Dick Jones' Patteran Pages

I looked out of the french windows last night at 9.00 pm to see that two inches of snow had crept across the garden and the spinney beyond. Then as I turned back into the room to tell Emma, the power went off.  We had a cache of candles and torches bought in the wake of the last outage so we sat in the flickering gloom for an hour as it got colder and colder then went to bed.  I spent much of the night blundering around in the dark in bleary response to Rosie’s panic-stricken screams each time the batteries on the torch in the kids’ room gave out. Twelve hours later the power came back on again and I was able to trash the entire contents of the fridge and freezer with lights on and central heating restored. 

...

If either one of these fucking idiots ever penetrates deeper into the United States than the odd coke fuelled awards ceremony in New York or Los Angeles, bundle him into the back of a car and dump him with neither map nor money in desert, on prairie or up mountain. Slack-witted, juvenile, braying über-brats, whose eminence in their field is testimony to the hectoring, bullying and general cruelty and cynicism that is passed off as ‘irony’ within our culture now.

...

Just days to go now to the move-out. We’re pretty much packed and ready for the logistical challenges of fitting a quarts-worth of downstairs here into a pints-worth of entire house there. The move is on Saturday so the ‘phoneline here shuts down around midday and – in glorious theory – opens up at the new address at the same time. Jaded by long experience of primate error in such proceedings, I anticipate long hours on the mobile working my way up the food chain towards someone who has some inkling of what to do next. Ditto, of course, with all the other utilities that should be coming on stream in our name at the point of occupancy. How sad that one anticipates the inevitability of cockup with such phlegmatism. The only investment of hope is in the possibility that it won’t be universal!

...

All deep things are song.  It seems somehow the very central essence of us, song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls!
Thomas Carlyle

Music, music, music. Fishing for Eels, our ceilidh and other stuff band, played its first gig in a long while last Saturday. It was a birthday party so pretty much a straightforward barn dance. Our second fiddler Xara called the dances, her relative inexperience in that curious art more than compensated for by pezazz and a refreshing absence of that awful doctrinaire solemnity that has so many callers barking orders like old-style primary school teachers.  We got a good sound, a low ceiling and composition walls absorbing it rather than bouncing it right back. We filmed it all and, after a little visual and sonic tidying and some judicious editing, I’ll upload it to the Fishing For Eels site.

...

I came across the band Beirut on a sampler and loved the melange of Parisian boulevardier, klezmer, Balkan Gypsy brass and art school rock sensibilities. A project mounted by the 21-year-old iconoclast Zach Condon - ukuleles, mandolins, a string bass and a pumping accordion lifting a frontline of what looks and sounds like trumpet, flugelhorn and tuba. Condon’s voice is as European an instrument as those behind it - melancholy and world-weary, with a breath of Tokay and Ász cigars about it.

IN SEARCH OF THE SINGERS – A CODA

In February 2007 I outed myself as having created an alter ego, one Jago Flood, for the sole purpose of writing and submitting for publication crap verse. The prolonged exercise followed an earlier exploration of the territories outlined above. Baffled by the terms of reference of this strange department of the world of poetry, I wondered, in time-honoured philistine fashion, whether anyone with a knowledge of the Roman alphabet and a keyboard might be able to pass off the entirely random as planned and prepared.

So was born Jago Flood. The name having been devised, the verse followed swiftly. I used two initial methods of composition – the stringing together of unrelated fragments drawn from spam emails and stream-of-consciousness spontaneity. I abandoned the spam approach almost immediately. Poetry based on a monotonous diet of vocabulary rooted in sexual regeneration medication, sub-prime financial assistance and Nigerian money laundering schemes would show its roots from the start. So it was down to stream-of-consciousness spontaneity crossed with the crazed semiotics and layout of a schizophrenic architect’s building plan.

I started with certain structural protocols in place: lower case letters throughout and the eschewing of all punctuation except for single and double forward obliques, filling in for commas and full stops. Straightforward enough and in keeping, I felt, with what I interpreted as a widespread principle behind so much of this radical verse, namely, the embracing of absolute creative freedom through the simple substitution of the rules of one set of generative syntax for another. 

Next I had to begin to compose poems within which no trace of conventional narrative, received meaning or orthodox semantics was evident. Further to this, I had to try to avoid any word combinations that might, through random association, create sense impressions or emotional colouring; I had to excise completely the serendipitous musicality that language in process will capture.

