Author Archive for peter

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The New World versus the Old

Published by peter on 2014-01-17 in Culture, Getting-things-done intelligence, Globalization and Matherati. 0 Comments

Propose to an Englishman any principle, or any instrument, however admirable, and you will observe that the whole effort of the English mind is directed to find a difficulty, defect, or an impossibility in it.  If you speak to him of a machine for peeling a potato, he will pronounce it impossible:  if you peel a potato with it before his eyes, he will declare it useless, because it will not slice a pineapple.  Impart the same principle or show the same machine to an American, or to one of our colonists, and you will observe that the whole effort of his mind is to find some new application of the principle, some new use for the instrument. ”

Charles Babbage, 1852, in a paper on taxation.  Cited on page 132 of Doron Swade [2000]:  The Cogwheel Brain:  Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer. London, UK:  Little, Brown and Company.

Human anxiety

Published by peter on 2014-01-17 in Fiction, Film and Religion. 0 Comments

Man, in contrast to other animals, is conscious of his own existence.  Therefore, conscious of the possibility of non-existence. Ergo, he has anxiety.”

Woman speaking at party, in Shadows, a film by John Cassavetes, 1959.

I am not convinced that man alone is conscious of his own existence, not when elephants go to specific places to die and other elephants avoid those places, nor when dogs play jokes on their owners, nor when octopodes exhibit an aesthetic sense, and nor when some birds seem to enter into relationships with humans to whom they present their offspring proudly as if to a grandparent.

All Africa within us

Published by peter on 2014-01-17 in Africa and Creativity. 0 Comments

There is all Africa and her prodigies in us; we are that bold and adventurous piece of Nature which he that studies wisely learns in a compendium what others labour at in a divided piece and endless volume  . . . There is no man alone, because every man is a microcosm and carries the whole world about him.”

Thomas Browne [1928]: The Works of Sir Thomas Browne (Editor: G. Keynes), Volume 2. London.

I stumbled across this quotation in the Menzies Library of ANU one weekend afternoon in Autumn 1980, and it led me to embark on an African adventure, spending six years in Zimbabwe and Lesotho.

Musical ignorance

Published by peter on 2014-01-12 in Culture, Music and Recent Listening. 0 Comments

You won’t find this blog doing late-breaking news or commentary.   Web-browsing, I am led to a report of an interview given by Cambridge academic George Steiner to a Spanish newspaper in 2008, in which he is quoted as saying:

“It’s very easy to sit here, in this room, and say ‘racism is horrible’,” he said from his house in Cambridge, where he has been Extraordinary Fellow at Churchill College since 1969.

“But ask me the same thing if a Jamaican family moved next door with six children and they play reggae and rock music all day. Or if an estate agent comes to my house and tells me that because a Jamaican family has moved next door the value of my property has fallen through the floor. Ask me then!”

In his essays and books, Steiner is a model of erudition.   But his knowledge of music is quite evidently lamentable.  In my experience, almost nobody likes BOTH reggae and rock music, and certainly no Jamaican I have known.  
Ignorance of reggae seems to be a special attribute of the literati.  VS Naipaul once described its beat as “pseudo-portentous”, a property which I have never been able to hear in the music itself.   I doubt he could either; he just liked the phrase and disliked the music.  And – like Charles Rosen with Mendelssohn – used his sharp verbal skills to seek to justify his prior musical tastes.  In both cases, the attempt fails. 
In response to Steiner’s ignorance, I decided to listen to the Master in a superb chilled-out remix:

  • Dreams of Freedom:  Ambient Translations of Bob Marley in Dub. Remix Production by Bill Laswell, Creative Direction by Chris Blackwell. Brooklyn, NY:  Island Records, 1997.

followed by some of the best industrial noise:

  • Shinjuku Filth.  Darrin Verhagen.  Melbourne: Iridium, 1999.

Popper vs Kuhn

Published by peter on 2014-01-12 in Argumentation and Science. 0 Comments

For Popper scientific communities are politically virtuous because they permit unfettered criticism.   A scientific community is, by (Popper’s) definition, an open society.  Kuhn had to be shouted down because he seemed to deny this claim.”

Page 920 of B. Larvor [2000]:   Review of I. Lakatos and P. Feyerabend: “For and Against Method“. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 51: 919-922.

