Saturday, March 24, 2007

Recommended Reading: The Tulip Touch


I read this with my first Year 8 class at GM (now Year 11!). Written by Anne Fine (The Flour Babies, Madame Doubtfire etc.), and winner of the Whitbread Children's Book Award in 1996, The Tulip Touch tells the story of an intense and dangerous friendship between two teenage girls - Natalie and Tulip. Natalie cannot escape the allure of Tulip's mysterious ways, but, as things become more and more sinister, she realises that being with Tulip is like playing with fire. And yet, has she gone too far to turn back?

Click here to visit Anne Fine's website.

Here are a couple of extracts from the novel to whet your appetite:

I paid for the privilege (if privilege is what it was). Nobody else would have Tulip in their gang. They knew from experience that she was out of school more than in. (That’s why I’d never seen her.) From that time on, I spent countless hours scuffing alone round the playground, desperately hoping that she’d show up, or that some soft soul in one of the busy swarms of children whooping around me would crack and say the words I longed to hear.
‘Forget silly old Tulip. She’s never here, anyway. Come and play with us.’
I look back and think I must have been mad. What sort of friendship is it when one of the pair is hardly ever there and the other is never permitted to go off and find her?

* * * * *

... I was so mad at her for the sheer stupidness of it (and for ignoring me so horribly) that when she took a gold chain I’d never seen before out of her pocket and twirled it round her fingers, I left Marcie to ask all the questions.
‘Where did you get that?’

‘It’s mine.’

‘Is it real gold, though? Real gold?’

‘Of course it is.’

‘Can I see it?’

‘You’re looking at it.’

‘No, I mean, can I hold it?’
Pleased with her interest, Tulip spilled the chain into Marcie’s hand. Marcie turned to the sunlight and studied it.

‘This is real gold. It’s got that funny mark.’ She raised her eyes to Tulip’s. ‘It can’t be yours.’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘I don’t think so. It must be worth an awful lot.’

The edgy tone I knew so well came into Tulip’s voice.

‘Why shouldn’t it be mine?’

Marcie said nothing, and, with Tulip standing there in her cheap clothes and worn jacket, there was no need.
Furious, Tulip snatched back the necklace and hurled it, glinting and rippling, as far as she could. It flew across the car park like a live snake, and fell with a rattle into the huge rubbish drum beside the wall. We stared.
Then Tulip said to Marcie:
‘I don’t want it any more. You can have it if you find it.’
Marcie hesitated just a shade too long. And then, humiliated by the notion of scrabbling in a dustbin for something cast out by Tulip, she turned her back on us.

‘I don’t want it!’

Poem of the Week: 'Refugee Blues'

This is a photo of the new Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, opened in 2005.

Another poem by W.H. Auden ('Night Mail' and 'Stop all the clocks...'). Auden was fascinated and appalled by Hitler's persecution of the Jews in the 1930s - so much so, in fact, that he married Jewish author Thomas Mann's daughter, Erika, only to ensure her escape from Nazi Germany.

In 1939 - the year of the start of World War Two and also the first Jewish ghettoes in Poland - he wrote this poem,
the reflection of a Jew addressed to another one about the situation of all Jews in Europe. They are homeless, they are not accepted by anyone, they are persecuted, they are less considered than animals: the archetypal refugees...

Refugee Blues
by W. H. Auden

Say this city has ten million souls,
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there's no place for us, my dear, yet there's no place for us.

Once we had a country and we thought it fair,
Look in the atlas and you'll find it there:
We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.

In the village churchyard there grows an old yew,
Every spring it blossoms anew:
Old passports can't do that, my dear, old passports can't do that.

The consul banged the table and said,
"If you've got no passport you're officially dead":
But we are still alive, my dear, but we are still alive.

Went to a committee; they offered me a chair;
Asked me politely to return next year:
But where shall we go to-day, my dear, but where shall we go to-day?

