G Flaubert: On Art and Being Ropeable

My sort of observation is mainly moral. I would never have suspected that side of [the existence of a traveler]. The psychological, human, comic side is so plentiful. You come across splendid faces, iridescent existences that glisten and gleam, exceedingly various in their rags and their robes, rich in filth, in their tatters and their finery. And there beneath it all, the old immutable, perennial rascality. That is the simple fact of the matter. What quantities of it pass before one's eyes! Now and again, in one of the towns, I open a newspaper. We seem to be going at a rattling pace. It's not a volcano we're dancing on, it's the plank over a latrine and it looks pretty precarious to me. Before too long, society is going to drown itself in the shit of nineteen centuries, and there will surely be some loud squawking.

To avoid the commonplace you lapse into bombast and, on the other hand, simplicity is so close to the merely platitudinous.

What a splendid Ernest! There he is married, established and perpetually magistrate besides. Behold, a bourgeois and a gentleman! Defender, now more than ever before, of order, propriety and the family. He has nevertheless followed the normal path. He too has been an artist, has carried a dagger and dreamed up ideas for plays. He's been a frivolous student in the Latin Quarter; he had a local shop-girl that he called "his mistress" and I used to scandalise her with my talk when I went to see him in his fetid rooms. He sampled the cancan at the Chaumiere and he drank spiced wine at the Voltaire. Then he got his doctorate. Henceforth began the comedy of being serious, as a sequel to the serious pursuit of the comic. 

Republic or monarch, we won't get beyond all that stuff for some time. It's the outcome of protracted endeavours in which all have played their part from de Maistre down to pere Enfantin. And the republicans have done more than most. What is equality then if it is not the negation of all liberty, all forms of superiority, of Nature itself. Equality, it's slavery. That is why I love art. There, at least, all is liberty in this world of fictions. - Every wish is granted, you can do anything, simultaneously be king and subject, active and passive, victim and priest. No limits there; for you and your kind humanity is a puppet with little bells on its costume to be set jingling with a prod of the pen, just like the street-corner puppeteer who works the strings with his foot.

In my opinion one of the things that proves that art is completely forgotten is the quantity of artists there are swarming about. The more choristers there are in a church, the more it may be supposed that the parishioners themselves are not real believers. They are not concerned about praying to the Good Lord, nor are they concerned about cultivating their gardens, as Candide puts it. They are more interested in having splendid vestments. Instead of towing the public along, you let it pull you. There is more pure bourgeoisdom among men of letters than there is in the grocery business. What are they actually doing, if not endeavouring by every possible device to diddle the customer, while still believing themselves honest! (artists in other words), all of which is the epitome of  bourgeoisdom

Everything feeds into Affectation: oneself, other people, sunlight, graveyards, and so on. . .

If I had a more solid brain I would certainly not have fallen ill from the vexation of doing law. Instead of taking hurt, I would have turned it to my advantage. My grief, instead of sitting in my skull, trickled down into my limbs and twisted them with convulsions. It was a deviation. You often find children who are injured by music. They have real talent, they remember tunes after hearing them once, they become over-excited when they play the piano; their hearts flutter, they lose weight, they go pale, they fall ill. And their poor nerves, like a dog's, are wrenched with pain at the sound of the notes. They are certainly not the Mozarts of the future. The  vocation has been displaced. The idea has slipped into the body and there it lies barren, and the body is wrecked in the process. Neither genius nor good health can come of it.
Same thing in art. Lines of poetry are not made from the passions. And the more personal you are, the weaker you will be. I have always transgressed in that way; because I have always put myself into everything that I have done. For instance, it was me who was in the place of Saint Antony [in F's first-written novel The Temptation of Saint Antony. CS] The temptation was mine rather than the reader's. 187

That is why I detest poetry that comes out in phrases. When it comes to things for which there are no words, the eye is enough. The exhalations of the soul, lyricism, descriptions, I want it all to be done with style. Otherwise it is a prostitution, of art, and even of feeling. . . They are all essentially the same, all the people who tell you about their lost love, their mother's grave, their father's grave, their sacred memories, who kiss medallions, who weep in the moonlight, who go into raptures when they see children, swoon at the theatre, look thoughtful when they stand by the Ocean. Fakers! fakers! triple charlatans! who use their hearts as trampolines in order to reach up to something.