I couldn’t do it. My general innumeracy/dyscalculia simply got in the way and I couldn’t synthesise geometric principles and language flow. What I ended up with looked on the page more like the deposits of a pissed spider than the feverish schemata of the nutty architect. So I was left with the stream-of-consciousness spontaneity and off I went.  Within a week I had a sheaf of what I thought were artfully obscure poems from the hand of Jago Flood.  Both intoxicated and appalled, I submitted several to two magazines (whose blushes I shall spare) and – to cut a long(er) story short – got both published. 

However, instead of feeling frightfully clever and fully vindicated now that my cynicism concerning the credulity of the zeitgeist addicts appeared to have been confirmed, I just felt like a cheap sham and I abandoned the experiment forthwith. What did I know? Maybe some chance concatenation of images had sparked off associations in the mind or imagination of the editor and, in a sense, he knew better than I did. Maybe unwittingly I’d slipped some light and heat into one of the artifices and it breathed with accidental life. Jason Flood was duly pushed under a bus and I returned to the business of writing what, for better or worse, came naturally. I lost none of my alternate bafflement at and contempt for as ‘those who want to work out the chemical equation for language and pass on their experiments as poetry’. I simply didn’t want to join that noisy club whose members confront the extremes of abstract art with the assertion that a child of four could do better.

But I didn’t have the heart to chuck Jason Flood’s verse into the grave with him. The poems hibernated in a dedicated folder until one day I stumbled across them and took them out for a look. What struck me about a handful of them was how the inner drive towards some degree of literalism inhabited their core. For all my attempts at creating an alternative currency devoid of intrinsic value, still the narrative imperative dominated, still the passion to communicate prevailed. And however strenuously I tried to distance myself from their content by having them speak from an alternative persona occupying an entirely different context to my own, still my own voice came back to me.

The principal poem in the group concerned a sort of odyssey made by a protagonist – some incarnation of Jago Flood – down through Manhattan from Upper West Side to the East Village to find his erstwhile partner. The route was one that Emma and I followed down and up again several times during our brief but intense time in New York in 2000. But beyond a degree of geographical familiarity, the tale was a fiction drawing on a distillation of long years of received experience and the vibrancy and exhilaration of immediate encounter, which, in fact, confirmed and ratified all of my cherished impressions of that extraordinary city.

The poem had been written in a few days of concentrated and highly focussed energy and it incorporated a number of events, clear recollections and sense memories. It began with the wailing, ululating nocturnal voice of the lone occupant of an apartment across the alley from our hotel. A slanted blind obscured the window, but the constant blue flicker of a television illuminated its edges. And snow fell almost ceaselessly for seven days.

I found myself picking at the poem, reluctant to let it lie fallow. Eventually I recast it completely, inserting conventional punctuation and rendering its shape and form more conventional. However, I made no attempt to neutralise or even moderate the voice telling the tale. So both protagonist and writer collude in an exercise in dissimulation, creating a partnership more akin to that behind the creation of a short story than a poem. Here it is, a piece of artifice, but one for which, by the time I had reorientated shape and form, I felt considerable affection.

...

MANHATTAN TRANSFER – GOING DOWNTOWN

Starting from the raggy edge
of a night of demons:
Crazy Helga in a blue room
across the alley, her shadow
wild & ticky on the busted blind
as she wails in German
at her TV screen.
Jesus, what a sound:
something dark & spiny
thrashing in her soul
to cry like that.

You
as the spidernet
remnant of a dream,
a fume that discharges
in clear light.

And then, as I bathe my face
in windowmorning light,
the snow still falls,
thick like feathers, like
the white silence
under a wing.
W. 186th – ghostblanketed cars,
hydrants, phone booths,
all mugged and compliant
like freezeframe phantoms.

You
as a lostsoul princess glimpsed
on a half a boxtop
in a trashcan.

So I step, a slomo dancer,
a magellan of the heart,
a one-trick missionary
with a world to lose,
into the drifts and dunes
and head towards Amsterdam.
Julio’s got his cab
on blocks by the sidewalk.
He curses, half under snow
with a wrench & a torch
while old man Turpin
turns Danish pastry snowslabs
with a shovel & spits
green pockholes deep.

