This post is to mark the passing of Don Day (1924-2010), former member of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly (the so-called “Bearpit”, roughest of Australia’s 15 parliamentary assemblies) and former NSW Labor Minister.   I knew Don when he was my local MLA in the 1970s and 1980s, when he won a seat in what was normally ultra-safe Country Party (now National Party) country – first, the electorate of Casino, and then, Clarence.  Indeed, he was for a time the only Labor MLA in the 450 miles of the state north of Newcastle.  His win was repeated several times, and his seat was instrumental in Neville Wran’s suprise 1-seat majority in May 1976, returning Labor to power in NSW after 11 years in opposition, and after a searing loss in the Federal elections of December 1975.   In his role as Minister for Primary Industries and Decentralisation, Don was instrumental in saving rural industries throughout NSW.   Far North Coast dairy farmers were finally allowed to sell milk to Sydney households, for example, breaking the quota system, a protectionist economic racket which favoured only a minority of dairy farmers and that was typical of the policies of the Country Party.  Similarly, his actions saved the NSW sugar industry from closure.   NSW Labor’s rural policies were (and still are) better for the majority of people in the bush than those of the bush’s self-proclaimed champions.

Like many Labor representatives of his generation, Don Day had fought during WW II, serving in the RAAF.  After the war, he established a small business in Maclean.   He was one of the most effective meeting chairmen I have encountered:  He would listen carefully and politely to what people were saying, summarize their concerns fairly and dispassionately (even when he was passionate himself on the issues being discussed), and was able to identify quickly the nub of an issue or a way forward in a complex situation.  He could usually separate his assessment of an argument from his assessment of the person making it, which helped him be dispassionate.  Although The Grafton Daily Examiner has an obit here, I doubt he will be remembered much elsewhere on the web, hence this post.

Update (2010-06-12): SMH obit is here.

Technorati Tags: New South Wales, Don Day

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!”

Malick’s mantra for The New World was “natural light, no cranes, no big rigs, handheld”. In other words, barebones, stripped-to-the-chassis, organic plein-air film-making. The second unit was despatched to gather beautiful and captivating visual ephemera – including breathtaking images of the film’s two lovers before a real lightning storm at sundown, and pennants of ducks quacking their way though the magic-hour’s crepuscular golden light – while soundmen taped riotous birdsong, forest murmurs and the hiss and babble of water in motion. And the handheld shots in Virginia are, in fact, just one half of an overarching visual scheme; in bold contrast, the English scenes (where the landscape is sculpted and tamed, where life is governed by rites and rituals as baffling and ornate as those of the Indians), the camera is almost always locked down or running, tamed, on tracks.

And then there is the editing. Malick extrudes his movies from the film-bins in the editing suite, “finding” as much of the movie there as he does on location. I’ve seen three separate edits (the 150 minute pre-release version that knocked me out, the 135 release cut (25 of those 30 viewings), and the Blu-Ray director’s cut of 172 minutes) and all strike distinct and equally wondrous variations on the same themes, yet seem radically different to one another at a gut level. This clearly suggests that Malick’s editing has nothing in common with the frame-fucking visual aesthetics of Tony Scott, as has been suggested by more than one fool. In fact, it has more in common with Godard’s jump-cuts, which once seemed so radical and disorienting but which have been absorbed and are now part of the common, comprehensible rubric of the form. Far from being meaningless or self-indulgent, there is insight, a mini-revelation, a deepening of meaning, or just a blessed surprise in almost every one of Malick’s cuts, which cleave in style to this rich filmic inheritance, whereas Scott is a creature of violent eye-ache, and little else.

The layering of sound also partakes of the full gamut of historical precedent and technical possibility, with Malick inhaling the past then exhaling the future of sound design. Along with Kubrick and Scorsese, he remains an American master of the voiceover. In The New World, the three main characters all share their thoughts with us, often when the speaker is out of shot, in low murmurs and incantatory tones (the voiceovers often sound like silent movie title-cards), until they feel like a unified single voice. Plenty of people hate this about Malick, and resort to the conventional line about voiceovers being the last resort of lazy film-makers. Many also dislike the structure of The New World, which is adapted from Wagner: ascend, ascend, ascend, ascend.

