Pseud's Corner: Part 5

Exact an undying revenge on silly, over-written, self-important waffle. All links and extracts welcome at

pseudsaustralia@yahoo.com.au  

For this week's tip-offs, thanks to MH, MJH, SL, BG

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The fulcrum of truth-claims in documentary drama now becomes clear. Rather than lying with the reporting of indisputable ‘facts’, as Weiss imagines, it is the abrasion between known and accepted views on the one hand, and views that have been ignored and suppressed on the other, that constitutes the force and appeal of the approach. Factual accuracy is, as it were, leveraged in the narrative to instantiate the general truth contained within the conditions of its possibility. But note there has to be a lack of fit in the structure of the drama, on cognitive, emotional and/or physical levels. Badiou says that Truth interrupts History. From a dramaturgical perspective we might say Truth interrupts Pattern. The experience of a drama must overrun its structural predicates and it is in the gaps, elisions and supplements to the action, what elsewhere I call a play’s ‘structural silences’ (Meyrick 2006) that its ontological truth is to be found. (Julian Meyrick, "The Ontology of Dramaturgy")

There have been other cooking shows before, of course, but it's hard not to be impressed by the role MasterChef has played in boosting the culinary confidence of a nation. - We see pasta being made from scratch. We lean how to shuck oysters and how to make our macaroons sleek and shiny - this all amounts to a better world. . . Tension is created in the usual overwrought style. But there's still a lot of fun to be had with the ridiculous dramatics as long as you know where to look. Keeping one eye on the Twitter news feed and one on the telly is a good way to cope. . . In small ways such as these, the overemotional MC moments can be skilfully wrangled back to the realm of the pisstakingly bearable. And thank god, because it really is such a splendid show . . . (Lorerlei Vashti reflects on the pisstakingly bearable agonies and ecstasies of MasterChef, Green Guide)

Through a dramatisation of this man's life, we watch as political idealism turns to doctrinaire ideology and democratic protest becomes a Trojan horse for enabling oppression of the people themselves. Iran: My Grandfather is an astonishing and cautionary tale. - The author portrays his grandfather in a series of vivid vignettes. As these include scenes of argument with his wife, post-coital argument with his mistress and seditious argument with his best griend, it's clear that the grandson has taken imaginative yet unsentimental liberties with this avatar. However, issues of authenticity are side-lined by the vigour of the writing, which includes some "deft info-dumps" presented as dialogue, and the immense commotion of the political background. Interspersed are cogent historical accounts that fill in the caesuras of the narrative. - Deadpan and yet clenched with outrage, these brief essays recount how Iran, the proud inheritor of Persian culture. . .[continues] (Kate Holden, "Iran and its awful ironies", The Age)

"People warmed to Rudd quickly," she told me. "But the affection hasn't deepened. He's seen as bright, not beholden to the party warlords, competent, his own man, really keen to have the job, a breath of fresh air. But who is he? The feeling is: we've been on lots of dates, but we haven't got to the next level." First and foremost, Kevin Rudd is the engine that drives him. Every witness to his life since [his Queensland home-town of] Nambour talks about the phenomenal machine inside this man. He turns many faces to the world, but the engine under the hood is the same 5.4-litre V8. What you see of Rudd at any particular moment depends on the destination and the terrain. He is a sui generis off-road vehicle whose driver is only glimpsed in passing, a shadow through the windscreen. (David Marr talks to Rebecca Huntley of Ipsos Mackay Research about who Kevin Rudd is, Quarterly Essay No. 38, "Power Trip)

I’d claim, therefore, that I’m only productive when I possess an arena to write in that is as supple and accommodating as an old, fuzzy, sublime memory. I don’t want to resign myself to having to assemble a new or revised order from the things around me, every time I sit down to unfurl my fists: writing should be like fly-fishing or tossing the ball; surveying your immediate surroundings, you should know the way and wend of the river, you should sink back into your chair with the faultless ease of a hand into a well-oiled baseball glove. - For me, if you’re having to repeatedly grapple with your workspace each time you succumb to your keyboard – as though words are only valid and apparent when chaos has been cast asunder – then your reserve of energy is being channelled into an unnecessary endeavour. Eventually, a desk will clean itself, but the words won’t ever fail to sprawl, to clutter up, to generate their own forms of fungus and dust. Eventually, there comes a time when you have to accept that objects in disarray won’t tell you anything. The words are skulking in the negative space around them, and unless it stinks of week-old pizza a writer has more important concerns to devour. (Kirk Marshall, "Kirk Marshall's Literary Space", LiteraryMinded)