You
as a face from
a crashed snowcloud,
bloodless, tearless,
turning away.

I sidestep the corner.   
Streetcenter subway breath
in plumes, denying snow.
In the deli the Slimani brothers
rattle and blather round
the kebab spit.
Here is a grillbound, spice &
powders corner of Algeria.
On the wall the entire 1st team
of AC Ajaccio, 1983, flyblown
bouffant bushes dooming them
to formica & disco history.

You,
a rumor
in the vapor bloom
on chrome.

On Amsterdam cabs in chains;
sunshine ghosts kicking up
the crystals. One bent warrior
with a stick raised like Aaron
wagging the serpent, steps
into white surf and disappears
and reappears as one dressed
in ashes for a wake. He moves
like he’s been cauterised in
a furnace of ice.

You
as a smoke theory
behind a high
brownstone window.

Check into EJ’s for waffles
and coffee & watch the steam
reorganize the air into thick
silver aboriginal mountains.
I slide across vinyl amongst
the prose & numbers shaken out
of the NY Times - the clatter and flash
of barcode headlines, the snap
and flutter of papers lifting
like sudden wings,
from front page clamor
to sports page sidewalk
whisper: Giambi misses
a 3rd straight game.
“Felt fuzzy”, he says.
Jesus, what a putz!
And Sheffield’s sprain’s no problem.
He’s good for Sunday’s game
against the A’s. The boys
kick it around: who are the king hitters?
who are the dancing queens?
“Who the fuck gives a fuck?”
yells Nance stamping snow
off her old lady boots.
“Gimme a black coffee    
so I can stand my spoon up in it.”

You
in the window
waterscape,
drawn south
on a hundred streams.
Which should I follow?

Through Morningside the snow’s
a grey dreamscape. Bloodholes
switch to emerald; the churn and spin
of cop cars crying out loud across
Cathedral Parkway. I’m highstepping
from bootburrow to icefield,
clogging deep and sliding hard.
I drop dark beneath
the streets - the visceral heat
of the subway neon
and the echo of the
footstep cough and scuff,
the hoot and slam wind.
A rocking conspiracy of
furtive travellers, wall-eyed
or wrapped in paper
winding sheets.

You
as a hiphop chant
in the wheels between
Parkway & Columbus.
Say my name,   
say my name
like you’re winding up
a spell.

At Columbus Circle
the lights go dim,
the brakes bind and
for a moment
we are all of
one breath in
the tarry dark.
Then, singing his pain
like a cantor, a guy
in a Mets sweatshirt
and a baseball cap with
a busted peak jumps up.
“We’re fucked, people!” he yells.
His voice is like stones
in a can. “We’re fucked!
This the last train
to San Fernando
and we’re going down!”

You
on the upline platform
at Delancey and Essex
in a brakeman’s cap
from Dave’s Army and Navy.
Blew me a kiss
and turned into a winter wraith.

Washington Square’s
a cloud chamber, the heart
of cumulus. My footprints
turn secret and die behind me.
The edge of everything touches
my face and whispers in
multiple falling voices.
Bleecker carries me
on a twilight current,
turning, turning, the thick
river, past the cameo flash
of Mr Piombino hip-deep
in front of the trattoria,   
dug into his own canyon
down to the sidewalk,
his spade disputing logic
with the falling snow that beds
deep in around his feet.
Two cop cars, chained wheels
flailing, and three kids in mufflers
dancing like full moon maniacs
through their slush and mud parabola.
The ghost of Sid Vicious shivers
on the corner of Bleecker and Grove
in charcoal and tarnish. Nothing
but slogans and a thin soul
against a night of hustling bars
looking for the trick who will whisper
where his mother went one
spectral Christmas Eve.
Hell - once just his father’s name
would have been enough
to light a candle
in the dark.

