Pseud's Corner (def) - "listing pompous and pretentious quotations from the media"

The aim, if you want to make it into future installments of Pseud's Corner Australia, is to somehow strike the perfect balance between pomposity and meaninglessness or between cliche' and an inflated sense of the importance of your own opinions (and preferably have yourself published in print or on-line). You'd think it'd be quite hard, but it's not - at least going on the following easy-to-access horrors from the past six months.

Nominations for July's Pseud's Corner are now open. Send all suggestions to: pseudsaustralia@yahoo.com.au   

Australia has been enriched, challenged and changed by taking a stronger and more complex place on the world stage, rather than just selling ourselves as a great beach resort populated by smiling out-doorsy larrikins. Now, I know this from my own experience. I know this from having worked recently with Benedict Andrews. I know this from seeing a growth in my own husband's work. We can justify ourselves with economic indicators and KPIs and graphs but it just makes us look like any other industry, and we are not. . . The arts operate at the very core of human identity and existence. They operate at the cutting edge of a science that is now trying to unravel the puzzle of consciousness and identity. (Cate Blanchett, Australian Performing Arts Market)

"We have been continuously working on ways in which we may be able to interpolate the principles of Intellectual Entrepreneurship (IE) here at the National Institute of Creative Arts and Industries (NICAI). We are very excited by the potential of IE and greatly challenged to find an appropriate interpretation for our context. - We anticipate that students will be setting their own agendas and pathways of study by asking questions such as: "What do I need to know; who can I study with, and work with, to find out what I need to know; how can I apply this knowledge; and on whose behalf?" - These questions arise from the educational philosophy known as 'Intellectual Entrepreneurship' (or IE), developed at the University of Texas, Austin, under the leadership of Richard Cherwitz. IE aims to shift the model of learning and teaching from 'apprenticeship-certification- entitlement' to one of 'discovery-ownership-accountability'. Students come to accept responsibility not only for what and how they learn, but are also accountable to the community for how they apply that learning. IE students are encouraged to act as 'citizen scholars' and 'social entrepreneurs' with their intellectual capital leveraging knowledge for social good. . . In tandem with this IE initiative, NICAI is also working on change to graduate profiles. Through links with industry, we anticipate advances in industry-led teaching, with greater emphasis on generic capabilities, student internships in industry, entrepreneurial skills, and more professional learning outcomes, all of which will contribute to 'pedagogy for employability'. (Sharman Pretty, "Designing Context - A View from the Edge")

The simple answer is to say that Rothwell is a maddening writer who makes every effort to bend the world to his will and the reader along with it, so that the effort to resist him partakes of that derangement. He is, to adapt Falstaff, not only mad in himself but a cause that madness should be in others. - Of course, putting it like this is unfair to Rothwell, whose work is as moving and eloquent and imaginative (and as willing to stare down the truth no matter what mesmerising abyss it lurks in) as contemporary writing can be. But he is at the same time at an edge of artifice and distinctiveness where a lot of wise heads and smart money are liable to reject him. What was it that Dr Johnson said of Milton? That, as Ben Jonson had earlier said of Spenser, he writ no language, that he wrote a Babylonish dialect? And wasn't it Joseph Conrad, himself a latter-day Homer of the sea, who said of that most Miltonic of prose epics, Moby Dick, that it didn't have a single line of sincerity in it? - This is the hyperbole of the anti-hyperbolic. . . Rothwell is a remarkable writer and he has the exorbitant pretentiousness that goes with everything that is exquisite and mandarin and expectant about his whole endeavour. - Whether he's waiting for God or Godot in the desert doesn't matter, or only to him. His Northern Territory is a kind of junkyard of the detritus of a formidable if decadent European cultivation, but who could object, that's how Dostoyevsky saw the West and its gaming tables: with cold, engrossed eyes. (Peter Craven, "Appointment with the sublime", Australian Literary Review, The Australian)

