Bayan time

Further to "You'll like this, it has buttons": the bayan arrived several days back. Being very busy (tax deadline again, and lots of web work to do ... sorry, guys) I swore I wouldn't spend time trying it out until I'd cleared my desk adequately, but once I'd opened the huge padded package from Ukraine with "НЕ бросать" (Russian: "DO NOT drop/throw") all over it, it was inevitable I'd get sidetracked. So, brief impressions.

It's a secondhand Орфей (Orfei = Orpheus) bayan - the Russian flavour of chromatic button accordion - with 120-button stradella left-hand keyboard and a five-row 85-button right-hand keyboard. It's a chunky 10kg (nearly 2 stone) instrument as used by professional bands such as the Ukrainian folk rock band Тік (above), with a very solid clarinet-like tone, with lots of bass (it makes my small piano accordion sound positively shrill and tinny). Oh, and it has a nice green casing.

Although I'd read around the topic as much as possible, moving to button-key was still very much a leap of faith after decades of playing a piano accordion - and even more so to go for a B-system bayan, where I'm likely to be on my own over learning (the reasons were partly affordability, partly liking the overall tone, and partly feeling indefinably simpatico with the instrument). But after a week, I can safely say I'm sorry I didn't make the change years ago.  The left-hand needs only minor acclimatisation, since I'm used to the stradella layout. As to the right-hand: I find the keyboard layout - shown here at Blumberg's Music Theory Cipher - both conceptually elegant and practical. As Blumberg puts it, it's an "isomorphic instrument" - every note has the same relationship to those adjacent (see basics), meaning playing scales in all keys uses the same fingering, as does chords.  Any scale is playable on three rows, but the five rows offer duplicate buttons playing the same note, which often offer easier alternate fingerings (for instance, a move to an adjacent key rather than a jump). The keyboard is also highly compressed compared to piano format: you can easily play two-octave chords. A downside, however, is that the non-linear layout makes long glissandos rather more difficult (Nydana's Accordion Resources has a good analysis comparing the B and C systems).

All of that is readable anywhere; but an aspect I haven't seen mentioned is that I'm finding it vastly easier to learn tunes on the Orfei than on a piano keyboard.  I tend to think visually, and find the 2D button layout gives tunes a "shape" - they become a path following locations on a surface - that's rapidly memorable. Another neat, and encouraging, observation is that there seems to be a kind of synergy: after a week exploring the bayan, I've noticed an improvement in my piano accordion technique. So far, it looks altogether an interesting project for 2011.

(There are some scary examples on YouTube of what can be done on the five-row bayan: see Lidia Kaminska and Alexander Dmitriev. Ouch).

- Ray

"You'll like this, it has buttons"

Seeing the above clip, I couldn't help thinking of Part 7 of Sydney Padua's funny and erudite steampunk comic strip Lovelace and Babbage vs The Organist (now complete - check it out). Inspired by Charles Babbage's hatred of street musicians, it pits the crimefighting pair against a fiendish musical plot, and at one point Charles Babbage is tormented by Charles Wheatstone with an English Concertina:

Wheatstone: "Anyways, look, you'll like this, it has buttons!"
Babbage: "FIENDISH!"

Anyway, I'd never heard of the accordina before, probably because it's such a niche instrument. Essentially a mouth-blown equivalent of the right-hand section of a three-row button-key chromatic accordion, it was invented and made around 60-70 years ago by André Borel in Paris. It wasn't wildly popular, and manufacturing stopped in the 1970s. But it recently experienced a revival on the French jazz circuit via exponents such as Francis Jauvin and Richard Galliano, and a company in the South of France headed by Marcel Dreux is manufacturing new instruments (not cheap - €1250, somewhat over £1000).

Dreux's Accordinas.com, a French/English site, is a good roundup of the accordina and its history. Another French site, la boite d'accordéon, spreads the topic somewhat wider to accordéons à vent (wind accordions) in general, with the history of the accordina and its precursors. Pat Missin's harmonica website goes into detail on many of these such as the harmonicor, Hohnerette and Psallmelodikon (some of these things look straight out of Jack Vance's SF story The Moon Moth - see Musical miscellany). This brings us full circle to Wheatstone, since probably the earliest modern button-keyed free reed instrument is another one he invented, the Symphonium.