And now Bleecker crosses Broadway
where the snowplows rule,
surgeons laying the white
flesh  bare. And I catch
up my breath and I check
the beat of my Magellan heart,
cruising now into a
safe harbour. The still pool
of the East Village,
the Stuyvesant rendezvous
whose lights bleed pastel thin
through still falling snow.
Dido’s bar and grill whose door
now unplugs and
in a plume of steam
it’s your tune comes stumbling
onto the sidewalk
in a spindrift of crystals
and memory like you knew
each step I took, each high step
sliding down Manhattan’s lattices
on hope and a dream unconsumed
to seek you out, painted
onto the inside of the glass
in your logger’s coat, in
your cossack hat like
you knew and sliced the moment
fine as ice and called me home
with your spilled tune,
its colors running in the current,
and you rising sideways and
your head turning in a mist
saying my name,
saying my name
like you’re winding up a spell.
 

...

pic: http://patteran.typepad.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/eastvillage1.jpg

COMMUNICATION BREAKDOWN – LATE EXTRA!

In theory, I’ve sorted out both ‘phone and broadband internet access at the new address. A simple temporary transfer is possible so all I have to do is install the router and all will follow seamlessly.

In a just world run by the intelligent and benign, this might be the case. But it’s safer to assume that somewhere between the soothing Scottish tones of the lady at the call centre and the actual implementation of the procedures involved in temporarily shutting down one account and opening another, the ball will be dropped. So if I fail to make an appearance after Saturday November 1st, imagine me on the ‘phone either no. 21 in an enraged BT Broadband customer queue listening to The Lighthouse Family, or in enervating conversation with an intellectually-challenged 12-year-old customer services operative who keeps referring to me as ‘yourself’.

...

In the meantime, a theme I have tackled before...

IN SEARCH OF THE SINGERS...

As far as I can tell, there are two kinds of poets: those who want to tell stories and sing songs, and those who want to work out the chemical equation for language and pass on their experiments as poetry.
Simon Armitage

I'm not Simon Armitage's number one fan, but the statement above encapsulates very effectively my reaction after a wide and deep trawl of poetry weblogs and magazines . In fact, I'm glad that he's made the pronouncement so definitively. I have tended to extricate myself from such grand tours with the distinct and unsettling feeling that I'm on the outside looking in; that there exists a club whose rules are so arcane I can never hope to qualify for membership.  I may be chasing up and down the wrong bloglines but a significant minority of the sites I've visited recently have been either a.) locked into exciting urban poetry scenes in which the blogger is a major player, giving readings every night from assorted chapbooks, or b.) replete with verse that, through its arcane content and construction, flies beneath the sweep of my poetic radar.

With respect to the first group, I suppose I must be grudgingly happy for the state of poetry that there are individuals out there shouting the odds on our behalf. That I am not one of them seems a grotesque injustice, but clearly I have enemies who have poisoned the publishers against me. I shall rise nobly above their craven efforts for it’s the second category that really exercises me most.

Now, before going into full-scale whine, I must invoke the first six words of Simon Armitage's statement - As far as I can tell.  The phrase has the virtue of humility. It establishes the possibility of a personal failure to comprehend as a result of major perceptual shortcomings.  But I have read and re-read the verse displayed on many of these blogs and mags*, making my way through the strange lexicons, looking for a way in - a gateway, a handhold, a step - only to flop out at the other end, uncomprehending and exasperated, a stranger in a strange land. There is an apparent confidence, and sureness of footing in so many of the poems.  They seem so comfortable inside their skins, coming from and going to places where meaning - however incoherent in the perception of this reader - resides and flourishes.  And because that confidence, that sureness doesn't flourish in this reader I can only conclude that, by any reasonable criterion, the writer must be babbling like an idiot.

I've read a great deal of poetry over the years and I have been as powerfully exercised by the semantic and stylistic challenges of the likes of, say, Basil Bunting, Samuel Beckett and David Jones as I have by more immediately accessible writers. And I'm drawn strongly by the sonic qualities of a poem: Kurt Schwitters, Bob Cobbing, the Beats, hip hop that isn't trying to get its cock out or gun you down - bring it on!  But an hour spent clambering through the clogged lattices of words, tripping over the broken bits of punctuation, listening out for a music I never hear, desperate to locate and lock into the pulse that powers the piece is exhausting and, ultimately, demoralising, for I feel the reflection must be, in the final analysis, on me.  

So Armitage's belief that there are those who simply 'want to work out the chemical equation for language and pass on their experiments as poetry' brings a measure of relief to me in my post-blogsearch and mag-scrutiny bafflement.  It inspires me to continue to set out across the territory in search of those who, like me, simply want to tell stories and sing songs.

