puff 619 What do we know about the mark on the wall? Images, rules and prior knowledge.

What do we know about the mark on the wall? Images, rules and prior knowledge.
INTRODUCTION

How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of grass so feverishly.

Virginia Woolf ‘The Mark on the Wall’ (1919)


To think that we understand better now than then is the idea behind this paper. It took

form in a critique of the concept of ‘High Literacy’ as this term is used by Bereiter and

Scardamalia in 1987 and developed in subsequent papers (c.f. Bereiter and Scardamalia

1987b, Bereiter 1992). But the idea might have been discussed with reference to other

texts, other signs, other points or marks of distinction. Virginia Woolf herself and

commentary on her writing (Holst) might be another place to start and is here used as a

cross reference to the literacy commentators.


The Bereiter and Scardamalia's first paper from 1987 has an explicit goal; ‘constituting’ new models of curriculum and instruction that can bring the benefits of high literacy to students who do not already come from highly literate backgrounds.

The present paper goes on to examine the premises, explicit and implicit in recent literature or literacy and cognition. In particular there is a questioning of the focus on approaching new conditions of learning and the value placed on prior knowledge which has come to be the major preoccupation. What follows is a literature review concentrating firstly on the way literacy and cognition are used by writers and then on the relationship between prior and new knowledge. The latter is seen to be problematic in several ways some of which are to do with confusion in the uses of literacy and cognition. The discussion of prior and new knowledge may lead to a reconsideration of the goals of language research and the general set of premises now current in language research.

A typology set out by Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987) is discussed. This isolates three distinct learning situations (these might be variously described as ‘learning models’ or ‘learning cultures’) and sets up a critical distinction between ‘knowledge telling’ and ‘knowledge transforming’ situations. The latter is taken to refer to ‘High Literacy’.

The way literacy is used in language research literature is then reviewed with particular emphasis on the work of Resnick and Resnick (1977). It is argued that their notion of two traditions of literature is questionable in several respects. The confusion of cognition with literacy is a major difficulty and this leads to problems that we now have in, for example separating out the meanings of ‘higher literacy’ on the one hand and ‘accelerated cognition’ on the other. Cognition seems too easily to become literacy and vice versa in the research literature.

It is not so easy to see the entry points, where literacy starts to look like cognition, or the vanishing points, where literacy becomes something else. It is argued that the models of the mind that inform the literature are in some respects inadequate and in other respects not well understood. The needs first to acquire new knowledge and then to deal with 'useless information' also bound up with our conceptions of literacy and cognition.

There is then a discussion of other recent critical reviews of the literature notably Alexander, Schallert and Hale (1991). While many terms are very well reviewed by them some, like ‘prior knowledge’, are left virtually unscathed. It is a feature of virtually all the literature that knowledge may be divided quite neatly into ‘prior’ and ‘new’ knowledge as though people know things that they remember or have experienced. Genre and schema theory, it is argued, depend on this division. The supposedly ‘liberating’ and ‘empowering’ aspects of genre and schema theory are mentioned but not discussed at length.



* * * *


Literacy n. ability to read and write. NZ Pocket Oxford Dictionary.

As research in cognition and literacy continues to mature it becomes increasingly important for those engaged in that research to have a shared basis for communicating their thinking about knowledge. Without some consistency in the usage of the terminology of knowledge, researchers run the risk of misconceiving their studies, misjudging their results and misinforming their readers.

Alexander, Shallert and Hale. Review of Educational Research Vol 61: pp 336-337, 1991.

Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987, 1987b, 1992) classify teachers as types A, B and C. Teacher A typically assigns reading selections with little preparation and then has students answer oral or workbook questions about them. Teacher A then goes through the selection with the class, asking more questions and explaining what it says for the benefit of those who have not understood it. Writing assignments are also given with little preparation. When they are handed in, Teacher A grades them on the basis of content and language and makes suggestions as to how they could be improved. Usually, however, there is no further revision of the papers.