Addendum: I've just ordered a new accordion. For the past thirty years I've played a 24-bass piano accordion, which is quite nice - lightweight and adequately versatile - for general busking-style playing. But lately I've practiced more intensively and become aware of its limitations, so decided to upgrade. I opted for a secondhand bayan - the Russian-style chromatic button accordion. I'm aware that its "B system" note layout has a reputation for difficulty; but I like the tone of these instruments a lot, and fancied a challenge. Awaiting arrival now.

- Ray

Isinglass curtains

A conversation in the Globe a couple of days ago turned from a discussion of beer production (for reasons that'll became apparent) to a Rodgers and Hammerstein song. The question arising: what are the "isinglass curtains" mentioned in the Oklahama! song embedded above?

With isinglass curtains you can roll right down,
In case there's a change in the weather.
- "Surrey with The Fringe on Top", Oklahama!, Rodgers and Hammerstein

The object in question is evidently the storm top or storm curtain that attached to the roof of carriages (this is a surrey) and early cars as rainproofing. This is a relatively well-trodden topic, but it's worth retracking as an example of the confusion that can arise if you try to brain out historical/etymological stories purely from the words present (at the level of assuming "plum pudding" contains plums). 

The phrase "isinglass curtains" is actually an anachronism anyway. Oklahoma! is set in 1906, but  a look at Google Books Ngram Viewer for isinglass curtains, and at Google Books, finds the earliest print occurrence to be 1927, after which the term was used for the storm curtains of early popular models of motor vehicle. The explanation for this at least is that the 1943 Oklahoma! was based on a play by Lynn Riggs, the 1931, Green Grow the Lilacs, and Hammerstein's adaptation of the play text altered the character Curly's words. In the play he refers to isinglass windows:

And this yere rig has got four fine side-curtains, case of a rain. And isinglass winders to look out of!
- The Cherokee night and other plays, Lynn Riggs, University of Oklahoma Press, 2003

As to "isinglass", it has two main meanings. One is a clear gelatine derived from fish swim-bladders, used in fining of beer and wine. Historically, it was a versatile and expensive commercial product, used as a gum, a food gelling agent, as the sticking medium for surgical plasters, as stiffener for cloth, as a sealant for preserving eggs 1, and for making mock pearls. The classic source was Russian: the swim-bladder of the "Huso", aka the Isinglass Fish aka the beluga or cavier sturgeon. The etymology of the word "isinglass" isn't 100% certain, but the most likely (according to the OED) is derivation from Dutch "huisenblas" = sturgeon bladder.

The other main meaning of "isinglass": the transparent variety - otherwise called muscovite - of the mineral mica. In some parts of world, notably Russia (hence the name muscovite - i.e. pertaining to Moscow), it's found in large enough sheets to make small window panes, so it was historically used for applications where tough, slightly flexible, heat-resistant, transparent material was needed, such as furnace or lantern windows. Why it's also called "isinglass" isn't clear, but the OED says "from its resembling in appearance some kinds of [the gelatine] isinglass".

Neither of these sound promising curtain material, and the twin meanings are already a recipe for confusion. Some sources opt for the first, despite the unlikeliness of making rain curtains or windows from a water-soluble gelatine:

In the stove window trade, mica acquired the name isinglass, after its resemblance to a gelatin made from fish bladders that was made into windows for carriages and early cars ...
- Roadside geology of Maine, Dabney W. Caldwell, 1998

Some sources mistakenly conflate the two ...

