Pseud's Corner 3

Send your favourite examples of self-important, euphemistic, contorted, pompous, wanky and plain weird prose through to pseudsaustralia@yahoo.com.au [Ed]

I have been looking at the idea of letting people help you. I feel that there are 3 levels of personal evolution when it comes to collaboration, delegation and relying on others. 1. Take 2. Push 3. Share. - Take is about being dependent and taking from others, it has a needy vibe and is obviously not ideal. In take, you draw from others unconsciously. Push is about being independent and winning from others. It has a competitive vibe and is about getting by, pushing your agenda. In push, you win, they lose. Share is about being interdependent and working with others. It has a liberating vibe. It is about effortlessness flowing and is the key to creating sustainability. In share, you flow. (Matt Church, "Take no More" Inspiring Thought Leadership)

The audience was peppered with Beckettian spectres. I didn’t see Barry Humphries, who’d been a striking presence at the Bill Henson opening in Sydney two nights earlier but Geoffrey Rush, [Mel] Gibson’s Vladimir, and a triumph 30 years later as Ionesco’s exiting king, was there, as was his friend Bille Brown who had actually written an Aladdin pantomime in which McKellen played the Widow Twankey. So too was Max Gillies who had done Krapp’s Last Tape for Elijah Moshinsky at Monash 40 years ago. And Colin Duckworth, the professor of French who knew Sam Beckett himself, was in the audience, having seen most of the notable Godots since Peter Hall’s. . .
With the passage of the years Waiting for Godot has come to seem less like a shocking paradigm of absurdity and more like the deep sad comedy of a continuing condition (call it human if you must). As with Eliot’s Waste Land, the brilliance of the comic surface has almost outlived the existential insecurity it is shaping. - Sean Mathias’s quietly brilliant production takes this fact as its opportunity by constantly emphasising the mature human face of the grinding rituals through which his two ageing tramps wait and wander (wittily and witlessly) as Godot puts them through their paces in his failure to come. McKellen and Rees, in contrasted ways, have the rueful stoicism of age, and their comic embrace of catastrophe — McKellen’s boggle-eyed and flailing, Rees’s dapper and wincing — is light years from the contorted angst of young actors with the world before them as an enigmatic agony. (Peter Craven reviews Sean Mathias' "Waiting for Godot", The Spectator)

Knowledge Transfer is the name of a central concern that an intellectually ambitious university should have. The attention that we're giving it is logical. I think we're in a phase in which responsibility is a key concern. - In the humanities you see that in the gradual demise of irony and theory. Knowledge Transfer expresses the ambitions of being understood and of making a difference. . .
A university stands in a reciprocal relationship to society. How much good will does our society have towards the university sector as a whole, and to the University of Melbourne in particular? Governments tend to reflect broad public sentiment in this respect. Research doesn't only need to be done, it needs to be seen to be done. That's crucial to good relations with the state, and crucial to developing autonomy. You can't force people to take you seriously. If we're ignored or left to drift - that's our problem. We have to do something about it. Knowledge Transfer is our name for doing something about it. (John Armstrong reflects on the concept of Knowledge Transfer)

Teachers must endeavour to engage their students by creating lesson plans which are 'RRR': Rich, Rewarding and Relevant... But there is one 'R' that we have omitted: Resiliency. Resiliency is the quality of approach that each student brings to their particular life circumstances; the ups and the downs. Fostering resiliency in the learning environment enables students to approach their world with confidence and expectation. Fostering resiliency is learning to get up after a fall. When we learn resiliency we take the bull by the horns and look life in the face again, after (or before) the fall. Resiliency is its own outcome in the modern classroom. (Lesson plans and their relation to fostering resiliency. Victorian Department of Education)

News just in: Katie Price has not had sex with her boyfriend for a month. According to Fairfax newspapers, reproducing news from Britain’s reputable New! magazine, her boyfriend Alex Reid is getting ‘a cuddle – nothing more.’ What on earth am I supposed to do with this information? . . . If I were being generous, I could argue that these stories personify common grown-up problems. Many couples, particularly those with children, frequently experience dry spells. . . But this news – and I use the word loosely – really doesn’t add much to our understanding of adult intimacy. . .
So much of our every day life – conversations in queues, reading newspapers, watching television – is routinely superficial. It involves little reflection or analysis. It’s what German philosopher Martin Heidegger called ‘groundless floating’ – a sort of existential treading water, which adds little to our character. We lose ourselves in daily interaction with things and people, rarely questioning the fundamental ideas or values we’re upholding – perhaps they’re a little frightening. And the entertainment media feed on this, of course. If it’s ‘idle talk’ we want, magazines like New! will supply it: a few minutes of distracted bliss, where the abstract failures or triumphs of famous strangers can take us away from ourselves. Price’s sex life is a vaporous lure for groundless floating. But when, then, does the shallowness end? What moments offer us retreat from surfaces and reflexes? For someone like Heidegger, it presumably ends with philosophy or poetry – with some radical authenticity, or re-envisioning of Western civilization. Others have replied with God, art or revolution. But with Price in mind, I’m suggesting intimacy. In its genuine form, love is one genuine antidote to distraction and superficiality. I’m not talking Hollywood romance, with its predictable plots and happy endings – though they’re aiming at something valuable. And I’m not talking about sex, though it’s often part of the magic. The reason is simple: regardless of how the world changes, love enters into your mind as a non-negotiable fact. It is inescapably, painfully real. . . And this is particularly the case when we have children. Once they enter your life, kids push you again and again to recognise your faults and frailties, and reassess how and why you’re living. They’re the ultimate existential test. (Damon Young, "Katie Price: No Sex for a Month", darkly wise, rudely great)

And, last but not least, Eduardo de la Fuente on Academic Vampires

A growing number of academics entering upper and middle university management are themselves vampires. It's not just deans and heads of departments who subscribe to vampire ideology. In Britain, where performative-vampirist culture has been around much longer than in Australia, even the odd Vice-Chancellor is a self-identified vampire academic. In Australia, vampires are also making their presence felt within research funding bodies and in the formulation of the research assessment exercise framework. - On the demand side, it's only a matter of time before students start to question "credentialist creep", especially if it means universities force them to take vampire subjects as part of their degrees. - On the supply side, things will change when a number of the senior vampires reach retirement age. . . But for those impatient for the vampire system to collapse, let me suggest a couple of personal strategies for coping with widespread vampirism in universities. . . At some point, theology has to be about God, the divine or the sacred; in the final analysis, art history has to be about things called paintings, sculptures or, for argument's sake, let's say multi-media artwords; and, philosophy finds it hard to escape entirely considerations of logic, epistemology and things like metaphsics and aesthetics. - Then there are disciplines where there is enough exposure to daylight so that vampire tactics lose some of their magic and dark powers. Try telling studets paying for an MBA and jggling assignments with work commitments that reading Michel Foucault on governmentality is good for them! - Interestingly, the fields of marketing and management studies seem to be experiencing something of a rapprochement with the traditional humanities. Ethics and aesthetics are quickly emerging as hot topics in fields such as branding, organisational dynamics and also studies of entrepreneurship. - Of course, if one is still feeling unsafe, one could always resort to more old-fashioned metjhods for repelling vampires. Academic vampires seem to be allergic to anything that requires lots of training, especially things that might be deemed to be part of high culture and, are generally repulsed by economists and anything that is perceived as propping up capitalism. (Eduardo de la Fuente, "Vampires latch on to learning" The Australian: Higher Education Supplement)

[With thanks for tip-offs from LK, PCF, ECD and ONR.]