Teacher B is careful to select and sequence reading material so its builds gradually on students’ existing knowledge. Before students read a selection, Teacher B carries out activities designed to activate relevant knowledge that students already have available. After the selection has been read, Teachers B guides discussion with questions that lead students to draw inferences from what they have read and to relate what they have read to their other knowledge. In writing, Teacher B emphasises students’ writing about what they know best. Teacher A and Teacher B are engaged in what Scardamalia and Bereiter call ‘knowledge telling’.

Teacher C’s approach can best be described as taking all the things that Teacher B does and trying to teach students to do them for themselves. This is not accomplished all at once, of course and so much of Teacher C’s behaviour resembles that of Teacher B. But Teacher C’s goal is that eventually it should not be necessary to conduct activities for activating students’ prior knowledge, to ask them questions in order to relate new knowledge to old, and so on. Students should be doing that by themselves and on their own initiative. Teacher C asks students themselves to recognise what is new and what is old information. In writing Teacher C makes use of external prompts, modelling, and peer co-operation to enable students to carry on their own Socratic dialogues, by means of which their knowledge is not only activated reconsidered and evaluated in relation to what they are trying to write. Teacher C is engaged in what Scardamalia and Bereiter call ‘knowledge transforming’.

The novelty of model C lies in its focusing of instructional effort so that what the literacy curriculum is primarily about is the deliberate transfer to students of those competencies that in other models belong to the teacher and indeed define what it is to be a good model A or model B teacher. Only model C, it is argued, has the potential to make high literacy an attainable goal for students who do not already come from environments of high literacy. The trick is to change the situation from one where students are exercising their competencies to one where they are developing and extending those competencies. Bereiter and Scardamalia argue that a normal child entering school already has the required competencies in such areas as identifying picture details, story details, supporting details, main ideas and referents, sequencing, drawing conclusions, predicting outcomes, inferring causes and effects and making comparisons. The pupil is to become the teacher by moving from a passive to an active role; from transcribing to transforming knowledge.

In many ways this is a well recognised model. It sits well with the idea of empowering students, and transferring responsibility. At the same time a number of issues that seem to me to be questionable are taken for granted. Teacher C is engaged in a kind of literary literacy. In fact it is questionable whether this is literacy at all. The student is supposedly playing with symbols, re-figuring them, looking of new meanings of meaning, new alternatives for alternates. Instead of literacy being a means to the end of reading and writing given texts in this usage it seems to mean something like ‘comprehension’ where one understanding gives way to another and then to another and then to another and so on, in an aetiology of the mind without limits.

A first response by a social anthropologist looking at the proposition that the pupil already has certain competencies might be to suggest that these competencies are, in many respects culturally bound or encased. The competencies may depend on cultural needs rather than school requirements. This would also seem to apply to any proposed extension or development of the competencies. They would be requirements of the student’s cultural circumstances rather than the school curriculum. Towards the end of high school a significant difference between school and home culture starts to emerge. There is obviously a gap between the demands of Teacher A and Teacher C larger than might be explained in cultural terms. It might also be argued that the student’s culture and the school curriculum are interwoven and difficult to distinguish.

It is also important to examine the basic premises of Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987, 1987b, 1992). They take a thesis set out by Resnick and Resnick (1977) arguing that two traditions of literacy exist. To paraphrase Bereiter and Scardamalia, ‘high literacy’, a tradition in education of the elites in Europe and America, has been aimed at developing the linguistic and verbal reasoning abilities, the literacy standards and sophistication, and the moral values and precepts appropriate to leaders of society. Mass education grew out of a ‘low literacy’ tradition of efforts to promote the minimum levels needed for religious practice. However it happened - this seems to me to be a complex question to say the least - Resnick and Resnick (1977) and Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987, 1987b, 1992) are adamant that two qualitatively different forms of literacy, ‘high’ and ‘low’ now exist.

