Retroid Raving

RIP Richard Wright, after a short battle with cancer, aged 65.  Founder member of Pink Floyd, keyboard man and vocalist.  Who - most appropriately - wrote "The Great Gig in the Sky" and "Us and Them" for 1973's "Dark Side of the Moon".  The Great Gig is instrumental, but who could forget these words, taped in the studio from a roadie?

"And I am not frightened of dying, any time will do, I
don't mind. Why should I be frightened of dying?
There's no reason for it, you've gotta go sometime."

"If you can hear this whispering you are dying."

"I never said I was frightened of dying."

And from "Us and Them":

"Down (down, down, down, down) and out (out, out,out...)
It can't be helped but there's a lot of it about.
With, without.
And who'll deny it's what the fightings all about?
Out of the way, its a busy day
I've got things on my mind.
For the want of the price of tea and a slice
The old man died....."

Rock on, Rick Wright.  There'll never be a Floyd without you.

Retroid has just been watching the Olympics closing ceremony from Beijing (OK, Cassandra, via DsTV...B-) - and how could we ever think we could do something like that??  For that matter, will anyone else ever be able to??

I have seen the future, friends, and it is jaundiced...in the sense of being Chinese, rather than connoting anything like "showing or experiencing a state of disordered feeling or distorted judgment as through bitterness or melancholy", or other meanings you thought you knew.

Seriously, now: when a country can go from nowhere to second to first in medals tallies in three Olympics; when it can put on a show like it did; when the populace gets behind the effort as it did...reminds Retroid of that quip heard on a radio programme a while back on why Sah Theffrica would never be another Korea: largely because we had no Koreans....  Or, in the case of China, one+ billion people to push around, or the might and will to do so, or people who will listen.

And nor does anyone else - except maybe India.

The East is Red, brothers and sisters; we may have to get used to North, South and West becoming that way too, as the Chinese reassert their merely postponed superiority in coming years.  Face it: the whole of western civilisation as we know/knew it may have been just a brief interlude in the Chinese peoples' continuous cultural and economic domination of our planet.  Learn Mandarin now....

But Retroid saw some light too - other than the crimson glow from the East - in the presentation of London's attractions for the next extravaganza.

Chief among them, apparently, one James Page: yes, he of the eponymous quartet.  Apparently other folk also think you cannot have too much of towed dirigibles.  Viva! I say to them, viva!!

At least we'll still have some music to listen to as we March Forward Gloriously to a Chinese Future.

It is the east, and Max is the sun....  Apologies to W Szekspir; however, Retroid was sufficiently moved by yesterday's opening of Mr Price UCT coronation inauguration of our new VC, to perceive a glimmer of light through the gloom that is OU^TM.

Cue appropriate image: thanks to the traffic in Little Mowbray this morning I was going back to the highway instead of escaping it, and caught this on the trusty PDA. 

Quite appropriate, I thought: a luminous body trying bravely to overcome the all-encompassing, enveloping grey mist.

Which brings us on  to the occasion: a beautiful warm evening - Retroid's partner dug him in the ribs for suggesting the hazy golden light was all due to pollution - with begowned academics scattered all over Jammie Steps.  Someone in a plain red job made an idle remark about needing a guide book to identify the more exotic plumage - something along the lines of the Hasid Spotter's Guide you can get in Jerusalem, in fact, to help you identify the more exotic specimens.

And truly, there were some wonderful gowns on offer - with simply stunning hats to go with them.  Mortar boards, soft floppy ones, things like bishop's mitres....

Never one to suffer hat envy - I boycotted the tea cosy I was offered in my PhD graduation - Retroid was nonetheless amused to feel a twinge of academic envy when it became evident that our orderly two lines of processioners who had formed up - obedient to The Hugh's urgings - early on, were in fact not only not the front-rankers, but were in fact the third ranked academics.  There were mutters of "What did you have to do / who did you have to sleep with to get in that bunch, then??"  I suggested we practice processing by marching into the tent in front of us and having a drink or two, and it nearly happened - but no, sense prevailed.

