Author Archive for peter

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Film: The New World

Published by peter on 2009-12-23 in Film, Heroes, History and Reviews. Closed

I am a great fan of the films of Terence Malick, and so I was delighted to read John Patterson’s recent article proclaiming Malick’s The New World as the single film masterpiece of the decade just ending.

It may seem like an exaggeration, but with The New World cinema has reached its culmination, its apotheosis. It is both ancient and modern, cinema at its purest and most organic, its simplest and most refined, made with much the same tools as were available in the infancy of the form a century ago to the Lumières, to Griffith and Murnau. Barring a few adjustments for modernity – colour, sound, developments in editing, a hyper-cine-literate audience – it could conceivably have been made 80 years ago (like Murnau and Flaherty’s Tabu). This is why, I believe, when all the middlebrow Oscar-dross of our time has eroded away to its constituent molecules of celluloid, The New World will stand tall, isolated and magnificent, like Kubrick’s black monolith. Anything else that survives from now till then will by comparison probably resemble 2001’s grunting apes. To quote, simultaneously, Godard’s Pierrot le Fou and primitivist auteur Sam Fuller – whose 1957 western Run of the Arrow is a sort of thematic inbred bastard cousin of The New World – Malick is seeking “in a word: emotion!”
Continue reading ‘Film: The New World’

Bridget Riley on drawing as thinking

Published by peter on 2009-12-21 in Art, Creativity and Hands. Closed

Ealier, I quoted Marion Milner on the zen of sunday-painting.   The British artist, Bridget Riley, writing for a catalog that accompanied a retrospective of her work presented recently at the Walker Gallery in Liverpool, UK, talks about the non-propositional thinking involved in drawing and painting, particularly during the exploration that she undertakes as she begins each new work.

For me, drawing is an inquiry, a way of finding out – the first thing that I discover is that I do not know. This is alarming even to the point of momentary panic. Only experience reassures me that this encounter with my own ignorance – with the unknown – is my chosen and particular task, and provided I can make the required effort the rewards may reach the unimaginable. It is as though there is an eye at the end of my pencil, which tries, independently of my personal general-purpose eye, to penetrate a kind of obscuring veil or thickness. To break down this thickness, this deadening opacity, to elicit some particle of clarity or insight, is what I want to do.

The strange thing is that the information I am looking for is, of course, there all the time and as present to one’s naked eye, so to speak, as it ever will be. But to get the essentials down there on my sheet of paper so that I can recover and see again what I have just seen, that is what I have to push towards. What it amounts to is that while drawing I am watching and simultaneously recording myself looking, discovering things that on the one hand are staring me in the face and on the other I have not yet really seen. It is this effort ‘to clarify’ that makes drawing particularly useful and it is in this way that I assimilate experience and find new ground. (p. 15)

. . .
You cannot deal with thought directly outside practice as a painter: ‘doing’ is essential in order to find out what form your thought takes. The ‘new curves’ that I started in 1998 grew directly out of paintings such as Shimmered Shade. The latent visual arcs and sweeping movements came to the fore in Painting with Verticals 1 (2006) and Red with Red 1 (2007). Retaining the diagonals and verticals of the earlier group of paintings, I introduced a curve that connected to the existing structure. This is the underpinning of my new curvilinear work. The vertical is still there, acting like a break in the movement across the canvas. The cut collage pieces define the various contours that arise from combining and recombining the slender curve with its diagonal accents. This has developed into a layering technique that allows me to weave forms and colours together in a supple plastic space. I have reduced the number of colours and increased the scale of the imagery. Would it be possible to once again build up a repertoire of these invented forms, a repertoire that might gradually acquire sufficient momentum to put itself at risk, to precipitate its own kind of hazard? It is only through the experience of working that answers may be discovered within the inner logic of an invented reality such as the art of painting.” (p. 18)

References:
The image is Red with Red by Bridget Riley, 2007.
Bridget Riley [2009]: Work.  pp. 15-18 of:   Michael Bracewell and Bridget Riley [2009]: Bridget Riley Flashback.  London, UK:  Hayward Publishing.
This essay was republished in The London Review of Books (31 (19): 20-21, 8 October 2009) and is online here.

Political activists of renown

Published by peter on 2009-12-20 in Africa, Heroes, History and Politics. Closed

Recently, I have listed the teachers and writers who have influenced me, along with the managers whom I admire.  I now list the politicians and political activists whom I admire.  Some of these led conventional political careers, others were community organizers or single-issue advocates, and yet others were spies, or were accused of being such.

