HSC English Reading Task 5

Stimulus Booklet:

Text One (Drawing) - Untitled (Banksy)

Text Two (Song Lyrics) - Blowin’ in the Wind (Bob Dylan)

How many roads must a man walk downBefore you call him a man?How many seas must a white dove sailBefore she sleeps in the sand?Yes, and how many times must the cannonballs flyBefore they're forever banned?

The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the windThe answer is blowin' in the wind

Yes, and how many years can a mountain existBefore it's washed to the sea?Yes, and how many years can some people existBefore they're allowed to be free?Yes, and how many times can a man turn his headAnd pretend that he just doesn't see?

The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the windThe answer is blowin' in the wind

Yes, and how many times must a man look upBefore he can see the sky?Yes, and how many ears must one man haveBefore he can hear people cry?Yes, and how many deaths will it take 'til he knowsThat too many people have died?

The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the windThe answer is blowin' in the wind

Text Three (News Article) - ‘It Means Nothing to Me’: Picasso Unimpressed by Moon Landing (Valentina Di Liscia)

The artist's underwhelmed response to the historic 1969 event is the "meh" energy we all need right now as billionaires race to space.

Over 52 years ago, on July 20, 1969, the world came to a standstill as humans landed on the moon for the very first time. Hundreds of millions sat glued to their television sets, watching in awe as iconic images of Neil A. Armstrong descending Apollo 11 and stepping foot on the rocky lunar surface beamed back to Earth in one of the most widely viewed broadcasts in TV history. For many, it was a deeply poignant, indelible moment, the kind that happens only once or twice in one’s lifetime.

But others were unmoved by the spectacle, perhaps most famously artist Pablo Picasso, whose quote in a New York Times roundup of reactions to the landing the following day remains an impressive display of apathy even in today’s notoriously cynical, meh-centric culture: “It means nothing to me. I have no opinion about it, and I don’t care,” Picasso told the Times.

The artist’s meager statement was published as part of a special two-page feature titled “Reaction to Man’s Landing on the Moon Show Broad Variations in Opinions.” It’s true that not everyone interviewed was celebratory — many saw the costly space mission as an overhyped, profligate waste of money. But even writer Vladimir Nabokov, who curtly stated that “the utilitarian results do not interest me,” acknowledged the “panic and splendor” of the event. Compared to another artist in the group, sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, who said the landing was “like humanity stepping out of the womb of nature,” Picasso’s muted response feels deliberately dismissive.

The Cubist pioneer was 88 at the time and had by then witnessed and endured his fair share of life’s hardships. He painted his legendary canvas “Guernica” (1937) depicting the horrors of war, including death and dismemberment, in the aftermath of the Nazi bombardment of the Basque city during the Spanish Civil War. Plagued by poverty, loss, and depression at the outset of his career, he created works in somber blue-tinged greens and grays during his influential “Blue Period.” He also inflicted pain on others, accused of emotional abuse and misogyny by his partners and relatives.

Picasso’s boldly indifferent response to the lunar landing is often quoted, but rarely examined in the larger context of his life and career; still, given these personal experiences, one can see why the multimillion-dollar moonwalk of two American astronauts may not have exactly riveted the hardened artist.

In any case, there may be no better time than now to echo Picasso’s deadpan words, in the wake of billionaire Jeff Bezos’s offensively expensive, eleven minute flight to space on a phallic rocketship. Dear Jeff: I have no opinion about it, and I don’t care.

Text Four (Speech) - Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, 1950 (William Faulkner)

Ladies and gentlemen,

I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work – a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So, this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will someday stand here where I am standing.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.

I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

Questions:

Text One - Drawing (2 marks)

How does the text use visual techniques to represent the changing nature of the human experience?

Text Two - Song (3 marks)

How does the song use language techniques to represent the complexity of the human experience?

Text Three - Article (3 marks)

How does the article challenge expectations by representing differing responses of individuals to aspects of the human experience?

Text Four - Speech (5 marks)

How does the speech represent the power of the human voice?

Texts One, Two, Three and Four (7 marks)

How do TWO of your given texts represent the challenges faced by individuals within the human experience?