‘Literacy’ as used by Bereiter and Scardamalia is to do with performance. In this sense it is an outcome resulting from cognition, literacy and other things. Something of this performance aspect can be seen in the central expectation that Bereiter and Scardamalia have of the teacher: to activate the knowledge of the student. It is as though teacher are to set the stage but not to direct the performance. To use their categories Teacher A is like a director, Teacher B is like a stage manager and Teacher C is like a theatre critic - depending on how ‘high’ the ‘literacy’ of the student is. At an advanced point the teacher might well make a mark on the classroom wall and ask the students what they know about the mark on the wall. Knowing something - that the mark is there perhaps - allows the student to begin a ‘transforming’ process so that the mark comes to mean something.

A great deal of the difficulties this writer perceives in the argument of Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987, 1987b, 1992) comes back to the distinction put forward by Resnick and Resnick (1977). Literacy is an ability to understand and communicate with written symbols. In this case the symbols are the letters of the alphabet and their aggregation into words. Understanding and communicating are done through reading and writing. This is a minimal definition but it is, I think, reasonably clear. Qualitative differences in reading and writing have a post-literacy teleology. Literacy is the ability to read and write. It is neither high nor ‘low’ unless we say that low literacy is illiteracy which is, of course, no literacy at all.

For example, when Bereiter and Scardamalia make a distinction between ‘knowledge telling’ and ‘knowledge transforming’ they are restating Resnick and Resnick’s distinction (1977) between ‘low’ and ‘high’ literacy. The mistake is shared by both sets of writers: ‘high literacy’ is a misnomer. The phenomenon they are talking about is better described in several ways each adding something to its description. It might be useful to simply call it ‘better thinking’. It could also be legitimately called cross-cultural thinking in that the student is being asked to step out of one frame of reference (‘low’ or ‘functional’ literacy) into another. ‘Accelerated cognition’ is a usage from the literature (Adey 1991: 79-95) that captures the thrust of the phenomenon, which is to allow faster, more independent minds to develop.

It could be said that Bereiter and Scardamalia are evoking models of the mind. Teacher A is working in a ‘steady state’ situation: what is given out by the teacher is taken in by the student. Teacher C is in a strong ‘feedback’ situation: what goes in is transformed into something else.

The newness of the phenomenon of accelerated cognition is difficult to assess. The notion that people might broaden their horizons has a number of histories some going back a long way but Resnick and Resnick appear to suggest (1977) that the demand for a sophisticated, ‘higher’, literacy is post World War I. This would coincide with several developments as diverse as thinking machines (artificial intelligence) and the reception of Frazer’s ‘The Golden Bough’ by a relatively wide reading public. Many possibilities for an expanded consciousness, a greater awareness or a higher intelligence have been suggested since that time including the recent proliferation of colleges of accelerated learning. Some critical points might be the ‘new criticism’, the poetry of Pound and Eliot which demanded multiple conversancies or 'readings' and, more recently, post-modernism which might be a later reaction to the phenomenon.

So far the distinction between teacher and researcher has been seen as critical. There is a further distinction, to be drawn between school culture (within which the researcher’s queries function as well as the teacher’s work) and the culture of the student. Where mass society rather than the society of elites is concerned the school culture/student culture distinction relates to functional or low literacy demands in the student culture as opposed to accelerated cognition demands in the school environment.

There is a real difference between literacy and cognition. Literacy is to do with understanding and communicating written symbols. Cognition is to do with processing information. The system used for processing information and the systems used for communicating and understanding written symbols overlap and may even be shared. The alphabet is a set of symbols. Knowing how to read and write the alphabet is a function of literacy. Knowing how to use the alphabet in patterns, words and sets of words is a function of cognition. Reading and writing a story involves literacy. Knowing what a story means involves cognition. Making up new stories has to be described with different terms such as creativity, thinking, projecting, gambling even. A new dimension of operations is involved.

Part of the confusion is to do with the ready acceptance by language scholars of work by their colleagues in artificial intelligence. For example, the reliance of many language scholars on the work of Rumelhart (1972) and Schank (1982) has meant an equation of reading with thinking, of ‘the reading machine ‘with’ the thinking machine’

While we may have terms to describe how we understand and how we process information I am not sure that we know how information is generated. Later the concept of ‘prior knowledge’ is discussed along with schema and genre theory. At this stage the major difficulty is that literacy, which refers to understanding symbols, and cognition, which refers to processing information, are both used to describe the generation of knowledge.