Came to a public meeting; the speaker got up and said;
"If we let them in, they will steal our daily bread":
He was talking of you and me, my dear, he was talking of you and me.

Thought I heard the thunder rumbling in the sky;
It was Hitler over Europe, saying, "They must die":
O we were in his mind, my dear, O we were in his mind.

Saw a poodle in a jacket fastened with a pin,
Saw a door opened and a cat let in:
But they weren't German Jews, my dear, but they weren't German Jews.

Went down the harbour and stood upon the quay,
Saw the fish swimming as if they were free:
Only ten feet away, my dear, only ten feet away.

Walked through a wood, saw the birds in the trees;
They had no politicians and sang at their ease:
They weren't the human race, my dear, they weren't the human race.

Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors,
A thousand windows and a thousand doors:
Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours.

Stood on a great plain in the falling snow;
Ten thousand soldiers marched to and fro:
Looking for you and me, my dear, looking for you and me.

Saturday, March 17, 2007

Poem of the Week: 'Digging'

It is ST PATRICK'S DAY today, so I thought it would be appropriate to post a poem by an IRISH poet. The poems of Seamus Heaney, Dublin-based poet and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, appear on many a GCSE syllabus. In this poem, 'Digging', he shows how, as a child, he looked up to his elders - in this case both father and grandfather.

Seeing his father (now old) “straining” to dig “flowerbeds”, the poet recalls him in his prime, digging “potato drills”. And even earlier, he remembers his grandfather, digging peat. He cannot match “men like them” with a spade, but he sees that the pen is (for him) mightier, and with it he will dig into his past and celebrate them.

To listen to some interviews with the poet, click HERE.

To read more about his life and work, click HERE.

And to read from a GCSE study guide on his poetry, click HERE.

Meanwhile, here is the poem:

Digging
by Seamus Heaney

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun.

Under my window a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:

My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away

Stooping in rhythm through potato drills

Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.

He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep

To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade,
Just like his old man.

My grandfather could cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.

Once I carried him milk in a bottle

Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up

To drink it, then fell to right away

Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods

Over his shoulder, digging down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge

Through living roots awaken in my head.

But I've no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.

Recommended Reading: Witch Child


The first law against witchcraft was in 1542, followed by more laws in 1563 and 1604, putting in place the death penalty for 'invoking evil spirits and using witchcraft, charms or sorcery whereby any person shall happen to be killed or destroyed'.

But how did you prove someone was a witch? Firstly, lots of paranoia and gossip. Strange woman on the edge of the village who never got married and lives on her own? Probably a witch then...!!!

And the proof? Does she float if thrown into a lake with her hands tied? Does she own a pet animal? Does she have a wart of birthmark? Does she confess after being tortured for days on end? If the answer to any of these questions was YES - then no further proof was needed... (Click HERE to read more about witchcraft trials in Great Britain)

Nowadays, there is no such crime as witchcraft in this country, although it was still considered a crime, for example, in Zimbabwe until last year. (Click HERE to read the news article)

Unsurprisingly, witchcraft has inspired lots of powerful literature over the years. Perhaps the most famous is Arthur Miller's play The Crucible. However, in the year 2000, Celia Rees wrote a fantastic novel for teenagers called WITCH CHILD. Here is an excerpt:

Early March 1659

I am a witch. Or so some would call me. 'Spawn of the Devil,' 'Witch child,' they hiss in the street, although I know neither father nor mother. I know only my grandmother, Eliza Nuttall; Mother Nuttall to her neighbors. She brought me up from a baby. If she knew who my parents are, she never told me.

'Daughter of the Erl King and the Elfen Queen, that's who you are.'

We live in a small cottage on the very edge of the forest; Grandmother, me, and her cat and my rabbit. Lived. Live there no more.