That is how The New World works, on an ever upwardly moving scale towards the climactic moment of release, when the movie ends on a bird skittering out of a tall tree in the edenic forest with a frrrrrp-sound of beating wings – fade to black. If you allow it, if you lower your resistance, The New World is not a movie you simply watch – it is a movie that happens to you, overwhelms you, like the weather, or true love. Malick took his time with this, his one true masterpiece, and so should you. As everything else rots away, it will abide.

My only disagreement with Patterson in this article is his dislike of Malick’s movie about war, The Thin Red Line, which is also one of the great films of all time, and certainly the greatest film about war.  Of course, the film moves slowly at times - fighting is perhaps 90% waiting around.  And, of course, there are close-up shots of nature (as indeed in all Malick’s films) – soldiers are often lying as close to dirt and grass and insects as Malick’s camera gets.  

Patterson  is not alone in praising The New World.  When the film was released in 2006, the indefatigable Mark Cousins, writing in Prospect Magazine (Issue 120, 22 March 2006), also declared it a masterpiece:

Terrence Malick’s The New World is a retelling of the settlement of America and the John Smith/Pocahontas romance, so you’d expect it to be only secondarily about England. Much of the glorious first half of the film is like a prayer to the swamplands of Virginia. But in the second half the story follows Pocahontas and her husband John Rolfe to the English court of James I. England is portrayed as a world of gateways. Nearly every scene is framed by one, or features a character passing through one. For Malick, England is obsessed by the idea of home, of arriving, of framing nature as something to be seen from inside looking out. This is an art and garden historian’s view of England, and it works brilliantly in The New World. But it’s not only the English bits of this film which seem to say something about England. The New World is the most romantic film I have ever seen, constantly externalising mental states, enraptured by the rush of feeling caused by nature and by love, intoxicated by sensation. It is not in any way a state of the nation film, at least not of the English nation. But it is a masterpiece nevertheless, one of the most thoughtful films ever made, and many of its thoughts derive from England.

 

Technorati Tags: Terence Malick, The New World, Mark Cousins, The New World

Edmund Campion, Robert Southwell, Thomas Aikenhead, Tom Paine, Abe Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Sol 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, Paul Keating, Vadim Delone, Barack Obama and Rory Stewart.

Australia (5), Czechoslovakia (5), and South Africa (4) 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.

Victor Barendse, Andreas von Blottnitz, Will Bobb, Gene La Borne, Judy Bradford, Jan Buettner, John Cornish, Don Day, John Griffiths, Neill Haine, Ben Hancox, Tony Hawkins, Michael Heath, JY Hwang, Walter Kamba, Mathieu Lasalle, Marian McEwin, Michael Orr, Maureen Piche, Jerry Rossi, Leanne Thomas, Dennis Trewin, Henry Vandemark, Don Warkentin, Richard Wetenhall.

Effective leadership is context-specific:  what works in one domain on one occasion may not work elsewhere or with the same people at other times.   However, in looking across the people whose management skills I have learnt from, I realize there are some common features which most share to a greater or lesser extent.   One is a sharp intelligence, which may be manifest in many diverse ways (verbally, mathematically, organizationally, etc).  A second feature is a marked ability to read the emotions of others and to sense the social dynamics of a group or a meeting.    Good managers know their audiences well.  A third feature is an ability to read their own emotions (a skill which is surprisingly uncommon) together with an ability to control the public expression of these emotions when it so behooves them;   most of the people I have listed would make good poker players.  A fourth feature is an integrity of purpose – enthusiasm, honesty, transparency, directness, fairness, a willingness to argue for positions, and a willingness to consider evidence before reaching conclusions.  Finally, all of these people are effective at getting things done – not a skill to be sneezed at, despite the generally low status that doing things has among the chatterati.

When I was an adolescent it struck me, rather narcissistically, that there were two kinds of people, politically speaking. On the one hand, there were those who had realised, at first dimly and intuitively, that there was something profoundly wrong with the social and political order in which they lived. It was wasteful, unjust, amoral and much more besides. Its language seemed formulaic and false, a screen of clichés and convenient fictions. Following up these dim intuitions, turning them into genuine understanding, would be no easy task. One had been thrown into this world, grown up with its assumptions and habits of thought, and these had (to use a phrase I would learn later) deposited a kind of inventory, and this inventory had to be painstakingly scrutinised and thought through. This thinking through would involve dragging into visibility and naming the whole social order. It would be a long game. One would have to relearn how to think and speak. But only fidelity to this project was worthwhile. And this type of person pledged that they would never succumb to the easy rewards of this social order, they would do everything they could to maintain their critical distance. Otherwise, they could not live with themselves. From this social order which they had not chosen they would at least win for themselves insight into its workings, and would attempt to prepare and imagine alternatives.

