Well… Between my inability to keep a blog running, my battles with procrastination and executive dysfunction, and the breakdown of the entire world as we know it, this has been a tough one!
So, what have I been up to for the last three months?
I’ve read The Storm of Creativity by Kyna Leski, which talks through the stages of the creative process, comparing them to the formation of a storm. Areas covered include “unlearning” what you know (and what you think you know), the creation of the problem you want to solve, connecting ideas, pausing when needed, and starting over or giving up completely.
It was a great book, which I found interesting, and helped a lot with my understanding of why we were doing this QoR module in the first place, but it wasn’t as useful as I’d hoped in helping me answer the question I’d been set.
I’ve been looking more into subversion in comedy, particularly satire and absurdism, and accidentally fell down a YouTube hole of clips from The Thick of It and Veep, and absurdist sketch shows.
My favourite part of this is when Michael Palin struggles not to corpse after handing the moustache back to John Cleese.
That’s a VERY strong Ribena.
Yes, that’s right, I’ve just embedded a whole episode. It was made for CBBC, and the first series was a bit hit and miss, but once it found its feet Sorry I’ve Got No Head was the best sketch show on TV at the time. They’re all on YouTube! Go watch them!
I started thinking more about how subversion tied in with my idea for my major project, creating excerpts from a book about the Mashu as if they were real, effectively writing a non-fiction book about fictional creatures.
I also used the Mashu to subvert the (amazing!) work of my coursemate, Inken Stabell.
Cheering Up Winterreise, Inken Stabell & Matt Farmer, (2020).
I love her stuff, but with the disparity between her bleak and monochrome landscapes and my bright and cheerful and colourful characters, it was too tempting not to try and combine them. Fortunately Inken seemed to like it, and didn’t object to my ruining her piece!
Thinking more about how I’m trying to encourage adults to play, I started wondering why adults are discouraged from playing in the first place.
After a bit of searching I found a quote from Dr Peter Gray, professor of psychology at Boston College, which led me to a TED Talk he did in 2014. I found it was much worse than I thought, We’re discouraged from play as early as starting school!
This led to another YouTube hole of some fascinating TED Talks about play:
I’ve just spent the weekend finishing off my presentation and writing my script. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic I now no longer have to actually present it, just include my script as notes in the presentation, which I must admit is a bit of a relief.
I just need to finish my synopsis paragraph ready for submission tomorrow…