Corto lives for ever in a dozen or so books set in Ethiopia Siberia Venice Samarkand

Corto lives for ever in a dozen or so books set in Ethiopia, Siberia, Venice, Samarkand, Switzerland and the Caribbean. He resembles the perennial seadog hero Maqroll el Gaviero of the magnificent Colombian novelist and poet Alvaro Mutis, who is naturally a Corto Maltese fan, as are a surprising number of writers and intellectuals like Umberto Eco and Jorge Amado. Pratt is also Francois Mitterrand’s favourite cartoonist; he once said that he would like to be reincarnated as Pratt’s hero.Hugo Pratt’s last book was devoted to another kind of hero, Antoine de Saint- Exupery. But somehow he is not as convincing as Corto Maltese, a character so real that Hugo Pratt wrote his life story – which curiously resembles his own.James KirkupHugo Pratt, cartoonist: born Rimini 15 June 1927; married three times; died Lausanne 20 August 1995..

In the world of Pierre Schaeffer, experimentation and entertainment were synonymous; any division between the avant-garde and the everyday simply did not exist. Schaeffer was perhaps best known internationally as the inventor of musique concrete, among the most radical innovations of 20th-century music, but in France he was better loved as the originator of the Shadocks, a cartoon series still adored by every Gallic thirtysomething. Born to a musical family in Nancy, Schaeffer mastered a technical understanding of radio early, working as an engineer for Telecom before setting up his own sound studio in 1943 when he began the series of radiophonic experiments that continued all his life. That same year he created a typical early work with La Coquille a Planetes, an eight-part series of fantastical sound battles between a voice and various monsters.
After the war he launched musique concrete with such masterpieces as Concert de Bruit (1948) and Symphony for a Single Man (1950), composed of real human noises, which became a ballet by Maurice Bejart and something of an international scandal.

If this genre of musical innovation, with its emphasis on radio technology and primitive recording equipment, now seems painfully dated, its offspring are still very much with us whether in the “scratching” of Hip Hop DJs or the “ambient house” of Aphex Twins. The work of those such as Schaeffer in France and David Tudor in America vanished from high culture only to emerge in a rougher, more vital state in a range of popular music.Whilst working for ORTF (Office Radio Television Francaise) Schaeffer expanded his experiments with electronic noise in an attempt to create a veritable lexicon of all possible sounds, their sonic frequencies and their physiological effects on the human ear. In 1966 he published a book, Traite Des Objets Musicaux, which tried to evaluate a whole range of sonic effects, to reconcile the traditional world of occidental instruments with sounds created in the rest of the world by accident or human design.In 1960 Schaeffer set up a research centre for ORTF, in which capacity he created the animated characters the Shadocks. Small birdlike beasts with serrated beaks, the malevolent Shadocks were accompanied by a range of comic, indecipherable noises, from shattering glass to mumbles and shrieks.

Despite this enormously successful series and the equally renowned programme Les Contours, Schaeffer’s research bureau was always under threat. When in 1974 ORTF was broken up into various other television chains, Schaeffer’s laboratory was abandoned along with its vital archives, which he rescued at the last moment to create the INA (Institut National de Audio Visuel).Whether the image of his Shadocks hard at work with their mechanical pumps (for some reason Shadocks were continually pumping) or a concerto created with just the sound of a creaking door, Schaeffer’s imagination and wit were a continual delight.Adrian DannattPierre Schaeffer, composer, inventor: born Nancy 14 August 1910; died Aix-en-Provence 19 August 1995.. It is all very well for the universities to set up their own higher education quality council, but why bother? If you want to determine the quality of a product or service, don’t ask the suppliers, ask the consumers! I have recently experienced at first hand some appalling standards of teaching on a Master of Business Administration (MBA) course, where one would hope to see better teaching standards. Some of the MBA lecturers seem to think that providing lecture notes that have been copied verbatim from textbooks and then simply going through them in class is called “teaching”. Some of them try to disguise this fact by copying the notes from obscure textbooks or by using an amalgam of such sources.

These lecturers don’t add any value, and I can study their subjects from home using the same textbooks without attending their lectures. Indeed, I have noticed several classes always have no more than a 50 per cent attendance rate for this very reason.
Many of the lecturers have their own favourite topics within their subject areas. One particular lecturer is so biased towards a handful of such topics that the rest of the subject topics just get glossed over I had to read up on these in my own time. For less conscientious students, there will be holes in their knowledge.In one subject I did a guest lecture on the last day of term. Afterwards, one of my fellow students whispered to me, “That was the best lecture we have had in this subject.” So much for the lecturer, who finds it very difficult to get his subject across and whose delivery is extremely dry and boring.In another subject, one of the students actually fell asleep and started snoring. It doesn’t take much to make a subject more exciting, but many lecturers don’t have a clue about how to do this.Some of the lecturers who turn up 5-10 minutes late have been faced with only half a class, even less for those who were more than 15 minutes late Then there are two who didn’t turn up at all. I expect to attend at least one lecture per term where a lecturer does not turn up with no notice of cancellation.Penalties against students who hand in late assignments take the form of losing 1 per cent for every day the assignment is late.