Sturgeon — regarded as a trash fish until about 1870, prized thereafter as sources of smoked meat, oil and the isinglass that was once used as windows in stoves and lanterns ...
- Biologists tackle fishery questions, Milwaukee Journal, March 24, 1991

Isinglass is a mica or clear gelatin made from certain fish bladders, principally the bladders of sturgeon. Isinglass was once used in glues and jellies, as well as (get this) the manufacture of drop-windows on buggies.
- Isinglass: this wordsmith correct in use of language, Richmond Times, Sep 16, 1994

... but the predominant assumption is that "isinglass curtains" refer to curtains with inserts of mica, and some sources explicitly confirm this, such as

... there were the Isinglass curtains — sheets of transparent mica sewn into black leatherette frames ...
- Saturday Review, Volume 50, 1967

But is any of this terminology reliable? A 1937 Q&A in Hospitals: the journal of the American Hospital Association, mentions that the "isinglass windows" of an oxygen tent were actually cellulose acetate, and before that Edwin E Slosson summed up the terminological lag in the area of these substances:

Fish glue films were called isinglass as though they were a kind of glass. When mica took its place it too was called isinglass, even in stove windows, and what is now called mica is mostly celluloid, and what is called celluloid, may be something else. Language lingers and lags behind the advance of science.
- The human side of chemistry, Edwin E Slosson, Am. Journ. Pharm, Nov 1922

This process continues. "isinglass curtains" and "isinglass windows" are names still used for the polymer canopies of powerboats and yachts.

Ultimately the best approach to finding what these isinglass curtains/windows seems to be to avoid the anecdotal, and look in contemporary hardware publications, which have technical descriptions of vehicles. The majority of hits (see "side curtains" celluloid) solidly confirm the existence of vehicle side curtains with celluloid windows; a significant minority (see "side curtains" mica) refer to mica windows. Given the stiffness of mica, however, I'm inclined to think that an isinglass (probably sic) curtain that "rolls" must refer to one of celluloid or of canvas with a celluloid light.  But I guess

With curtains of either celluloid por canvas with celluloid (or possibly mica) curtains you can roll right down,
In case there's a change in the weather

lacks a certain something, and is reminiscent of Charles Babbage's comment on Tennyson's The Vision of Sin.

Another appearance of isinglass curtains in literature: the poem Parent by Josephine Miles.

Letting down the isinglass curtains
Between the wet rain and the back seat
Where new plaster flattened me, my father said,
Wait here. I will get you the sherbet
Of your eight-year-old dreams.
There were no drive-ins then.
The rain roared. Don't go away,
I said to him? He said to me.

Her poetry is worth checking out: minimal yet poignant, often stream-of-consciousness. Parent comes from the 1979 autobiographical collection Coming to Terms, which initially tells of her childhood when she had to endure a full-body plaster cast (hence the "new plaster flattened me") due to disabling arthritis (see Josephine Miles: mentor to a revolution). The isinglass curtains in this case, as told in another poem in the collection, Doll, in the family's Mitchell.

1. Although I suspect many of the references are confusing it with the far more widespread use of water glass, a syrupy solution of sodium silicate, for this purpose.

- Ray

After the Crash

I've updated this post and shifted it to November 2012 - see Muriel ... and After the Crash - to maintain continuity with other Maxwell Gray readings.

- Ray

Troka

I very much like folk-classical fusion (see Methera and Musical miscellany, previously), and the Finnish musical circuit is especially rich in that area. Just encountered: Troka, an award-winning band whose reputation has spread to the USA (they appeared on Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion radio show). The line-up is Matti Mäkelä (fiddle), Antti Järvelä (double bass), Johanna Juhola (accordion), Ville Ojanen (fiddle, viola and mandolin) and Timo Alakotila (harmonium and piano). From various sleeve notes:

Troka have been praised for their ability to bring a contemporary feel to folk music. Their sound is influenced by both the classical string quartet and traditional ensemble techniques.

The embedded video above, Kesäillan Tvist (Summer Night Twist), is my favourite so far, with its upbeat main section (hoedown-like, but with an edge of classical/European) framed by a sinister-fairground strings-accordion intro and outro 1, alongside Ängskärsmenuett (Ängskär Minuet), a charming folk/classical/ambient original composition by Timo Alakotila, and Lellupuo-Iikoon Friioomarssi (Iiko's Courtship March). There are more samples at the Troka MySpace page (though I find it a bit tetchy about loading).