I am turning towards a kind of aesthetic mysticism (if those two words can go together), and I would wish it stronger. When you receive no encouragement from other people, when the outside world disgusts you, enfeebles you, corrupts you and wears you down, then decent and sensitive people are forced to seek somewhere within themselves a more suitable place to live. If society carries on the way it is going, I do believe that we shall see a revival of mysticism, as has happened in every gloomy era. Unable to find any outlet, the human spirit will be condensed. Perhaps the day is not far away when we shall witness the return of a universal apathy, of beliefs in the end of the world, of a new Messiah. But because the theological foundations are missing, where will this oblivious enthusiasm find its field of action? Some will seek it out in sex, some in the old religions, some in art; and the human race, like the jews wandering in the desert will chase after all kinds of idols. We have come upon the scene a little too early. In another twenty-five years the point of intersection will be superb. In the hands of a master, when that day comes, prose will be able to play a formidable humanitarian symphony. Books like the Satyricon and The Golden Ass could come back again, transposing into psychic excess everything that such books offered by way of carnal excess. 

When the brain droops, the cock stands up.

The best authors believe that they write tolerably well. (La Bruyere)

I do know that it is impossible to get published anywhere, at the moment, and that all the actual reviews are squalid whores playing the coquette. Pox-ridden to the very marrow, they pull a face at opening their legs to the healthy creations that are desperate to get in. So, the best way is to do what you do, publish in book form, it's more daring, and be on your own. F to Louise Colet, March 1853

We used to have a poor devil of a servant, a man who now drives a hackney-coach; this wretched Louis had - or thought he had - a tapeworm. He talks about it as if it were a real person who talks to him and tells him what it wants, and he always refers to this creature inside him as he. Sometimes he has cravings and he attributes them to the tapeworm: "He wants it," and Louis immediately obliges. Recently he wanted thirty sous worth of brioche; another time he had to have some white wine, and next day he would kick up a fuss if he were given red wine. This poor man eventually sank in his own estimation to the same level as the tapeworm; they are equals and they are locked in a dreadful battle. "Madame," (he said to my sister-in-law recently), that scoundrel has got it in for me; we are daggers drawn, you see; but I shall have my revenge. One of us will be left standing." Well it's the man who will be left standing or should I say the man who will step aside for the tapeworm. So as to kill it and get rid of it, he has recently swallowed a bottle of vitriol, and he is now dying as a result. I am not sure if you appreciate the profundity of this story. Can you see this man finally believing in the almost human existence of what was perhaps only an idea, becoming the slave of his tapeworm! I find it quite dizzying. What a strange thing is the human mind!

I think that the sufferings of the modern artist, by comparison with artists of former times, are like factories compared to craft production.

The political situation has confirmed my old a priori theories about the featherless biped, whom I regard as a cross between a turkey and a vulture.

Perhaps I would've been a great writer if language had not been so unmanageable. (Goethe)

If the moral sciences had two or three primordial laws at their disposal, as in mathematics, then they would make real progress. But they are groping in the shadows, bumping into things at random and wanting to establish them as axiomatic. This word, soul, has spawned almost as many stupid remarks as there are souls!

People write books for everyone, art for everyone, science for everyone, just as they build railways and soup-kitchens. The human race has a passion for moral degradation. And I am angry at having to be part of it.

One thing is for sure, I am part monk. I have always greatly admired those fine sturdy fellows who lead solitary lives, whether dedicated to drunkenness or mysticism. It was really one in the eye for the human race, for the useful, for general well-being.

exposition . . . the purest poetry. . . 

If you want to know my frank and confidential opinion, I have not written anything which I find fully satisfactory. There is in me, very distinctly I believe, an ideal (apologies for that word), an ideal of style, the pursuit of which leaves me gasping without respite. Despair is consequently my normal state of mind. It takes a violent distraction to fetch me out of it. And anyway, I am not naturally cheerful. Gross buffoonery and obscenity in unlimited quantities, but underneath it all is my lugubriousness. In short, life pisses me off considerably and that is the declaration of my faith.

