Pseuds Corner No 13

. . . an occasional column devoted to meaningless, self-important, euphemistic, contorted and plain weird prose from throughout the media-sphere. Send you favourite examples to pseuds' HQ: pseudsaustralia@yahoo.com.au [Ed]

Writing the second novel is supposed to be hard, because you write into expectation. . . This, now, is the matter most at hand for me. And if in some ways that deadens the passion, it certainly invigorates the experience -- the vividness of it all. Because it is located more in the work, the voyage, the journey (insert your own platitude), and less in the ethereal destination of arrival, success, ego, fame, some killer whale of need (insert your own platypus).
Sisyphus (sisyphus, platypus, tomayto, tomato) springs to mind. What would Sisyphus have done if he'd ever got that rock to the top? How would he have felt? Don't we need the struggle, even if we struggle with it? - So in this way, every novel is a first novel. All the uncertainty, even if they're different uncertainties. All the investment. But mostly, the same shackling to the fundamental experience the novel takes place in: your life. (John Bauer, "Another first novel")

In the case of classical music, record companies and entrepreneurs appeal to our hedonistic responses when they decide to package all Mahler's slow movements in one box set - that's over 150 minutes of contemplation, melancholia and metaphysical yearning with proportional profit margins to match. But, far away from the profit dollar, what we are contemplating here is the texture of time. Mahler, through his seemingly immobile phrases, elongated compositional lines and heady climaxes, teaches us that our thoughts and ideas can be short or long, that there is no right or wrong to slow versus fast. (Xenia Hanusiak compares the slow food movement to the slow movement of Mahler's Fifth Symphony, The Age 25/01/2011)

The gospel references don't intrude with a reverberant or religiose rhetoric, but Steele often gives chapter and verse at the start of a poem, as if a religious vision were the gnomic precondition of this swirling erudite talk that has been made artifactual and poetic without losing the implication of a moral dimension. . .
It's a sense of the fated journey that makes the book moving for all the bric-a'-brac of its referencing and erudite innuendoes and inflections. There's a beautiful sombre line in a poem that is among other things a tribute to the high and hairy language of the Irish: "The road to Heaven is well enough signed,/ but it's badly lit at night." Yes, we know not the day nor the hour, though this book of poems is luminous with the sense of a mortality costing not less than everything and the light that darkness is configured by. (Peter Craven reviews Peter Steele's The Gossip and the Wine, The Age)

"We're seeing younger consumers and younger members of society re-evaluate their role within wealth creation in often very, very social ways. That lies at the heart of "betapreneurialism"; your reason for doing something isn't necessarily just about making yourself wealthier. There is an implicit consideration of those who are part of that journey with you. . . Baby boomers were all about self; self-pleasing, self-actualisation, and finding value in self. What you now see when you look at a younger generation is people who are re-evaluating the reasons why you do something. And I think there is less of an inclination to think that it's really about fiscal generation; it's about value generation." (Chris Sanderson, "guru trend-spotter", in conversation with Michael Short in The Zone)

"Sustainability at the University of Melbourne is evolving beyond an operational focus to a philosophy underpinning all that we do. . . The University has a long-term commitment to reducing the environmental impact of our operations, while developing opportunities for students and staff to be informed and empowered as advocates for a more sustainable world. . . The growing importance of 'Education for Sustainability' is reflected in our graduate attributes, enabling graduates to become 'active global citizens' and to 'be advocates for improving the sustainability of the environment'." (Chris White in conversation with Shane Cahill about the myriad ways in which a philosophy of sustainability is being practised in the operations of the University of Melbourne's Property and Campus Services, The Melbourne (University) Voice, March, 2011)

Vintage Pseuds

Many areas in the arts still need financial stabilisation. Others need consolidation and some need growth. A redefinition of the Australia Council's "Key Organisations" should be undertaken. At present the category is too large and indistinct, with a massive variance occurring within its spectrum. There is a need for a new platform of support for "flagship" organisations across the art forms. Flagship organisations are those that commission ambitious new works and engage with multiple audiences. They need differentiation from the incubator groups catering to niche and cogniscenti clusters. These flagship organisations already exist, but are buried in the morass of "Key Organisations". Their leading role in creating national cultural assets and setting the national cultural agenda needs to be recognised and supported. Funding these organisations will assist the arts to flourish, make them more accessible, and by extension create an adaptive, innovative society.
The "small to medium" performing-arts sector was analysed in 2002, but no particular financial action was taken. These are urgent issues. Artistic and professional outputs have already plateaued in this vital part of the arts sector. We need government funds to increase our capacity, to bring human resources up to an acceptable professional level. . . (Juliana Engberg, "The Arts" in Dear Mr Rudd: Ideas for a Better Australia, 2008)