What Decibel give us is a highly complex, and densely material, negotiation of both the appeal of these concepts, and the rather clunky but beautiful sounds, warm overlays and microtonal fluctuations of these materials when harnessed in conjunction of [sic] what one might characterise as a surrealist bazaar of sound reproduction technology. Like the flea-markets and junk shops which Ray and Andre Breton formerly prowled, Decibel's mechanics of performance is rich in the "convulsive beauty" and strangely patinaed dance of objects and sounds which emerges from such a play of thingness within the audiences's perception. Jonathan W. Marshall, “Thingness and Sonic Alchemy: Decibel performs Alvin Lucier” Liquid Architecture Festival of Sound Art

Pseud's Corner 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Karl Kraus: Journalists, Aesthetes, Politicians, Psychologists, Academics and Others. . .

From: Pro Domo et Mundo
Of Society

I divide the people I don’t say hello to into four groups. There are those I don’t say hello to so that I don’t compromise myself – the simplest case. Then there are those I don’t say hello to so that they aren’t compromised – a case requiring some delicacy. Next are those I don’t say hello to so that I don't do damage to their image of me. They’re even harder to handle. Lastly there are those I don’t say hello to so that I don't do damage to my image of me. There I have to really be on the look-out. And yet I’ve got together a rough routine. My way of not saying hi to people is such that I know how to bring out each of these nuances so that no one is done an injustice.

Middle class society is made up of those who have already had their appendix out and those who already have so little ready money that they wouldn’t even be in the running for the Imperial Order of Franz Josef.

One couldn’t make head or tail of him, because he was something. He didn’t have that adroitness which is better than what one is because it draws to oneself what one isn’t.

They will sooner forgive you the low trick they played on you than the good deed you did them.

There have been so many times when someone who shared my opinion kept the better half for himself. Now I’ve wised up and only ever offer the public my thoughts.

The prospect of a city whose every extra seems to occupy centre-stage is definitely enough to drive one mad. In Vienna you find your way into a street blocked by the garbage man, you have time to observe his features till he's taken the can round the corner. There’s nothing in the street except the garbage man, he grows to gigantic proportions and stands between you and life itself. Or maybe it’s a local police guard. You see him on a daily basis, you take part in his story, you say to yourself - he’ll be grey soon, like me. Isn’t it tragic to spend your time waiting to die being the involuntary spectator of all this banality? . . . In this city the extras have taken over the film. The head of each sardine comes to have an individualisable visage of its own and threatens to devour the man whose plate it's on. Life here traces itself out without any hint of perspective; its figures are like those of a bad cartoon. They remain frozen when they should be on the move. They move in order to show off the boots they’re wearing. Horses hang in the air, their front legs extended. A man tells a joke, opens his mouth to laugh and will never again shut it. A flower-girl is petrified between takes of the self-same scene. A cab-driver points to his horses and hopes, by assuring the passer-by that he has a cab to go with it, to bring the latter to convince himself that he does indeed have one. The young gallant today is badly shaven.

I've found a thought, but then I have to look for $10. I lose the thought, but I find the $10. The thought is again nearby; I just have to look for it. The person behind the counter is waiting; I have to find change - a $2 coin. I have it already! No, it’s a button. The folks roundabout are getting interested. Then it’s gone again, that thought. The official personage behind the counter is still there. I’m supposed to hand over a $2 coin, but all I’ve got is the $10 note. My coat’s open, the weather's cold and damp, I’m standing in a draft. I’m going to catch flu and then – goodbye work. I have to make a decision: should I go to get change or should I concentrate on the thought? If I go for change, I know what will happen. A dirty-looking hand will reach out to mine, press some gold coins into it and then strew stupid shrapnel on top. I close my coat. Now the thought will be there again soon. The person behind the desk turns away contemptuously and makes a tooting noise. Oh thought, now you’re gone.