Edmund Campion, Robert Persons, Robert Southwell, Thomas Aikenhead, Tom Paine, Abe Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Solomon Plaatje, Franklin Roosevelt, Ted Theodore, John Curtin, Doc Evatt, Richard Sorge, Imre Nagy, Zhou Enlai, Milada Horakova, Bram Fischer, Salvador Allende Gossens, Lyndon Johnson, Donal Lamont, Rudolf Margolius, Gough Whitlam, Helen Suzman, Andrei Sakharov, Alexander Dubcek, Nelson Mandela, Zhao Ziyang, Martin Luther King Jr, Zdenek Mlynar, Mikhail Gorbachev, Vaclav Havel, Michael Schneider, Bella Subbotovskaya, Paul Keating, Vadim Delone, Jes Albert Möller, Barack Obama and Rory Stewart.

Australia (5), Czechoslovakia (5), and South Africa (5) have produced more than their per capita share of political heroes, it would seem, but the distribution no doubt reflects my reading and interests.  Of course, it hardly needs to be said that I do not necessarily agree with any or all the views these people have expressed or hold, nor necessarily support all their actions.

Poem: Pas de deux for Lovers

Published by peter on 2009-12-18 in Poetry. Closed

While quoting poetry by Michael Dransfield, here is another of his fine poems, along with Caspar David Friedrich’s painting, Cape Arkona at Sunrise (1803):

“Pas de deux for Lovers”
To wake
and go
would be so simple.
Morning ought not
to be complex.
The sun is a seed
cast at dawn into the long
furrow of history.
Yet
how the
first light
makes gold her hair
upon my arm.
How then
shall I leave,
and where away to go. Day
is so deep already with involvement.

Reference:
Thomas W. Shapcott (Editor) [1970]:  Australian Poetry Now. Melbourne, Australia:  Sun Books.

Research funding myopia

Published by peter on 2009-12-16 in Argumentation, Computer Science, Computer technology, Computing-as-interaction and Science. Closed

The British Government, through its higher education funding council, is currently considering the use of socio-economic impact factors when deciding the relative rankings of university departments in terms of their research quality, the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), held about every five years.   These impact factors are intended to measure the social or economic impact of research activities in the period of the RAE (ie, within 5 years). Since the RAE is used to allocate funds for research infrastructure to British universities these impact factors, if implemented, will thus indirectly decide which research groups and which research will be funded.    Some academic reactions to these proposals are here and here.
From the perspective of the national economy and technological progress, these proposals are extremely misguided, and should be opposed by us all.    They demonstrate a profound ignorance of where important ideas come from, of when and where and how they are applied, and of where they end up.  In particular, they demonstrate great ignorance of the multi-disciplinary nature of most socio-economically-impactful research.
One example will demonstrate this vividly.  As more human activities move online, more tasks can be automated or semi-automated.    To enable this, autonomous computers and other machines need to be able to communicate with one using shared languages and protocols, and thus much research effort in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence these last three decades has focused on designing languages and protocols for computer-to-computer communications.  These protocols are used in various computer systems already and are likely to be used in future-generation mobile communications and e-commerce systems.
Despite its deep technological nature, research in this area draws fundamentally on past research and ideas from the Humanities, including:

  • Speech Act Theory in the Philosophy of Language (ideas due originally to Adolf Reinach 1913, John Austin 1955, John Searle 1969 and Jurgen Habermas 1981, among others)
  • Formal Logic (George Boole 1854, Clarence Lewis 1910, Ludwig Wittgenstein 1922, Alfred Tarski 1933, Saul Kripke 1959, Jaakko Hintikka 1962, etc), and
  • Argumentation Theory (Aristotle c. 350 BC, Stephen Toulmin 1958, Charles Hamblin 1970, etc).

Assessment of the impacts of research over five years is laughable when Aristotle’s work on rhetoric has taken 2300 years to find technological application.   Even Boole’s algebra took 84 years from its creation to its application in the design of electronic circuits (by Claude Shannon in 1938).  None of the humanities scholars responsible were doing their research to promote technologies for computer interaction or to support e-commerce, and most would not have even understood what these terms mean.  Of the people I have listed, only John Searle (who contributed to the theory of AI), and Charles Hamblin (who created one of the first computer languages, GEORGE, and who made major contributions to the architecture of early computers, including invention of the memory stack), had any direct connection to computing.   Only Hamblin was afforded an obituary by a computer journal (Allen 1985).
None of the applications of these ideas to computer science were predicted, or even predictable.  If we do not fund pure research across all academic disciplines without regard to its potential socio-economic impacts, we risk destroying the very source of the ideas upon which our modern society and our technological progress depend.
Reference:
M. W. Allen [1985]: “Charles Hamblin (1922-1985)”. The Australian Computer Journal, 17(4): 194-195.