The recognition of written symbols is literacy. The use of those symbols is cognition. Language is literacy combined with cognition, intuition and other ineffable things. Most of the above is obvious and self-evident but it needs to be stated in order to deal with difficulties found in the literature generally as well as in the specific instance of Bereiter and Scardamalia. Where they talk for example about ‘high’ and ‘low’ literacy there are serious problems; literacy is a skill of recognition and description. It does not easily yield to such divisions as ‘easy’ and ‘hard’ or ‘low’ and ‘high’.

Even more problematic is the way the concept of ‘task’ is used in the ESOL literature generally. Tasks it seems are part literacy, part cognition creatures. There are reading tasks, writing tasks and tasks of classification and order, tasks of organisation, and then reclassification and re-organisation.

How is the concept of a ‘knowledge-transforming task’, so common not only in Bereiter and Scardamalia but in the literature generally, to be regarded? To begin with, a set of ‘key’ phrases seem to ensue once one accepts that there are such things as ‘knowledge-transforming tasks’. ‘Problem solving’ (as a subject), ‘High Literacy’, Bereiter and Scardamalia’s ‘Teacher C’ all rest upon this idea of a ‘task’.

But the idea is pernicious. Not only is there a confusion of literacy and cognition there is also an entry into a culturally inappropriate discourse. In order, for example, to enter a fully operative ‘Higher Literacy’ context Teacher C must have students who are ‘disembedded’. This term is used to describe a situation where apparently the student is not fettered by too literal a form of literacy, in other words by the constraints of local understandings.

A student of literacy cannot be removed or disembedded from their own literacy. Models of logic can of course be introduced, developed and changed. Whether a student of Teacher C can ever be ‘transformed’ by a ‘disembedded’, ‘Higher Literacy' seems unlikely and impossible. This is partly because of the confusion of meanings in the concept of task and also because of assumptions about what is being transformed. Usually this is taken to be a loose idea of ‘knowledge’ considered to be ‘prior knowledge’.

One reason for the emergence of terms like ‘disembedded’ is to do with the emphasis on the mastery of new knowledge. There are several points of view besides the one found in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages research. Pana (1989) talks of ‘English as a second life’, and the blending of language learning and new experience found in her work is in some ways reminiscent of the confusion of literacy and cognition so far discussed. Also the power of new objects discussed by post-modernists such as Baudrillard (1990) may need to be considered in these terms, especially as new objects present themselves or are captured in print. There is also, as James Collins (an American Anthropologist) has recently reminded us (1995:75-93) questioning from certain quarters whether literacy leads to cognitive or social development. Collins quotes Levi Strauss:

Writing is a strange thing ... The one phenomenon which has invariably accompanied it is the formation of cities and empires, the integration into a political system, that is to say, of a considerable number of individuals and a distribution of these individuals into a hierarchy of castes and classes ... It seems to favour rather the exploitation than the enlightenment of man kind.

(Levi Strauss: 1961:292-2)

Neither Levi Strauss nor Collins makes anything like a distinction between high and low literacy. Collins does come to what he calls a Great Divide (1995:76) but with a distinction between what he calls unitary literacy and multiple literacies, a kind of West versus the Rest approach. The corresponding idea that industrial societies are single task centred while traditional societies involve people having a multiplicity of tasks to perform might be worth exploring in relation to kinds of cognition and kinds of literacy as might the idea of multitasking as this word is used with regard to gender difference: men deal with one thing at a time and women can deal with several. Whether this distinction applies to the same or a comparable extent for women and men in traditional societies as it does elsewhere might also be explored.

There are obviously a great many things in the gap between teaching practices especially at the high school level and the research perspectives of academics in the tertiary sector. The ways of understanding the situation and needs of the student involve different vocabularies. In the case of the researcher I have tried to show the obscure and confusing nature of the terms used. It would be interesting to look at the terms students and teachers use for literacy and cognition at some future point in time.

