An early post for Monday. Yawn. In today's class we will begin our extensive journal project. Aside from filling (at least) one composition book, you will be asked to write on many levels, in many different styles, to write poetry and to role play. If you've visited this site before, you're familiar with David Bowie's apocalyptic "Five Years," a song that led into the equally apocalyptic tale told in the concept album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars. During this period of Bowie's long career, the apocalypse and literature such as Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World were a major focus.

Here is another of Bowie's doomsday visions, a poem that opens the 1984 concept album Diamond Dogs:

F U T U R E L E G E N D

And in the death
As the last few corpses lay rotting on the slimy
thoroughfare
The shutters lifted in inches in Temperance Building
High on Poacher's Hill
And red, mutant eyes gaze down on Hunger City
No more big wheels

Fleas the size of rats sucked on rats the size of cats
And ten thousand peoploids split into small tribes
Coveting the highest of the sterile skyscrapers
Like packs of dogs assaulting the glass fronts of Love-Me Avenue
Ripping and rewrapping mink and shiny silver fox, now legwarmers
Family badge of sapphire and cracked emerald
Any day now
The Year of the Diamond Dogs

In class we will look at several other visions of an apocalytic world, a concept not new to our times, and explore just why it is that the world will end next Saturday, or is it the Saturday after that or

Your first journal assignment is to eloquently explain what you would do, if indeed there were only five years left. Also, how do you feel the planet would react to this news?