am I doing? All I seem to be doing is looking and my mind has been kidnapped. Perhaps he should have his own verb and not have to borrow Mr. Mesmer's. When I watch Vertov I am vertovised.

And here then (I put this up once before but it is worth repeating) is the opening sequence of La Bête Humaine. It really should have been on the list.

There are lots of other train rides mentioned in those 78 comments. And, if you really have nothing to do, you can also take a virtual ride on the Trans-Siberian railway using Google Maps. As you go, you can choose to listen to "rumble of wheels, Russian radio, Valerij Scshezhin (balalaika), Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace), Nikolai Gogol (Dead Souls), or Ilya If, Evgeny Petrov (The Golden Calf)". I only made it as far as the suburbs of Moscow the first time round. Then I discovered you can skip to scenic points along the route so I saw a bit of Lake Baikal. "Karymskoye village foggy morning" also sounds interesting.

Sideways Index

2010-10-22T14:23:11+02:00

Every time I add a post to Sideways Station it is like adding a card to a pile. The older posts are so far down that it is almost impossible to get to them.Therefore I decided it was time to add an index, which is on its own separate page.

CLICK HERE TO GO TO INDEX

In working on this I also discovered that some of the older posts now have broken links, which I will gradually try to fix.

The Da Vinci Scope

2010-10-16T13:55:12+02:00

Can you identify this painting? It looks very old and very damaged. It seems to represent an aqueduct.

Let's try taking a step backwards.

A city with two stubby, semi-Oriental towers, a clumsy whale, three boats, mansions which seem to be subsiding on a water front. Everything is a bit crooked and murky. It doesn't look very good, to be honest. Except for that wonderful ship on the left-hand side.

Next step.

Things are looking much more handsome. Have you guessed the painting yet?

We're miles from the city! The trees and the hand might give the painting away at this point.

Leonardo da Vinci's Annunciation (Uffizi, Florence).

Now look at the full view of the painting and see whether you can make out where those arches in the first picture were. Basically they are invisible. (And how did he manage to make that tiny ship so beautiful?) That just shows the degree of detail you can see in the photographs of works of art which are available to see here until 29 January 2011.

Not shown on that page, but also available is Botticelli's Primavera. To see that, open up one of the five paintings from the Uffizi and then you'll see small images of six paintings from the Uffizi along the bottom of the picture which appears. The second from the left is La Primavera. Click to open.

It is pretty amazing stuff. You can zoom into the cracks on the canvas, see single brush strokes and maybe identify new species of moulds.

By the way, the angel in Leonardo's Annunciation was one of the best performers in the Angelic Gymnastics Competition which I held some time ago.

Last quiz. Whose (left? right?) eye is this?