1. PS: Oh, damn! That accordion outro is so catchy, it's turned into an earworm.

- Ray

Crossing the bar

The Lympstone-based Wayland Wordsmith blog ("discourser on the Exe estuary") wrote yesterday of "Going out over" [the bar], a rite of passage for Lympstone boys described in Devon Life in 1979 by Cyril G Tuckfield:

"Victorian blogger" in Sidmouth

I just posted to the Devon History Society blog a news item Peter Orlando Hutchinson: "Victorian 'blogger" arising from Friday's Western Morning News piece about the cultural and historical landscape project In the Footsteps of Peter Orlando Hutchinson.

This Winchester-born polymath spent most of his adult life in Sidmouth, and meticulously documented the neighbouring landscape, as in the diary entry here with its nice sketch of the Ladram Bay coastline from High Peak on 31 December 1877. As a great fan of the East Devon coast, I look forward to seeing one of the projects planned end results, a fully searchable electronic document of the diaries.

A Sidmouth Herald article last year - Sidmouth antiquary’s diaries explored - quotes from Catherine Linehan's biography Peter Orlando Hutchinson of Sidmouth, Devon 1810-1897 describing what sounds an enviable if geeky lifestyle financed, as mentioned in the paper Peter Orlando Hutchinson (1810-1897) and the Geology of Sidmouth, by "a modest private income":

Among his many activities, Peter spent whole days on foot or by carriage in exploring the neighbourhood. A frequent companion was Mr N S Heineken 1, a retired Unitarian Minister. With a pocketful of sandwiches, or a hamper of provisions and tools, they visited, measured, sketched and mapped the hillforts, earthworks, tumuli, churches and ancient monuments within a 20 mile radius.

This Branscombe Project biographical play - Orlando Hutchinson in Branscombe - gives an informal run-down of his life and interests.

Some of Hutchinson's works are available online: The Geology of Sidmouth and of South-eastern Devon (1843); Chronicles of Gretna Green (1844: vol 1, vol 2) - the best bit of this completist parish history is the pi final chapter, Advice to young ladies, warning against elopement; and The diary and letters of His Excellency Thomas Hutchinson : captain-general and governor-in-chief of his late Majesty's province of Massachusetts Bay in North America (1883) - this Thomas Hutchinson, his great-grandfather; along with various papers such as his Dissertation on the site of Moridunum (The Gentleman's Magazine, February 1849).

He also wrote some fiction, as in these rather laboured 1845 Metropolitan magazine pieces about imagined dialogues between statues:  No. I ("The Statue of Charles the First, at Charing Cross, to a large block of marble in Wyatt's Yard, at Paddington"), No. II ("Shakspere's Statue in Poet's Corner to Thorwaldsen's Statue of Lord Byron in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge"), No. III ("Queen Elizabeth at the Royal Exchange, to James the First at Temple Bar"); No. IV ("Dr. Johnson's Statue by Bacon, in St. Paul's Cathedral, to Sir Walter Scott's Bust by Chantry"); and No. V ("George the Third's Statue in Cockspur Street, by Wyatt, to George Washington's Statue in the State House, Boston, Massachusetts, by Chantry").

According to the above bio-play, he self-published a novel, Branscombe Cliffs, which would be interesting to see (I fear the worst: given POH's style and interests, I suspect it could be like Brief Encounter written by a trainspotter).

1. Google Books finds him to be a Unitarian minister into astronomy, photography and mechanics.

- Ray

RHD Barham and Dawlish

Wayland Wordsmith just asked, in a post about bathing machines in Budleigh Salterton, about the source of a quotation - describing the red cliffs of East Devon as being like "anchovy sauce spread upon toast".- attributed in a 1969 Devon Life article to "a West country poet".

A search on the phrase finds the author to be one RHD Barham. This is not the clergyman and author Richard Harris Barham, 1788–1845 (aka Thomas Ingoldsby, author of the classic Ingoldsby Legends) but his son, the Reverend Richard Harris Dalton Barham, who evidently inherited the talent for literate doggerel. As this article explains - The Ingoldsby Legends, Ingoldsby Country & Tappington Hall - the Barhams were a Kent family and RHD Barham the rector of Lolworth, Cambridgeshire - but the Devon connection is that RHD lived in Dawlish from 1863, and died there in 1886.

