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Tuesday, 3rd November, 2009
"We live in an age of schmooze, where we are encouraged to flatter, to suck up, to lie to those in power, to get what we want. Those who refuse to do so are banished like Cordelia who, with her father's stubbornness, refused to compete in his contest of flattery and falsehood for her own gain. Such contests have become too familiar in today's corporate and political worlds. Those who refuse to play it do so at their own peril." -- Susan Mitchell, writing in a review of a performance of Shakespeare's King Lear in The Australian, 27th October 2009. [Comments on King Lear. In Shakespeare's play, perhaps his greatest, King Lear gives away his kingdom to his false daughters Goneril and Regan, who are prepared to flatter him, while stripping his loyal but honest daughter, Cordelia, of everything.]
This is pretty typical of so much public comment in Australia -- if you're on the "right", it's great that Fox News has become so profitable and influential. But if you're on the "left", it's good to see the New York Times overlook any news embarrassing to Barak Obama. After all, politics is all it's about these days, whether you're on the right or the left. That's the way it has to be, with Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
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Monday 6th July, 2009
Plato's Gorgias is a gripping read, despite the seemingly "unpromising" material. Plato has a great sense of humour, and when Socrates concludes, following the arguments of Callicles, "there is little to tell between good people and bad people in terms of how good and bad they are...[and]... if anything, bad people are better than good people", I laughed out loud. Callicles launches an unrestrained attack on Socrates and, although Socrates comes out ahead in the argument, having tied everyone up in knots as expected, the issues, still strikingly relevant today, are not totally resolved. Robin Waterfield's translation and introduction are really good, in the Oxford World's Classics. Friday 3rd July, 2009 J. M. Coetzee's novel Disgrace is disturbing and confronting. Set at a transitional period in South Africa, it imprints the mind with both specific and wider issues of desire, understanding, sacrifice, and trust -- between both people and peoples. Wednesday 17th June, 2009 In today's Australian concerning Peter Costello's retirement from politics, Paul Kelly writes ".. Costello was too often the barrister in politics, lacking intellectual curiosity..". This hardly comes as a surprise, but it seems to be a bit rough on barristers, and upon Costello himself, given that we don't encourage intellectual curiosity at all, not even in our universities. Wednesday 17th June, 2009 Driving to work, there was an amazingly vivid, complete and long-lasting rainbow. There's a rational explanation, of course. But each explanation has its own level, and the phenomenon always transcends the explanation. That is what makes science possible -- and wonder also. 11th June, 2009 Michael Ignatieff's biography of Isaiah Berlin is worth reading for the account of Berlin's meetings with Akhmatova and Pasternak in 1945; but certainly not just for that. Although Ignatieff paints Berlin as a liberal, Berlin's sense of the tragic in human affairs, his awareness of the conflicts between values, and perhaps his fondness for the social circles in which he moved, mean he may well be classed as a conservative. For example, on the conflict between values, compare with the comment of the archetypal conservative, Edmund Burke: "Freedom, to be enjoyed, must be restrained". Indeed, Berlin's idea of "objective pluralism" is, like tolerance, a form of restraint. 9th June, 2009 "For so long I hated to be pitied, But one drop of your pity And I go round as if the sun were in my body. That's why there is dawn all around me. I go around creating miracles, That's why!" Anna Akhmatova, 1889-1966. [This is taken from Michael Ignatieff's biography of Isaiah Berlin]. 29th May, 2009 There's no question of the intensitivity of jargon change these days. The latest seems to be "definitional decisions". What's next? Maybe "definitivity of definitional decisions". 28th May, 2009 In today's Sydney Morning Herald, Elizabeth Farrelly reveals that journalism students who distributed a newsletter Festival News at the Sydney Writers' Festival had their publication impounded -- "freedom of voices does not mean freedom to blurt", said the Festival manager. But it transpires that the students' University was getting money out of the Festival by subsidizing the newsletter, a secret deal of which the students were unaware. Of course universities are mere business corporations now, so it must be appropriate for journalism to be just a form of public relations. After all, "it's only the perception that matters", as one Australian University Vice-Chancellor once said it. 21st May, 2009 The ABC news website today has the following report: "There have been dozens of assaults targeting young foreign students on and around the campus [of the University of Newcastle, Australia]. There are now calls for the police and university to do more before the situation threatens Australia's international education industry." It's good to get our priorities right. 11th May, 2009 "Quality assurance" is a higher education minister's and bureaucrat's delight. What a pity it has precious little to do with actual quality. And it "assures" nothing whatsoever, except perhaps its oxymoronic status. |
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11th May, 2009
A small sample of the wisdom of George Eliot: "...it is impossible for me to represent their [Dinah and Seth in her novel Adam Bede] diction as correct, or their instruction as liberal. Still--if I have read religious history aright--faith, hope and charity have not always been found in a direct ratio with a sensibility to the three concords; and it is possible, thank Heaven! to have very erroneous theories and very sublime feelings." 8th May, 2009 P. J. O'Rourke's address to the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) apparently drew attention to the tenth commandment -- "thou shalt not covet" (Exodus 20:17). I suppose it's just a matter of time before O'Rourke and the CIS draw attention to other Biblical texts such as: "go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor,.." (Matthew 19:21), and "all...had all things in common; And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men..." (Acts 2:44-45). I look forward to seeing a Bible-based economics from O'Rourke and the CIS, with an appropriate selection of texts, of course. 5th May, 2009 "The free market is just a mechanism ... all the free market does is measure what people are willing to pay at a given moment for a given thing" -- P. J. O'Rourke. Of course. But then, why was market worship compulsory for so long? 3rd May, 2009 Quality is "degree of excellence" - Concise Oxford Dictionary, fourth edition (1961). Quality is "character with respect to excellence, fineness, etc., or grade of excellence" - Macquarie Dictionary, revised 3rd edition (2003). Quality is "degree or standard of excellence" - Collins English Dictionary (2006). Quality is "fitness for purpose" - Australian Universities Quality Agency (AUQA). Any old purpose seems good enough for AUQA. But who cares about the English language anyway? (Especially when it is so politically useful.) 3rd May, 2009 Contradictions are anathema to the corporate mind. 28th April, 2009 The Rudd Government's payments to individuals are unlikely to have the intended effect. But if Mr Rudd called them tax cuts, at least Peter Costello and the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) might say that they are a good idea. 28th April, 2009 "Networking" is the art of ingratiating oneself with those in a position to confer some possible advantage, thus encouraging discrimination in one's own favour. 27th April, 2009 Aspects of Professor Fred Hilmer's interview with Luke Slattery (The Australian, Higher Education Supplement, 1st April 2009) -- one tiny nail in the coffin of silent university conformity when faced with Government policy. But the lid is open, and there is no corpse. 27th April, 2009 "The more complicated the forms assumed by civilization, the more restricted the freedom of the individual" - Mussolini. Higher Education policy, and the universities themselves, seem determined to prove that Mussolini was correct. 26th April, 2009 I bet you my mobile phone moves more quickly than your mobile phone. 26th April, 2009 In "The Bacchae" by Euripides, it finally struck this reader that the frenzies of the Bacchantes are a punishment from the god, not a gift. GO TO ROD'S HOME PAGE EMAIL: nillsen@uow.edu.au |