Preaching, advising, rebuking, reviling

Published by peter on 2014-01-12 in Books, Fiction and Literature. 0 Comments

Henry James on literary criticism (in a letter to Charles Eliot Norton, March 1873):

I do  . . . believe in criticism, more than that hyperbolical speech of mine would seem to suggest.   What I meant to express was my sense of its being, latterly, vastly over-done.  There is such a flood of precepts, and so few examples – so much preaching, advising, rebuking & reviling, & so little doing: so many gentlemen sitting down to dispose in half an hour of what a few have spent months & years in producing. A single positive attempt, even with great faults, is worth generally most of the comments and amendments on it.”

Paging Joe Leeway!

Published by peter on 2014-01-11 in Film and Music. 0 Comments

leeway-joeI saw James Ivory’s film Slaves of New York soon after it appeared in 1989.  The movie contains a scene set in a nightclub (minutes 63-69) with the most superb trance music, played by a male singer/guitarist and 3 female supporting musicians:  one on percussion, one on synth, and a trumpeter.   For most of this number, the trumpeter is smoking a cigarette, not playing, until near the end, when she plays while holding her smoking cigarette.  The rhythm is a consistent, driving pattern:  ta-ta-ta-ta daa daa (eg, 4 quavers followed by two crotchets) in each bar, or variants of this, with no changes of harmony, and drone-like chants over the top.  The percussion includes a regular high-pitched woodblock (or similar).
Other than two songs by the combo of Arto Lindsay and Peter Scherer, this is the best music in the film (which apart from this music is forgettable).  Unfortunately, this track is not on the official soundtrack, and the credits at the end of the film do not identify it clearly.    The song is Mother Dearest, and the male singer (and the song’s composer) is Joe Leeway, formerly of British group, The Thompson Twins.   It is a shame that he has not released any music under his own name, and no longer seems to be working as a muso. What a great loss to music.

Go West, young man

Published by peter on 2014-01-06 in Hands, History, Literature and Poetry. 0 Comments

BlueHighways

I was headed out down a long bone-white road, straight as a string and smooth as glass and glittering and wavering in the heat and humming under the tires like a plucked nerve. I was doing seventy-five but I never seemed to catch up with the pool that seemed to be over the road just this side of the horizon. Then, after a while, the sun was in my eyes, for I was driving west. So I pulled the sun screen down and squinted and put the throttle to the floor. And kept on moving west. For West is where we all plan to go someday. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: ‘Flee, all is discovered.’ It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and see the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.
It was just where I went.”

Robert Penn Warren [1946]: All the King’s Men.  Harcourt, Brace and Company.

Transitions 2013

Published by peter on 2014-01-04 in Africa, Communism and Obituaries. 0 Comments

People who have passed on during 2013 whose life or works have influenced me:

  • Joan Child (1921-2013), Australian politician, Speaker of the House of Representatives, Commonwealth of Australia
  • Molly Clutton-Brock (1912-2013), British/Zimbabwean community organizer and anti-racism campaigner
  • Peter Geach (1916-2013), British philosopher and logician
  • Norman Geras (1943-2013), Zimbabwean/British political philosopher and blogger
  • Natalia Gorbanevskaya (1936-2013), Russian/Polish poet and political activist
  • Michael Heath (1956-2013), American USNavy SEAL and businessman
  • Fr Stan Hosie (1922-2013), Australian/American priest, teacher, swimming coach, life member of the Far North Coast Amateur Swimming Association, and co-founder of the third-world development charity Counterpart International
  • Doris Lessing (1919-2013), Zimbabwean/British writer and political activist
  • John Makumbe (1949-2013), Zimbabwean political scientist and democracy activist
  • Nelson Mandela (1918-2013), South African freedom fighter and political leader
  • Teresa Toranska (1944-2013), Polish journalist and writer.

Last year’s post is here.

Dissident graffiti in Czechoslovakia

Published by peter on 2014-01-03 in Art, Communism and Politics. 0 Comments

MustekStationPrague
In August 1984, I saw a display of cartoons by Jan Bernat, at the Mustek Metro Station in Prague, CSSR.   One cartoon showed a crowd of Western Europeans of various nationalities saying “No”, “Non”, “Nien”, etc, to nuclear weapons, with Ronald Reagan in front of them all and holding a placard saying “YES.”
However, some graffitist had scribbled over Reagan’s “YES” and written “NO.”