Reread and rework your story. Leave it alone and then take it up again, because books are not sired like children, they are raised like pyramids, according to a premeditated plan, by transporting great blocks and piling them up one on top of the other, a back-breaking grinding toil. And it's totally useless! And it sits in the desert casting a prodigious shadow! The jackals piss all round it and the bourgeois come and clamber over it, and so on; extend the analogy. F to E Feydeau, October 1857

What is the best guise in which to give voice occasionally to one's opinion concerning the events of this world, without having to risk looking like an imbecile later on? This is a rather serious problem. I think the best thing is to portray, in all sincerity, the things you find exasperating. Dissection is a form of revenge.

Those who have no need for the supernatural are rare indeed. Philosophy will always be exclusively the portion of aristocrats. You can fatten up the human throng, bed them up to their bellies in straw and even cover their stables in gold leaf, brutish they will always be, whatever anyone says. The only progress we can hope for is that the brute can be made a little less spiteful.

Lucretius ought to be mentioned with some respect. I see nobody to match him except for Byron, and Byron doesn't have his gravitas, or the sincerity of his sadness. I think the melancholy of the Ancients runs deeper than that of the Moderns, who all more or less hint at immortality beyond the black hole. But for the Ancients that black hole was infinity itself; their dreams dawn and fade against a background of ebony darkness. No cries, no convulsions, nothing but a face fixed in thought. From Cicero to Marcus Aurelius, when the gods had gone and Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment when only man existed. Nowhere else do I find such grandeur.

I am suspicious of your novel about the theatre. You are too fond of them, those people! Have you met many who love their art? So many artists are merely bourgeois who have strayed from the path. F to George Sand, September 1868

In the days of Pericles the Greeks produced works of art without knowing whether they would have enough to eat on the morrow. Let us be like the Greeks!

Paganism, Christianity and now the Age of the Lout: these are the three great phases of human history. It is unpleasant to find oneself at the beginning of the third.

The downfall of the bourgeoisie has begun, because it shares the feelings of the rabble. I cannot see that it reads different newspapers, that it enjoys different music, that its pleasures are any more dignified. In both cases, there is the same love of money, the same reverence for the fait accompli, the same need for idols to overturn, the same hatred of anything superior, the same spirit of denigration, the same crass ignorance!

Because of your contempt for intelligence, you think yourselves full of common sense, realistic, practical! But people are only truly practical on the condition that they are a little more than that. . . You would not be enjoying all the benefits of industry if the only ideal of your eighteenth century ancestors had been material usefulness.F to the Municipal Council of Rouen, 1872

I am not a Nature man: I find it's "marvels" less moving than those of Art. It overwhelms me without imparting any "great ideas". I am inclined to tell it inwardly: "that's lovely; I emerged from you quite recently; in a few minutes I shall be back inside you; just leave me in peace. I have better things to do."

From: Flaubert, Selected Letters

Pseuds Corner Black Label Edition: Damon Young

Just as the pink petals fling themselves onto asphalt and pebbled concrete, so too does Nikos throw Why into the day. His why is not simply an interrogation - in the face of daffodils, baby honey-eaters and blossoms, it is a celebration, a yes to what perplexes and goads with its tangible thusness. (Damon Young, "My Melbourne Spring", Meanjin Volume 69, No. 3, 2010)

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)

To avoid the commonplace you lapse into bombast and, on the other hand, simplicity is so close to the merely platiduninous. - Flaubert

***

What do you do as an aspiring writer with those stray thoughts that you're really rather brilliant – that ecstatic inkling that the greatest writers of all times are not so much your heroes but your . . . peers and equals? What do you do if you're an aspiring philosopher with the afternoon dream that the content of your life - your kids, your happy relationships, your love of old pens and karate - is deeply admirable? The Great Stage's advice is - if you ever get round to putting them down on paper - stow them away in a folder in the bottom drawer of your desk, lock that drawer and get someone you trust to mind the key. The writer who features as the star of our second Deluxe Edition of Pseuds Corner has earned a proud place for himself there by doing the opposite - letting the notion that the small details of his own life are really rather edifying colour his writing: indeed a lot of the time not just colour it, but supply its basic content.