And the other type? These consisted of those scandalised by the very presence of the first type. For these people, the mere fact that a form of life existed seemed to be sufficient proof that it should. And for them, the first type of person could only be motivated by resentment or fashion.”

After that year, my university provided no more courses on logic (and its study was discouraged by my pure mathematics lecturers), and I took up mathematical statistics in addition to pure math.  I wrote to Rennie to tell him. He eventually replied, writing from Woop Woop; he and his family had taken some time off to travel around Australia by caravan.   A year or so later, as a consequence of a sequence of four independent and extremely improbable events, our paths crossed again.  (“There is a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.”)   He and his family then settled near to where mine lived, and so I would meet up and visit with him each university vacation that I was home, a couple of times per year.    At his suggestion, I bought a copy of Hughes and Creswell’s book on modal logic, and worked my way through it.    The conversations I had with him on these occasions were among the most riveting and profound I have had in my life.   I did not learn of his death until some time after it took place, and the news made me very sad.  I feel honoured and privileged to have known him and to have had the opportunity to visit with him.

Later I learnt that Malcolm had embarked on his academic career in Philosophy by first reading every single article in every single issue of the journal Mind, in order to be properly prepared.   This did not surprise me:  he was extremely well-read and thoughtful about all that he read.  He had put himself through university by working as a programmer for IBM in Sydney, so he also had a connection with the early days of computing.  When he died, he left a wife and son.

The Australasian Journal of Philosophy published an obituary for him in 1980, written by LG and RR, whom I believe were Len Goddard (1925-2009) and Richard Routley (later Richard Sylvan) (1935-1996).  Goddard himself died earlier this year.  I have excerpted some of their obituary of Malcolm Rennie here:

Malcolm came into philosophy late and left it early. He was twenty-one before he completed first-year Philosophy as a part-time student at Sydney. He died at the age of thirty-nine, though he had given up academic life three years earlier, crippled by arthritis and in permanent pain. Friends could only watch in anguish, caring but impotent. But he got a little pleasure from contemplating some of the bizarre remedies which they suggested to him from time to time – one involving a complicated process requiring a couple of tons of paw-paw leaves. We were all clutching at miracles.  Three years after his introduction to philosophy, Malcolm graduated from Sydney with first-class honours. A year later he picked up a first-class M.A. in Logic, and the University Medal, at Armidale. But after he had sat the M.A. papers and before the results were out, he was sure that the was going to fail. As if he needed to worry: his papers were brilliant. But he was a worrier. The best always are, and he was one of the very best.

He found his true intellectual home in logic. Two years after leaving Armidale, now a Lecturer at Auckland, he published the first of a steady stream of papers. All but one were on logic and all were an important contribution to philosophy. He would have liked that way of putting it. He was exasperated by those who thought that logic was not a part of philosophy and he despaired of those philosophers who seemed almost to take pride in saying that they knew no logic. He could get angry at times.

This is no place to review his papers. They are there to read; so, too, are flattering reviews of them. Everything he did was impressive. His early published work was mainly in modal logic and the related area of tense logic. The clarity with which he presented complex semantic analyses revealed the fine quality of his mind. This ability to present complex matters clearly is part of what made him a superb teacher; the other contributing part was his warm nature. He enjoyed teaching and he cared about his students. He had immense patience with those who wanted to learn. A former colleague recalls how, whenever Malcolm visited his house, even the younger children would swarm about him and he would interact with them by teaching them, and the children would be fascinated. When he left Auckland and went to Queensland University, he involved himself in the teaching of logic in schools. The textbook which he wrote with Rod Girle was intended for use in Queensland schools. It is so used, but it also used in universities; surely a testimony to its clarity and scope. A more advanced text based on his lecture notes, which he was writing in collaboration with lan Hinckfuss, will be published soon.

