Report by Ms de Meaner
So good! Hon menshes to Bill Greenwell ("Hot Love"), Shirley Curran ("A Whiter Shade of Pale"), Kathleen Bell ("The Sun Has Got His Hat On"), Gerard Benson ("Carolina in the Morning"), Tony Black ("St Louis Blues"), Josh Ekroy ("Do Wah Diddy Diddy"), Adrian Fry ("What's in a Kiss?") and El Basilio ("You Picked a Fine Time to Leave Me, Lucille"). £20 to the winners. A £5 book token for Ian Birchall. In addition, the Tesco vouchers go to G M Davis, the overall winner.
"Space Oddity" (1969) is Bowie's finest political allegory. He chronicles astronaut Major Tom's (Harold Wilson's) strained relationship with Ground Control (his mutinous cabinet). Initially they support him: he has really made the grade; but when he proposes industrial relations reform, in his In Place of Strife, he is seen as a dangerous maverick. Despite attempts to keep in touch ("Can you hear me, Major Tom?"), he appears increasingly isolated and paranoid ("Here am I floating round my tin can/Far above the moon"). No more "white heat of technology" - his circuit's dead. With the election declared, Tom has a premonition. Lamenting "Planet Earth is blue/And there's nothing I can do", he foresees, too late, a win for Heath and the Tories.
Anne Du Croz
"How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?" anchors itself in the ideologically conservative realm of "common sense" by asserting that (pace Magritte) "you can't take a fish for a walk". It simultaneously denies utopic transformation while reinscribing it at a deceptively overt level in an idée fixe, a dominant paradigm selected from a system of differences - a dog, and only a dog, not a rabbit, kitten, parrot, etc.
Typically, the desired Other is fetishised as a commodity, yet one as mysterious as the narrator's reasons for a sudden "trip to California", because its price is unknown. At that point, it is impossible not to recall J Pierpont Morgan's classic dictum: "If you have to ask, you can't afford it."
G M Davis
"MacArthur Park". We've all been there, haven't we? We bake a cake, cover it in bright green icing, name it after a park, throw away the recipe (or permanently delete it, taking care to wipe the hard drive), then as soon as our back is turned, some idiot takes it out in the rain and leaves it there. Yet Jimmy Webb transforms this everyday occurrence, capturing brilliantly the utter desolation so familiar to millions of mortified cake bakers. The epic theme is ideally suited to Webb's heroic blank verse, interrupted by a heart-rending "I don't think that I can take it". The grief for the melted cake and lost recipe contains poignant echoes of Milton's Paradise Lost.
David Silverman
Middle of the Road's alliterative line "Chirpy chirpy cheep cheep chirp" combines repetition and variety in magisterial fashion. A tour de force.
Ian Birchall
No 4002 Under their skins
Set by Patrick O'Byrne
According to the Observer, Tory traditionalists adore Lady T, would "mug a hoodie", and don't know what an iPod is. Describe other trads, eg, Labour, NS readers, etc.
Max 120 words by 25 October
Email: comp@newstatesman.co.ukObserver
