Day 74: Deception: the good, the bad and the lying

Day 74 (17 Feb) ...or, my life as a fake. I seem to have spent too much of the weekend trying to think about a draft of a teaching citation I have to write. It's all too much, and rather unnecessary gloss on academic endeavour. Still, it must be done.

Starting early, at 6.12am

Thus at 6.12am I came out to face the insipid screen of blankness again. Essentially, I don't write about myself in glowing terms terribly well and although it's a team thing and I can write deservingly of the great team I work with, it's still awkward writing. Anyway, much to do before the rest of the day gets underway with the usual washing, breakfast etc. 

I shall be back, urban green

Later it is a stroll through South Bank to check out where I'll be working one day a week from this semester. My university is sharing facilities with the SB Institute of Technology and I'll be teaching politics there. Though I've passed the buildings many times on the bus, I've not walked through them before today. I can see I'll be back with my proper camera...there is much to photograph. 

I was on the way to the afternoon's performance of 'Driving Miss Daisy'. Yes I saw the movie years ago and yes, I was going along mainly to see Angela Lansbury and James Earl Jones, just because... A third actor Boyd Gaines (Miss Daisy's son) has barely received a mention and yet has a tremendous role on stage. 

I'm glad I saw it and yes, it was everything people has said and who wouldn't want to watch to icons of performance there in front of you.  I dozed off for a bit though, well, listened intently with my eyes slightly flickering. 

S'pose I was guilty of thinking too much about work and one of the books I'm reading at the moment, and indeed at 6.12pm, John Mearsheimer's Why Leaders Lie (2012). Mearsheimer is probably one of the leading 'realists' in my discipline of International Relations. I'm not an advocate of the realist paradigm, but I do read into it. The pretext of the book is interesting enough: do international leaders lie (about reasons for going to war, for example) and if so why. I'm still early in the book but the fine-lining between deception and lying outlined early on in the book makes me feel this is going to be some read. 

Book of the moment, at 6.12pm

'Lying is obviously a form of deception, but not all deception is lying. There are two other kinds of deception: concealment and spinning. Unlike lying, neither involves making a false statement or telling a story with a false bottom line. Concealment and spinning, however, are not the same as telling the truth'. All that at p. 9. 

So much there to think about as I had to write a citation I barely believe (though I'm not lying, being deceptive or spinning...well, maybe spinning--it's encouraged); we watch the saga of the latest opinion polls fall out on a Sunday night; and I watched two 80+ actors superbly deceive us over 90 minutes as they portrayed two people's lives from 1948 to the 1970s...that is clever and deliberate deception in a way.