Pseuds Corner - No.10

- an occasional selection of the worst of the Australian media-sphere, with particular attention to arts and political commentary that is pompous, pretentious, over-written, self-important, knowing instead of knowledgeable, name-dropping, euphemistic, cliche'd or sloppily written to the point of meaninglessness. . .

Cave's saturnine persona refutes Australian national optimism and its chirpy creed of "No worries". This is why he was so intent on colaborating with Kylie. One druggy evening in March in 1992, he persuaded a fan to give him a little pink and baby-blue plastic bag with Kylie's name on it, now on show at the National Library; he toted the candy-coloured trinket around the world, hoping it transmitted a message. In 1996 she fell for the bait and sweetly permitted him to slay her in "Where the Wild Roses Grow". They make an odd couple in the video. Frankenstein's lumbering monster has apparently convinced Ramsay St's fluffy, sugary Charlene to go out on a date. It was a sacrificial act, designed to ravage the suburban Australia of barbequed nature strips, trilling budgies and unstained laundry happily flapping on rotary clothes lines. - Cave has compared Australia to the Holy Land, but only because its terrain is so stark and unhallowed . . . "More flies than at the Cruxifiction", comments Euchrid in And the Ass Saw the Angel, futilely brushing away the winged filth that crawls on his skin. Who but an Australian, picturing Golgotha, would listen for the hum and drone of the blowies that surely converged on Christ's succulent wounds? (Peter Conrad, The Monthly)

I’m a morning person if you accept that morning is a state of mind, beginning when you decide it should. I think Descartes said something like you shouldn’t let anyone get you out of bed until you’re good and ready if you want to do decent mathematics. In a perfect world, it would be the same with writing, of course. But even on little sleep the morning can be golden for creative work, the brain surprisingly deft, somehow reborn. (Kristel Thornell on the meaning of morning, Melbourne Writers Festival blog)

I’ve been in a lot of aeroplanes lately – flying out from Melbourne, flying in novels, and in dreams. Sometimes the ports look similar. Familiar, unfamiliar. My life is literature, is writing, is reading, and always passion, and there are good and bad things about being intertwined with fiction, about consistent imagining. It can be expansive, but also irrepressible. It can thrill or bother me at three o’clock in the morning. - But then, flying somewhere to talk about it - to share on stage, in a workshop, over a glass of wine - these habitations of the mind, connections formed on the page, worlds opened up, emotional educations or confirmations. - The next chance to do this is somewhere close to where I grew up – Byron Bay. I can’t wait to dig my feet in the sand, and to dig deep into the minds of authors. (Angela Meyer on being a Busy Byron Bay Writers Festival Bee, Literary Minded)

Want to know my favourite sex toy? My wooden spoon. I use it to cook lamb stir-fry, sweet potato soup and Mediterranean vegetable frittata. Another bedroom aid? The duster, broom or nappy wipes. . . You can imagine the dream scenario: as I approach 35, my life is part Voltaire, part Viagra. When I'm not cooking three dinners, wiping snot out of my daughter's eyes, or impaling my foot on Lego starships, my wife and I are enjoying tender hours of lovemaking. . . I jest, but the 'Mentally Sexy Dad' is a real phenomenon. The brainchild of blogger Clint Greagen at Reservoir Dad, the competition celebrates men who're committed to a more balanced family life. It's a reminder: men who clean, cook and parent are hot stuff. . . This is the logic behind Reservoir Dad's competition. In an irreverent way, Clint is trying to highlight the attractiveness of alternative masculine domesticity. Of course this involves a little beefcake: bulging guns or tight bums in little undies. But this is only the most obvious allure. More than anything else, these are men who refuse to be bound by traditional gender roles. They can be tough, brawny and probably boozy - but they also wash, cook, clean and kid-wrangle. In this, the competition, also running the United States, is a celebration of today's real new age man: not stereotypically emasculated or wimpy, but caring, careful and committed. It's not a denial of what most men in Western societies do. It's an expansion of it: showing how their energy and perseverance can be broadened and enriched; how they can be bigger men, not in waistline, but in spirit. They're 'mentally sexy' because they've given their responsibilities and ideals thought, and demonstrated will, intelligence and foresight. It's about the allure of the soul, not just the biceps. (Damon Young, "Mentally sexy dads", ABC The Drum Unleashed)