Damon Young's self-appointed task as a philosopher is to offer general advice to the perplexed. And there's nothing wrong with that in itself. However, the fact that so much of the good counsel comes with reference to the exemplary sophistication - the raw satisfactoriness - of Mr Young himself is a major problem. Three years after the publication of his first book, Distraction: A Philosopher's Guide to Being Free, Young is already talking about it as if it were the work of late Emerson, warmly effusing on the ABC website about the air of "meditative patience” he detects in certain passages of the book he wrote with his favourite fountain pen:

'My pen,' wrote the Roman author Ovid, 'the best part of me, truest witness, my soul's true mirror.' Of course, Ovid was exiled to the shores of the Black Sea because of his quill. But never mind, the lonely poet was right: our pens can help to bring out what's best in us. It's easy to forget this. We see so many pens: countless chewed, inky, snapped biros. In 2005, Bic apparently sold it's one-hundred-billionth pen. With these figures, it's easy to take them for granted, leave them between car seats, or use them as pea-shooters. (Am I giving away too much about my teenage years?)
But why? In a time of cheap ballpoints, tiny laptops and Word-enabled mobile phones, what on earth can be gained from a fountain pen? Isn't this just expensive, shallow, Luddite stubbornness? Perhaps for some, it's a misplaced longing for the past, or a sign of pomposity. But for most, it's simply a useful, beautiful, evocative tool. . . Take my new pen, a simple European model. It is simply a pleasure to use: balance, texture, colour, line - these all add to the experience of writing. And as I write a lot, this is important. It makes the job a joy. . . By encouraging longhand, it offers meditation, focus, personality. I wrote much of Distraction by hand, and the passages written in longhand have a certain meditative patience. (Damon Young, “The Write Tools” darkly wise, rudely great; “Write On” ABC Online, The Drum Unleashed: Robust Community Debate)
 
Major problem number 2 is that he insists on calling the product of this rather tepid narcissistic discourse of the self “philosophy”. Too often Young strays into territory that is philosophy-related but distinctly unphilosophical. Distraction and many of Young's various efforts on the opinion pages of newspapers degenerate into a sort of literary-philosophical Who Weekly, throwing round the names of the odd philosophical classic, or milking episodes from the lives of the philosophical greats for home-truths that are instantly applicable to the busy inhabitants of the contemporary world.

This is not to deny the need for philosophy to keep in touch with what the Germans call Lebensweisheit; the practical wisdom of the world is a neglected aspect of philosophy's historic role, so much so that practical wisdom is sometimes seen as a challenge to philosophy coming from outside philosophy, rather than one of philosophy's perennial sources. (On this equally cockeyed view, Lebensweisheit is a sort of instinctive protest leveled by non-philosophers against philosophers' ingrained habit of turning just about everything into an open-ended series of potentially quite complicated questions.) How philosophy in its incarnation as Lebensweisheit came to be neglected is a question that's been posed on The Great Stage once or twice before. The fact that practical philosophical wisdom has fallen into disuse seems to stem at least partly from the way philosophy is nowadays expected to justify itself to the institutional powers-that-be within universities as a distinct discipline with a technical vocabulary, science-like research methods, cognitive authorities, disciplinary boundaries and a specifiable use-value of its own. Within the contemporary academy, philosophy, it has to be said, turns easily into a rather desperate exercise in academic conformity on the part of what was historically a sort of anti-discipline - one, indeed, that has produced some of the most chequered non-conformists of all history. Part of the academic mug’s game that philosophers are forced to play involves seeking out industry partnerships and justifying the tangible benefits of philosophical scholarship to the economic life of the nation in pretty much the same terms that the engineering faculty points up its contribution to more efficient power grids and the medical faculty its presence on the advancing front of breast cancer research. You don’t have to be a great sage to see that the playing field isn’t quite level.

Young's major intellectual problem is not academic philosophical conformity, however, but the opposite - the conformism of the book market, with its many varieties of half-written fiction and half-thought thought - so few of which seem like the result of aesthetic conception or philosophical reflection pursued for their own sake. While philosophy as a technical speciality passes over into a would-be science that is equally devoid of depth and the rush and colour of life, philosophy as Lebensweisheit passes over into lifestyle journalism, finding would-be depth anywhere and everywhere. Philosophy as lifestyle journalism dive-bombs into the shallows, mistaking the clarity with which it sees the bottom for penetration of vision. In a nutshell - the problem here is that philosophy, as it's practised by Young and his pop philosophical models, especially when it takes up residence in the arts liftouts of newspapers and so cuts its ideas down to the size required by the liftout format and the liftout tone, loses connection with the other bases of the overall philosophical enterprise. Philosophy without Lebensweisheit is often colourless, pointlessly theory-driven; on the other hand, philosophy which develops no rigorous concepts, builds no theories and puts no intellectually concentrated images into circulation is humdrum - humdrum, and, in Young's case, liable to inflate its own credentials with grandiose fantasies about its own significance.