Pseuds Corner No 12 - Pseuds Melbourne

. . . an occasional column devoted to self-important, euphemistic, contorted, pompous and plain weird prose from throughout the media-sphere. Send you favourite examples to pseuds' HQ: pseudsaustralia@yahoo.com.au [Ed]

I am watching The Social Network. The breakneck delivery of conversations, (conversations?) between the technology powerbrokers makes me uber. I sit upright, as upright as I imagine I would be in an electric chair. I am on speed life alert, goodbye contemplation, hello quick or the dead. . . But then there's my other love, Mahler - the composer of the longest movements in symphonic lieterature. How can his languid verbosity and posturing on the infinite possibly fit in to my social network lifestyle? (Xenia Hanusiak, The Age 25/01/2011)

Javier Marias is one of the reigning foreign language masters to whom we defer as if they were the automatic inheritors of a modern classicism carried like an insignia or an insinuation. . . Marias' While the Women are Sleeping is full of fiddly little jewel boxes of gentle creepiness. Stories of ghosts, stories of graves, faint intimations of how the spirit of story that is the spellbinding glory of the world is never separate from the spiral staircase of what makes the blood go chill. (Peter Craven, The Weekend Australian, 29/01/2011)

With this spirit of like-minded people to which Margaret Mead refers, I’d also like to use this opportunity to recognize the amazing work of my co-authors Michael and Scott. Both have been engaged by some of the leading companies on the planet — which have sought their wisdom, expertise and Thought Leader capabilities to help drive results in organizations. They are brothers in arms, as are all Thought Leaders, on this journey to raise consciousness by inspiring thinking that facilitates conversations that rock the planet. - Imagine a place where great thinkers can come together, financially resourced, strong in their views, articulate in expressing them and focused on value. What a force they could be. What kind of legacy could a group like that make? It would be a kind of immortality. A loosely put together carbon structure of genes and DNA seems doomed to entropy and finally death. But a collection of ideas, a meme pool, will and always has served the world long after the grey matter responsible for it has passed. Matt Church, Thought Leaders: How to capture, package and deliver your ideas for greater commercial success)

She is nice. She gives head. She doesn't like all the attention in bed. She's used to selfish lovers. Not lovers like me who need the redemption of her pleasure. She probably doesn't cum unless she's alone. She's been with a string of those weak men who feel threatened. Men who like women that don't say much. She falls for men who take. Not men like me who need vindication, who need to give back too. That without her orgasm she hasn't truly validated who I am. Without that mark left behind on the bed, I am left only with the stain in me. (Jon Bauer, Rocks in the Belly)

Pseuds Melbourne

- wherein staff writers at The Age newspaper and tenured university professors masturbate in public with their eyes closed at the thought of the city of Melbourne's style, sophistication and general ssssassiness.

What do you call a city whose unofficial dish is kingfish ceviche or salt and pepper calamari; a city enamoured equally of hierloom vegetables and re-imagined street food; a city that also spent the past 12 months going a bit mad for that humblest of convenience foods, the sandwich? You could call it many things. Interesting, certainly. Enigmatic. Eclectic, even. You could certainly call it Melbourne. (Larissa Dubecki, "The year in food and drink (in Melbourne)" the age (melbourne) magazine)

Oddly this year, architects are providing proof in their own puddings. A headquarters for the Australian Institute of Architects in Exhibition Street (by Lyons) will be 21 floors of energy efficiency, composed of a fashionable broken surface of ribs and fins and highlighted by a ribbon of bright green (this year's colour). - In the new architecture of disorder, there is chaos, fuzzy logic, irregular patterns and an organic expression of function. It's all about the contemporary human condition and our precarious grip on the environment, wedded to a belief that fundamentalism has passed us by. (Norman Day, "The year in architecture (in Melbourne)", the age (melbourne) magazine)

Pseuds Corner Holiday Edition

"Grandeur is a mixing together, a moral aspect of what do we value, and with an economic aspect - which is, where are the resources going . . . It's saying that in life you must try to fuse your ethical ambitions and your economic ambitions. . .
The image that was very much in my mind, thinking about grandeur, was a story of boys behaving badly at school. It was a school trip on which two boys had picked on a third. And the ones who'd done the bullying were from the most affluent families.
For me that caused a sort of sacred rage. . ." (John Armstrong, in interview with The Zone, "Grand designs", The Age, 01/11/10)
 