At Auckland and Brisbane, Malcolm taught logic across its whole range, from elementary introductory courses to set theory, recursive function theory and the philosophy of mathematics. But he was not just a logician (a phrase he hated). He also gave courses on political philosophy, ethics and the pre-Socratics; and he brought to them the same precision and clarity which marked his work in logic. He was good at teaching, whatever he taught, and he was prepared to teach almost anything at any level because he enjoyed teaching. Yet he gave it up when he went to his last job, a research post at Canberra. The pull of full-time research in his favourite field of logic was a strong incentive, and besides, Canberra was not far from his birth place near Cooma. He was born on a farm and the countryside was always with him.

He had a love-hate relationship with Canberra. The city was too pretty for him and too artificial. He once said that he wished he had a truck-load of mud to throw on the buildings just to make them look real; and he was delighted when he came across a garden in which someone had not swept up the autumn leaves. But Canberra had some secret charm for him. It was enough of a country town to make him feel at home. He grew vegetables and watched the gang-gangs in the garden and worked away on his logic. It was during his stay in Canberra that he served for several years as Assistant Editor of this Journal. Those who received his comments on their submitted articles will know how acute his criticisms were, and how helpful. And he volunteered to do some undergraduate teaching, though he was not required to do any at all; but he could not give up teaching entirely. He was not an idle man.

At Canberra he continued his work on modal logic but he also became interested in the logic of predicate modifiers. His adaptation of Church’s type theory to serve as a categorial grammar was brilliant. Fortunately the first volume of this is published. He finished the second volume before he left Canberra but two sections are now missing. As his illness progressed, he became despondent, lost interest in his work, and simply dumped his papers. Friends rescued most of them, but not all. There are plans, however, to publish the incomplete second volume as part of a new edition of the original first volume.

So much of Malcolm Rennie’s work remains unpublished. He was, for example, working on a book on the theory of finite automata, an interest which developed from his knowledge of computers. And it was a wide knowledge: he worked as a computer specialist for several years when he was a part-time student at Sydney University. He also left a lot of unpublished material on procedure theory and a half-completed dictionary of logic.

There is so much more to be remembered: small things and big things. He hated conferences. He thought they were vanity shops for the self-indulgent.  He hated pomposity. He hated rules and rule-makers. Bureaucracy and officialdom were his bete-noires. But he had deep loves too: philosophy, the countryside, his home. There was in fact very little about which he was indifferent. He held strong views about most things, and this made him a rich man to know.

When he left Canberra, he spent two years driving round much of Australia with his family and wrote long letters to his friends about what he had seen, though it caused him much physical pain to drive and to write. He was living on the north coast of N.S.W. when he died.

He would have hated this. Obituaries are for members of the establishment, and Malcolm was never a member of that. The pub is a better place.” 

Reference:

LG and RR [1980]: Malcolm Rennie, 1940-1980. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 58 (4):  438-439.

Technorati Tags: Mervyn Pragnell, Malcolm Rennie, logic, Victoria Roberts, Woop Woop, modal logic, tense logic

Pragnell recruited people for his logic reading-circle by haunting London bookshops, approaching people he saw buying logic texts (Bornat 2009).  Among those he recruited to the circle were later-famous computer pioneers such as Rod Burstall, Peter Landin (1930-2009) and Christopher Strachey (1916-1975).  The meetings were held after hours, usually in Birkbeck College, University of London, without the knowledge or permission of the college authorities (Burstall 2000).  Some were held or continued in the neighbouring pub, The Duke of Marlborough.  It seems that Pragnell was employed for a time in the 1960s as a private research assistant for Strachey, working from Strachey’s house (Burstall 2000).   By the 1980s, he was apparently a regular attendee at the seminars on logic programming held at the Department of Computing in Imperial College, London, then (and still) one of the great research centres for the application of formal logic in computer science. 

Pragnell’s key role in early theoretical computer science is sadly under-recognized.   Donald MacKenzie’s fascinating history and sociology of automated theorem proving, for example, mentions Pragnell (MacKenzie 2001, p. 273), but manages to omit his name from the index.  Other than this, the only references I can find to his contributions are in the obituaries and personal recollections of other people.  I welcome any other information anyone can provide.