Heroes: the underground railroad in Rhodesia

Published by peter on 2009-12-15 in Africa, Heroes, History and Politics. Closed

Talking about Zimbabwean history reminded me that there are some unsung heroes of Zimbabwe’s struggle for majority rule whom I wish to salute. These are the people who, rejecting the racist policies of the Rhodesian Front government, organized an illegal underground railroad to secretly transport black and white resisters across the border, mostly to Botswana and Zambia. The whites transported were usually resisting military conscription to fight in a war they disagreed with, a war in support of a cause they believed immoral.

I knew a couple of these railwaymen: AP (“Knotty”) Knottenbelt, who had been headmaster of Fletcher High School, a state boarding school for black boys, from where he resigned in 1969 rather than raise a Rhodesian flag; he is said to have tied the flag to the back of his car and driven it through the dust of the schoolyard in front of the assembled students before hoisting it. He later taught at the University of Zimbabwe, and the Mugabe Government appointed him to the board of the Posts and Telecommunications Corporation after Independence. Another railwayman was his bridge partner, Nick Holman (1919-2002), father of the (now former) Financial Times Africa Editor, Michael Holman. These men and their collaborators deserve praise and admiration for their great personal courage in support of a non-racial society.

One of those transported by this railroad was the late Christopher Lewis, son, grandson, and great-grandson of Rhodes Scholars.  His father, Charles Patrick Jameson (“Pat”) Lewis (d. 1975) was a lawyer in partnership with Hardwicke Holderness MP (1915-2007), and Chairman from 1961-1969 of the Constitutional Council established under the 1961 Rhodesian constitution; Christopher Lewis’s paternal great-grandfather Vernon Lewis CMG (d. 1950), was a Rhodes Scholar later appointed in 1950 Chief Justice of Southern Rhodesia (being succeeded on his death the same year by Sir Robert Tredgold); Vernon Lewis was married to Ethel Amy Jameson, daughter of Leander Starr Jameson (1853-1917), Prime Minister of the Cape Colony between 1904-1908, who had led a failed attack against the Transvaal in 1895-1896 (later called the Jameson Raid). Another son of Vernon Lewis, John Vernon Radcliffe Lewis (1917-?), was also a Rhodesian and Zimbabwean judge.

Christopher Lewis’s maternal grandfather Leonard Ray Morgan (1894-1967), also a Rhodes Scholar, was a lifelong friend of Robert Graves whom he met at Oxford, and was Permanent Secretary for Education in the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland; and Christopher’s uncle by marriage was the chiShona linguist, George Fortune (1915-2012). Ian Hancock’s interesting history of liberal white opposition to the racist policies of the Rhodesia Front is dedicated to the memory of Pat Lewis. Christopher’s sister Annette was married to lawyer Anthony Eastwood (1940-2015), whose first wife Ruth Fischer (later Ruth Fischer-Rice) (b. 1939) was the daughter of Bram Fischer (1908-1975), lead defence counsel at the Rivonia Trial of Nelson Mandela and others. Bram Fischer was the son of a Judge-President of the Orange Free State and grandson of the only Prime Minister of the Orange River Colony, Abraham Fischer (Prime Minister 1907-1910); his wife Molly was a niece of Jan Smuts.

Well before the fall of communism, Anthony Eastwood once told me of visiting the USSR as an honoured guest and asking, as a lawyer, if he could meet a fellow lawyer. The next day he was ushered into a meeting with the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the USSR.

A wonderfully well-written but very sad memoir by Hayden Eastwood, son of Anthony and Annette Eastwood, of his upbringing was published in 2018.

References:

Hayden Eastwood [2018]: Like Sodium in Water: A Memoir of Home and Heartache. Cape Town, RSA: Jonathan Ball.

Ian Hancock [1984]: White Liberals, Moderates and Radicals in Rhodesia 1953-1980. New York, USA: St Martin’s Press.