Thank God I am not a squid, I think as I watch the unimaginable ordeals of so many animals; thank God I am not a gannet chick swallowed alive by a pelican; thank God I am not expected once a year to crawl up cliffs a million times higher than myself?. - Perhaps some of the gratification of nature documentaries is in reminding us of our own animal truths. . . Life reminds me of a favourite poem by Mary Oliver, Wild Geese, simple and moving because it speaks of the knowledge we have when we shiver in cold, when we are hungry, when we are frightened: that we are warm, living beasts, no less, little more:
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk
on your knees for a
hundred miles through
the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the
soft animal of your body
love what it loves. (Kate Holden, "A cosmos of wonders imparts its cosy glow", The Age)

I was startled by Professor Gillian Whitlock's reading of my essay 'After the Academy' (Australian Book Review, June/July 2002). She appears to think that my choice of 'romantic', 'organic' tropes and of such generally non-U discourses as 'settler autobiographics' was unwitting, and that I had somehow managed to get through seventeen years as a full time academic without achieving self-awareness in my own writing practice, and without being so much as touched by the ideas or the language by which I was surrounded. . .
There is, of course, no such thing as ME (I take it this was a laboured pun on campus-specific essentialist crimes; if not, it is now), and if Professor Whitlock claims to have no heart or soul then who am I to argue? As far as the development of the academic self over time is concerned, there can be no clear distinction between the 'sandstones' and the 'gumleaves', for most of us are the hybrid offspring of both, or perhaps I should say that our selves are constructed on the site where the various discourses circulating around both intersect. (Kerryn Goldsworthy responds to Gillian Whitlock, Australian Humanities Review)

The Almodóvar that was before us had all the suspense and sparkle in the world. - Yes, and by the grace of God, most of the acting was superb. Wendy Hughes had just the right kind of hauteur and quivering warmth as the famous actress who is besotted with her girlfriend and is the unwitting destroyer of the boy. This is a big handsome performance in the role that was recreated on the London stage by Diana Rigg, and Hughes gives it a sort of bewildered vulnerability in the midst of decaying magnificence that is splendid and also splendidly matched by Peta Sergeant, who sizzles with sexiness and self-pity as the damaged damsel who is her Stella and her Atthis. . .
Some of the other parts are, admittedly, played a bit cheesily. Katie Fitchett was too much a sketch of bouncy goodness and then long-suffering nobility as the nun who gets pregnant and then infected with HIV. And Jolyon James is far too effete and goonish as the actor who plays Stanley, but he’s a lot better as the missing father in drag. - This is not a flawless production but it is full of a wild energy and a counter-balancing grace that delivers a contemporary masterpiece full of all the dramatic and cinematic echoes in the world, which is all at once full of life and of the magic that gives it form. (Peter Craven, "Comedy and energy - and tears" Australian Spectator)

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

Pseud's Corner 2

It is odd, after reading glorious sample after glorious sample of Benjamin Law's pithy, stark, delightfully graphic prose (torn vaginas, anybody? Teaching your Malaysian migrant mother the word 'c**t'), to find the man in person
such a sweet, wholesome type of chap. Butter wouldn't melt. Smegma
might, obviously, which would no doubt lead into yet another brilliant
exploration of sticky honesty that Ben does so well. . .
There are very few Australian essayists who have the ability to make one LOL - which I believe is the correct term for someone of my increasingly idiot generation - and I feel so blessed that Ben has momentarily pried his talent from brief and inviting pieces in local magazines to focus on this particular collection of work. (Marieke Hardy interviews Benjamin Law)