*Here are four locations within which I found myself with neither map nor compass.

Five Fingers Review
Alice Blue Review
Glitter Pony
Octopus

Still in business.

...

A second draft.

CERTAINTY

Post-coitum, he relaxes back
into rumpled sheets, cat-happy.

His lover lies curled in sleep,
her back, her shoulders a trove

of moon-silver, her hair a coil   
of gold. He watches through

the porthole - a city skyline;
cranes and barges slide away

astern. Her breathing rhymes
with the blood-beat of deep engines.

Land dissolves and light decays.
He sleeps, sea-dreaming miracles

and the ferry bears them forward
in a straight green line. Only over water,

such flawless symmetry: this,
the brief geometry of certainty.


pic: http://www.stylease.com/blog/

COMMUNICATION BREAKDOWN?

In a few moments I’m going to change wireless routers. The Belkin has finally exhausted my patience, its coup de grace to a long career of malfunctions and general operational eccentricities having been persistent denial of access to the Patteran Pages, necessitating continual hard re-boots.

If the switchover is successful, I shall be taking the Belkin out onto the patio and administering termination with extreme prejudice. I shall start with a clawhammer and finish the job with a rubber-ended tent mallet.

If I make no further appearances today, you can assume that the switchover was unsuccessful but that I administered anyway.

...

A longer off-air period is likely to start on Saturday, November 1st. We’re having our entire ground floor ripped up in search of a persistent water leak, which will then have to be plugged and the floor dried out. Even taking into account the mordant pessimism of the British contractor, this process could drag on for over a month. During the works, we’ll be moving to a house just up the road. I don’t even know whether we can sort out a 'phone there yet, much less Internet access, so I’m anticipating at best very occasional posts done from upstairs here.

...

Well, here goes...

pic: http://flickr.com/photos/8544019@N06/2158613458

pic: http://www.cartoonstock.com/

THIS SHOCK NEWS JUST IN FROM GEOFF DEE, MY VANCOUVER STRINGER.

Following the problems in the sub-prime lending market in America and the seismic effects of the HBOS implosion in the UK, uncertainty has now hit Japan.

 In the last seven hours Origami Bank has folded, Sumo Bank has gone belly up and Bonsai Bank announced plans to cut some of its branches.
 Yesterday, it was announced that Karaoke Bank is up for sale and will likely go for a song, while today shares in Kamikaze Bank were suspended after they nose-dived. 
Samurai Bank is soldiering on following sharp cutbacks, Ninja Bank is reported to have taken a hit, but they remain in the black.

 Furthermore, 500 staff at Karate Bank got the chop and analysts report that there is something fishy going on behind closed doors at Sushi Bank, where it is feared that staff may get a  raw deal.

...

The Census Bureau reported that Las Vegas is about to pass Washington, D.C. in population. Of course, there's a huge difference between Vegas and Washington. See, in Las Vegas, people gamble with their own money.

Jay Leno

ANTHROPOMORPHOSITY

The Economy: a multi-limbed denizen of inner city territories, now helpless and floundering in the wake of a freak ebb tide. The Banks: lumbering glossy cetaceae, swift and graceful within their medium, now beached and gasping and close to death high up the strand. The Markets: a febrile and neurotic flock of exotic artiodactylae, shy and skittish, now running amok through the streets.

Anthropomorphosity: the process whereby, through attributing human characteristics to non-human entities and generalising from them, we avoid taking responsibility for our own individual actions. And who, in its liberal application, are the chief offenders? The media, by whom all phenomena must be rendered palatable for a distracted and preoccupied public.

So let’s just step back and distance ourselves from this world inhabited by functionally insensate organisms whose panicky thrashings have brought about the current financial crisis. The economy – the banks, the markets - are run by men and women much as you and I in that they sit down to defecate and close their eyes when they sleep. If there is panic within their community it is not because, like woodland creatures fleeing a fire, they are incapable of thought or reflection. It is because too many of them are purblind, mendacious, arrogant, self-centred fuckwits whose all-consuming ambition and predatory individual greed have shut down every rational faculty other than those that promote their own immediate gratification. And, of course, as they hurtle off the edge of the precipice and into free space, they take us with them.