Why is there such a gap and how did it emerge? Resnick and Resnick (1977) may supply some of the answers: two different kinds of symbolic understanding (‘literacy’) are involved. One is an older form, call it ritual based (‘functional literacy’?). Another is figurative metaphorical or metaphysical, a symbolic understanding that proceeds to organise metaphors and metaphorical relations. Secondary school teachers are stuck with the former as a matter of cultural demand while researchers are beckoned by the grail of the latter which is new, historically and, I would argue, not, as yet, understood.

The secondary teacher/researcher divide is structured in terms of this change in the use of written symbols. Some teachers are conservative, reactionary even. Some researchers including Bereiter and Scardamalia are quite simply over-the-top. One extremely useful piece of work is Alexander, Schallert and Hale’s model (1991) which leaves word knowledge as a distinct entity able to provide access to content which is then classified in various ways, and discourse which is then classified to include the way language works.

Literacy and cognition have been confused and in the language research literature they have become fused. Coming at this fusion or solipsism directly will probably not help a lot although the review of the way they are interchangeably used may help to clarify matters.

Further directions seem to me to come from a study of the early artificial intelligence research in the first instance. In particular I think the way we use concepts like memory needs to be reconsidered in terms of the way language learners employ and are caught up in concepts of time. Once memory is considered as not necessarily being lineal then our concepts of prior knowledge may change in a way that sheds light on the uses of literacy and cognition. A general reconsideration of metaphor might also be useful. But many other entry points need also to be examined.

Alexander, Schallert and Hale (1991) provide an excellent review and a worthwhile clarification of terms used to designate what they call knowledge constructs. Especially interesting is the emphasis those writers give to prior knowledge. This is not the place to pursue their arguments but prior knowledge is at the crux of the higher literacy/accelerated cognition phenomenon. Bereiter and Scardamalia’s ‘knowledge transforming’ or Cummings' ‘gist’ arguments depend on one state of knowledge becoming changed or rearranged. The notion that knowledge could be an accretion, a rather slipshod, unhandy gaggle of matters and thoughts seems never to occur in the research literature. The image of the thinking machine, the processor with its clear simplicities is pervasive. When we ask 'What do we know about the mark on the wall?' we are asking 'What do we know about the mind? As Witte points out in an excellent recent article there are many conceptualizations of writing. Witte may be correct or at least he might be pointing in the right direction when he suggests that we should reconsider the work of Vygotsky and Pierce. Other approaches seem reductionist by comparison.

At least part of the problem with definition is to do with the effect that schema or genre theory has had on the way reading and writing are understood. This general approach lifts the significance of prior knowledge. Instead of using a minimal idea of literacy where the ability to understand and communicate with symbols might be considered as a kind of basis upon which understanding is built, literacy is equated with prior knowledge and then classified into different kinds of understanding. One’s ‘literacy’ in this sense is how well one understands a subject. We say in everyday speech that so and so is ‘computer literate’ but we don’t mean that so and so knows everything inside the computer. He or she knows how to use the computer’s symbols.

In turn this greater emphasis on prior learning derives from the importance given by genrists and schema theorists to work done in artificial intelligence especially by figures like Rumelhart (1977-1980) and Schank (1982). From there the genealogy of ideas probably goes back to cybernetics and information theory possibly to rest on an idea of ‘feedback’ (c.f. Bateson 1972). This genealogy leads in fact to a question: has literacy been confused with memory or system? If the confusion has been with system then perhaps this is not a confusion after all: literacy may be said to be the understanding of a system even if that set of symbols and the manipulation of them involved in literacy is dreadfully unsystematic.

On the other hand the concept of system is dangerous in this context as we are still too close to equating literacy with sense. Literacy is not and cannot be memory. Nor is it logic. And literacy is not prior knowledge. The latter is an extremely difficult beast to deal with as is the schema and genre theory that accompanies it.