 ***

Well, it looks as though Pseud's Corner is going to have to be a fortnightly thing. Thanks to everyone for the suggestions - your favourite pompous wanky quotations from the Australian media-sphere are going to be in the mix as of today. For anyone who hasn't got the invitation yet: take your revenge on the worst writing you can find by emailing it or a link to

pseudsaustralia@yahoo.com.au

For the time being we're keeping the definition of the pseud-ish fairly loose. If you're looking to get a nomination for The Corner of Shame yourself, remember - the key is to strike a balance between pomposity and meaninglessness - between cliche' and an inflated sense of the importance of your own opinions. If that doesn't seem like specific enough advice, have a careful look through this week's success stories. Try inflating 5 minutes worth of googling (search entries: Tolstoy/literature/seafood) into an entertaining little thought-piece for the back-page of a broadsheet newspaper. Try taking a once-controversial truth that has since been repeated so often that it's become a howling banality and repeat it again - there's a plentiful supply of them in the life, the work, the novels and philosophy of the past. Don't just quote your once-dangerous verity, though, do a serious spot of over-writing. (Have a try with the idea that someone's sense of his own physical being makes a difference to the way he thinks and writes.) Basically - find a dead or dying horse and give it a really good flogging. Lavish all your tedious verbal ingenuity on other people's ideas as if they were your own.

Remember, above all, that words have no meaning. Or that when they are just tokens in the game of self-esteem you play with yourself, you can make them mean whatever you want them to mean. "Sublimation" can mean losing control of finer feelings and "precisely" can refer vaguely to something that you vaguely gesture in the direction of. Or perhaps to your very act of gesturing. Whether it's someone else's show that you're reviewing, the scene of contemporary culture that you're observing, a disaster in a faraway foreign clime or a farce unfolding on local tv that you're reporting on, remember - you are front and centre. Thoughtfulness, critical reflection - I mean, what are they but personal experience?

Today's edition of the Corner of Shame starts with something new. Every month - or will it turn out to be every fortnight too? - we'll award an Order of the Brown Nose. Pretty self-explanatory really. Like Pseud's Corner itself, it's another feature of the funny pages of Private Eye - a magazine we feel positively aglow in recommending to anyone who finds that first-hand experience of the Australian media reduces them to thoughts of self-harm. Congratulations to Marieke Hardy for a truly great feat of public brown-nosing in this month's Readings catalogue. Surely encomiums to literary friends have rarely been as pointlessly weird and disgusting and yet so authentically sucky. Can we promise Marieke the OBN every time she stages a public love-in like this and simultaneously declares herself and her readers to be complete dickheads? It would be foolish to promise.

Actually, no it wouldn't. Every time you do it again, Marieke, you can have the OBN automatically.
  
***

I'm often attracted to artists who're physical. - They don't have to be he-men or world-class athletes. But I enjoy the obvious lesson: the seemingly cerebral work of writing is no impediment to physical labour.- And, more importantly, exercise and exertion contribute to literary work. They keep the blood pumping, the brain buzzing, and the mind undistracted by the ennui or itchiness of a lethargic body. Contrary to the myth of the drunk, absinthe-guzzling romantic, health can be good for literature. "Guy loves a couple or three streams in all his life," said Hemingway, on fishing, "and loves them better than anything in the world." - As Hemingway's writings on boxing, bullfighting and fishing suggest, it goes both ways: the experience of sport or physical leisure is enriched by literature. It clarifies the virtues of struggle and endurance; it shares the love of a bruised but pulsing will.- So when I read of Hemingway's fist fight with the poet Wallace Stevens, I don't react with disgust - not at the physicality, anyway. In the confrontation itself, I see two men of beautiful words, putting themselves to the test; striving palpably, rather than in the sometimes anaemic arena of words. . .
Hemingway v. Stevens is a tangible reminder that writers are creatures of ardent flesh. It's what can propel them into pages - the very paper that immortalises their embodied mastery, and records the thrill of physical virtue. - Writing is, in other words, a whole throbbing, sweating, panting life - not simply a desk, chair and paper. The hand that holds a pen can also be a fist - and more 'literary' for this. (Damon Young, "Hemingway's Fists", Darkly Wise, Rudely Great)

