Holding Your Breath

(STUDENT LIFE)

- Words, Ben Madden.

During August of last year, in the middle of my Honours course, I began the process of applying to various universities in the United Kingdom to do my PhD there. In October of this year, I will commence my doctorate at York with a partial tuition waver, generous living stipend and a job on the editorial team of an academic journal. Success, as measured by anyone’s standards.

I can imagine, though, how crushing it would be to fall short in this process.  For the record, I was rejected by one university, and another at which I was offered a place was unable to offer funding. The sheer effort involved in piecing together an application, coupled with the strong chance that it will be unsuccessful, is enough to shake anyone’s karmic view of the universe.

Karma, perhaps, is the wrong concept to invoke here. Karma implies that we get what we deserve, and I defy anyone to even define “deserving” or “undeserving” in the context of academia today. Hard work is not solely a viable criterion – we all know savants who manage to breeze through university at the top of the class with a minimum of effort. That, to be honest, is the state that I aspire to, though it isn’t often something I achieve. On the other hand, should we consider the earnest strivers (with whom we’re all acquainted) more deserving? That doesn’t quite seem just either. The process of applying to study overseas throws all of these questions into sharp relief; even more so in the absence of any clear idea of what kind of competition one faces. I find myself somewhere between these two extremes; talent has often enough compensated for my indolence, but I can’t help but wonder where that talent might lead if the indolence were eradicated.

Ambivalences of this kind have no place in any application for postgraduate study. Applications for funding are, on the whole, particularly brutal. Academic merit on its own is never enough. Instead, funding bodies are in search of global future leaders. Because, as we all know – and you must tow this line at any cost – the adventure of insight that is a university education is only worthwhile if it allows you to “contribute to humanity”, in a manner circumscribed by the left-liberal ideology that animates the admissions process, the funding bodies, and the institution as a whole. The document I ended up submitting was earnest, factual, and ultimately insufficient; it didn’t win me any funding. What is more, it seemed to systematically sidestep every aspect of my personality that makes me recognisable to myself.

Why should this matter? Well, I suspect that most of us who go on to achieve academic success of any kind are motivated by the same deep-seated quest for something resembling parental approval. This may seem like a sweeping conclusion to arrive at based on scant evidence, but it’s hardly a novel thought. I think this something common to all human accomplishments; they arise from a sense of psychological necessity. The greater the accomplishment, I imagine, the deeper the need that animates it.

If only our institutions of higher learning were prepared to do more than pay lip service to their commitment to self-expression and self-development, then the imbrications of personal history and ambition would not be such a taboo topic. And then, finally, we might move beyond the liberal fantasy that blind commitment to mankind should motivate all of our actions, and strip away much of the hypocrisy and self-promotion that mar academia today.

In Conclusion…

- Connor O’Brien.


Thanks all for voting, reading the mockup, offering advice, and generally supporting us throughout the campaign. It’s almost over now. Phew.

Early on, the other team cottoned on to the fact that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. We hope that, whoever scores editorship of the publication, On Dit really will change for the better in 2010. And we like to think that we’ve spurred the current eds to have a good, hard think about why students aren’t engaging with the magazine at present. In the current issue of On Dit, there’s a survey - please, fill it out. If you think On Dit rocks, tell the current eds… they’ll get a kick out of it. And if you think On Dit sucks, don’t just bitch and moan about it to your friends in Mayo - tell the eds what you think, and they’ll endeavour to start publishing the kinda of magazine that you actually want to read (until the end of the year, at least).

Anyway, we’ve been tossing up some new ideas for next year, based on your feedback. How do you like the sound of:

• an On Dit Flickr group, in which you can submit your photographs and illustrations for upcoming issues of the magazine?
• regular recruitment drives throughout the year, designed to pull in new contributors from a variety of different faculties and clubs?
• launch parties/exhibitions, working in conjunction with local DIY art groups?
• connections with other student newspapers around the country?

This is all neat stuff. We really want to have fun with this ‘ol magazine next year. Show the doubters that student culture ain’t dead.

Competition breeds innovation. And with that in mind, we’re glad the other team have decided to put up a good, hard fight. It’d be a bit of a hollow victory, scoring a job that nobody else actually wants.