That the use of terms is messy and somewhat incoherent is established convincingly by Alexander, Schallert, Hale (1991) and others. It may be that some of the comments above on the way ‘literacy’ has been used in the literature contributes to this critique. More interesting though is the need to look at what the terminology, imperfect as it might be, seeks to accomplish and why it has come to exist as a set of explanatory concepts.

Virginia Woolf’s ‘The mark on the wall’ (1919) comes to mind as does Janet Holst’s excellent article (1988) about this story. What was Woolf’s prior knowledge of the mark? Where did the story come from? How was it generated? Holst’s article concentrates on the use of time in the piece. It is also interesting to ask about the way people ‘read’ and write about uncertain symbols. The thrust of the academic literature, it seems to me, has since at least the early eighties been in the direction of knowledge generation especially as written text. This focus has produced the most readily available ‘answers’ - the easiness of genre and schema theory where knowledge is generated along predictable lines. Is the mark a sign? Is it part of a text (or, as Witte would have it, a context, a text or what he calls an intertext? Do we suppose that the mark is a message written on the wall? Do we suppose we know what writing is?



BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adey, P. (1991) Cognition acceleration through science education. In Machine and Devices (eds.) Learning To Think; Thinking to Learn. Pergamon Press: London.

Alexander, P. A., D. L. Schallert and V. C.Hale (1991) Coming to terms; how researchers in learning and literacy talk about knowledge. Review of Educational Research 61, 315-343.

Baudrillard, J. (1990) Revenge of the crystal. Selected writings on the modern object and it’s destiny, 1968-1983. Pluto Press: Sydney.

Bateson, G. (1972) Steps to an ecology of mind. Ballantrae Books

Bereiter, C. and M. Scardamalia (1987a) An attainable version of high literacy: approaches to teaching higher order skills in reading and writing. Curriculum Inquiry 17:1.

Bereiter, C. and M. Scardamalia (1987b) The psychology of written composition. Hillsdale, N. J.:Erlbam.

Chan, Burtis, M. Scardamalia and C. Bereiter (1992) Constructive activity in learning from text. American Educational Research Journal 29: 97-118.

Collins, James (1995) Literacy and Literacies. Annual Review of Anthropology 24:75-93. Edit Durham, W. Annual Review Inc Pal Alto California.

Dornic, S. (ed.) (1977) Attention and Performance Vol 1. New York: Academic Press.

Harvey, D. (1989) The Condition of Post-Modernity: an enquiry into the origins of cultural change. Oxford:

Heap, J (1986) Cultural logic and schema theory reply to Bereiter. Curriculum Inquiry 16:1

Heap, J (1991) Ethnomethodology, cultural phenomenology and literacy activities, Curriculum Inquiry.

Holland, D. and N. Quinn (1987) Cultural Models in Language and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Holst, J. (1988) Time as an entry point; stylistic analysis of Woolf’s "The Mark on the Wall". Language and Style 427-440.

Mahala, D. (1991) Writing utopias; writing across the curriculum and the Promise of Reform. College English 53.

Martin, J.R. (1991) Critical literacy: the role of a functional model of language. Australian Journal of Reading 14.


Ogden, C.K. and L.A. Richards (1972) The Meaning of Meaning London: Routledge, Kegan Paul Ltd.

Pana, I. G. (1989) Translations into English as second life. Meanjin 48.

Resnick, D.P. and L.B. Resnick (1977) The nature of literacy; an historical exploration. Harvard Educational Review 47: 370-385.

Rumelhard, D.E. (1977) Toward an interaction model of reading. Dornic (ed).

Rumelhart, D.E. (1980) Schemata; the building blocks of cognition. In Spiro, Bruce and Brewer.

Sadowski, M., A. Pairio and E.T.Goetz (1991) A critique of schema theory in reading and a dual coding alternative. Reading Research Quarterly 26.

Schank, R.C. (1982) Reading and Understanding Teaching from the Perspective of Artificial Intelligence. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum.

Spiro, R.J., B. Bruce and W. Brewer (eds) (1980) Theoretical Issues in Reading Comprehension. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum.