There is only one way of rescuing yourself from the machine – by using it. In effect, you only arrive at yourself by car.

The greatest ill in the world is the compulsion to fritter away one's inner vitality on material things that are supposed to serve that inner vitality.

The way people defend themselves against me demonstrates that my attacks on them are so justified that I always regret not having foreknowledge of their defensiveness – which I would otherwise have made a major theme of the attack itself. An academic philosopher, unmasked by me as a militarist, put it this way – Kraus went on the attack against me because I didn’t want to contribute to his magazine; as a lecturer he would supposedly have had to reject such an unreasonable demand. – Now admittedly I don’t remember having invited him to contribute to the magazine. If I did so, it must have been before he got his PhD, and what he really meant was that he had to decline because he wanted to become a lecturer. If I'm aware of something like that, it speeds up the process of getting to know the man and his mindset and I integrate it into the judgment I pass on him. For my attacks present their motives for all to see. By attributing my attack to vengefulness, this man is lying in a way that makes him guilty of worse motives than my supposed vengefulness. Apart from that, he’s going about it illogically, for it remains an open question how it’s possible I myself didn’t become an academic long ago if I’m that egotistical and calculating and make such a pretence of intellectual effort. If I were what they say I am I would have long ago become what they are now! Whenever someone I’ve called a bad apple retorts in this way, all I have to say is that I would never have thought he was such a bad apple!

I imagine an ugly woman who looks in the mirror could believe the mirror image ugly, not she herself. Thus it is that society sees its nastiness and crudity in my mirror and stupidly believes that I’m nasty and crude.

If you’re getting panicky in the slaughterhouse of middle-class life, maybe you should grasp the opportunity and desert to the war.

Journalists, Aesthetes, Politicians, Psychologists, Academics and Other Numbskulls

The distance between art and the general public was never so great as it is today; however there has never before been that art-like artificial hotchpotch, the sort of thing that seems to write itself and almost reads itself. Today everyone writes and everyone understands and it’s just a matter of chance who remains a reader and who steps forth as writer from out of this horde of educated Huns striding forth against culture.

The sociability of the theatregoer is the shabby remainder of an epoch that's already kicked the bucket. Life, having got in a tangle, once got free of itself on the stage – from which location the devil once took it; from which spot the knacker now will.

In hatching the idea of teaching journalism at universities, mainstream culture has really come up with a funny one. Anyone with any social responsibility would demand it be made part of the MBA.

The idea behind all sorts of education is to make life into a charmless business, either by telling you how life is or telling you it amounts to nothing. We’re confused by this continual to-ing and fro-ing, one minute enlightened, the next endarkened.

Space and time get written about as if they were things for which no practical application had yet been found.

I’d give my life to know what the majority of human beings is meant to do with these much touted wider horizons.

Psychoanalysis unmasks the poet at first glance, you can’t put a single one over it – it knows exactly what Des Knaben Wunderhorn means. So be it - though now I'd say it’s high time for a psychological method that can see through the man who seems to be talking about sex but who’s secretly actually talking about art. For this return journey on the highways of symbolism I gladly offer my services as chauffeur! Though I’d also be pleased if a man who thought he was talking about psychology could be proven to have a subconscious that was actually talking about something else.

Neither jurists nor doctors seem to be aware that in matters erotic there are neither certain truths nor objective facts; that no expert report can convince us of the worth of an object we cannot love and no diagnosis of its flaws disappoint us once it has awakened our love; that we love totally in spite of realistic considerations, gratifying ourselves if need be in spite of the true state of the world. In short what they are oblivious to is that it’s high time to hound jurists and medicos out of a world that belongs to thinkers and poets.

They have the press, they have the stock-market, now they have the unconscious!

If someone steals something from you, don’t bother going to the police, who won’t be interested. Don't go to a psychoanalyst either, who will only be interested in one thing, that it is actually you who have stolen something.

Fine views are worthless. It all depends who has them.

Satires which the censor understands deserve to be banned.

The fool who can’t pass by a single one of the riddles of the world without restating the riddle as if it were nothing but his humble opinion wins a reputation for modesty. The artist who turns his thoughts ecstatically to something as inconspicuous as a trellis or a cobblestone is considered arrogant.

What is education? That which most are given, many pass on and few possess.