The dismal fact is that, in accepting without question this preposterous characterisation of a process devised, maintained and run by our fellow human beings as the mindless cavorting of fatuous organisms beyond reasonable control, we collude in our own subjection. It is as if we would willingly give over the running of an entire urban transport system to a small group of testosteronal junior car thieves - provided the appropriate anthropomorphic spin could be applied by the media.  It’s cowardly, irresponsible and downright stupid.

The facts, then, as we who can see the emperor as naked recognise them. Economy, banks and market – they’re all under the direct, if multi-layered management of male and female carbon units. Everything happens within the human dimension; nothing is outside our control  or beyond our competence. This being the case, it must follow that, to a degree at least, each one of those carbon units is capable of thought and feeling and therefore each one is capable of comprehending principle and praxis and thus each one is capable of functioning within the constraints of trust, conscience and empathy. From this fundamental understanding, change must begin.

A rejection from qarrtsiluni and an acceptance from Snakeskin.

...

Meanwhile, I’ve been doing a little work on a poem that's been around for a while.

FIRST ECLIPSE

A full eclipse, they told us:
bit by bit, a feeble daytime moon
will efface the sun, enfold us
in a counterfeit of night at noon.

Around the edges of the lunar disc
a crown of fire will burn so bright
that scrutiny by naked eye would risk
blindness.  Thrilled, we learned that light

that violent must be sifted
through a darkened lens.  And so
the grownups stood about, eyes lifted,
penitents in sunglasses who know

the world’s about to end.  Meanwhile,
we children lay in long grass, sharing
out the negatives I’d brought – a pile
of family snaps from home.  Pairing

them up like playing cards, I dealt,
choosing for myself a glossy square
of clouds on a bright black day, and knelt
(like a penitent) to outstare

the slow mutating sun.  Indistinct
at first, but then, from partial darkness,
bold and clear, Mum and Dad, arms linked,
strode out of their past.  The starkness

of that moment’s image – of their smug duality
before my birth – was blinding and I dropped
my hand.  Lost in eclipse, I couldn’t see
where light began or where the darkness stopped.

'WHY DO WE BOTHER?'

There was a guy with whom I would occasionally share bar space at my local. He was an engaging soul with a keen appetite for vigorous debate.  Any subject would do and he was pretty much indifferent as to which side of any ongoing argument he adopted. In fact, he was consistent only in the certainty that whatever stance you took he would automatically take the other. In consequence, he frequently found himself defending the entirely indefensible with absolutely no supporting data whatsoever. At which point, undismayed and indifferent to the house of cards collapsing around him, he would shrug and say, “Well, what do I know? I’m fucking ignorant, me”.

In the congenial context of a pub debate, so blatant an assertion of the principle of not letting complete ignorance get in the way of a robust opinion would bring him a round of applause and another beer. When it begins to manifest as a journalistic tic in the work of well-known columnists who really ought to know better, it becomes a major irritant.

Janet Street-Porter has been an agreeably gobby commentator on things socio-cultural since the ‘60s. Always ready to take a pop at the various shibboleths that piss off those restless for change in a hidebound world, she has, for a couple of generations of liberal lefties, been something of a bringer of light.

Sadly, iconoclasm has given way to the grumps and all too often these days JSP simply lobs a couple of half-bricks in the direction of her target and then wanders off. I reported a while back on her clunky and ill-humoured attack on blogging as ‘the musings of the socially inept’, bloggers as ‘people who have nothing to say apart from the fact that their pet has just exited via the cat flap and the baby has soiled another nappy’, and blogs as ‘about as interesting as watching cheese develop mould’. I noted at the time that there seemed to be a curiously transparent fear of her own jealously guarded territory being breached by know-nothing arrivistes.

Now she enjoins us all to recognise Harold Pinter as ‘a bore’. Commenting in The Independent on the highly praised new production of his play No Man’s Land at the Duke of Yorks Theatre, she asks, ‘Why do we bother?’, laments ‘the monumental waste of talent’ and leaves the theatre 'repeating just two words: “What?” and “Why?”’