Ah, dear old London, with your million deep-fried chicken shops, your "traffic calming", your excellent jackets and scarves, your bleak council blocks called Mandeville Close and your scowling, enduring populace. London, with your buildings black with grime and your unlovely rubbish strewn everywhere; your pockets of wild woodland in the suburbs and spires rising beyond grassy heaths. Yout sad-faced men; your relentless architecture of cream-piping terraces or terse Georgian facades for thousands and thousands of kilometres of streets; your bricks in a dozen hues of baby-cack brown; and your discount shopes jostling awkwardly in the ground floors of 200-year-old houses. Your august street names resonant of the Monopoly board and a hundred historical novels. Your riot of a peak hour in the Underground and your doughty buses. Your wonderful pubs and your awful Chinese takeaway. Your coltish maidens, your mulish old women, your cheery blokes, your oiks with slack mouths and one eye higher than the other. The way you make me inexplicably call older men "sir" here. The way people say, "Yer orright?" to each other in passing. The pockets of cosiness and pointy bits of charm. The sheer crammed, uncomfortable, elbows-in fullness of it. . . This is a town with 7 1/2 million people and a street layout from the Dark Ages. I wonder if Melbourne, much younger and more springy, has the same comprehension, the same understanding of past and therefore future needs. (Kate Holden, "Our streets paved with pigeon poo, the future takes wing" The Age)

"We wanted something that in a sense would be a finishing school for people who have a very good undergraduate qualification and are now wanting that kind of capstone degree that gives them depth and an entry to the more cross-cutting skills," Considine says. The EMA [Executive Masters of Arts] is part of the university's rollout of its Melbourne model, which focuses on professional and specialist graduate schools while providing generalist undergraduate degrees. . . Considine conceives the course as being a master of the liberal arts that will showcase the strength of the humanities. While there is strong backing for the course from the faculty, when he engaged consultants to test-drive the idea with employers and prospective students, the feedback was dismissive. People were unimpressed with the fluffy name, but from that came the idea to add a strong professional, or vocational, component and harden up the name. In some ways the EMA has taken ideas from the MBA in that it will have an emphasis on a strong cohort experience and networking. ("Arts master gets down to business". Andrew Trounson interviews Melbourne University Dean of Arts, Mark Considine. Weekend Australian)

This is Melbourne's fourth such festival, described as a cultural celebration of "light, hope and enlightenment," in which an array of artists gather at the square to poke coloured holes in the long, dark nights. . . Ever since we crawled out of the primordial soup, man has been fascinated by light and has gone to great lengths to replicate it. In Ireland, the prehistoric mound of Newgrange was built with utter precision to capture the sun from the winter equinox; in Egypt, the temple at Abu Simbel is a similar ingenious collaboration of science and architecture. From the first naked light bulb came the fairy lights, the floodlights at sporting events, lights in cars, stick-on wall lights, night-lights and flourescent wands. But light is so much more than watts and matches. We are all looking for a way out of the dark. . . . So where does that leave [Mexican artist, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's] Solar Equation? Operated by mathematical formulas but visually a metaphor for so much more. As it hovers above the square, 7 1/2 billion times closer to us that its prototype, it looks almost apocryphal, as if it has just tumbled out of a William Blake painting. The fact that today is World Environment Day adds resonance; we are at the mercy of this great big burning ball. Without it, we are nothing. (Kathy Evans, "A little enlightening relief" The Age)

Distraction draws on the lives and ideas of a surprising and illuminating collection of philosophers, writers and artists – from Plato to Matisse, from Seneca to Machiavelli, from Nietzsche to T.S. Eliot. ‘They are not heroes,’ says Young, ‘they are my peers. They are people who I talk to like to my friends. What I do with their advice is my business but I will certainly ask for it. In writing this book I have wanted to meet them. I have wanted to say to Seneca, “Dear Seneca, your death is an inspiration!”. I wanted to say to Ovid, “your poems have survived!” I wanted to say to all of them, “All this time later, we remember you!”’ (Maria Tumarkin interviews Damon Young)

Thankfully, however, all is not lost. Although the culture of traditional NSW pubs is inexorably dying in Sydney, numerous examples of this magnificent genre still exist elsewhere in the premier state. One need only travel two hours north from Sin City to Newcastle and the Hunter Valley to see that, thankfully, there is still somewhere in NSW that is keeping the dream alive. - While visiting this part of the world around 12 months ago I was inspired to see just how many old-style pubs it still had, and how many old-style blue-collar drinkers continue to exist in their unspoilt natural habitat. A day spent pub crawling around the Hunter Valley, immersing oneself in the simple pleasures of establishments such as the Boatrowers Hotel of Stockton, the Grand Junction of Maitland and the mighty Cessnock Hotel is an experience that truly rekindles one's faith in Australian culture. While Sydney continues to be redeveloped, desecrated and spivified, at least the heart of real Australia continues to beat strongly somewhere else. (Ben Davies, "The death of Sydney pubs", The Spectator)