Anyway, if you haven’t voted yet, bloody well get to it, and we’ll see you all at UniBar tomorrow night. We need a drink.

Surviving the 20th Century

(CULTURE)

An interview with Alex Ciaravolo of 20th Century Graduates.

- Interview, Thalea Hurren.

20th Century Graduates are the fresh new darlings of Adelaide’s indie scene. Alex Ciaravolo from the band gives us a few quick facts about the best-educated band in town.

20th Century Graduates, what’s with the name?

We were kicking around ideas for a while, and Jeremy just came up with this little number. I’m not too sure if there’s any intended significance, but I like to think that it means we’ve survived something and are ready to take on whatever challenge is ahead.

Your personal contribution to the band?

I’m guitarist and back-up vocalist. Oooh, and I play a keyboard part for about ten seconds in one song. Jeremy is the main songwriter, but we all throw in ideas here and there so I suppose I can put ‘songwriter’ on my CV, too.

Best 20CG song we should listen to ASAP?

Tough question – I like ’em all quite equally. Which is very different from other bands I’ve been in where I’ve hated some songs. I’d say ‘Little Red Romance’ could possibly be the pick of the litter, and might end up being our first single when we get to that stage…

Inspiration comes from…

Life in general, really: waking up and feeling good, waking up and feeling shit, picking up a guitar and finding a new little lick, hearing an awesome new song for the first time and getting excited.

Who’s the parental figure of the group?

Well, despite him being a couple of years younger than me, Jeremy is our fearless leader. He pretty much runs the show and we rally around him when other bands try to beat us up. We always win those fights, too, because there are 7 of us when we’re in full flight.

And the alco/druggie/general ratbag of the group?

It’s gotta be Jon [bass player]. He won’t even be offended at me saying that. Which is just another reason why it has to be Jon.

A good gig starts with…

Lots of friends coming along to check us out and a little song we like to call ‘Misery Jane’.

And ends with…

‘us staring at our shoes’ [that’s a lyrical reference, y’all].

On Slavoj Zizek: Thinking Though the Gaps in the World

(ONDIT-PEDIA)

- Words, Brendan De Paor-Moore. Illustration, Chloe Langford.

Slavoj Zizek, love or hate him, has earned the dubious and paradoxical title of ‘academic rock star’. The persona and style the Slovenian philosopher has established is vital to understanding the position he’s opened up in the public intellectual space. Zizek’s oratory is a headlong rush of trenchant observation and exclamation, wrapped in a garland of ceaseless nervous tics (and a thick Slavic accent). His writings are similarly peripatetic and restless, driven by a commitment to Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxist revolutionary politics. He’s easily intellectually distracted – the subject of each of his books is all and everything. (According to Terry Eagleton in the Times Literary Supplement, Zizek’s “forty or so books …are disheveled collages of ideas, ranging from Kant to computer science, St Augustine to Agatha Christie.”). Zizek’s wide range and rapid movement bizarrely replicates the hypertext ‘mode of consciousness’ – but his work is not so much a celebration of this multiplex mode of consciousness as it is an effort to show the way that truths are scattered and dispersed through this fragmented space of representation. Zizek shows a way to use the distractedness of popular culture to create an active and critical consciousness, as opposed to the atomised form usually created by such fragmentation.

One of Zizek’s typically counterintuitive readings of culture is his off-hand reading of the Gap: Gap sells blue jeans to both upper class and working class people, and this coincidence of fashionable objects of consumption could easily be seen as evocative of the end of class antagonism in the so-called ‘post-industrial age’, but when you look at the attitudes taken by the different subjects we see that even in this tiny phenomena we find the formal basics of an antagonism remain. For the lower-class consumer, the jeans represent the emulation of the wealthy, the attainment of enviable status, and so on, but for the upper-class patron, the same jeans represent their informal attitude – the fact that even though they are wealthy they are comfortable in the same clothes as everyone else. Consumers buy the same item to purchase different kinds of social identity. We can allow Zizek his satisfaction at the irony that the very name ‘the Gap’ is strangely suitable to this state of affairs.

