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Salient: Victoria University Students' Paper. Vol. 26, No. 2. 1963.

Strike A Balance!

page 2

Strike A Balance!

Salient's hope is that this year's crop of freshers will try to strike a balance between being a stout chap and pillar of bureaucracy, and becoming a basically naive and unrealistic acolyte of this university's falsest religion, that of the pseuds.

Victoria is hardly renowned for its eccentrics. Statistically, there must be few universities which show such a high proportion of hard-working, part-time students. But, in consequence, the few select members of the avant-garde that we do have must work doubly hard to justify their existence in a university composed mainly of sober-sided junior bureaucrats.

There is nothing wrong with a little bit of gamesmanship, if you have genuine pretensions to being an artist, who must sell his image as much as any other student, and in Vic, probably much harder. So we accept the trappings of beard and off-hand manner, in-group and brave conversation. But every year there arrives at Vic the usual proportion of young students, self-confessed terrors at school, who set out determinedly to gain a reputation for being off-beat, or just beat, when their entire artistic contribution will consist of a short poem to Argot or a badly-played bass in the Jazz Club, to save face with the fringe group.

This group might conveniently be named, as is the practice in Great Britain, the pseuds.

The mark of the pseud at Vic is his frenetic desire to be in. He dashes off sloppy poetry for the little magazines, appears conscientiously at the art films at the Paramount in duffel coat and beard, and frequents the right coffee-bars, using his out-of-date pseudo-American hip slang in a tone of voice carefully pitched to reach the far corners of the coffee-bar, and thus impress any of the sober-sides who may be within listening range.

The pseud has always just been to a wild party, or knows of one for the coming Friday. He thinks he knows at which coffee-bars in town he can purchase marijuana, and he listens with utmost solemnity and attention to the maunderings of young Vic poets at Contemporary Arts Concerts. He takes English I and Greek History Art and Literature, and sounds off in tutorials with appropriately outrageous opinions. His philosophy can be briefly and conveniently summed up as "To hell with religion, boys, back to the Godhead," and he finds it easiest to argue from the viewpoint of Zen.

His loudest proclamations are naturally against all that the solid chaps at Vic stand for, and to emphasise his attachment to the New Left, he enters any mob demonstration against the existing order that he can find. The CND Featherston-Wellington march however might be a bit arduous for him.

The pseud is a characteristic of any University, because a University will naturally harbour people with intellectual pretensions without the accomplishment to back it up. We once met a pseud who solemnly affirmed that he was not really interested in the academic side of Vic because "it doesn't teach anything that I want to learn." Maybe so, but the aper and the hanger-on will never really learn anything because he is fundamentally incapable of original thought, and therefore will be completely incapable of learning anything from the best-taught subject.

R.G.L.