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Diss: one year on

Near-exactly one year ago I submitted my dissertation. In honour of the sleepless nights, it is presented here in full. If you like science fiction, you might find it interesting, and if you don’t, you might find it more interesting still. If anyone’s stupid enough to try to steal this essay as their own, more fool them, it’s a bit winding.

Childhood’s End: How Arthur C. Clarke uses science fiction and its tropes to explore humanity’s conception of itself

“We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors.” – Solaris, Stanislaw Lem[1]

Childhood’s End  by Arthur C. Clarke is an example of science fiction at its best. This essay will show how it conveys its ideas clearly, using the tools of the genre to their fullest extent. I will demonstrate the depth and of argument that is demanded of the science fiction writer by showing the change and development of some of the novel’s themes. I will place the novel in the context of its field, show the qualities unique to the science fiction novel and also to this particular book. First, I shall define what I mean by science fiction.

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Read the world

An intelligently written, comprehensive look at why it is important that we all read. I think the most salient point Honor makes is that it does not matter what you are reading, as long as you are reading something, and so are engaging in the world.

Personally, I’ve been going through Sterling and Lebowsky’s State of the World conference for the past week, feeling pretty stupid that some of it’s beyond me, but good about the fact I’m stretching myself. But honestly, Batman comics are just as good. READ!

honorgj's avatarhonorthywords

read
This is not a manifesto, this is not a judgement, this is not an order.
This is simply an idea, an idea I want to share, an idea I want people to read.
I am not self-absorbed enough to think that the world is going to take notice, but even if you, reader, can take on board this small piece of advice, I am happy. I am happy anyway, but that is beside the point.
Yes I am biased here. I am a fourth year literature student, about to – hopefully – study a masters. I have read my entire life. As a child I was under the illusion that one day I would become Matilda and have super-powers because of the amount that I read. While I do not have telekinetic powers and the ability to terrify bad teachers, I have acquired a different kind of super power: knowledge…

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2013 in Review

I occasionally run a little “Inspirations” section under a blogpost to share what stuff I’m interested in or enjoying, because sooner or later what goes in will show up in what comes out. Plus, any chance to send people towards good stuff is one that should be taken up. This is a massive version of that sort of thing. I go on a bit, because it’s my blog and I’m allowed to.

I include old stuff that I’ve discovered this year, since this is the Internet age and it doesn’t really matter when something is released. I don’t really watch TV, so that’s out. As for theatre, I’ve seen quite a few shows this year (more than one, which is a lot for me), mainly at the RSC. None of them have moved me enough to produce an actual list, but the RSC productions of A Mad World, My Masters, All’s Well That Ends Well, and Wendy & Peter Pan were particularly good.

Obviously, this isn’t a decree, it’s a conversation. Tell me I’m wrong, what I’ve missed, what I’d like, what I have to look forward to.

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Wrapping up 2013

Hello again. Sorry the blog went quiet without warning. You know how it is, once you stop doing something, it becomes harder to start it up again. Plus, an awful lot of life seemed to be happening for a while there, so I didn’t really feel like doing much of anything. Still, cusp of a new year, so well worth clearing up the detritus of life since the last update, putting a bow round it, calling it a present, and then moving on to a more communicative 2013.

I last left you with two weeks to go before the first official Rebel Breed performance, and a vague promise to blog more and write more in general. Obviously, blogging more has not been a success. But what has been successful, you ask?

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Putting on a Show – Week 13: It’s coming

Clock
A clock, to represent the rapid passage of time

Two weeks to go until the show.

Gulp.

But hey, that’s exciting too because…

It’s two weeks to go until the show!

You see, sometimes life’s just a matter of a change in emphasis/font/medication.

There’s not a great deal to say about the show other than rehearsals are going. As my honourable colleague says, we’re exactly as rehearsed as you would expect for the number of rehearsals we have in fact had.

Instead, let’s talk about multi-tasking.

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Blogging will be a thing again, and some reviews

Blogging has again become sporadic and erratic. Fear not Putting on a Show will return, as will #fridayflash, but travelling and other factors have caused some skip weeks.

You’re probably owed an explanation of what else I’ve been up to creatively apart from Nando’s, but sadly the answer to that is not much. Rehearsing a musical somewhere you don’t live, setting up a multiplatform writing partnership, attempting to escape graduate unemployment, and readjusting to the family home and its pets and schedules, plus god knows what else, has very much taken up the available brain space that I would prefer to use for creativity. As such, not much is getting done, I’m afraid.

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Putting on a Show – Week 12: Getting Serious Now

As you may have gathered, Nando’s and Nandon’ts is but one prong in a many-pronged approach to making stuff in Leicester. We’re taking meetings this week concerning a potential theatrical project concerning mental health. Podcasts are being planned (and are already starting to live over on rebelbreedin.libsyn.com and on iTunes).