And we waited.  And we waited some more.  The marimba band was pretty good, mind, and I saw more than one trouser leg or skirt twitching in time to stuff ranging from "Mama Tembu's Wedding" to "Take Five".  All the more so because we became their captive audience, given that we were right in front of them, and we were royally entertained.

Now although Retroid did in fact know the majority of folk nearest him, it was obvious that this occasion - unlike the discipline-segregated graduations - was truly one where those from NOJS and SOJS could mingle, on JS, pre-postmodernly and intertextually, as true comrades.  A pity that this is so rare....

Then at last the off, and we third-rankers processed in a dignified manner, in our appointed lines, up the steps, to pass from marimba rhythms into the far more formal "Gaudeamus" being rendered by a mass choir.

Retroid thought that this particular archaic Latin offering had been benched in recent times: he recalls one particularly entertaining moment in Senate a while ago when someone expressed the wish to have something played that was more appropriate for an accountant-led African class world research-led world class African University.  Like "Shosholoza, possibly?  And how many verses does that thing have??  It lasted the whole procession, with only one age-challenged person in front of Retroid in the expensive seats bravely mouthing her way through nearly all of it.

While we're on the subject of music, Retroid has to admit suffering through the later excerpt from Mozart's "Don Giovanni": like the former offering, incomprehensible except to the initiated.  I can think of many more appropriate musical interludes.  Like Dollar Brand/Abdullah Ibrahim's "Mannenburg", heard by Retroid in that very venue in 1974.

 And in the expensive seats up front, who else but The Arch, Cape Town and UCT's own Godzille - and Trevor's Manual of Fiscal Rectitude.

I looked with interest on the stage for Obi-Wan, but the Absent Registrar was not obvious.  Mind you, Retroid has little idea what the alleged functionary looks like, given his habit of labouring deep under some rock in Bremner, emerging only to defend the indefensible from time to time.

The Archie Mafeje segment was touching: Retroid had no idea that OU^TM had in fact snubbed him in the 1990s - but then, no-one tells us up North anything.

The meat of the occasion, and the cause for the light in the east, was Max Price's address to the UCT congregation.  If you weren't there, you can read it in here; suffice it to say for the details that Retroid's partner remarked that it was the same speech he gave in Senate while job-hunting, only longer - which at least means he's consistent, and that he's thought about it since. 

One novel idea was the one concerning the creation of Pro-Vice Chancellor posts, to manage certain key research thrusts at UCT (given that OU^TM is a business and does no research, it does not come into this).  Retroid was especially interested in the identification of HIV/AIDS and TB as a key area, as this is not a thousand km from what he and friends do.  However, as a taxonomist, he is also a little bothered by the dependency of the chain of command upon the Chancellor.  You know, Chancellor, Vice Chancellor, Deputy Vice Chancellor (which seems a slight on those worthies, given they do have jobs, and do not only deputise) - and now Pro-Vice Chancellor.  Retroid would like to suggest the following as a reductio ad absurdam:

Chancellor: as is
VC: Semi-Chancellor
DVC: Hemi-Semi-Chancellor
Pro-VC: Demi-Hemi-Semi-Chancellor

Or just title them something different entirely: like Chancellor, Principal, Vice Principals and Research Deans??

But we digress.  The vision of the new Semi-Chancellor is that we - as an African University - should be the place where others come to learn of Africa.  He also sees a revitalisation of research, and not only in the niche areas where we underfunded African researchers crawl, in order to have something novel to publish on.  Viva! we say to this, viva!

As the Hon Naledi Hall Pandor MP ANC said, we are in for interesting times with Max Price.

Bring them on....

Well, an old one, really, but what with HAcker's Blog closing down, and the greyness closing in...I thought we needed some sunshine in our lives.  Another View from the North.

Oh, alright, here's another....