At the heart of the problem is the conversion of what were once known as literature and philosophy into a literature and philosophy industry. Though you can sometimes hear the pain and self-doubt with which “industry representatives” use this crassly inappropriate metaphor, so many of them just keep on doing it. The situation is one to which Young is no doubt doing his best to adapt. The re-invention of literature and philosophy as industries means exactly what you’d expect it to mean: rapid machine-like production of standardized opinions and works for as wide an audience – or as well-defined a niche market – as possible. Above all, it means systematically and tirelessly exercising your powers of self-promotion. On Young’s blog, “darkly wise, rudely great”, the sad joke that human communication on the whole is degenerating under the conditions set by the contemporary market economy into one vastly ramifying exercise in cross-promotion seems to come true literally. And in general, so much of what is happening in the public world of writing reads like a textbook case from a first-year macroeconomics seminar: the ever more extravagant self-praise in the literary “industry” looks like a bad case of runaway inflation, where the expectation that everyone else in the market is about to jack up their prices or their stated opinion of themselves leads every individual market player to make the expectation come true, precisely because it seems the only way of holding your own. Of course, it has to be said emphatically – pretty much everyone is doing it in the book industry, though no one is doing it quite like Young. It’s so often what makes the internet – the blogosphere especially – so tedious. Time and again, your heart rises as you come across a bright independent new voice. Time and again, what you find you’ve discovered is another “emerging writer” rotating on the spot within a narrow circle of egotistical career-building self-preoccupation.

Some of the lifestyle philosophy on the market - not only Young's - comes pretty close to Oprah-style pop-psychological fluff. In fact, it often comes to something worse than that. Oprah doesn't purport to be much more than a saleswoman of "the happy thing"; her attitude seems basically to be that whatever puts you in the happy way should be given a go, whether it's white-water rafting, standing on your head, joining Rotary, salsa aerobics, having a good cry on tv (or a good scream) or saying to yourself that you're worth it 30 times a day. Young, on the other hand, dignifies his more high-minded mix of happy-making activities with the name of an ancient and venerable subject, philosophy. In doing so he flatters the vanity of his uncritical readers that their everyday concerns are quintessentially philosophical. Of course they aren’t “unphilosophical”. But to pretend that they’re anything but potential starting points for a type of reflection that is arduous, analytic, scholarly, argumentative and many other things besides – is to seriously gild the lily.

Young’s personal specialty - distilling moral commonplaces from his own life and the lives of philosophical and literary greats - needs to be viewed with a wide cultural lens. What it seems to be part of, in the long-run, is a pop cultural reduction of the past, above all the extraordinary cultural creativity of historical individuals, to a routine set of comestible, rather sentimental concerns. This is the same general process whereby Keats becomes a pseudo-American heart-throb, every second Jane Austen character turns into an Eastern Suburbs private schoolgirl and John Nash goes from being a profoundly dissociative mathematical mind to a "beautiful mind" whose owner is cured of his non-conformity by the Power of Love and Success. In Young’s work, the whole process of anti-metamorphosis – the transmutation of the extraordinary and the complex into the simple and approachable - goes even more badly wrong. Plato turns into someone who belongs simultaneously in a glossy travel brochure ("The evening breeze from Piraeus was perfect") and in second-rate gay pornography ("He was young, handsome, well built - he could feel the eyes of the old men on him, touching him, tasting him.") Marx turns into a man who liked his seafood and whose life-work confronts us with the unchallenging idea that "in the economy, as in the jungle, there's no such thing as a free lunch". What can you say? Praise the thinker and pass the canape's! But don’t talk to me about philosophy.