Lancaster bombing

Published by peter on 2009-12-14 in Africa, History and Politics. Closed

This week marks the 30th anniversary of the signing of the Lancaster House Agreement between the British Government and the major political forces in Zimbabwe, an agreement which led to Zimbabwe momentarily becoming – for the first time in its history – a British colony. 

Before 1979, Rhodesia had initially been governed from the first European settlement in 1890 as a concession of the British South African Company* (advised from 1898 to 1923 by a semi-elected council), and then from 1923 as a self-governing British territory with dominion-like status.  From 1898 onwards the franchise, as in other British-controlled territories in Southern Africa starting in 1836, was a conditional one – in order to vote one had to satisfy certain conditions: age, gender, literacy, education, income, and property-ownership.   These conditions were biased against non-whites, but did not exclude them completely, as I explained here.  Because the franchise was not race-based, white Rhodesians like Ian Smith could delude sympathetic foreigners, and themselves, that they were running a democratic and non-racial government.

Continue reading ‘Lancaster bombing’

That deadline

Published by peter on 2009-12-14 in Decision theory, Military strategy and Obama speeches. Closed

Nate Fick, whom I saluted here, had an op-ed in the NYT last week on the decision by the Obama administration to announce a deadline for withdrawal, here.  His conclusion:

Announcing the timeline was risky, and it could turn out to be our undoing. The president delivered two intertwined messages in his speech at West Point outlining his Afghan policy: one to his American audience (“I see the way out of this war”), and one to the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan, including the Taliban (“I’m in to win”). The danger of dual messages, of course, is that each may find the other audience, with Americans hearing over-commitment and Afghans hearing abandonment.
The only way to reassure both is to show demonstrable progress on the ground.  A credible declaration of American limits may, paradoxically, be the needed catalyst.”

Can the obese now expect an apology from the medical profession?

Published by peter on 2009-12-11 in Medicine and Science. Closed

Western medicine has a long history of blaming the victims of illness for their illness, attributing moral and character defects to the ill – eg, those suffering from cholera (before the mid 19th century), from physical addictions (until the mid 20th century), and from stomach ulcers (until the discovery of Helicobacter Pylori in 1982).   The most recent morality campaign waged by the medical profession has been against the obese, who are assumed by many medical practitioners to be lazy, weak-willed, or worse.  The medical professions urge the over-weight to diet and to exercise, and they even restrict treatment in some cases to people who are not obese.  Never mind that the scientific evidence for the relationship between regular exercise and appetite is weak, and suggests in any case that the former increases the latter: so that, if anything, more exercise is likely to lead to increased weight, not to reduce it.  
Now, science tells us that appetite – and hence obesity – may also be a function of one’s genes, as this article in tomorrow’s SMH reports. 

SOME of the children were so fat they had been listed on the British social services ”at risk” register because it was assumed their parents were abusing them with deliberate overfeeding.
”In one case, one of the children had been taken into care,” said Stephen O’Rahilly, a world expert on the genetics of obesity at the University of Cambridge.
But then his research team discovered the problem. The obese children had a section of DNA missing in their genetic code – a fault that produced a very strong drive to eat.
Continue reading ‘Can the obese now expect an apology from the medical profession?’

Poem: Lines for a Friend 1948-1964

Published by peter on 2009-12-09 in Poetry. Closed

Writing just now about Mendelssohn’s sorrow at the death of his close friend, Edward Rietz, brought to mind this poem by Australian poet Michael Dransfield (1948-1973):

Lines for a Friend 1948-1964
“Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath.” – Tennyson
over before you knew it
misdiagnosed and done for
they cremated their error
you became some ashes a little placque a case history
paintings you did are lost also your poems
nothing but ashes in a wall of dead remains
you will not see again the way
the morning sun floods down O’Connell Street
perhaps you are the sun now
perhaps not
childhood was the salt edge of the Pacific
was the school under the old trees
it was soon after that they disposed of you
I went to the funeral you and I were the only two
there really the only two who knew the gods had gone
death and morning the only two,
damned because poets
over before we know it
we pack our lives in little souls and go
out with the tide the long procession
the ant the elephant the worker the child
even those doctors who stood around they will die sometime
their money cannot buy them out of it
we know what is to come a silence teeming
with the unfinished spirits good and bad,
and how we’ve lived determines what we’ll be
next time around, if time’s not buried with us.

Reference:
Thomas W. Shapcott (Editor) [1970]:  Australian Poetry Now. Melbourne, Australia:  Sun Books, p. 210.