Budget Discussions

Music - Homrong - Musicians of the National Dance Company of Cambodia

Some tortuous conversation got me thinking about how The Thunderbirds crew got all that stuff built on the island without the rest of the world finding out. I am sure there are many discussion threads about this on various fan sites so I will not contaminate this discussion by trying to find out. My views are either that a huge construction crew of loyal builders was ferried out there on smallish boats and then paid to keep the secret or that Brains started small and worked his way up using machines. It would be like firing a thread across a ravine and then dragging a piece of string followed by a rope until you have enough structure to make a bridge. Brains would have started with a little caterpillar machine that could build bigger machines and in turn they could build the huge things required to build the whole thing. Of course he would have to have had some sort of Santa-Claus machine to turn the rock into metal. I think I had better end this now before I invent so much "outside the text" that I create the whole world.

That is an interesting thought. If you try to define how something from narrative media (thanks for the term Alice) could have been achieved, you could end up having to define the real world. One thing means another has to happen and before you know it you have required everybody in the world to eat nothing but rice pudding to sustain your creation. There is never anything outside the text. You can make it up but try and sustain it. I want to say something about how you can create a whole world in a book with very little effort. It is a bit like the discovery that the brain "fills in the blanks" in its sensory input rather than trying to make sense of a full set of information. You don't need to fill out a book with heavy detail like Dickens, you can create a very real-seeming world just with a few 'hooks'. Isabel Allende does this. I have not read enough Magic Realism to know if this is a trait of this particular genre but I suspect it is so maybe there is already enough discussion about it.

I am afraid I did the normal thing when confronted with the Robert McCrum's list of top 100 books in the Observer and counted how many I had actually read rather than looking for ones I had not read and should. (I got 7 and my wife got 9). So many of them are copyright free that I have no excuse not to download them and read them on the Palm Pilot.

Music has changed to Happiness by Lisa Germano. I have been warned (probably correctly) that my blogs are tending towards the dark side and this confirms this. Don't read anything into this. I just like them and I do have to add that I have had to turn off some of the sadder records because I just couldn't listen to them. Which leads me to this question; why is Shiny Happy People not included on the REM Best of? Do they want to be seen as 'not too upbeat'? Maybe Shiny Happy people is a really depressing song - I don't know what it is actually about but it sounds happy and has happy in the title so it is a happy song. Maybe they just forgot. Michael Stipe maybe standing right now with his palm on his temple saying 'Doh'.

No poetry today. I seem to have a minor burnout. I didn't have to get the bus home yesterday so I didn't have any composing time. Still need that hour a night.