 ***

Home is a varied thing: part sanctuary, part nursery, part kitchen and vegetable garden, part office. If I were to give a word to what unites it all, I wouldn't say bricks and mortgage. I'd say 'rhythm'.- Home combines all sorts of rhythms: eating and sleeping, outings and returns, work and play, and the cadence within each. For example, the rhythm of chopping parsnip and carrot for mackerel soup is very different to the rhythm of writing a newspaper column. Yet home throbs with all of this. (Germaine Leece interviews Damon Young about "The Philosophy of Home", Some Home Truths - What Home Means To Us Today)

Put economically, attention is a scarce and precious resource; frustrating as this might be, we have to be canny with it. When we cannot do this, we're said to be "distracted". The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that to distract someone is to "prevent (someone) from giving their full attention to something". For example, while I was writing this book my wife, Ruth, read the first two paragraphs and immediately wanted to talk about our little boy. In the words of the Oxford English Dictionary, she was "preventing her husband from giving his full attention to his book". With her understandable interest in our son, she was distracting me: presenting a stimulus that clogged up my perceptual bottleneck. - But there's more to distraction than a breach of cognitive constraints. Psychological blockages are part of a much larger set of limitations: those of mortal life itself. (Damon Young, Distraction: A Philosopher's Guide to Being Free)

"It can be genuinely consoling to admit that we all struggle to seize life's elusive potential. With a combination of Schadenfreude and relief, I certainly feel much better when I read of Marx's chaotic work habits. He apparently found all his domestic arrangements difficult, and spoke of producing "miniature dunghills" after his daughter Eleanor was born. When he did get the time to work on what he once called his "economic shit", he would embroil himself in petty disputes, even challenging mortified writers and editors to duels. (And I thought my hours spent watching Doctor Who were wasteful!) . . . Marx was a curious mix of idler and workaholic. He was often distracted from his important work by petty disputes, domestic chaos and illness. If the portly, scruffy philosopher wasn't fidgeting or pacing, his fiery temperament led him astray. And when A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy didn't live up to Marx's hype, his easily diverted character was to blame: despite all his self-congratulation, he simply hadn't put the work in. Admittedly, it's hard to concentrate on the revolution when your arse boils are flaring up. Yet Marx's chaotic home, unpaid bills and life of impetuous feuds give the impression of a disorganised teenager in a man's shaggy body. . . We need to eat, to wash, to find shelter, and these things aren't provided gratis by Mother Earth. As Marx was keen to point out however, most work is simply the replacement of one necessity with another: the laws of the economy become as commonsensical as those of metabolism and circulation. Even if we don't catch our own fish (Marx's favourite dish), we still have to pay the bills (or, in Marx's case, get Engels to pay them). The lesson is simple: even if you're bankrolled by the son of a wealthy industrialist, necessity will out. In the economy, as in the jungle, there's often no such thing as a free lunch. (Damon Young, Distraction: A Philosopher's Guide to Being Free)

Aristodemus [i.e. Plato] shrugged his broad shoulders. He was young, handsome, well built - he could feel the eyes of the old men on him, touching him, tasting him. He enjoyed the attention, the longing of their wrinkled hands, dried-up mouths. But they were disgusting. He looked around him, quietly grimacing at the landmarks and faces. Luminescent above him was the old Parthenon. How typical of this race of old women - a temple to a virginal, celibate sky-gazer. Still, she did help that cunning old bastard, Odysseus. She wasn't all bad. . . He ran his fingers over his chest. His biceps swelled, forearms tensed - and more looks of longing. Plato revelled in this distance, in the human span that cut him from his admirers. Being beautiful was easy enough - there were plenty of handsome young epheboi. His exquisiteness was his discipline: he knew with precision how to approach and withdraw, how to mix tenderness with cruelty. - He drummed his fingers on his thigh, watching the muscles dance. Hypnotised, he turned as he heard footsteps behind him - but he kept up the cadence on his skin. It was his brother. "Plato, you little oik. Father wants you." . . . (Damon Young, "The Lesson", Meanjin)