Swales, J. M. (1990) Genre Analysis English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wittle, Stephen P. (1992) Context, text and intertext toward a constructivist semiotic of writing. In Written Communication 9, No 2 April 237-308, Sage Publications.

Woolf, V. 1919. The Mark on the Wall. In The Second Book of English Short Stories. Harmondsworth: Penguin 142-149.Catalogue
Last Gasp Cafe 29
Two songs in C. Long Black Jar and Colin both composed and performed by Peter Cleave

Last Gasp Cafe 28
Two songs composed and performed by Peter Cleave.Red Bus and Long Black Jar. Chords on Red Bus have a structure! Recorded on the Wetlands.

Last Gasp Cafe 27
Two songs performed and composed by Peter Cleave.You're Free, Red Bus. Recorded

on the Wetlands.
Last Gasp Cafe 26
Two songs composed by Peter Cleave. We got lucky, Idol. Recorded on the Wetlands.

Last Gasp Cafe 25
Two songs composed by Peter Cleave. Red Bus, Lady so Far. Recorded on the Wetlands.

Last Gasp Cafe 24
Two songs composed and performed by Peter Cleave. Idol and You're Free. Recorded at the Stomach, Palmerston North

Last Gasp Cafe 23
Two songs composed and performed by Peter Cleave. Long Black Jar, You're Free. Recorded at the Stomach, Palmerston North




Composed by Peter Cleave. Bass by Leo Cleave. Guitar and vocal by Peter Cleave. For Paula Miranda for her role as Mia Hill in Perfect Stranger

Sweet Killer Love

Sweet Killer Love

Come from the stars above

You smile

The devil is in your detail

The devil is in your detail
\
You walk into the market

Hand up on your hip

You look

The price is way too high

The price is way too high

Sweet Killer Love

Sweet Killer Love

Come from the stars above

You smile

The devil is in your detail

The devil is in your detail

You touch the base of your neck

You set your shades down on your nose

You look again

Who are you waiting for?
Who are you waiting for?

Sweet Killer Love

Sweet Killer Love

Come from the stars above

You smile

The devil is in your detail
The devil is in your detail

Moving right along now
Looking down the line

Who will take you home?

Who will take you home?

Sweet Killer Love

Come from the stars above

You smile

The devil is in your detail

The devil is in your detail


puff 532 Last Gasp Cafe 22

Concert for gold diggers, claim jumpers, future super stars, foxes and trout. 女子高生 Two songs composed and performed by Peter Cleave Concert for gold diggers, claim jumpers, future super stars, foxes and trout. 女子高生 Two songs composed and performed by Peter Cleave: Johnny Rockaway and Red Bus

Johnny Rockaway
For Johnny Rockaway
The gangsters came to play
To throw a rose
into the grave
of Johnny Rockaway
Brando on the screen
so high on his machine
waves a hand to all the fans
along the way

Wear your hair up high
Turn your collar to the sky
No surrender
No sweet goodbye

(guitar break)

For Johnny Rockaway
The gypsies came to pray
to light a bonfire
at midnight
for Johnny Rockaway
Bardot on a motorbike
The chrome so bright
so lost, so lost
in her shades

Wear your hair up high
Turn your collar to the sky
No surrender
No sweet goodbye

Johnny Rockaway
loved Jimmy Dean
the Dodge, the De Soto and the Galaxy
Go Johnny Go ,
Go, Go said Chuck,
the American King,
Johnny Rockaway





Red Bus
On the Red Bus
nothing seems to matter much
say what you like or what you don't
the bus runs on

she was a claim jumping, gold digging future super star
I sold cars on Saturdays

we met on the Red Bus
where nothing seems to matter much
say what you like or what you don't
the bus runs on
and on

she was a city girl and a foxy trout who left nothing out
I was a valley boy

we talked on the Red Bus
about anything that came to us
about life after life after life
and the bus ran on



trout 女子高生 red bus marlon brando bridgette bardot chuck berry gypsies cars gangsters

puff 531 Last Gasp Cafe 21 女子高生

Concert for the Batcave 女子高生Two songs composed and performed by Peter Cleave: Broken Road and We got lucky