It would hardly be laudable if Zizek’s work was a reduction of political issues of class and identity to this kind of cultural analysis of signs in consumerdom. My feeling is that it’s the other way ’round – Zizek works to reconnect severed images and signs to fundamental political structures. If Jean Baudrillard was the theorist who declared that culture had unhinged itself from any fundamental symbolic features, and become dictated only by the drive to infinite and accelerating self-expansion, Zizek is the theorist who gambles on it being still dictated by the basic co-ordinates of capitalist society. These co-ordinates are defined by a basic antagonism between the drive of profit to infinitely maximise itself and the interests of other social structures and agents to both derive benefits and protect themselves from the damage that is often a consequence of the unburdened capitalist will to power. Hence, the seemingly flippant use of ‘the Gap’ actually indicates something far more significant: the fact that our society does not fit together into a harmonious whole, but is riven with cracks and fissures which are the domains of struggle. The basic identifying feature of ideology at its purest is the attempt to paint over these cracks with a harmonious portrait.

Zizek is the first public intellectual whose mode of address corresponds fully with the globalised world. Because he himself is a media entity (the subject of two films – Zizek! and A Pervert’s Guide to Cinema – a commentator in several papers and reviews, and a constantly updated presence on YouTube) his very occupation of this specific domain enables him to appropriate it for a use against its own grain. Working in an absolutely post-modern style, Zizek insists on modern themes of fundamental social dynamics, struggles for emancipation and a fundamental ground of human freedom. In this way, he exposes the superficiality of the post-modern – able to sustain itself only as a style.

We’re Not Done Yet!

- Myriam, Connor & Mateo

We’ve got the mockup online, but we’ve still got some good content coming. Every day this Election Week… we’ll be updating the Campaign for a NEW On Dit blog with new articles and pretty images, to pleasure your peepers.

If you’re an Adelaide University student, don’t forget to VOTE for a NEW On Dit. It’s easy. Head down to the Barr Smith Lawns, walk into a voting booth, and scrawl a big fat ‘1’ next to O’BRIEN, ROBIN, SZLAPEK-SEWILLO (we’re down as ‘Team 2’… catchy) for On Dit editors. It’ll take sixty seconds, max. Then, next year, you’ll get all this goodness in regular paper-and-staples form. Ooooooooooh.

Leader of the Pack.

(CULTURE)

An interview with Leader Cheetah’s Joel Crannitch.

- Interview & photographs, Thalea Hurren.

It’s been a busy time lately for Joel and Dan Crannitch, Mark Harding, and Dan Pash. As Adelaide’s Leader Cheetah, their country-inspired indie-folk has captured hearts nationwide. Recommended listening: the energetic “Fly, Golden Arrow Part 1”, lilting “Rosewater Smile”, and radio favourite “Bloodlines” (which boasts an impressive accompanying film clip by Dan McGuiness). We sat down with drummer Joel Crannitch and a bottle of red to suss out what’s on the cards for Leader Cheetah.

This past year, Leader Cheetah have scored supports for the likes of Elbow and the Doves, and ‘The Sunspot Letters’ [Leader Cheetah’s debut] has been featured heavily by Triple J… has it all stayed exciting for you?

I don’t think anything’s really changed over the last few months…I guess playing with bands [as a support act] isn’t what excites me so much - it’s not what I really love doing. The best things we’ve done have been shows where the people are there more to see us. Some bands we’ve supported it’s felt like, ‘We really fit in here,’ and they’ve been the more exciting ones for me – Dinosaur Jr., and bands like that. And obviously Splendour [in the Grass], when people did come over to see us, and the Middle East tour… that’s stuff I enjoy doing.

How do you feel about the widespread acclaim your album received?

I don’t look into it that much, but we’ve been very fortunate – a lot of people have liked our album. The reviews we’ve had have been great.

What about the negative criticism, I did hear one mag gave you zero stars…

Negative criticism is only negative to the degree that we want to take it negatively. Most stuff I’ve read has been pretty good… I think! Anyway, if we get a bad review from someone and you look at other bands they’ve reviewed and liked… perhaps we don’t want to be compared to them.

You played Splendour just a few weeks ago – how did that go?