Men came and dragged her away. Men in black coats and hats as tall as steeples. They skewered the cat on a pike; they smashed the rabbit's skull by hitting him against the wall. They said that these were not God's creatures but familiars, the Devil himself in disguise. They threw the mess of fur and flesh on to the midden and threatened to do the same to me, to her, if she did not confess her sins to them.

They took her away then.

She was locked in the keep for more than a week. First they 'walked' her, marching her up and down, up and down between them for a day and a night until she could no longer hobble, her feet all bloody and swollen. She would not confess. So they set about to prove she was a witch. They called in a woman, a Witch Pricker, who stabbed my grandmother all over with long pins, probing for the spot that was numb, where no blood ran, the place where the familiars fed. The men watched as the woman did this, and my grandmother was forced to stand before their gloating eyes, a naked old lady, deprived of modesty and dignity, the blood streaming down her withered body, and still she would not confess.

They decided to 'float' her. They had plenty of evidence against her, you see. Plenty. All week folk had been coming to them with accusations. How she had overlooked them, bringing sickness to their livestock and families; how she had used magic, sticking pins in wax figures to bring on affliction; how she had transformed herself and roamed the country for miles around as a great hare and how she did this by the use of ointment made from melted corpse fat. They questioned me, demanding, 'Is this so?' She slept in the bed next to me every night, but how do I know where she went when sleep took her?

It was all lies. Nonsense and lies.

Sunday, March 11, 2007

Poem of the Week: 'The Second Coming'


Written in 1919, a year after the end of the catastrophic First World War, 'The Second Coming' is W.B. Yeats' attempt to question the state of the world as he saw it. Amid the apocalyptic climate of post-war Europe, where, in the words of Larkin, there would be "never such innocence" ever again, Yeats could no longer find comfort in the idea of a good, healing 'second coming', but started to wonder, instead, if any such event might well be a far more sinister and violent affair: no heroic Christ, but a hellish monster instead...

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.


Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
*
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

* Spiritus Mundi:
The phrase "spiritus mundi" (literally "spirit of the world") is a reference to Yeats' belief that each human mind is linked to a single vast intelligence, and that this intelligence causes certain universal symbols to appear in individual minds.

Recommended Reading: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde


Many people believe that EVERY human being has the capacity for evil - it is simply that MOST of us know the difference between right and wrong, and the power of SOCIETY and MORALITY (and our awareness that everything has CONSEQUENCES) are enough to stop us giving into our 'evil side'. Many different cultures around the world believe in this balance - this yin/yang - within the human psyche, which ensures that we live our lives on an even keel. However, if we lost that 'self-control' - if the yang was stripped away and we wer left only with the yin - and if nothing we did had any consequences any more, imagine what horrible things we might be capable of...

This is exactly what happens in Robert Louis Stevenson's powerful, 19th Century short story, THE STRANGE CASE OF DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE. Dr Jekyll, a brilliant doctor and scientist, discovers a potion that unleashes within him a creature of complete and violent evil - but all he has to do is take another potion and he returns to the good, kind, gentle man he was before. Before long he becomes ADDICTED to the thrill of this experience, but what will happen if he can no longer control when he 'changes'? And what if he gets 'stuck' as Mr Hyde and can't get back?

This is a scary and sobering look at the human capacity for evil, and at the power TEMPTATION and ADDICTION can have over ANY one of us. And it is a short, quick and exhilerating horror/thriller too.

Finally, if any of you read this and want to borrow a modern film of the book on DVD, come and see me...