The "anchovy sauce" line comes from his poem The Monk of Haldon: A Legend of South Devon (see page 488, Temple Bar: A London Magazine, Volume 20, 1867), a picaresque yarn inspired by the remains of a chapel near Dawlish. It tells how the chapel and the associated holy well are tended by a succession of monks until a rough and sinister one, Friar John, takes over the post. A pirate, Sailor Jack, visits him one evening, and over a drinking session boasts about his loot. Friar John attempts to murder him, but Jack chokes him and throws him into the well. On later investigation, however, two corpses are found in the well, neither of them Friar John. The investigators find a cache of loot nearby, and cover up the well; Sailor Jack never encounters good fortune again. The reader is advised that the well is findable, but "to let well alone".

The relevant lines, a nice landscape description, are:

To the right, under Haldon,
Lie Teignmouth and Shaldon,
With hamlets, whose names to recount I'm not called on:
Between them the Teign rolls her eddying flood,
The stream looking tinted and turbid with blood;
But it's only the rain that has stirred up the mud!
It's certainly odd that this part of the coast,
While neighbouring Dorset gleams white as a ghost,
Should look like anchovy sauce spread upon toast!
We need not now pause
To find out the cause
Of this variation in natural laws;
But Mr. Pengelly
Can easily tell ye,—
(I think, by the way, that the gentleman said,
'Twas iron or manganese made it so red).

This geological flavour 1 is explicable by RHD Barham's interests:

Richard Harris Dalton Barham, son and biographer of the author of the "Ingoldsby Legends," was born at Westwell, Kent, in the month of October, 1815. He was educated at St. Paul's School and Oxford University, and followed his father, both in the choice of a profession, and as a contributor of mock-heroic stories in verse to Bentley's Magazine. Shortly after leaving Oxford he was presented with the living of Lolworth, near Cambridge, where he resided, until, in 1863, delicate health compelled him to seek a warmer climate, and he retired to Dawlish, where he pursued geological studies.
- page 365, The Poets and Poetry of the Nineteenth Century, Alfred H Miles, 1905 (Internet Archive poetspoetryofnin10mile)

His obituary in The Hampshire Advertiser on May 8th 1886 says that he spent days in searching the cliffs and quarries for fossil madrepores, a collection of which he presented to the town of Dawlish. Returning to the Miles book:

He published, besides the "Life and Letters" of his father (1870), "The Life and Remains" of Theodore Hook (1849), and a novel entitled "A Rubber of Life," [as Dalton Ingoldsby] which was afterwards dramatized for a London Theatre. "The Temptations of St. Anthony" ... is the best known and perhaps the best written of his verse tales, though, like some of his father's "Legends," it suffers from that facility of composition which so often proves fatal to felicity of style. In verse of this class it is so easy to be slovenly that one has frequently to regret spray-footed lines and hump-backed cadences, the more to be deplored that they are found in close proximity to stanzas wholly regular.
...
The Rev. R. H. Dalton Barham died at Dawlish on the 28th of April, 1886.
- Ibid.

Addendum: I've followed the thread further at the Devon History Society weblog, concerning an episode in the last year of Barham's life, when he gave evidence in the investigation of a fatal accident at a Dawlish beach. See 1885: Dawlish "death trap".

Addendum 2: see also Angela Williams's Literary Places site, which has two posts about Barham: R. H. D. Barham at Dawlish tells of Angela's initally unsuccessful search for his grave at St Gregory's churchyard; and R. H. D. Barham’s grave visits its real location (the guidebook being wrong) in Dawlish cemetery.

1. Though admittedly with a geological error: the part of the coast that "gleams white as a ghost" visible from Dawlish is actually still in Devon. It's the Cretaceous chalk cliffs of Beer Head.

