Greece: stand by for elder statesmen with stuffed wallets….

Standby for long grey files of Europe's elder statesmen
their wallets stuffed with the riches of
bad banking, offshore deals and weird deals
we know not of
standing solemnly in front of us
telling us that the Greek people
are mad, irresponsible,
and don't understand money.
Standby for them to tell us that the system
is essentially good and the Greek people
are essentially bad,
standby for them to tell us that their core belief
that money can create money is
wise and wonderful
and that the wicked Greek people
are betraying the law of nature
that whatever is lent must be given back
a hundredfold
and the law of nature that trees produce olives
is as nothing compared to that.

Indominus Rex - Jurassic World's monster - symbolism

According to wiki


Director Colin Trevorrow has stated that the Indominus rex, the synthetic hybrid dinosaur at the center of the film's story, is symbolic of consumer and corporate excess. Trevorrow stated that the dinosaur was "meant to embody [humanity's] worst tendencies. We're surrounded by wonder and yet we want more, and we want it bigger, faster, louder, better. And in the world of the movie, the animal is designed based on a series of corporate focus groups."


He also stated that "There's something in the film about our greed and our desire for profit. The Indominus Rex, to me, is very much that desire, that need to be satisfied."


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Not that we have to take his word for it!

We can let it 'symbolise' whatever we want - referencing why from stuff within the film - or not!

It might also symbolise or represent a whole load of other things.

And we can also ask, why a dinosaur? Why do dinosaurs have traction as symbols today?

(I don't have a clever answer for that question!)

Further thoughts on tigers, book-tigers and the meaning-bag...

I shouldn't have to say it, but I will. (Still with the tiger in The Tiger who came to tea'.)

If it were 'just a tiger', then we would want it to behave according to what we know tigers do. In our collective experience and knowledge of tigers, a tiger that turned up at a house would in a British context (as is the book according to its signposting in the illustrations) be an escaped tiger. It would be fearful and dangerous to humans.

It isn't.

So this is a 'book tiger', not a tiger…the kind of tiger that it's OK to find in art and literature. Surrealist if you like. So, that's yet another reason why we can ask, 'what does this tiger represent?' We can speculate about what it might represent for Judith Kerr….and we can investigate ourselves to discuss and wonder what it might mean to us and to our children. Two separate things that may or may not overlap. And whatever it means to Judith, may or may not have bearing on what we make of it. That's up to us to decide. And there'll always be more meanings beyond whatever we say anyway…The meaning bag never fills up!

Tigers, the Gestapo and the Today programme

In a recent 'Imagine' on BBC1 I was interviewed about the wonderful Judith Kerr. In the conversation I made some comments about the tiger in 'The Tiger who came to tea'. The point I was trying to make was that it is a 'tiger' but at the same time it is a whole cloud of meanings - some to do with tigers but others to do with surprise visitors, some who could be dangerous, some who might pose a threat, and genial though the tiger is in the book, he/it does in fact eat all the food and drink all the water out of the tap. At some point in this conversation I mentioned that Judith had a dangerous time in her childhood (of course) when anyone from the Nazi security services could knock on the door.

This observation has been reduced to: 'Rosen says the tiger is the Gestapo'. No, that's not what I said. We all interpret texts how we want to. I wasn't saying the tiger IS the Gestapo, the tiger retains its tigerishness but that Judith and the rest of us are entitled to pour into that image, dangers of all kinds, and, as it turns out, this tiger is not all that dangerous. More like a predatory uncle figure who drink the drinks cupboard dry.

Anyhow, poor Judith has been confronted with this idea that I said, 'the tiger is the Gestapo' and quite rightly she has rebutted it rather crossly. And said, 'no, he's a tiger'.

Yet, it has to be said, at some level, any of us who write things don't actually know what our characters, motifs, and scenes represent and symbolise. We don't fully know ourselves so why would we or should we fully know what the images we create represent?

Anyway, the Today programme (tomorrow morning sometime around 7.30 I think - or a bit later) are going to return to the matter, with me chatting about it. Hope you tune in!

For Jeremy Corbyn

Fresh from:
proclaiming the virtues of the
1000 year dynasty, the British monarchy;

advising us of the special qualities of a 
non-elected second chamber
with its origins in Norman rule;

celebrating an economic system
that was developed and finessed
with the use of child labour around 1810;

continuing to solve international disputes
with the 10,000 year old method of
killing those you disagree with;

they tell us that socialism is outdated.

"Knowledge", "Not-knowledge" and "lesser knowledge"

In order to win the argument about the validity of exams and the exam curriculum, the people who run education have to impose a non-contestable, a mustn't-be-contested notion of 'what is knowledge'. It just is. The knowledge that has to be studied will be and must be the knowledge that is. The only knowledge. The knowledge. Or just 'Knowledge'. All other knowledges or abilities or capabilities outside of this 'Knowledge' have to be treated as lesser, or irrelevant or not important or not-knowledge. 

Part of this process, is also the idea that the best time (or indeed the urgent and only time) this 'Knowledge' can be acquired is between the ages of 4 and 21. Any knowledges outside of this time frame are also lesser. Support for the acquisition of 'Knowledge' or other knowledges outside of that time frame also have to be less because supporting it would kick away some of the control and containment that you can get with a test-crazy regime imposed on young people.

"Rosen doesn't just do funny…he is funny" says Alex O'Connell re 'Uncle Gobb'

Sunday Times children’s book of the week

Michael Rosen is on side-splitting form, says Alex O’Connell


Uncle Gobb and the Dread Shed illus. Neal Layton

published by Bloomsbury

'Another book by the prolific Michael Rosen (he’s written more than 140) is a cause for delight, and in the case of my eight-year-old daughter, it induced a fit of the giggles that lasted six minutes.

Rosen, a former children’s laureate, doesn’t just do funny - like so many comedians who bash out kids’ books - he is funny. And unlike so many other mid-range stories, heavy on the illustrations, which play with formats and type with postmodern predictability but forget to tell a tale, Rosen is the real thing. Even his acknowledgements and profiles at the back made me smile. Neal Layton’s drawings are a perfect match, too.

This is story of a ten-year-old Malcolm who must live with his appalling Uncle Gobb whose constant carp is that ‘the boy needs to do more homework!’ while threatening to put his nephew in the Dread Shed (Rosen’s version of Dahl’s Chokey). So far so good baddie. Malcolm’s best friend is the ‘peaky’- looking Crackersnacker who, despite being his pal, sometimes calls him Ponkyboy in reference to an occasion when Malcolm thought the capital of Italy was Ponky, not Rome. Malcolm also eats a lot of beans.

Rosen weaves in maths, geography, social responsibility and education (he’s wonderful on the cult of the ‘worksheet’) into the fabric of the tale with the lightest of touches, as Malcolm desperately tries to outdo his uncle. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that the boy doesn’t entirely defeat him. This is something of a relief. Only a spoilsport would deprive us of a follow-up,  and Rosen lets us know in the final chapter that he isn’t one of those.'

End