Here is a brief extract:
Nearly a year later, in the month of October, 18... , London was startled by a crime of singular ferocity, and rendered all the more notable by the high position of the victim. The details were few and startling. A maid-servant living alone in a house not far from the river had gone upstairs to bed about eleven. Although a fog rolled over the city in the small hours, the early part of the night was cloudless, and the lane, which the maid's window overlooked, was brilliantly lit by the full moon. It seems she was romantically given; for she sat down upon her box, which stood immediately under the window, and fell into a dream of musing. Never (she used to say, with streaming tears, when she narrated that experience), never had she felt more at peace with all men or thought more kindly of the world. And as she so sat she became aware of an aged and beautiful gentleman with white hair drawing near along the lane; and advancing to meet him, another and very small gentleman, to whom at first she paid less attention. When they had come within speech (which was just under the maid's eyes) the older man bowed and accosted the other with a very pretty manner of politeness. It did not seem as if the subject of his address were of great importance; indeed, from his pointing, it sometimes appeared as if he were only inquiring his way; but the moon shone on his face as he spoke, and the girl was pleased to watch it, it seemed to breathe such an innocent and old-world kindness of disposition, yet with something high too, as of a well-founded self-content. Presently her eye wandered to the other, and she was surprised to recognize in him a certain Mr Hyde, who had once visited her master and for whom she had conceived a dislike. He had in his hand a heavy cane, with which he was trifling; but he answered never a word, and seemed to listen with an ill-contained impatience. And then all of a sudden he broke out in a great flame of anger, stamping with his foot, brandishing the cane, and carrying on (as the maid described it) like a madman. The old gentleman took a step back, with the air of one very much surprised and a trifle hurt; and at that Mr Hyde broke out of all bounds, and clubbed him to the earth. And next moment, with ape-like fury, he was trampling his victim under foot, and hailing down a storm of blows, under which the bones were audibly shattered and the body jumped upon the roadway.

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Another Riddle


I can't find any other riddle from the same book that hardly uses any Redwall Map thinking like something that sounds burnt but alive between the pond and the orchard and all. So, here's one that hardly uses map thinking. Though it uses a lot of Redwall history......

'Twas I slew the Scourge in days of old,
Then I was one, but now we are two.
We who are dumb, yet sound so bold,
Days and night to order you.
We are those who announce a feast,
Or victories of the brave-hearted.
We are those whose solemn farewell,
Mark sadly a loved one departed.
On our oak see knowledge unfold,
We never speak 'til we're told?
We never speak 'til we're told.

Big Hint: It's something instrumental.

Saturday, March 03, 2007

Poem of the Week: 'Not Waving But Drowning'

'Not Waving But Drowning' by Stevie Smith tells the short, dark, humorous story of a man whose thrashing - whilst drowning in the sea - is mistaken for waving by people on the shore. It is also clear that this is a metaphor for any situation in which a cry for help is misinterpreted or ignored by friends and family: people only see what they WANT to see.

For a hypertext annotated version of the poem (if you can bear the website's background!), click here.
Listen to the poet reading the poem at the Edinburgh Festival in 1965 here.
Click here for a biography of Florence Margaret 'Stevie' Smith.
And for a slightly happier poem by Smith, click here.

Not Waving But Drowning

by Stevie Smith

Nobody heard him, the dead man,

But still he lay moaning:

I was much further out than you thought

And not waving but drowning.


Poor chap, he always loved larking

And now he's dead

It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,

They said.


Oh, no no no, it was too cold always

(Still the dead one lay moaning)

I was much too far out all my life

And not waving but drowning.

Recommended Reading: The Bird Artist

"My name is Fabian Vas. I live in Witless Bay, Newfoundland. You would not have beard of me. Obscurity is not necessarily failure, though; I am a bird artist, and have more or less made a living at it. Yet I murdered the lighthouse keeper, Botho August, and that is an equal part of how I think of myself."

Continuing the INTERNATIONAL WEEK theme, this week I am recommending an amazing piece of CANADIAN fiction from the 1990s. The Bird Artist by Howard Norman. Many of you will have studied an extract from this novel with me in Year 8 - in which Fabian Vas enacts the brutal murder of his mother's new lover, Botho August. But how many of you then went on to read the whole book?

Like what you read above? Click here to read more of the first chapter.

If you do decide to read the whole book, why not use this reading guide whilst you do so.