Plus, if you are interested in appearing in/helping out with a pilot for a webseries adapted from As You Like It by William Shakespeare, please email us on rebelbreedinc [at] gmail.com and we’ll get back to you with details. Also, like and follow us all over that Internet:
Twitter @rebelbreedinc
facebook.com/rebelbreedinc
youtube.com/user/rebelbreedinc
 – it’ll be a laugh. Thanks to anyone who already has, it’s nice to not be shouting completely into the void.

But the most important thing remains Nando’s. We’ve got through the whole play now, and the songs are starting to stick, the lines are starting to go in, and the whole thing is slowly creaking into life (the tango looks good, despite the difficulty it took certain cast members to figure out how to do a lift).

However, one thing these blog posts have been lacking is some evidence of what the show is actually like. Part of it is because it’s still in development, part of it is keeping the surprise, and part of it is not having the time to film and record stuff as well as rehearse. I can offer you the next best thing, though.

Cast member and costumer Olivia Deane is also a talented singer-songwriter. Her website is oliviadean1.wix.com/olivia-deane, and you can find her on facebook.com/oliviarosedeane, or her blog oliviadeane.wordpress.com. However, the best place you can find her is her YouTube channel. Below is her latest song, “Muse”.

With talent like that, how could we possibly fail? Stay tuned!

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New ventures

Tl;dr – making creative things in Leicester. Get involved.

Over three years of living in Leicester, I met a load of talented people, who just give away their time either through generosity or because they don’t quite realise how special they are. Also, I made friends with these people.

The other thing that happened is my confidence in writing, and my output, increased by a lot. (Also, directing is fun apparently.) (Also also, I like doing radio.) So, when I stopped pretending to a degree/graduated (ymmv) it seemed imperative to keep doing this sort of thing, because it’s what (all I’m) good at.

One project I did while in university has proved to be the catalyst for doing all of this. Basically, things got out of hand. William Breden came to me with an idea for a musical skit, taking the piss out of musicals and cheap dates with affection. This has snowballed into a full-length show at Dave’s Leicester Comedy Festival in February 2014. However, we needed to bill it under some sort of company name, rather than just vaguely go “here’s a show”. Also, through our collaboration, there proved to be a lot of common interest in doing a wide variety of stuff independent of any groups we’re associated with.

Enter Rebel Breed.

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Crawl #fridayflash

#fridayflash, wordbunches every Friday, or so. Occasionally they’re topical, mostly they’re not. This week’s prompt is “a rainy night”.

#firdayflash 2013-10-11

It’s Friday night. It’s dark, it’s cold. it’s raining, and I am standing at the bus stop, wearing a garish t-shirt emblazoned with the name of some society or other. I’m huddling under the umbrella of someone from halls with the rest of the group, and we’re chatting idly, swaying a little from the pre-game. Hopefully, the bus will arrive soon, take us to the centre of town, and we’ll then drink our way back up the road to the union, via a couple of bars I know and plenty I hadn’t even heard of before I read the event. Then, we’ll dance at the union night to about half one, when I know Caz will want to slink away, and be back here by two, where we’ll burn toast and wake the neighbours by talking too loudly, then eventually wind up in bed.

So, hopefully, the bus will arrive soon, so we can get started. And, hopefully, on that bus I’ll find you again.

I’ve reread the text confirming you’ll be on it a dozen times (and my muscle memory’s flicking to its place on my phone right now), but I’m not going to believe it until I see you. I can’t text you again, because that’s desperate, and I want you to think I’m cool, even though we both know I’m not. What I am, is deeply, desperately in love with you, and luckily you seem to like me too.

I know we’ve barely known each other a few weeks, but I know how I feel about you now. It came to me when I was doing my laundry yesterday, failing to operate the machines, and you came over… to point and laugh at me. I saw your smile, and I realised that I could no longer go a day without seeing it. I love your hair, I love your shoulders, I love your arms, I love your waist. I love the way you talk about biology, as if it was the most amazing thing in the universe, and the way you looked at me when I read out the poem I was studying. I love the way you dance, the way you talk, the way move amongst crowds, darting and dodging the other people as if they weren’t even there. There have been others before you, but none compare. I’d crawl through fire to get to you, without even a second thought. I love you with my entire heart, and, hopefully, you’ll love me too.

It’s Friday night. It’s dark, it’s cold. it’s raining, I’m a little bit drunk, and I couldn’t be happier.

“A Rainy Night” by Benjamin Maltz-Jones

‘Zack? Zack? Zack? Zack?’

‘Will you stop calling my name?’

‘Sorry, it’s just so fun to say. I can’t see a damn thing in this place. What the hell happened to all the electricity? This was supposed to be a nice getaway for both of us.’

‘That’s the rain’s bloody fault for flooding the basement. I told you we should have rented somewhere without a basement. Nothing good ever came from having a basement.’

‘Surely that’s not true. Something good is bound to have come from there.‘

‘Seriously, name one thing Marty.’

‘…basement dwellers.’

‘They don’t count. ‘

‘That’s where we met.’

‘Ok, so I guess they do count. For now.’

‘Ouch, that’s a little ominous. Why are you so scared of basements in the first place? We’ve played board games so many times down at Erin’s place. That space was just so good to set up in, and kinda warm, seeing as we were next to the boiler. ‘

‘I’m surprised we didn’t sweat buckets considering.’