UPDATE (2009-09-23):  Today’s issue of The Guardian newspaper has an obituary for theoretical computer scientist Peter Landin (1930-2009), which mentions Mervyn Pragnell.

References:

Richard Bornat [2009]:  Peter Landin:  a computer scientist who inspired a generation, 5th June 1930 – 3rd June 2009.  Formal Aspects of Computing, in press.

Rod Burstall [2000]:  Christopher Strachey – understanding programming languages.  Higher-Order and Symbolic Computation, 13:  51-55.

Wilfrid Hodges [2001]:  A history of British logic.  Unpublished slide presentation.  Available from his website.

Peter Landin [2002]:  Rod Burstall:  a personal note. Formal Aspects of Computing, 13:  195.

Donald MacKenzie [2001]:  Mechanizing Proof:  Computing, Risk, and Trust.  Cambridge, MA, USA:  MIT Press.

Technorati Tags: Mervyn Pragnell, lambda calculus, Alonzo Church, logic, Rod Burstall, Peter Landin, Christopher Strachey

Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of World War Two could well have been very different. He truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely. In 1952, he was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ – in effect, tried for being gay. His sentence – and he was faced with the miserable choice of this or prison – was chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones. He took his own life just two years later.”

It might be considered that this apology required no courage of Brown.  This is not the case.  Until very recently, and perhaps still today, there were people who disparaged and belittled Turing’s contribution to computer science and computer engineering.  The conventional academic wisdom is that he was only good at the abstract theory and at the formal mathematizing (as in his “schoolboy essay” proposing a test to distinguish human from machine interlocuters), and not good for anything practical.   This belief is false.  As the philosopher and historian  B. Jack Copeland has shown, Turing was actively and intimately involved in the design and construction work (mechanical & electrical) of creating the machines developed at Bletchley Park during WWII, the computing machines which enabled Britain to crack the communications codes used by the Germans.

Perhaps, like myself, you imagine this revision to conventional wisdom would be uncontroversial.  Sadly, not.  On 5 June 2004, I attended a symposium in Cottonopolis to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Turing’s death.  At this symposium, Copeland played a recording of an oral-history interview with engineer Tom Kilburn (1921-2001), first head of the first Department of Computer Science in Britain (at the University of Manchester), and also one of the pioneers of modern computing.   Kilburn and Turing had worked together in Manchester after WW II.  The audience heard Kilburn stress to his interviewer that what he learnt from Turing about the design and creation of computers was all high-level (ie, abstract) and not very much, indeed only about 30 minutes worth of conversation.  Copeland then produced evidence (from signing-in books) that Kilburn had attended a restricted, invitation-only, multi-week, full-time course on the design and engineering of computers which Turing had presented at the National Physical Laboratories shortly after the end of WW II, a course organized by the British Ministry of Defence to share some of the learnings of the Bletchley Park people in designing, building and operating computers.   If Turing had so little of practical relevance to contribute to Kilburn’s work, why then, one wonders, would Kilburn have turned up each day to his course. 

That these issues were still fresh in the minds of some people was shown by the Q&A session at the end of Copeland’s presentation.  Several elderly members of the audience, clearly supporters of Kilburn, took strident and emotive issue with Copeland’s argument, with one of them even claiming that Turing had contributed nothing to the development of computing.   I repeat: this took place in Manchester 50 years after Turing’s death!    Clearly there were people who did not like Turing, or in some way had been offended by him, and who were still extremely upset about it half a century later.  They were still trying to belittle his contribution and his practical skills, despite the factual evidence to the contrary.

I applaud Gordon Brown’s courage in officially apologizing to Alan Turing, an apology which at least ensures the historical record is set straight for what our modern society owes this man.

POSTSCRIPT (2009-10-01):  The year 2012 will be a centenary year of celebration of Alan Turing.

Technorati Tags: Tom Kilburn, Manchester, Alan Turing

Reference:

Donald A. Ranard [2009-08-25]:  Saving Kim Dae-jung.  International Herald Tribune, page 6.  For reasons known only to themselves, and as further evidence of the MSM’s failure to understand the 21st century, this article appears not to be in the New York Times online archive (at least, it is not accessible via its title, its author, or any of the people mentioned in it!)