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Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Dreg

I've decided to go ahead with the podcast using the resources available to me, probably beginning in January and continuing at a rate of one episode per month.

As part of the preparation process, I have been cutting down and then building back up an episode called "Let's Revue," which is a collection of songs and short plays. Since I had cut it back, it seemed a bit light in the short play department to me, and last week I had the idea of adapting three short stories I had written in the 1980s.

Adapting the first one, which was called "Seminar," was a piece of cake. I turned the whole thing around in two evenings--and late evenings at that. I still need to take one more pass at it, but it's in pretty good shape as it stands.

The next story I set my sights on was one called "Dreg of the Wildebeest," the story of a Neanderthal who is having a midlife crisis. This will not end up in "Let's Revue," however. As I started to do research on it yesterday, I found this bit of information at the Neanderthal listing on Wikipedia:

Steven Mithen (2006) proposes that the Neanderthals had an elaborate proto-linguistic system of communication which was more musical than modern human language, and which predated the separation of language and music into two separate modes of cognition.


Well, after reading something like that, how could I not realize that "Dreg" needed to be transformed into "Dreg: The Musical"? This is going to become a major project that might even begin life as part of the podcast, but not for some time. there's too much reading to do, too much thinking, too much pondering to find a word that rhymes with "paleolithic."

The third, story, an odd, Kafkaesque piece called "Odyssey," should be simple enough to adapt this coming weekend. I'll report more next week.