Yeah, that was fun. It was good to be there on a stage with our friends Middle East, who played the next day. The crowd was a decent size – it felt pretty good that a fair percent of the eighteen thousand people that were there made the effort to come watch us.

How is it being in a band with your brother – is it the ideal situation where you’ve always got a shoulder to lean on or are there family squabbles?

Yeah, it’s perfectly fine. I think because there’s such a big age gap we don’t get into punch ups and shit like that like some other brothers ‘round the same age maybe do… we haven’t ever really raised our voices at each other.

So you’re also in another band, Thunderclaw, and the sound is pretty far removed from Leader Cheetah – as a drummer do you prefer playing the heavier beats as opposed to the more mellow vibe?

They’re completely different styles of music but I approach them in exactly the same way – I’d say I have a similar drumming style in both bands. I don’t really prefer either [heavy or mellow], because they’re so different. People often say Leader Cheetah is simple and not as out there as Pharaohs, or Thunderclaw, but it’s just as interesting to drum to because I put my own spin on it and I still go as nuts as I ever did. I try to go a bit heavy and have a bit of fun with it – don’t stay too safe.

What’s the future of Leader Cheetah?

We’re working on new music, a new album, got lots of touring come up over the rest of the year…

Do you see yourselves heading stateside again for the next album, or going for more an Australian base?

Yeah, I guess you could say ‘The Sunspot Letters’ was more or less produced in the US. I think we’ll either do the next record in the States, or it’ll probably an American producer that will do it for sure.

It’s good how you have that Americana vibe but with an Australian spin…do you look for that or does it more happen naturally?

The only reason there would be an Australian spin is because we’re from Australia! We don’t try to be American or Australian – we just do what we like, play what we like the sound of.

Copy - It’s Alright

(OPINION)

- Words, Joel Dignam.

In response to ‘The Ethos of Immediate Gratification’.

The cheap and efficient online distribution of digital music files is a technological breakthrough - a technological breakthrough that only benefits artists and consumers. File-sharing turns music into an infinite resource. It used to be the case that if one million people wanted a copy of that album, one million CDs would need to be produced and distributed. Now, an album can be created and distributed to any number of people cheaply and quickly. Why would we want to change this?

Artists benefit from the existence of file-sharing. The major issue facing musicians is not that too many people are ‘stealing’ their music, but that too few people even know of their music. While the handful of megabands who have already achieved international fame may miss out on potential sales, the majority of artists, struggling for recognition, can use modern technology to make their music available to everyone, and thus acquire a following – as many bands have done through Myspace. Only wildly successful bands can live off album sales; the reason that bands sell albums is to popularise their music so that they can profit from better attended gigs and greater merchandising. File-sharing, while it may disadvantage the minority of soundly established outfits, is a boon to independent musicians or the proverbial garage band.

Copyright does not exist to penalise stealing or immorality. The purpose of copyright law is to promote the development of the arts, by making it profitable for people to produce artistic work. As new technologies blossom, it is senseless to marry ourselves to outdated distribution models. Copyright laws must be updated to recognise the change in the way that intellectual property is now shared.

I’m A Tutor… Get Me Out Of Here

(STUDENT/TUTOR LIFE)

- Words, Ben Revi.

I was offered my first teaching job at the wise old age of twenty-two. It was a fairly inauspicious introduction to the world of academic work. At the time, I was six months into my doctoral studies, and I had to complete my first major review. I was asked, as I later found out everyone was, if I’d considered using feminist approaches in my work. Then I was asked if I wanted to be a tutor the following semester.

The first tutorial was a bizarre experience. I walked in, uncharacteristically early, and had no idea what to do. In a fit of contrived recklessness, I decided to sit on a table. I waited until everyone was seated. Then the silence hit me. I realised that nothing at all would happen until I said something. I tried to calmly introduce myself – I’m sure from the outside I must’ve sounded like I was yelping. I asked everyone in the class to introduce themselves, realising immediately that there was no way anyone’s name was ever going to stick to me. I was frightened – I was no older than most of my students, and I knew I couldn’t outsmart them. I tried to fill the next two hours with whatever theory came to mind. When time was up, I ran.