- Ray

Murmuration

A starling murmuration above the Exe reed beds, Topsham

Murmuration of Starlings

Thousands of voices in a winged parliament, apparently unanimous; they consent together, these flocks of birds. They mount as with one heart and will and purpose, which may be said to be a parable of example to Britain in these urgent days. A whole multitude of starlings will rise into the sky with a surprise of instinctive discipline; they may divide into three or four companies which wheel about only to unite with perfect timing to continue the flight, a thrilling sight to see.

This nice quote comes, surprisingly, as part of advertising copy for Bestobell asbestos products in The Industrial Chemist, November 1945 (the starlings are used as a metaphor for teamwork).

We of Bell's are rather proud of a far-flung organisation based on the United Kingdom and extending through the alphabet from Australia and Argentina to West Africa, from China to Peru as the saying is. (It is a live and active marketing organisation which is ready to be of service to other manufacturers.) But we are very proud of the fact that in every part of the organisation a unanimity of zeal in team-work speeds to serve our multitudinous customers, bringing to them in engineering problems large and small the resources of our skill, experience and research. Starlings have their place in the economy of nature; Bell's in the well-being, efficiency and productivity of industry.

Such coordination seemingly doesn't always work. The excellent Lol Manuscripts blog just annotated a 1622 tract, The Wonderfull Battell of Starelings, reporting how in 1621 in Cork, Ireland, masses of dead and maimed starlings fell from the sky - a spot of Forteana explicable, as far as I can tell, by a collective navigation error leading to two starling flocks crashing head-on.

Starlings exhibit one of the best-known examples of flocking phenomena, when massed animals appear to act as a coherent unit due entirely to nearest-neighbour interactions. (We regularly see these starling flocks over the marshes by the River Exe opposite Topsham). The general dynamics are quite well understood (particularly via the work of Craig Reynolds on "boids" simulations), but the specifics for starlings were recently analysed in more detail by the European STARFLAG (Starlings in Flight) project:

Current computer models assume that each bird interacts with all birds within a certain distance. But the new observations, however, show that each bird keeps under control a fixed number of neighbours - seven other starlings - irrespective of their distance, which is the secret of how they stick together.

"This is very robust and works wherever your neighbours are," says Andrea Cavagna of Italy’s National Institute for the Physics of Matter.

A flock under predator attack may expand dramatically, but birds can regroup very quickly because the cohesion does not depend on the physical distance among starlings, but rather on their ability to interact with a fixed number of neighbours.

- Study of starling formations points way for swarming robots, Roger Highfield, Science News, The Telegraph, 29 Jan 2008

Technical details aside, "murmuration" is an interesting word. From the OED:

1. a. The action of murmuring; the continuous utterance of low, barely audible sounds; complaining, grumbling; an instance of this. Now chiefly literary.
b. Sc. Rumouring; the action of spreading a rumour or rumours. Obs.

2. A flock (of starlings).
One of many alleged group terms found in late Middle English glossarial sources, but not otherwise substantiated.

- Oxford English Dictionary

The reason for the OED's use of "alleged" is elaborated in a landmark paper, Proper Terms: An attempt at a rational explanation of the meanings of the Collection of Phrases in "The Book of St Albans," 1486, entitled "The Compaynys of beestys and fowlys" and similar lists., John Hodgkin, Transactions of the Philological Society 1907-1910 Part III, pp 1 - 187, Kegan, Paul, Trench & Trübner & Co, Ltd, London, 1909.

Hodgkin says of these collective nouns a.k.a. company terms:

In the year 1486 there was printed at St. Albans an extremely interesting book, which for want of any specific title is generally known as " The Book of St. Albans." In that portion in which the Treatise on Hunting is contained there occurs a list which is headed "The Compaynys of beestys and fowlys," and consists of a strange and motley collection of queer expressions, which at first sight are not easily explicable. On reference to such of these terms as are contained in the portions already issued of that monumental work, the New English Dictionary, it is found that where the explanations are given they are generally stated to be 'technical,' ' fanciful,' or 'alleged' terms for a 'company' of this or that, and we are told that these were " artificial terms invented in the fifteenth century as distinctive collectives referring to particular animals or classes of persons"; and it was in order to get at the root of the matter, and settle it once and for all, that the present investigation was undertaken, and I hope to be able to show from the evidence collected that the majority of these arc not company terms, and that there are no solid grounds for supposing them to be such.

