Wings of thought, etc.

 Nearly 8 years ago I wrote here

In a summer concert (probably called Music for a summer's evening  – they usually are [see here]) given by a choir I used to sing with we were singing, inter alia [or should that be aRia? {bou-boum-tsh  – Ithangyou}],  Verdi's Va Pensiero and Borodin's Polovtsian dances [victim of many a metathesis, but I digress]. They seemed quite dissimilar, until you look at the lyrics – particularly the metaphors in them:

Verdi's setting is:

(the melody known to the listeners of Classic FM as The Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves)

The words are translated ('after a fashion' as my brother once said in response to a sales assistant's 'Are you being served?'...

<autobiographical-note type="2023 addition">

It was in Squire Pianos, once at an address in the Uxbridge Road, Ealing, known to me at the time, thanks to a youthful misreading of their sign, as "Square Pianos".

</autobiographical-note>

...) in this Wikipedia article:

Fly, thought, on wings of gold;

go settle upon the slopes and the hills,

where, soft and mild, the sweet airs

of our native land smell fragrant!

Borodin's setting is:

(the melody known to the listeners of Classic FM as Stranger in Paradise)

– translated as

Fly away on wings of wind

To native lands, our native song,

To there, where we sang you freely,

Where we were so carefree with you

There, under the hot sky,

'Fly', 'wings', 'native land'  – it's all there in both of them., because the people singing, in both pieces, are expatriated slaves. Moreover, the Wikipedia translation does the correspondence no favours: Borodin's sky is 'hot', but Verdi's 'sweet airs' are 'mild' – a flamboyantly inappropriate translation of tepidi (which you'll see towards the end of the second line).

During one of the Covid lockdowns, when Wokingham Choral Society was wrestling with the unfathomable whims of the DCMS, I was singing the Verdi again:

My choir's latest virtual rehearsal was based on what is known in England as "The chorus of the Hebrew slaves" (so much better as the Coro di Schiavi Ebrei, as our copy had it...

<TYPO status="dubious" reason="old language?">
I think, though my knowledge of Italian is based on a course I did in 1992. the modern Italian would have degli in place of di. This would be yet another example of archaism in the 19th century text, like those I noted here

In his text for Va pensiero, Verdi (or his librettist if he had one ...? 

<stop-press date="June 2020">
Yes he did – the splendidly named Temistocle Solera
</stop-press >

...) does not use dove, in

Ove olezzano tepide e molli 

L'aure dolci del suolo natal

...

The ove shows that at one stage some Italic dialects followed the French path, without an initial d. 

<background>
Earlier in the same post I had written:

The word for 'where' has a chequered history in the Romance Languages. Simply put (which is all I'm up to) it is derived from UBI [='where'] or UNDE [='where from'], with or without an initial DE. So French où comes from UBI, Italian dove comes from DE + UBI and Spanish is 'etymologically pleonastic' when it asks 'Where are you from?'; '¿De dónde eres?' starts with DE DE UNDE, meaning 'from[from[from where]]]'.

And what in modern Italian would be aire is aure (reminiscent, to me, of the two possible forms in Portuguese of the word derived from CAUSA(M): Fr.chose, Italian and Spanish cosa, but Portuguese [modern Continental Portuguese, that is] either coisa or cousa – to be filed under Interesting but irrelevant I suspect). ...[2023 note: the original had an interesting note on Catalan on, but the indentation was a bit much. And my use of the term 'interesting' is admittedly relative.]

</background>

As Metternich...

<parenthesis>
"needs citation", to use Wikipedia's passive-aggressive  gibe, but my history teacher used to say it, and what's good enough for Mr Crosby is good enough for me.
</parenthesis>

...said at the time 'Italy is a geographical expression'. The name VERDI was a coded feature of political graffiti, standing for Vittorio Emanuele Rei D'Italia. (And, now I think of it, the Hebrew Slaves have an allegorical relevance: the people of that geographical expression had been "enslaved" for centuries by various imperial powers.)
</TYPO>

Those quotes around "enslaved" would be frowned on in much post-colonial analysis, but I used them at the time of writing. 

That's all for now. Lots of words to be learnt for our June concert.

b

The Trumpet Involuntary

Paul Klee talked about drawing as  'Taking a line for a walk'. In my case it's taking a thought for a walk. And as a distraction from Rishi and Jezzer's Alan Quartermain stunt (using the halving of inflation the way our hero used a lunar eclipse ...

<parenthesis>
[well. Rider Haggard did eventually correct the earlier editions, which made the eclipse solar]
</parenthesis>

...), here is today's rambling, taking as its point de départ this tweet:

It's no good clicking on this, which is  as dumb as a screengrab can be, but...

<help-is-at-hand>
That BBC News  report is here:

Public emergency alerts to be sent to all UK smartphones

and the supporting Ministry of Love video is here. 
</help-is-at-hand>

Well, we'll all sleep sounder in our beds now, except those shiftworkers who rely on Airline Mode – rather than switching the Infernal Machine off.

And the author of that tweet is not alone.

To quote the opening salvos of that report:

A siren-like alert will be sent to smartphone users across the UK next month to test a new government public warning system.

It allows the government and emergency services to send urgent messages warning the public of life-threatening situations like flooding or wildfires.

The test is expected to take place in the early evening of 23 April.

Phone users will have to acknowledge the alert before they can use other features on their devices.

A message will appear on the home screens of people's devices during the test, with vibration and a loud warning sound that will ring for about 10 seconds, even if the phone is set to silent.

Take special note of that last clause: noise-pollution is guaranteed. There is a lifeline (sanity clause?) though:

People can opt out by searching their device settings for emergency alerts and then turning off severe and extreme ones. Officials say the alerts could be life-saving, though, advising against switching them off.