‘I remember having to bring shorts round that one time in the middle of winter! My mum was so confused, poor thing.’

‘Ha, I remember you getting changed, and then running down to the basement fast as you could. Rest of the house wasn’t nearly as hot as it was down there. You remember when we all slept down there…’

‘…and brought the sand down with us? It felt seriously tropical, loved every minute of it.’

‘Erin’s mum wasn’t best pleased when she found us down there with an ice cooler full of beer, an old jukebox filled with Beach Boys songs, and barely anything on. Especially you Zack.’

‘I bet she thought we were having some kind of weird tropical orgy down there.’

‘God, can you imagine the look on her face if she had run down the stars and that was what was happening?’

‘She was probably mildly disappointed that all we were doing was relaxing in deckchairs. Where did we get those from again?’

‘I think we… borrowed them from a local poolside. I remember being made to take them back the next day, never been so embarrassed in all my life’

‘You loved it. Zack… do you want to go downstairs and check if the water’s started to drain out yet?’

‘…why don’t you want to do it?’

‘You’ve already forgotten?’

‘Ok, fine. But you owe me. Can’t believe I’m going to have to go down there. I bet it smells.’

***

‘You almost done Zack?

Zack?

Hello? This isn’t funny, you can come back upstairs now.

Hey, the lights are working again! Is that what you’ve been doing all this time? Nice work!’

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Oh, hi Erin! We’re just playing a game.’

‘Where’s Zack?’

‘He just went down to the basement to turn the power back on.’

‘We had that thing filled in years ago. Fuse box is in the kitchen now.’

‘Zack?’

© Benjamin Maltz-Jones, 2013. Ben can be found @V_Ben on Twitter.

Inspirations

Black Hole by Charles Burns (1995-2005)

Before Sunrise, dir. Richard Linklater (1995)

Back to Basics and Victim of Geography by Billy Bragg (1983-1988)

If you want to join in with #fridayflash, great! Around 500 words is best. Either send me a link to its page on your site, or as a .doc or .rtf attachment. Email it to james@jamesdavidward.com with the subject header SUB: #fridayflash, and I’ll post it up. No money involved, all rights remain your own. There are no restrictions, but if you want a prompt, next week’s is “comfort”.

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Putting on a Show – Week 11: Rehearsals and keys

Firebug
We rehearsed in our venue. Our venue is a pub. All rehearsals should be in the pub.

All is excitement in the world of chicken, and chicken-related theatrical produce. Yesterday marked our first rehearsal with our current cast and script, and everybody has hit the ground running in terms of knowing stuff and not falling off the stage. Plus, our little family is expanding – we’ve added Jasmine Coben the choreographer and Douglas Deans the ukulele player. This is some next level hype, people.

The major issue we’ve had in commencing rehearsal is, as usual, my fault. When you (and when I say you, I generally mean ‘I’) compose songs, you’re basically making them to suit your own voice and abilities. This is fine, except when you give it to someone who has a drastically different voice than you, such as a woman. It’s at that stage you realise the song is ridiculously low or high, the actress loses confidence and the rehearsal grinds to an agonising halt.

The obvious answer to this problem: change the key. What is ‘the key’? Some basic and probably incorrect musical theory for you. Western tonal harmony (that is, British and American non-weird music) is based around the relationship between notes, not the actual pitch of the notes themselves. Therefore, as long as you move all the music the same distance up or down in pitch, it makes no difference what the actual pitch of the music is. If you’re playing a piano or a guitar, it’s a fairly simple matter to change the key, and many experienced players can do it in their heads.

The only issue with this in our musical is that we’re not using pianos or guitars – we’re using the humble ukulele. The great thing about the ukulele is that you can play many of the most common chords you need using very few fingers. The problem with the ukulele is that if you try to play any chords other than these, your fingers look like a spider having a stroke, and you promptly forget how you fingered them. (Also, for whatever reason, it is very difficult to play an E chord on a uke. Which is irritating, because it’s a basic chord that’s VERY easy to play in guitar, and thus features prominently in a wide variety of songs. Bah.) With guitars, you have a thing called a capo that you can put across your frets to easily change key. You can get these for the uke, but I am poor and do not own one.

So, we have the fun task of figuring out which of the few possible keys that the ukulele naturally plays in fit with the songs and the actors’ voices. Luckily, we’re managing to figure it out. This does mean that I have the occasional exotic chord to remember (I still haven’t figured out F# minor), but luckily, now it’s more Doug’s problem than mine.

Next week – the next rehearsal! Full steam ahead for our Nandocas.

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Eliah #fridayflash

#fridayflash, wordbunches every Friday, or so. Never knowingly oversupplied. This week’s prompt is “obscure Bible story”.

#fridayflash 2013-10-04

DR. EVERETT REID: As you may know, accompanying the Bible is an assortment of apocrypha, religious stories that date from the same period, but are not considered part of the main canon. We have recently discovered a cache of writings from the period, and a new translation of the most complete tale is reprinted below:

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