Over the weeks, I became a lot less anxious about teaching. I realised that the few extra years I’d spent reading piles of obscure rubbish had perfectly prepared me for the job of trying to translate the obscure rubbish my students had to read into some form of actual English. I began to mark essays, and was genuinely pleasantly surprised by some of them. (Some.) I think it worked out okay, in the end.

Some years later, I’m still tutoring. I’m also trying to actually finish my PhD thesis. In five hours, I’ll be taking the first of four consecutive classes – I don’t get much sleep anymore. But I do get the benefit of having stayed in this little sheltered university world my entire adult life, which I figure is a bonus. I get to keep meeting interesting people who want to make some sort of difference. And hell, I still get to keep reading their words in the student newspaper.

Most students don’t understand how important On Dit is. It should be a creative outlet. It should be a forum for would-be writers, artists, illustrators, photographers and designers to offer something to the people around them, and for the rest of us to be inspired by their work. University should never, ever be about qualifications and job specifications. This is the one time in our lives where we can explore, make mistakes, flirt with the dangerous side of sanity, drink too much, say foolish things, question the basis of our very existence, then write about it all and get published. We can think whatever we like and argue with whoever stands in our path.

Plus, writing for On Dit will improve your essays. I guarantee it.

Goodbye.

(PHOTOGRAPHIC ESSAY)

- Words and photographs, Christopher Arblaster.

Grandma died on Wednesday. I don’t know specifics, but I understand she left us in the early hours of the morning – a suitably peaceful passing for a woman whose gentleness of spirit made Mother Theresa seem like Mike Tyson.

I visited grandma last Sunday. I didn’t visit her as often as I should have. For the last few months, she lived in a nursing home in Hahndorf with my Pop-Pop. At the time, I thought she was doing quite well.

Stuck in a Paddling Pool: Course Changes at the University of Adelaide

(STUDENT LIFE / OPINION)

- Words, Hannah Mattner. Photograph, Hannah Davis.

Change can be hard to deal with. The flipside: change can also make life better. The course structure changes facing Adelaide University students (implemented in one fell swoop at the beginning of 2009) have been hard to deal with, and have improved nothing whatsoever. The shift from a myriad of subject-appropriate unit structures scattered across schools and disciplines, to a uniform rank of three unit courses (shared by all faculties), has left students angry. Soon, hopefully, they’ll pick up the pitchforks.

By the time I heard about proposed changes to course structure in second year from legendary politics tutor David Olney, the uni’s policy was as solid and immovable as the statue outside Elder Hall: all undergraduate subjects in almost all disciplines (I think the professions are still wandering along in their own special world) would adopt a three-units-per-subject structure, replacing the existing model, which varied the number of units to allow for increasing depth of learning.

In the Humanities, under the older model, we waded in a multitude of four-course-per-semester first year paddling pools, developing the skills we would require to eventually dive into the two-course-per-semester lake of third year. There was a sense of progression – a sense that we were being prepared for a final, satisfying swim in the vast ocean of postgrad study. We would work our way up from ridiculous first year attempts to write a thousand words of coherent argument to locking ourselves in the library for three weeks to research and understand the nuance of a single topic. We’d still not do, or know, very much compared to ‘real academics’ – but we were learning to write bigger and better and deeper.

The new model doesn’t work: second- and third-years are now forced into ‘advanced’ courses – because one year of study apparently gets you to the pinnacle of undergrad expectations – which are each worth three units. So-called ‘advanced’ students now have four classes in each semester, rather than the two more immersive classes. Essays are two thousand words – which is simple, boring and is never going to motivate anybody to think deeply about the text or topic in question. After the jump from first to second year, it’s possible to totter along, rarely having to think beyond the obvious, with no scope to explore or extrapolate on an interesting idea. One can’t fit much into two thousand words.

This is not what anybody expects from a university degree. Fortunately, I’ll get away, having suffered only a semester of this flawed new system. The rest of you in the Humanities will endure up to three years of wandering through a multitude of paddling pools, knowing that you could’ve had great lakes to use for your experimentation and discovery.

Note: The changes at Adelaide are far from over, with the university currently conducting a review of its course structures with a view to changing them. Again. The SRC wishes to present a submission of student concerns to the committee in charge of it all. To tell the SRC what you think, fill out the form on the SRC website.