So there  is  a temporary solution to the Evensong problem...

<inline-pps type="stop-press">
But not on my phone (4G, Android) Perhaps it's for iPhones only, or 5G. Or maybe it's just a sop, to make people more likely to ... Surely they wouldn't be that devious?
</inline-pps>

... short of confiscating the congregation's phones and switching them off (that is, not just 'silent').

The article goes on:

Messages would only ever come from the government or emergency services and will initially focus on the most serious weather-related events, with the ability to get a message to 90% of mobile users within the relevant area.

Terror alerts could be added to the list of potential events that would trigger a notification.

The messages will include details of the area impacted and instructions about how to respond.

Messages 'would only ever come from the government or emergency services.' Oh yeah? My money's on scammers finding a way to take advantage of those 'instructions about how to respond.'

Well, I must return to das Land ohne Musik, or at least ohne Die BBC Singers.

b

PS What is it with ex Prime Ministers and dodgy dossiers?

Update 2023.03.22.15:30 – Added <inline-pps />

Update 2023.03.24.14:35 – Added PPPS

My last line (before the PS) was premature. White knights are in the offing, the axing has been suspended, ...

<inline-p⁴s>
So their position is just ahem sub-Damoclean (didn't think I'd ever be able to reuse that one).
</inline-p⁴s>

... and the BBC Singers will be singing at the Proms. So it's possible that they'll make it beyond their hundredth birthday – though their future is not yet assured.

Update 2023.04.05.16:50 – Added <inline-p⁴s />

The Edge of Reason

Reviving an old practice, I'm going to look at how this blog has been performing in the past year, using statistics provided by Google Blogger based on Page Views. Interest in Harmless Drudgery is, to use a technical term that I haven't had to grapple with since my Nets&Comms days, bursty.

<autobiographical-note date-range="1984-2003">
In the very nearly 20 years I spent at DEC/Compaq/HP ... 

<bloody-capitalists>
(those skinflints were careful to get rid of me just before I clocked up my 20th year – when they would have had to fork out for a gold watch)
</bloody-capitalists> 

... I often met the term. A signal is bursty when it keeps changing from very busy to almost quiescent, from polygonum baldschuanicum ('mile-a-minute plant') to tumble-weed.
</autobiographical-note>

Some days it barely claws its way into double figures, but on other days it can run to several hundred. This 'burstiness' is ironed out to some extent to an average of 30-odd a day, but the monthly average can be pretty variable too:

Du côté de chez Knowles

I've been watching The Edge of Darkness (made in 1985, but repeated recently  on BBC 4) for the nth time (n = 3, I think – > 2 anyway). It's still very good (though not without flaws   –  notably the very clunky sketching of the eco-political background, by means of an extremely silly guest speaker (who appeared in the first ten minutes but never again). I imagine he may have had leather patches on his elbows, in common with most speakers in the Rent-an-Idealist-Boffin stables. And the inevitable and entirely gratuitous bit of hanky-panky with Zoe Wanamaker was buttock-clenchingly  pointless.

But for the most part it's good, and stands the test of time...

<recursive-tangent>
(which is more than can be said for the idiom 'it stands the test of time'. Why did I use it? Beats me.
</recursive-tangent>

. It deals with a detective (Bob Peck) investigating the death of his daughter and learning about her in the process (and finally coming to sympathize with her). Made in 1985, it is strangely reminiscent of – though obviously different, both in political background and sex of the main characters ...

<etymological-fallacy>
(the word protagonists sprang  guiltily to mind [and to my lasting shame and regret] , but I suppressed the urge. I try not to entertain the etymological fallacy – which decrees that words can only ever mean what their roots [etyma?] originally meant [eg decimation can only ever refer to a 10% cull] – but I find it hard, knowing an admittedly tiny amount about classical Greek tragedy [Greek O-level Best Before June 1968, but I have read at least one Euripide {sic}] to imagine a play with more than one protagonist. So I try to avoid kicking the hornets' nest. But an inventor whose prototype is a failure, and who designs and builds another should surely not feel constrained to call the second one a deuterotype.)
</etymological-fallacy>

... – the 1982 feature film Missing, which has Jack Lemon reprising (preprising?) the Bob Peck role of a politically naïve...

<etymological-fallacy take="2">
(and that's another thing, I don't insist on naïf for a man, although I'd probably use it if I ever had need of the phrase faux naïf, which I've managed without for the last seventy yea...(whoops))
</etymological-fallacy>

... bereaved father. I suppose there was something in the water in the '80s that encouraged the revisiting of this trope.

But, as good old Willy Wordsworth so eloquently put it, 'Up! Up! my friend and quit your books'.

I shall return.

b

Update 2023.06.02.10:50 – Added PS

PS And here he is. Bursty or what?  For the last week of May (except on 31st, when there were nearly 500) daily visits came to an average of about a dozen. In the first 1 and a bit days of June, they're just shy of 1200 (1198 at last count, but by the time I hit Publish who knows?). This is more than all but four of last year's totals for a full month.

But I'm missing the cricket...

Update 2023.06.10.20:10 – Added PPS

Curiouser and curiouser. The burst has continued: in the first ⅓ of June, visits to the blog have amounted to more than the total from January to May 2023:

HD Page Views in first half of 2023

Update 2023.06.15.14:30 – Added PPPS

Last time, honest. Now that the first half of June is nearly over, HD  Page View have outweighed the previous 6 months (Dec 2022-May 2023), and by close of business 'today' (I'm not sure when the day ends on the Internet; possibly 23'59" PST) it'll probably have included November 2023 as well: