Twilenge....One Man's Journey into Vampire Perplexity!

So last night I finally finished the massive 700+ page new book from one of my favourite writers Paullina Simons called A Song in the Daylight. To be honest, I was slightly dissappointed with this effort from her. Certainly not up to the Tully standard that made me a follower of her work. This time around I found it all too heavy. The main character has a significant 'itch' which is never really explained unlike Tully who is highly complex for good reason (no spoiler alerts). Anyway that is not the issue at hand here.

The real issue is that I told no more than three of my friends (all female and including my sister in law) that once I had finished this book, I would take up what I call the Twilenge. In short, I've been a constant cynic towards the entire Twilight series including the movies. Before the series took off in the global western imagination of every girl/woman inspired by pasty white men who glitter in the light, I read around 20 pages of Twilight (the first one) and put it down with the thought, nice for young women...perhaps. But since then I do not need to tell you its become an international best seller. I took the 'anti-twilight' label on happily. But how did I do it? Apart from reading those initial pages, I also saw the movie on the flight home from London in May (Ok so I had exhausted all the movies on the play list and was still 6 hours away...I had a choice, Free Willy or Twilight.....it was a tough choice). Needless to say I wasn't impressed. In fact, I think I may have fallen asleep - but waited impatiently for the death of the 'bad' vampire at the end. But that was a non-event.

Ok so I've heard so many people protesting my disdain for Twilight for various reasons. Let me list them for you quickly:

(1) You're just jealous of Edward - Oh yeah...cursed brown skin! (jokes...nothing racist there ok?)
(2) You're just jealous of Stephanie Meyer - yes damn it, why can't I make millions from....
(3) Why do you have to be critical of it? Just get over it - ok...if you can get over telling me how brilliant it is I will.
(4) It's just a book - it's also a book that influences and has a wide....audience. Should it not be subject to critical thought? All other literature and movies are? (I also heard my friend tell me that the girls at his work said to him, you should read it, your wife would want you to be more like Edward....that sadly is not a joke.)
(5) You don't get it cause you're male and you don't get romance novels - sure, except I have read all of Jane Austin's work (except for Mansfield Park) and loved Pride and Prejudice as much as anyone. I suppose however the Austin is not really a good example of romance novels. After all, Pride and Prejudice is really a book about just that, Pride and Prejudice (and not Keira Knightly)
(6) You've not even read it so how can you judge - can't argue with this one....

In response to this last one, people began to Twilenge me. What is that you say? To read the first two books and see what I think. Well, my friend Sam finally decided to let her 'baby' go, and now I'm ready to dive into Meyerist fictional delight fantasy .... I have no way to finish that sentence. My friend Sam told me to be nice. My sister in law Julia told me to read it with an open mind (I'm striving to do this...really). My other friend Shannan told me that I wouldn't be able to put it down as the story will suck me in. My other more critical friend Sam R told me that if I could get through the second book, she'd buy me lunch (I'm holding you to that Sam!) and my wife....well she just laughed.

So for the next month, I'm subjecting myself to the first two hopefully (oh yeah...free lunch baby!). While doing so, I thought I would post up my play by play commentary of it. Open minded of course. I'm not an English major, I've only done literary or theatrical critique perhaps a handful of times in my life (once I had to do a sociological critique of Terminator 3....pretty fun stuff) so don't expect too much. Just honest lay public perceptions on what is one of the most widely read books of our recent times. Should be fun um...I can't finish that one yet....

Joseph Karl Obama?? - Top Ten Reasons Why Obama is not a Socialist.

Alot of banter in American politics and amongst the lay general public (some of the things I've seen on Facebook...yesh) have touted Obama as a Socialist. Right Wing pundit Glenn Beck has been shouting this worn tag line for sometime now. Now I'm not going to debate US politics here, I am well qualified NOT to do so. But it pains me to hear such rhetoric bouncing around the heartland of the US of A...especially amongst some of my comrades (oooo....no pun intended!). Fact is, if Obama is a Socialist, then Australian PM Ruddbot is Lenin incarnate (or does he look more like Engels?)...and Sweden should be renamed the United Swedish Socialist Republic. Culturally speaking its so bizarre to see America so fearful of a tax payer funded welfare state (as well as other liberal policies) when you have lived in a country (Australia) where this is the case. Even more bizarre is how people conceive such a system as a blight on their freedom....and a impediment to innovation.

Let's not bore with details on this any further. I asked a friend of mine (near PhD in Pol Science or more correctly Pol Theory) for his top ten reasons why Obama is NOT a socialist. This is what he came up with;

10. He never said "let's rename Guantanamo to Gulag"
9. KGB stands for Kentucky Grilled Bicken
8. He wouldn't rename Washington "Obamagrad"
7. People don't line up for food or commodities, just celebrities
6. You can pronounce his last name
5. He hasn't called North America the "United Socialist American Republics"
4. The Whitehouse isn't called the "Kremhouse"
3. Businesses still screw more people than the government does
2. Fox News is allowed to air
1. People actually have rights

I think you will agree, the list is symbolic. How? It stands as a witness to the ridiculous claims that Obama is somehow secretely turning the USA into the next Socialist state. Anyway, I thought the list was worth sharing, even if it is just a sarcastic rant! For more significant reasons, perhaps you should check out the response of the National Director of the Democratic Socialists of America (a real socialist?), Frank Llewellyn. Perhaps when people actually understand what socialism is, they'll stop making such monolithic accusations.

The Humanity of Creativity - QUT's decision to end Arts.

So for the first post I thought why not get into something that hits right at home. It has been close to three years since the VC at QUT (Peter Coaldrake) announced that he would close the then School of Humanities and Human Services and remove the option of a Bachelor of Arts or Bachelor of Social Science from the course list. Alot of controversy surrounded the decision including some significant 'creative' accounting on behalf of QUT corporate to prove their case for the dismissal of the Arts program from QUT (for more on the story see Mark Bahnisch's blog entry back in 2007 on the issue). One of the more controversial statements from Professor Coaldrake on the decision relates to his belief in the future of the Creative Industries program. In a media release he said;

Professor Coaldrake said QUT's strength in humanities was its Creative Industries faculty at Kelvin Grove, which was internationally competitive."For us, that is the new humanities," he said.

The main focus of this post will be on this notion of creativity and how it works in our current economy. But before I do, I should mention that as 2009 draws to a close, the Humanities program (minus the Human Services which are now located in the Health faculty) ceases to exist. Along with it a group of academics and other staff within the school have lost their positions. Now it's a real shame, I think, to believe that we live in an age where the critical Arts are no longer needed. I for one studied Social Science and have almost completed my PhD in the discipline of Sociology (perhaps more alligned with Social Theory) and find that the critical skills (alongside some strong empirical research capabilities) makes you quite attractive to employers in research and policy design. Of course, a Bachelor of Arts is limited. But in my opinion, so is a straight Bachelor of Business, or dare I say, the much lauded Bachelor of Creative Industries.Indeed. we are getting to the stage that the piece of paper without the words 'honours' or 'masters' or even 'doctorate' is worth little.

And this is where the heart of this post. Creativity. Is there a problem with the Creative Industries? That is not the point of the post. I'm not one to stir up other disciplines and call them hopeless, useless, good for nothing, about as worthless as the New Zealand dollar at the moment (no cynicism intended here). In my opinion, all disciplines deserve their place in a University setting. Creative Arts indeed is one of them. At the expense of Social Science, Humanities, Critical Thought? Now we get to the meat and potatoes (ok...bad pun since I'm vegetarian).

What is the purpose for advancing the Creative Industries so? On this question in 2003, Thomas Osbourne (Sociologist from the UK) proposed an interesting argument. Using the Foucaldian approach from governmentality analysis Nikolas Rose, Osbourne contends in his paper Against Creativity that being creative has now become an obligation in our contemporary economy. Through various instruments of governmentality including expertise such as the 'psy sciences', the notion of 'being creative' has now become a type of capital. The ability to 'create', to innovate or think 'creatively' is a resource not just within the visual arts or other traditional industries that require it, but now pervades a multitude of industries. For Osbourne, creativity is an attempt to 're-enchant' the world against the mundane and banal conditions of advanced modernity (a problem that Weber foresaw). But like the Weberian analysis would point to, the eventual conclusion of such attempts is a commodification, a capitalisation or a corporatisation (to use other words) of creativity. Osbourne (2003: 523) writes that 'what we have is a romanticism and subjectivism tied to the very demands of rationalization (economic performance and efficiency) and 'science' (the expertises of creativity).'

What does this mean essentially? To put it bluntly and in terms understandable to the lay public, the once individualised nature (I dare not use the term authentic) of creativity has now become a commodity, something to be bought and sold and a domain now owned by the corporate world (Toby Miller for instance asks the question 'who owns Youtube again? For a lecture on the subject of Facebook and Myspace see here). To use political terminology however, we could also say that the 'obligation to be creative' (as Osbourne suggests) has now also become part of the neoliberal paradigm. On that point I do not want to dwell.

In my own research into self exploration and self authenticity, I find that within the 'self-help' industries, creativity is now a firmly implanted ideal. To become self-authentic, it is often touted that one must find their 'creative' outlet. It is almost as if you cannot become authentic within the self without finding 'the artist within' or the 'musician awaiting to burst out'. Such notions in my mind are indeed tied back into the wider discourse where being creative has become an ultimate moral ideal, but one that can be critiqued.

From this point of view and that of Osbourne or even the more recent piece by Toby Miller called From Creative to Cultural Industries (ruthlessly subtitled - Not all industries are cultural, but no industry is creative), we can begin to see why it is that QUT has taken the stance to enhance the Creative Industries and denounce the traditional humanities/social sciences. Inevitably, the corporate decision to remove the Arts program in favour of more focussed effort on the Creative is one based in an ideal which is now fundamentally part of neoliberal/economic rationalist paradigms and corporate dollars. Yet, with all this teaching on how to think creatively, who is teaching to think critically as part of the fundamental value core of the school?