Seeing as none of you got the subtle Pink Floyd reference for the last post, you get another:

Well it would be...if I were Alan.  If it were psychedelic.  If I hadn't had breakfast already.  No mushrooms, but I licked the knife....

As I tell my students, an extra five marks if you (a) name the band (OK, I gave that one away), (b) name the album, (c) hum the tune.

OK, no sunset photos - at least, not of last night's - but I'll show all is not doom and gloom NOJS, by sharing this with you.

Taken as I was crawling up past my old residence from 1974, Belsen/Kopano, just after the rain one morning a while ago.

And here's a genuine View from the North: from the stairs next to the RW James building, where UCT's two claims to science/medical Nobel prizes - Aaron Klug and Allan MacLeod Cormack - would have done their physics, if it had been there at the time.

And yes, @AJC, those are palm tree leaves...B-)

...so there Retroid was, stressed to the max (sick domestic worker, builders, kinder transport, abrupt cessation of funding, unexpected school debate call-out), and...was solace to be had in red wine?  Dangerous....  In the James Page quartet??  Too much headache....  Cream???  Too potentially loud....

No, dear readers, none of these.

A sunset: pinks, grading to oranges, flecked with greys.  Out there towards Devil's Peak (Hoerikwagga, big thing above UCT, whatever).  Glowing gently.  Caring nothing about misguided, possibly stupid funders, dim Reddam Junior Debating team organisers, or even rock n' roll.

Just being.

Man, how Zen is that??

View from the North - which is a collective, BTW, and therefore gender-free - was amused to read on the front page of the Weekender yesterday that there is a scholarly tiff brewing between Zakes Mda and one Andrew Offenburger, an "African history PhD student at Yale University".

Specifically Offenburger says that Mda, in his third novel entitled "The Heart of Redness",  has "gone beyond the permissible" by "paraphrasing, borrowing sections sequentially, copying and replicating semantic strategies" from another book by someone called Jeff Peires.  Who Mda acknowledges.  But not well enough, apparently: "Listing 88 instances, Offenburger says paraphrased lines account for the majority of the transgressions...[Offenburger] says even when Mda does not paraphrase or copy, the two books share peculiar words in common, pointing to "an engagement of excessive intertextuality"".

Ooooh-KAAAY...so not only has he acknowledged a source, he has paraphrased it, possibly plagiarised it, engaged in "excessive intertextuality", and used some of the strange words the other guy did.  Great word, that, intertextuality: however, almost completely meaning-free for us up here in the North.  What IS intertextuality?  How does one engage in it?  Wikipedia thinks it is "...the shaping of texts' meanings by other texts", but also that it is possibly just "...a stylish way of talking about allusion and influence".  But then, they also go on about poststructuralism.

The article goes even deeper into the kind of impenetrable jargon and logic found SOJS*: VftN found these gems towards the end.

"Mda argues that plagiarism is when a writer deceives and tries to pass on someone else's work as their own..."  And later: "Mda also maintains that intertextuality is not peculiar to post-colonial African literature but is an international postmodern phenomenon, also found in music and art collages composed of images borrowed from other creators".

So it's OK to plagiarise when you quote someone?  And interweave your vision with others in new creations?  And there's that word "postmodern" again...VftN collectively does not understand this concept: surely postmodern is future?  But that is by the way, and simply betrays our lack of modern (or possibly post-modern) literary and philosophical education.

But it seems the wheel of postmodernity turns on a 400-odd year cycle: the HoD of Engels at Uniwits says "...plagiarism has become very problematic in an age of increasing intertextuality...so if we want to assert it we should have very clear criteria.  After all, in his own time, even Shakespeare was a great plagiarist".  Good company, Bra Zakes, good company indeed...B-)

So when IS it plagiarism, VftN asks, plaintively?

When a student does it?  If Turnitin picks up on it? 

When is it OK to paraphrase, and when to intertextualise?  Surely that's what we scientists from NOJS (and some South) do, when we write reviews?  The Wikipedia article says "intertextuality makes each text a "mosaic of quotations"" - which is exactly what this blog posting is, with my last review (9000 words on plant-produced pharmaceuticals) hot on its heels as a set of interlinked and copiously referenced paraphrases.

So Bra Zakes - if I may call you that - I would tell the upstart from Harvard where to put himself.  Continue, Bra Zakes, to use another's work as a reference point to construct wonderful intertextual postmodernist postcolonialist fantasies.  Poststructurally and hypertextually, if this is possible.

We pre-postmodern illiterates will just sit back in awe, illumined by the bright and furious flashes of great intellectual discourse.

* SOJS = South of Jammie Steps.  As much a geographical location as a state of mind.

A Retroid non-rave this morning, for a change...!  Or at least a positive one.

I was greatly heartened this morning to see, on the UCT News page, that:

"A group of students swopped their lunchtime food for scrubs and soap on 24 April to clean the decades-old statue of Cecil John Rhodes at UCT.

Members of the Residence Sports Council, an initiative of the Student Representative Council comprising sport representatives from residences, cleaned the dirt on the statue "in recreating the image of the man recognised in South Africa".

Mzo Daphula (pictured left), SRC member for sport and recreation, said the statue, unveiled in 1934, was in the main area of the university, and cleaning it was a sense of identifying that "he (Rhodes) is still with us".

"We should forget about the past and what people may attach to him. Away with reverse racism! If this image was not needed, it could have been removed. We see the significance of it on our campus, and the least we can do is to clean it," Daphula added.

- Author: Myolisi Gophe"

What an image; what a visual metaphor, my colleagues SOJS* might say, for the complexities of our history, and hope for the future.  Only they would usually be a lot more verbose and use bigger words.  B-)

What I see is UCT students embracing the past, and making it theirs: Cecil did make it possible for us to HAVE a University in a place where you can look out from, after all, whatever else he may have done - and for that he deserves some recognition.

And he has it.  He will continue to sit, in that awkward-I'm-favouring-my-piles position, surveying his old haunts - only a lot cleaner now.

Thanks to the ministrations of folk that he probably would never even have contemplated would attend "his" University.

Viva, Mzo Daphula et al., viva!  You have just done more to make me hopeful for the future of OU^TM than 90% of all Bremner-speak I have read in years.  Thank you.

* = South of Jammie Steps.  Where they say "postmodern" a lot.  And wear funny clothes.

Life, as it has a tendency to do, gets away from one.  As it has got away from me, lo, these many days...53!!  I'm really 53.  Still here.  Still in the same office.  Same old, same old....

But not quite: see, I listened.  To my good wife, as it happens, who speaks more sense than I deserve.  And whose signal advice to me was "Stop moaning and look on the bright side for once!"  Only probably more forcefully than that.

So I did: stop moaning, that is, or largely, anyway.  I still don't like the view out of my office - hey, that RW James roof really sucks big time, even if they are renovating it - and I have problems with The Vision Thing (or lack thereof) at OU^TM and I am presently manopausal, but there ARE good things happening.

Mad Bob M may be going, for a start.

While the ways of funding bodies in SA continue to amaze and bewilder, the research seems to be really getting somewhere.

And my family gave me Cream 2005 - the Reunion Concert DVD -for my birthday.

Sublime.

Soothing.

Transcendant.

"In the white room with black curtains near the station.
Blackroof country, no gold pavements, tired starlings.
Silver horses ran down moonbeams in your dark eyes.
Dawnlight smiles on you leaving, my contentment.

I'll wait in this place where the sun never shines;
Wait in this place where the shadows run from themselves...."

First heard on Radio London, UK, 1968 - and never forgotten.  Ah, me.  Time for the second career, methinks.  Rock nostalgist.

Until the mellow feeling wears off then: have a good weekend.

