Class Warfare Read Online Free PDF

Government, very secretive, a vague amalgam of former welfare recipients housed in a converted warehouse, in a provincial city. What goes on there? Questions are asked in Parliament, loudly, by entrenched back-benchers; the Honourable Member from Purple Falls requests a definition of the Central Experience. Someone replies, softly:
Celery
. Plant tall celery, tend it, in the quiet sea.
    Q.
Please, can I go to the, uh, washroom?
    A.
Yup.
    The examination reminds him of too much. In blue ink, it has the effrontery to quote Wallace Stevens: “The body dies, the body’s beauty lives.”
Discuss in depth
, the examination says. (How did
he
know?)
    Little brothers and sisters, I will plant tenderness in the hearts of English professors, your masters, everywhere. You will forget what an inscape is, and you won’t care. Oxymorons will proliferate, syllogisms will slide to and fro, and no one will care. Shapeliness will save you, shapeliness will suffice.
Analyze this poem
. With reference to one or more.
More
, always,
more of everything
. And I shall seed the waters of oblivion, lovingly, for you.
    The gardeners wear flippers and masks, pale green, who go down into the waters of oblivion. Gently, they weed and prune. Their bodies are smooth, with the smoothness of damp plaster, in that light. They make no sound.
    The man who is leaving his wife sits at the front of the examination room, writing. There is a question here about Meaning:
levels of meaning
. Last night he finished his essay on Anagogical Sublimation, a field in which he may be a pioneer. “Why the hell,” Valerie wanted to know, “do you waste your time with that stuff?” He’s wondered the same thing himself. If he were half a man he’d be in a logging camp, building Character, muscles, sublimating everything. Meanwhile he has a terrible hangover, and the room is rancid with panic. The aspirin, as usual, isn’t working. He remembers more of the song:
Too much of nothing / makes a man feel bad
. The examination will soon be over.
    The caloric content of celery is a negative quantity.
    Harvesting the waters of oblivion, a project: cutting celery, in the green sea. The gardeners use small, ivory-handled knives, souvenirs of the Jubilee, to slice the celery, to sever the tall green stalks.
    Where no fish glide to and fro. Where no bright red and golden fish dart, to and fro, among the pale stalks.
    Â 
Upward, my soul
.
    Â 
    Compare and contrast any TWO of the following.
In case of emergency, follow directions on printed sheet. Remain calm …
NOTE TO INSTRUCTORS:
Do not answer questions asked by students during the examination period
.
    NOTE TO STUDENTS: The Kermess is a Flemish outdoor festival.
    You learn something new every day.
    Upward, my soul, vigilantly through the green waters, these murky waters, oblivion.
Explain, in as much detail possible
. The harvesters work in perfect silence, deep in the celery plantations, in the salt sea. The students are beginning to drift away. One by one they go, away, the beautiful of this world. “Icarus,” the examination says, “a figure in Greek legend …” Goodbye, Valerie. Goodbye forever.
    At the end, proofread.

SANTA CLAUS
    EVEN TO HIS closest friends, he was often a mystery; the great affection he inspired was not unmixed with awe, a sense of sheer astonishment at the multiplicity and ardour of his genius. His generosity had over the years become a part of him as essential, as physical, as the immense belly, the beard, the curious yet somehow appropriate manner of dress. What had begun, perhaps, as a rich man’s whimsical impulse—who could remember?—had grown into a habit, a lifework, an industry. If sometimes he wearied of it, if the scope and complexity of his responsibilities sometimes overwhelmed him, he nonetheless resisted, better than most men, the seductions of pessimism. The more cynical of his associates may have observed, toward the