Robin catwoman 女子高生 broken road ring moon cat cream bubbles bath
We got Lucky

It was all over before it had begun
it was good night nurse on the midnight shift
it was red, red wine, blue bubbles in the bath

we got lucky
there was a ring around the moon
we got lucky
and we slept till noon
gave cream to the cat
and that my friends was that

It had just begun when she said she'd won
so it was lights for the tree and wood for the fire
candles, blue bubbles in the bath

we got lucky
there was a ring around the moon
we got lucky
and we slept till noon
gave cream to the cat
and that my friends was that



puff 530 Last Gasp Cafe 20 女子高生

Concert for the Black Hawk 女子高生Two songs composed and performed by Peter Cleave: Johnny Rockaway and We got Lucky.



black hawk 女子高生 cat cream bath bubble red wine marlon brando gypsies gangsters pray hair high collar sky

puff 529 Last Gasp Cafe 19

Concert for Spiderman 女子高生 Two songs composed and performed by Peter Cleave: Long Black Jar and Johnny Rockaway



Spiderman 女子高生 long black jar picture wall hall no surrender sweet goodbye

Long Black Jar

Saw your picture on the wall
thought I heard you in the hall
put flowers in a long black jar

Now I'm playing such a sad guitar
and I'm wondering where we are
o darling talk to me

talk to me about the way things used to be
don't talk about setting me free

Thought I heard you in the driveway
Thought I felt you behind me
but there's only one person here
puff 514 Last Gasp Cafe 18
Two songs in new keys. Another concert for Mary J Blige. Long Black Jar and Idol. Both songs written and composed by Peter Cleave




idol maryjblige peter cleave last gasp cafe long black jar ghosts
Idol
It was just a wish
From high on a wish list
but it had to be you
cos you are so fine

And the idol smiles
there is a door in the wall
the traffic stops
the rain begins to fall

Latrice and Labelle
are lost in LA
But they find a sign
meant for you and me

And the idol smiles
look out the window in the wall
The traffic stops
the rain begins to fall

Way on down the hall
Uncle Phil is asleep
You whisper to me
about Dragon Ball Zee

And the Idol smiles
it is written on the wall
the traffic stops
the rain begins to fall

puff 470 Last Gasp Cafe 17
On the deck...Idol and Broken Road for the Goo Goo Dolls...concert by Peter Cleave

puffshop
女子高生
Idol
It was just a wish
From high on a wish list
but it had to be you
cos you are so fine

And the idol smiles
there is a door in the wall
the traffic stops
the rain begins to fall

Latrice and Labelle
are lost in LA
But they find a sign
meant for you and me

And the idol smiles
look out the window in the wall
The traffic stops
the rain begins to fall

Way on down the hall
Uncle Phil is asleep
You whisper to me
about Dragon Ball Zee

And the Idol smiles
it is written on the wall
the traffic stops
the rain begins to fall

Last Gasp Cafe 16 Two songs for Green Day



Last Gasp Cafe 15 女子高生
Concert for Donnie Darko. Long Black Jar and You're Free composed and performed by Peter Cleave
long black jar you're free ana carolina reston green day

puff 291 Last Gasp Cafe 12 Will there be Fox in the Metaverse


Will there be Cher in the Metaverse? Roaches? Peter?

puff 290 Last Gasp Cafe 11 Two songs for the Astrochick



Puff 285 Last Gasp Cafe 10- Upstairs Studio Concert
Long Black Jar
Colin


Last Gasp Cafe 9
A concert for the Metaverse



puff 281 Last Gasp Cafe 8 A two song concert for Tyra Banks


puff 265 Last Gasp Cafe 5
A concert for Mary J Blige by Peter Cleave featuring songs dedicated to Ana Carolina Reston and Daniela Cicarelli


puff 261 Last Gasp Cafe No 3 For Peter Wheeler
Featuring Colin, To see you is to love you, Nadine...