At the end of a hard day, in a hard week, I found myself in my office, feet up and eyes closed, listening to my old friends the Tony Iommi Quartet...loud.  Very loud.  The way it was meant to be....

"People think I'm insane
Because I am frowning all the time

All day long I think of things
But nothing seems to satisfy
Think I'll lose my mind
If I don't find something to pacify

Can you help me occupy my brain?
Oh yeah!

I need someone to show me
The things in life that I can't find
I can't see the things that make true happiness
I must be blind"

Oh, yes...sing that depression, John Michael Osbourne, give voice to that paranoia.  Let's just hope we don't get to this:

"And so as you hear these words
Telling you now of my state
I tell you to enjoy life
I wish I could but it's too late"

Geniet die naweek, all.  I intend to.

I took an unaccustomed walk just now, down University Avenue, under a canopy of leaves that surely didn't exist when I first used to do the same promenade.  To a Union that no longer exists, from a building then new, now over 30 years old...past frontages that are very changed, with strange statuary in front of them; ending up in front of a Jammie Hall that is - changeless.  And nearly stepping in a strange little water feature that seems to exist to collect leaves, but that is by the by.  Looking up at Jammie, and then down at almost-out-of-his-chair-on-sighting-a-virgin Cecil JR, one could believe that more than a third of a century had not passed; that one might still see a poster advertising the movie "And Now For Something Completely Different", again; that students with longer male hair and bell bottoms would soon hove into view.

I wasn't going out for nostalgia; in fact, I was looking for a cup of decent coffee to keep me awake while I grimly plough through the crap on my computer that keeps me from actually working on anything publicationally subsidisable (OK, yes, sorry, we have generator power...B-).  But there I went, and here we are: nostalgising.  All too soon, however, you realise the past is a different country, and sometimes the visit's not worth it.

Anyone else ever smoke other-than-tobacco-cigarettes in the bushes behind Jammie?  No bushes there now...but I remember vividly skulking back there, waiting for a Dollar Brand concert to start back in 1975 so we could slip in the side door.  The man's still playing, but not like in the Dollar days, and not with Basil Coetzee.  Probably a lot riskier to smoke herbs, too.

Go hunting guinea fowl in the field opposite Belsen with a baseball bat?  No field there now, and anyway, Belsen's Kopano...despite the fact that former residents voted clearly in favour of retaining Driekoppen.  One wonders why anyone bothered to ask.  I suppose you could use your car, now, given at least the guinea fowl are still around on Ring Road, but the thrill has gone (we never actually caught one, BTW).

Listen to the "Voice of Aquarius"?  Live, in all (3?) Unions - with your 10-cent coffee and 80-cent spaghetti bolognese?  Watching the serious bridge players (yes, Hugh, once you as well)?  Not that I dislike the new dispersed catering model; having a choice of three different vendors right outside our building is heaven, compared to the old dash through the rain to queue in the Union.  And life's too short for bad coffee, and there are a number of good places to indulge these days.  My office for one - it's amazing what research funds can buy...B-)

Watch mad folk on shower boards ride down Jammie steps, shedding kneecaps and fingers as they flew?  Banned these many years, but hold!  Was that a mountain bike I saw, slaloming down from the hall towards Cecil?  Yes, it was: mad bugger.  Hope the Group 4 security catch him.

Be all as it may, it gets increasingly hard to relate how things were to the way things are: there are three times as many people on campus these days compared to 1974; our village has become a town - with all of the crass commercialisation and homogenisation that entails.

Not that I think we are now serving up plastic degrees, and you want a diploma with that?  Heavens and other locations forbid!  I just think we may be doing it with plastic utensils, without looking the customers in the eye.

Ah, me.  So it's back to looking at the ugly building across the road - 27 years, and it's still there, blocking the view - pondering fresh and interesting ways to serve up what increasingly feels like the same-old, same-old.  Mind you, my gloomy long-time colleague and current HoD muttered darkly not two hours ago, that "we'll all have to go back to chalk-and-talk at this rate, until 2013!".  So the past has not gone: the village comes back to the town; once again we shall sit again under the shade of trees, and dispense knowledge in the open.