There’s no shame in failing to connect with an artist and his or her work. Francis Bacon depicted the pain and isolation of the individual; Francis Bacon wiped oil paint all over his canvases to no great purpose. I’m with the first statement. Opera is the perfect synthesis of music and theatre in which each enhances the other; opera is an uncomfortable pairing of music and theatre in which each detracts from the other. I’m with the second statement. In supporting Bacon as a great artist, I’m in the majority. In dissing opera as neither artistic fish nor fowl, I’m in the minority. I accept willingly, comfortably even, that, since so many respected friends go for opera in a big way, it’s a failure of connection on my part and, like a reluctant agnostic, I regret this incapacity.  What I’m not going to do is express a personal evaluation as if it were some universal truth that hitherto has gone unrecognised.

Which is, of course, exactly what Janet Street-Porter does as she flounces through the foyer, baffled in the aftermath of yet another production of a Pinter play. Her expectation appears to be that we will flounce with her, liberated from having been in thrall to the old bore for these past 50 years, the scales having fallen from our eyes. Instead, there is an embarrassed silence, as with adults in the wake of some adolescence bêtise, and we wait for her to get her coat and make her exit.

...

The interface between education and schooling (if two phenomena so very disparate can be said to have an interface) is very much in the forefront of the great ongoing debate about how our young people should best be prepared for a changing world requiring a constantly increasing variety of skills. The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority – the UK government body responsible for overseeing appraisal and assessment procedures – has just commissioned a single examination to be taken at age 18 designed to test the candidate’s readiness across the curricular spectrum to undertake higher education. This is the sample paper released today.

THE FINAL EXAM

 
Instructions:
               Read each question carefully.  Answer all questions. Time limit:  2 hours.  Begin immediately.
 
History:
            Describe the history of the Papacy from its origins to the present day, concentrating especially, but not exclusively, on its social, political, economic, religious and philosophical impact on Europe, Asia, America and Africa.   Be brief, concise and specific.
 
Medicine:
            You have been provided with a razor blade, a piece of gauze, and a bottle of scotch.  Remove your appendix.   Do not suture until you work has been inspected.  You have fifteen minutes.
 
Public Speaking:
            2,500 riot-crazed Papua New Guinea headhunters are storming the classroom.   Calm them.  You may use any ancient language except Latin or Greek.
 
Biology:
            Create life.   Estimate the differences in subsequent human culture if this form of life had developed 500 million years earlier, with special attention to its probable effect on the English Parliamentary System.  Prove your thesis.
 
Music:
            Write a piano concerto.  Orchestrate and perform it on flute and drum only.  You will find a piano under your seat.
 
Psychology:
            Based on your knowledge of their works, evaluate the emotional   stability, degree of adjustment, and repressed frustrations of each of the following: Alexander of Aphrodisis, Rameses  II and Hammuarabi.  Support your evaluation with quotations from each man's work, making appropriate references.    It is not necessary to translate.
 
Sociology: 
            Estimate the sociological problems that might accompany the end of the world.  Construct an experiment to test your theory.
 
Engineering:
            The disassembled parts of an RPA Interceptor hunting rifle have been placed on your desk.  You will also find an instruction manual, printed in Swahili.  In 10 minutes, a hungry Bengal tiger will be admitted to the room. Take whatever action you feel necessary.  Be prepared to justify your decision.
 
Economics:
            Develop a realistic plan for refinancing the national debt.  Trace the possible effects of your plan in the following areas: Cubism, the Donatist Controversy and the Wave Theory of Light.  Outline a method for preventing these effects.  Criticize this method from all possible points of view.  Point out the deficiencies in your point of view, as demonstrated in your answer to the last question.
 
Political Science:
            There is a red telephone on the desk beside you.  Start World War III.  Report at length on its socio-political effects, if any.
 
Epistemology:
            Take a position for or against truth. Prove the validity of your stand.
 
Physics:
            Explain the nature of matter.  Include in your answer an evaluation of the impact of the development of mathematics on science.
 
Philosophy:
            Sketch the development of human thought.   Estimate its significance.  Compare with the development of any other kind of thought.
 
General Knowledge: 
            Describe in detail.  Be objective and specific.

Way back in 2006, when the world was still in steady state and patrician capitalism was kind to us and we could consume with impunity, the following small poem appeared in qarrtsiluni. Now, as we wobble abandoned into the darkness, I feel the need for a little spiritual optimism...

AFTERWARDS

Lifting my face from
out of my hands
I see that the world
as it was is still there.

But I see too
that my hands
have opened like
two leaves and now
my old sunflower face
is turned towards light.