Socrates laughed. It was a hoarse, wet-sounding laugh - but a genuine one.
"I know I'm wonderfully amusing," said Plato. "Lucky you - I'm to be your pet boy, yes?"
"Absolutely," said Socrates dryly. "Once you're spayed and toilet trained you'll be perfect."
"Don't blaspheme," was the quick reply. "Only the gods are perfect. And Pericles, of course - if you believe my uncle."
Socrates laughed softly and rose. Without a word, he unfastened his tunic, kicked off his sandals, and waved for a slave with oil. "Enough. It's time for you to teach me a lesson [in the wrestling ring]."
"You're joking," said Plato, looking the old man up and down. For an ugly mutt, he had a beautiful physique - muscular, well-proportioned, relaxed. He looked like a nobleman, except for his horrid mien.
"Why does everyone," laughed Socrates, "say that when I'm naked? No, I'm serious. You're not afraid of a little wrestling, are you? What a shame, Plato. I think your uncle's Persian perfumes have made you into a sissy."
Plato shook his head and stripped. The slave oiled Socrates first, and then the younger man. They stepped into the arena. As they stretched, Plato enjoyed the soft sand, still warm on his feet. The evening breeze from Piraeus was perfect. (Damon Young, "The Lesson", Meanjin)

Aren't children a distraction from creative endeavour? In a word, no. I think Connolly, and those who agree with him today, are profoundly mistaken about the role of children in creative life. And their failure to appreciate this stems from a confusion about the nature of distraction itself. . . For example, as the parent of a verbose, energetic little toddler, I'm more productive than when I was single. The reason for this is simple: I've learned to work with less! Dealing for months on end with sporadic working hours and flagging energy, I became accustomed to opportunistic work: getting pen to paper, whenever or wherever I had the opportunity. He's asleep in a cafe? Great, time to finish off that chapter! He's absored in his Lego? Brilliant, I can catch up on important emails! Put simply, parenthood has disciplined me - and maybe Cyril Connolly was just a little, well, soft.
. . . Playing with Nikos has been a great exercise in creativity. Whether it's morning Lego, drawing differs or making a chair-and-doona cubby, playtime accustoms me to open-ended, free-thinking activity. It urges me to be cautious, less conservative in my writing and thinking; to commit myself to the twists and turns of the process, rather than desperately chasing outcomes. It becomes less rigid, and more innovative. . . But most importantly, my son is a commitment; a living line in the sand. This might sound glib, but he's often why  Iwrite. To take up my pen with sincerity is to defend him, and the sort of world I'd like for him. In this, he a reminder of what I value inlife, and the embodiment of every living thing. If I want a more creative existence, he's not a distraction - on the contrary, he's what I should never be distracted from. (And, bless him, he hasn't woken up yet!) (Damon Young, "Driven by distraction" The Age)

[pen-portrait of Mr Young by A Karenina]

Pseuds Corner - Part 8

As the University strives for excellence in research outcomes it is actively seeking to accelerate its engagement with the world and harness resources and expertise from several continents. Monash focuses its world-wide engagement through strategic and long-term partnerships. - In an increasingly transforming and competitive environment we need new ways of thinking about international engagement and what it means to be a ‘truly international university’. There are three important elements that form the core of international research and international education: mobility, collaboration and contribution. Mobility, is argued to be about [sic] creating opportunities for students and staff to travel beyond their borders in an attempt to nurture ‘global citizens with global outlook’. Collaboration is about forging new partnerships based on collaboration [sic] and mutual respect that produces ‘win-win’ outcomes to ensure that relationships going forward are sustainable. And contribution is not only about equipping our future generation of leaders with the relevant skills and values to contribute to society but universities leading by example in providing educational opportunities beyond monetary gains. (Professor Stephanie Fahey, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Global Engagment) "Message from the DVC(GE)", Monash University)

Home is a varied thing: part sanctuary, part nursery, part kitchen and vegetable garden, part office. If I were to give a word to what unites it all, I wouldn't say bricks and mortgage. I'd say 'rhythm'.- Home combines all sorts of rhythms: eating and sleeping, outings and returns, work and play, and the cadence within each. For example, the rhythm of chopping parsnip and carrot for mackerel soup is very different to the rhythm of writing a newspaper column. Yet home throbs with all of this. (Germaine Leece interviews Damon Young about "The Philosophy of Home", Some Home Truths - What Home Means To Us Today)