This Hodgkin proceeds to do, and finds various errors in attribution: miscopying; texts meant to illustrate other turns of phrase than collectives; terms not substantiated in contemporary dictionaries; and so on. In the case of "murmuration", it appears that its inclusion in sources - "a murmuracion of stares" - was actually intended to list the word for the noise starlings make, not a collective noun for the birds themselves. Hodgkin concludes by describing the process of copying ...

...
6. That Skinner misunderstood the St. Albans list, imagining that all the phrases contained in it were intended to be company terms, and that in consequence he misinterpreted it; that Handle Holme, followed by Halliwell, still further extended this idea.

7. That Skinner's attempted explanations and definitions are wrong, with the exception of a few accepted company terms, and that the meanings he gives, and in some instances the derivations, are irrational.

The definitions of Skinner and Halliwell seem to have been followed by the [New English Dictionary] which has extended considerably the number of phrases in "The Hors, Shepe, and Ghoos" and "The Book of St. Albans" lists to be interpreted as company terms.

... that enshrined it as a collective. Over most of the word's history, however, there's little evidence of its practical use as one. A glance at Google Books N-gram Viewer and clicking through to book search (see here) finds that in the 19th century the majority of uses of "murmuration" were in the first OED meaning - grumbling/complaining - and that "murmuration of starlings" chiefly occurs in boilerplate repetition of lists of collectives. It's only in the 20th century that it starts making a live appearance in mainstream language, perhaps kicked off by WH Auden.

Inspire them with such a longing as will make his thought
Alive like patterns a murmuration of starlings
Rising in joy over wolds unwittingly weave;
- Look, Stranger!, WH Auden, 1936

If he came, so must she; but she was bored stiff by the whole performance; she felt, and looked, as alien as a bird of paradise in a murmuration of starlings.
- Miss Buncle's book, Dorothy Emily Stevenson, 1937

The clearing ended where a derelict stone building, roofless and black with spreading moss, held back a grove of leafless elms, where a murmuration of starlings was gathered.
- Titus Groan, Mervyn Peake, 1946

The new owners watched as a murmuration of starlings swooped and chattered in the fading sky;
- Mr. Blandings builds his dream house, Eric Hodgins, 1946

For once, the sun took her by surprise. A murmuration of starlings swept up from a wind-swept meadow swinging and shining with morning.
- A Clouded Star, Anne Parrish, 1948

They were brief and simple: Sussex, Oxford, London; birds, water meadows, a London Square where a murmuration of starlings arrived every evening to take possession of the plane trees;
- The greyhound in the leash, Joyce Mary Horner, 1949

Now, "murmuration" makes regular appearance in nature news stories as a practical collective name for the spectacular clouds of starlings seen at dusk before they roost for the night; see, variously, Murmuration of starlings signals that winter is here, Starlings' pier show on display, The mathematics of murmurating starlings, and so on. It's a nice word, and I hope it thrives. But to put in context, "murmuration of starlings" is, and always has been, used considerably less than the more mundane phrase "flock of starlings" (see Google Books N-gram Viewer again).

- Ray

Traveller's Rest

I was delighted to find a moment ago that the Google Books preview for the 2003 SF anthology The Caltraps of Time (David I Masson, Wildside Press LLC) contains in full one of the SF stories I find most memorable, Traveller's Rest.

As the Independent obituary shows, Masson was an interesting character; like many of the best SF writers, he didn't have a 'techie' background. He was an eminent specialist librarian, a curator of rare books.

Traveller's Rest, set on an alternate Earth where time varies with latitude, could be viewed 'straight' as a tragic story about a soldier living on a world with different rules of physics, or as an allegory for the perception of time of a soldier moving between frenetic combat and the calm of home. Either way, it's excellent.

See Traveller's Rest.

- Ray