In Rabe's performance, we get a needy and manipulative woman whose finer feeling is sublimated into a grotesque and hilarious act, only barely controlled. Jagged anachronisms leap from the mannered gentility. Anna is as likely to shriek "Get off my tits," or "You pagan slut!" as she is to defend a lesbian assignation with a learned reference to biblical writ. . . Questions [however] lurk under the sparkling dialogue, elevated language and histrionic displays about the authority and inevitability of performance - those we give to the world, and the ones we reserve for our most intimate relationships. - In this production, the relationship's intimacy and power struggles aren't precisely embroidered into the linguistic corsetry. We are left to take the distracting jewels of Mamet's dialogue as they come. (Cameron Woodhead, "Marriage made in drawing room hell" - a review of MTC's Boston Marriage)

One sees Matt Preston's cravat and wonders if he had it rough as a boy. But there is method in Matt's sartorial high-jinks, for it is impossible to take insult from a man who dresses as a jester. One sees the pink pantalons and senses there must be some delirium hovering hereabouts. And one forgives. . .
As MasterChef  was ending I flicked to The Pacific on Seven and a young GI lay on the beach at Iwo Jima under an artillery barrage. Twenty years old and hellfire coming down on his head and his friends dying around him and his face gripped in horror. The look was familiar to me. Where had I observed this unholy dread before? Had I lived a previous life as a digger? Was I, long ago, a centurion? Had I halved Frenchmen with a broadsword. - No. I had seen the same expression moments earlier on Channel Ten as Jimmy Seervai plucked frantically at a lobster's alimentary tract in the MasterChef challenge while time ticked towards his ruin. . . And I didn't know who to mourn. The marine, giving his life so that we might live free; or the failed MasterChef, succumbing to a spiky gang of crustaceans in a studio-itchen amid a feast of hyperbole. And, yuck, when did my dinner begin to taste of life-and-death? (Anson Cameron, "A case of suffering for one's tart" The Age)

IT IS the start of autumn and the first televisions of the season have begun blooming on grass verges.- Or perhaps fallen from the trees along with the leaves. Summer's carefree days are drawing in, digital television broadcasting impends, and on the footpaths all around my place, there is a veritable harvest.- On a typical walk I pass about 10 of them, softening in the damp, cords growing into the earth. . .
My mum and I love hard rubbish. We drive along, our eyes scouring piles of wonky chairs, dismantled computer desks, old eggbeaters, sheets of chipboard. "Alert!" I cry, and we zoom over to peer and pluck.- Bricks to raise my potted plants into the sunshine, a raffia shelf, a jewellery tree, a photo album, a peeling old wooden box, we chuck it all in the back of the car. - My mother muses over a rocking chair with a broken strut. "I could fix it," she says hopefully. "Like the last three broken chairs you took home? The ones still in a pile in the shed? Those loser chairs?" "You're right," she says sadly, and walks away, but then turns back and seizes her prize. "It would be perfect to grow vines over! Novelty garden furniture!"- It's hard to resist the temptation of free treasure. And it's environmentally virtuous too: recycling and scavenging is all the thing, don't you know. In some poor countries a family could live off the crap on my footpath. . . (Kate Holden, "Footpath frenzy", The Age)

ANNA Karenina continues to be read and remembered for many reasons. Its beginning - Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way - is one of literature's most quoted starters. Beautiful, doomed Anna flinging herself in front of a steam-shrouded locomotive remains the very essence of romantic tragedy. Jealousy, adultery, lust, agricultural reform - Anna Karenina has it all. But what sticks in my mind are the oysters. - I once met some oysters in Avignon. They were asleep on wooden trays between layers of damp newspaper, a situation in which I myself have been found from time to time. A man was selling them from a van, shucking them to order for customers and stallholders at a makeshift bric-a-brac market across the river from the medieval ramparts of the Palais des Papes. We slurped them straight off the shell, washed down with a precocious young stubby of Stella Artois. [Ah, those precocious French boutique beers!] - The medieval popes in their fortress across the Rhone must have eaten such oysters, their souls unsullied by the experience. They ate clams, too, I imagine. There's a clam bisque in Madame Bovary that I wouldn't mind trying. Flaubert handles shellfish in quite a different way to Tolstoy, of course. And there, limpid on the half-shell, lies the difference between Russian and French literature. If Tolstoy were French, Anna Karenina would've drowned herself in a tureen of steaming bouillabaisse. (Shane Maloney, "The world on a half-shell", The Age)