When I realised so many years ago that Jesus's sisters had been cruelly written out of history, and that no matter how much I cared, I could not reinstate them, I felt useless. None of the tools I had spent so many years acquiring as an academic scholar and general audience non-fiction writer were in any way equal to the task. I was surplus to what these women required. - I tried to forget the sisters. To abandon them to the dust of the unmarked past where I'd found them, but failed. To do so made me feel complicit in perpetuating what they'd already suffered - the terrible pain of being forgotten. - There was only one thing left to do. Slowly, I learned the craft of fiction writing so I could tell these stories the only way they could be told. (Leslie Cannold, "The Da Vinci Sisters", The Age 26/12/10)

I'm sitting in my local cafe, near the window. My jacket is on. I can see the Manchurian pear trees nearby, and the sky through their silouette fingers: clouds of white, light grey and charcoal, moving quickly from the shop facades to the awning of the cafe. On my table is a double short black and my laptop. The coffee has one sugar in it. Plugged into my laptop is a pair of large black headphones. They fit over my ears, and sit against my skull with soft rubber pads. Bruch's Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor is playing - Jascha Heifetz is the virtuoso. . . Even here in the cafe, the headphones need to cover my ears, otherwise the piercing voice of the proprietress will intrude. This is a relationship between me (the author), you (the reader) and the page. The proprietress in not helping by interrupting. (Damon Young on the moral quintessence of distraction, The Reader Vol.2)

The story of the Christ child makes the spirit soar, as it has for countless generations. What is it that defines Christmas for us? The strain of the obligatory socialising with family (including the ones you might naturally run a mile from)? The obligation huge numbers of people have to make those they love, especially children, feel that love because of the effort to delight them with the right gift? The general mayhem of spending and socialising and simulating good cheer in the midst of the strain and the squalor of another year gone? - Well, Christmas can be all of that. It's easy to forget that when Dickens created his ''Bah! Humbug'' man Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, he wasn't simply adding new refinements of sentimentalism to the long-established myth. He was also delineating, with great power, the travails of the long-distance loner. (If you re-read the bits of the story everyone forgets, before Scrooge comes good, you'll find that Dickens accommodates a sweeping blackness as disturbing as Kafka's.) - But on top of everything else, there's the story of the Christ child that surfaces in us like a race memory. . .
It was pleasing the other week when that easygoing lady of the left, Tanya Plibersek, Minister for Human Services and Social Inclusion, took to task whatever blighted public servant it was who ordered that there should be nothing Christian in any of the displays in post offices, as if a nativity scene was the insignia of the Spanish Inquisition and nothing but the stench of infamy in the nostrils of all those fundamentalist atheists who march under the banner of Richard Dawkins. - Plibersek said, quite rightly, that the Christmas story was a thing to be treasured, and people should also be free to honour Hanukkah and Hindu and Muslim festivals. - Of course that's true. Christmas is the one, though, that underlies the Jewish and Greek influences that structure our world. - If you doubt the Jewish influence in Christianity, think of the stupendous, densely Hebraic accents of Mary's great prayer which is known to the church as the Magnificat. (Peter Craven, "Tale of Innocence and Joy", The Age, 24/12/10)

If the independent arts remain invisible to government policy and support, a diminished view of the arts will guide community participation, venue programming, education programs and media responses - and the arts will suffer across the state.
In the words of one prominent voice: "It's important that we don't allow the arts to become just a platform of observers; it's about participation; it's about artists. And in my view, an active arts community is a community where there's diversity, where the community is engaged with artists, where they're welcoming of artists, where the artists and the art forms are not institutionalised for their own sake, but they are ever-evolving - they're thoughtful, they're powerful, perpetually fresh, perpetually edgy". . .
An effective arts policy, collaborating with the independent arts, will create partnerships with those smaller organisations already immersed in artist development. A devolved funding approach overcomes the stop-start nature of project funding, securing the committment of expert organisations for programs such as mentorships, audience development, public space creation.
In 2011, Victoria's arts policy must take the creativity, diversity and sheer scale of the independent arts as its starting point. With a strong peer-review culture, and unencumbered by the art-form boards of the Australia Council, Arts Victoria is well placed to collaborate on new models. . . (Esther Anatolitis, wind assisted by T. Baillieu (aka "The Voice") - The Age, 17/01/11)