Finally, the means of measuring and evaluating knowledge transfer needs to be agreed. There are models and frameworks for evaluating the work of a department or unit in this area. For evaluating staff performance, the standard at present is likely to be Michigan State University’s Evaluating Quality Outreach Framework. Here, a staff project is measured against four dimensions: significance, context, scholarship and impact, and for each of these an appropriate group of qualitative and quantitative measures is chosen from a menu. Evaluation usually involves comparing historical data of external and internal outputs, and relating the department’s priorities to the percentage of staff time and cost. A staff member makes a portfolio submission, which includes a list of projects and clarification of their percentage contribution to each; the staff member’s reflective narrative of their own output; external documentation of impacts such as satisfaction surveys, testimonials and external reviews; and numerical data such as the number of students involved in an activity, the number of product units distributed and the number of community members involved. The Michigan State framework provides a rich array of alternatives to traditional measures of research or teaching performance, which are generally not appropriate for knowledge transfer. (Professor Warren Bebbington, Deputy Vice-Chancellor ("University Affairs"), "Embedding knowledge transfer in the university agenda")

The Proposition seemed to me like the kind of arthouse schlock that rides into battle with severed heads and genitals held on high as emblems of a ghastliness that can outstare realism, a cocaine-like fantasy of epic grandeur that sizzles and fizzles with a sort of adolescent poetry but lacks anything that might give it form or pressure. . .
From the outset [John Hillcoat's new film, The Road] skilfully establishes the moral gravity that underlines the horror-style narrative momentum. The father's narration tells us that if God's voice does not come through the child, then he never spoke a word. And so it goes as father and son move over the bleached and devatstated landscapes of some rural Pennsylvania or Oregon of the mind, some Montana that may be coterminous with a world where men rove like wolves. (Peter Craven on filming Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Australian Review of Books)

The essence of place-making is community engagement. It is more than just community consultation: it is genuine engagement and connectedness with individual community members - to a point where they themselves become place-makers of their own making. - Beautiful and meaningful places and spaces create an intransient value to the locality and a sense of pride to the community. As a result, people spend more time in their community: walking more, buying locally and spending more leisure and play time locally in vibrant mainstreets where there are places to sit, pause, learn, shop, connect and celebrate. - We all know and gravitate towards such places, and yet we keep building ‘empty’ places with little or no sense of ‘spirit of place’. Some would blame globalisation and consumerism on the demise of local communities, where they are reduced to their lowest common denominator - commercial exchange. Some would say that our built environment professionals are too focused on the hardware of place and have neglected the software, the soft skill of place-making. - Place-making provides a way of seeing the world through a more sustainable filter, and provides a platform to make the necessary changes and move towards sustainable lifestyles and behaviours. ("The art of place-making" Urban Design Forum)

One of the challenges for those who like to achieve is reconciling success and happiness. Most contemporary success formulas, science or systems have an element of drive or doing. Most of the happiness schools of thought talk about being present and living in the moment and being. - This creates a clash...or does it? - It's not an either/or proposition, it's an and/also one. It's about walking and chewing gum. Set the goals and intent but then let go and enjoy the process you put in place. The key idea to mesh these two worlds is to study or consider manifestation as an idea. It's about intent and action. Or put another way, you can pray as much as you like but you have to move your feet as well. (Matt Church, "Consider manifestation", Inspiring ThoughtLeadership)


What is Gender-Based Analysis (GBA)? GBA is a tool to assist in systematically integrating gender considerations into the policy, planning and decision-making processes. It corresponds to a broader understanding of gender equality using various competencies and skills to involve both women and men in building society and preparing for the future.
What is gender mainstreaming? Gender mainstreaming is a dual approach that implies the reorganisation, improvement, development and evaluation of all policy processes for the purpose of incorporating a gender equality perspective into all policies, at all levels and at all stages, by the actors normally involved in policy-making. By bringing gender equality issues into the mainstream, mainstreaming them, we can make sure that the gender component is considered in the widest possible variety of sectors, such as work, taxation, transport and immigration.
Who does GBA? Individuals who participate in developing policies, programs and projects are doing GBA. Including gender expertise in the policy process helps policy-makers become more gender-aware and encourages them to incorporate that awareness into their work. Most often, people who do GBA are:
- Involved in the planning and design of governmental or non-governmental interventions.
- Involved in the administration or implementation of governmental or non-governmental interventions.
- Participating in governmental or non-governmental interventions.
- Involved in developing policy or in research that guides governmental or non-governmental interventions.
[continues at length. . .] ("What is Gender-Based Analysis? (GBA)")

Spotters: CMcC, LK, CS