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)

Age Review of Damon Young's Distraction: A Philosopher's Guide to Being Free

We live in an age not given to deep or extended reflection. The phenomenon of lifestyle philosophy is part of a sporadic and slightly tortured effort by philosophers to make themselves relevant to such an age. For better or worse, philosophy stopped being what it once was, the much vaunted queen of the sciences, several centuries ago. And the times are definitively over when a literary or philosophical education was seen as a necessary preparatory to life in the wider world. A fair portion of academic philosophy has coped with that by remaking itself in the image of a technical discipline, with its own sub-disciplines, journals and professional cadres. Lifestyle philosophy has struck out in the opposite direction. Its working assumption is that philosophy can be made as applicable to everyday life as the individual lifestyle philosopher dares to make it.

Damon Young's Distraction is very much in this vein. Subtitled A Philosopher's Guide to Being Free, it takes up the perennial theme of individual liberty and does something with it very much along the lines of Alain de Botton or John Armstrong. It shares the attractions and the pitfalls of Armstrong's work, which at its best can give readers a gentle introduction to a philosophical theme but at its worst reduces the history of ideas to something colourless and quaint, a sort of boutique blandness.

Young argues that distraction is the very opposite of freedom - it is what robs us of our authentic selves and radically narrows our ability to give shape to individual character. This all seems unambiguously true; we live in times that are rife with diversions of dubious value, a seemingly endless array of trivia. For Young, we can all be happier, healthier and wiser if we concentrate on what we truly value, and the lives and works of great philosophers and artists apparently show us how we can go about it - they're quintessentially edifying, or so the argument goes.

In seven chapters Young surveys the areas of contemporary life where distraction exercises its devilish and humdrum charms - in the world of work, in our dealings with technology, in war and politics. But he also takes us on a Cook's tour of Western cultural history in search of a cure. This is where the problems begin. The meanings of thousand-page novels, philosophical systems and their authors' lives are condensed into paragraphs or single sentences - the meaning of T.S.Eliot's life is that "hard work pays off", with Marx it's that "in the economy there's no such thing as a free lunch", while Plato's idealistic disaffection with the Greece of his day suggests to Young we shouldn't "flinch or close our eyes" when confronted with "the opportunity to live".

The potted versions of the lives seem slightly irrelevant to Young's theme and he often strains to derive much coherent, reflective meaning from them. Too often the result is stereotyped life-stances that Young plays off against one another. Thus too much romanticism in life is a consistent no-no. On the other hand, adhering too strictly to reason, order and principle underplays the importance of emotion and imagination. Yes, indeed. But can any of the great philosophers really have recommended a life of unadulterated romance or the reasoned eradication of passion? Young writes as if they might have, so he can guide us to the middle ground, from which freedom gently beckons.

The difficulty is not so much Young's style, which is at times lively and (maybe a touch predictably) amusing. It's a problem with his self-help-y point of view. The overall cast of Distraction isn't equal to the grand idea of a new book about freedom. Flattening writers' lives into a digestible series of underpsychologised set pieces isn't enough to make a compelling case about liberty or individuality in our times.And even if we'd like to think that the wisdom of past ages could be transferred into our personal philosophical bank accounts without further ado, the question remains whether the historical context of an Eliot or a Plato's life was so different from our own that the project of letting them speak to us directly is bound to fail.

Young is right that we live in distracting times. But is more freedom or self-realisation quite the solution? There are good reasons to think the opposite but they don't get a look in. Might not some of our ills - from stockmarket turmoil to climate change - be the byproducts of the very liberty Young advocates? To see that, the cruel problem of freedom needs to be grasped from a less comfortable point of view than that of Distraction.