FTFAGOS* - I shall stick resolutely with my painstakingly-over-years digitised teaching material, refer the students to the Web and to texts, and pitch up like an Oxford or Cambridge don to hold tutorials.  A dream come true!  I may yet enjoy this year...B-)

* = forget that for a game of soldiers.

Comrades in the educational struggle: I hope you are over your solstice festival and calendar-change celebrations and are gearing up for the oncoming battles?  Good!  Then I have something of interest for some of you: I have just had an email from a group at the University of Newcastle in Oz about a survey they are conducting.

 "I am an infectious disease scientist and in collaboration with religious and psychology academics at the University of Newcastle I am conducting an international internet-based survey on creation vs evolution to determine current perspectives in this 'debate'. It is a short survey. We would greatly appreciate if you would consider reading the information statement and completing the survey accessible at:

http://www.newcastle.edu.au/school/hss/disciplines/survey.html

It is important that all relevant groups are represented in the responses of this survey. Thank you for considering this invitation. Sorry to disturb you with this email if you are not interested. If you are willing, please feel free to pass this on to your colleagues.

David P Wilson

<David.P.Wilson@studentmail.newcastle.edu.au>"

All relevant groups would be those of you involved in education / educating educators / formulating educational policy / philosophers / humanists / anyone, really.

Forward to a secular evolutionary education policy...!

I was most impressed, when I first came to UCT - lo, these 33 years ago and counting - that the English Department (girlfriend's chosen major, not mine) had a recommended reading list that included a significant amount of science fiction.  Which is SF, and never Sci Fi, BTW .

I have no idea whether or not they still recommend Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle" or "The Sirens of Titan" - but if they don't, they should.  And they should add to that list some of the truly impressive New Young(ish) British Wave of authors: people like Charles Stross, Ken MacLeod (OK, so they're nationalistically Scottish),  Peter F Hamilton and Alastair Reynolds; newer Americans like Dan Simmons, Greg Bear and Gregory Benford.  Not to mention OFs like Theodore Sturgeon, Philip K Dick, who seems to have become Hollywood-respectable, Samuel R Delany and especially Roger Zelazny...I have just found my 1973 copy of "Lord of Light", which starts with the  immortal lines:

"His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god.  He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam."

 The thing about the new guys, and OFs above, is that they write well: they blend hard science (never a bad thing for non-practitioners), sociology and politics in a way that Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clake never could.  I remember being totally bemused by a postgrad with literary pretensions in our Dept about 20 years ago, who said she never read "...that stuff, because it was simply fantastical by definition, and had no literary merit".   I rmember making the point that she couldn't say that if she'd never read any, but like  most people who put down  "The Satanic Verses", she obviously didn't need to to know it was bad.  She didn't seem to have the same opinion of "1984", or "That Hideous Strength" or "Brave New World", so obviously SF by mainstream literary authors was OK?

Ah, well.  Invincible ignorance is not punished by hellfire in the old Catholic canon, merely by eternal stagnation (aka Limbo).

But back to the New Age: this is an exciting time, much like the mid-1970s, when it seemed that every few months brought a new chapter in the "Dune" saga (40 years old this year!), or from Larry Niven's "Known Space" or "Ringworld" universes.  Alastair Reynolds is cranking them out, it seems, as is Charles Stross - who is very funny, as well as being seriously good at his social / scientific predictions.  Anyone who wants to blow their mind(s) need only read Stross's "Accelerando", available online: this has to be the single best (well, OK, SF) novel of the last 10 years and possibly even further.  Apart from Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, which mixes a history of the Age of Enlightenment with some serious mysticism - and cryptography.   And U-boats.  And gold...but I digress.

And having digressed seriously, given that I should be writing a chapter for a book of reviews, I should share this with you.  Enjoy.