Well, I’ve had a lovely weekend. Top priority was catching up on my sleep–I’d been spending too many nights up past midnight (and with a military schedule, that’s not workable for five consecutive days). And catch up I did. Perhaps too much so, but it was nice to be able to do it. Incidentally, that’s why I was so wordless the last time I wrote–my poor brain was just too addled by the sleep debt for me to put any good thoughts together in words. However, I thought that tonight, fresh from my refreshment (and starting to build this week’s sleep debt), I’d put up some of the half-thoughts I’ve been collecting.
#1: Repopulating Darfur with Arabs:
An internal UN report, obtained by The Independent, shows that up to 30,000 Arabs have crossed the border in the past two months. Most arrived with all their belongings and large flocks. They were greeted by Sudanese Arabs who took them to empty villages cleared by government and janjaweed forces.
One UN official said the process “appeared to have been well planned”. The official continued: “This movement is very large. We have not seen such numbers come into west Darfur before.”
How interesting… What if the Muslim world was considering Manifest Destiny of its own, and we were to see, over the course of the next couple centuries, a systematic change in Africa’s demographics… Would they put the indigenous tribes in reservations, or keep pushing them further south, or what? What would this mean for the continent? How would it reshape the world’s future? (The sci-fi writer in me wants to pursue these possibilities and see what they might mean for the future.)
#2: Harry Potter (of course):
I suggested to my friends that we check out one of the book release events going on, Friday night, for the historic (in a pop-cultural sense) occasion of the release of the last book. I hadn’t saved a copy in advance, and didn’t even buy one, but it was fun to see all the people there, half in costume. They hosted activities, but my friends and I came up with our own: a scavenger hunt. I’ll write about it for real once I upload the pictures I took. Actually, the funniest thing is that I went back on Saturday morning with the half-formed intention of buying the last book, and got sidetracked, bought a dozen (more or less) other books, and then spent the rest of the weekend reading. But I realized as I left the bookstore, bags in tow, that I’d forgotten to pick up Harry Potter #7. (I guess it wasn’t really that high on my priority list.)
#3: Surprising productivity:
I don’t usually do much on the weekends, and I give myself the room to be lazy, since work all week usually wears me out. However, as I was tallying up the things that I did this weekend, I was surprised by them (especially considering the sleeping in and book-reading I did). 6 loads of laundry, 4 shelves of books, I finished one of the knitting projects I’d been working on–one I started in Baghdad–and started a new one, I started going through magazines and collecting the clippings that I wanted in a notebook, I finished 2½ books, and completed a few other little cleaning projects around the house. Not bad for a weekend.
#4: Readers and writers:
One of the shows I half-watched as I read through book #2 was a house-decorating show, where they tracked a couple different families who were moving into new houses. I won’t get into the details here, because it would be a lot of explaining for little to no purpose. However, the thing that I noticed was this. One of the couples had (IMHO) abysmally pedestrian taste. The first thing that they hated about the house that they were moving into was the cobalt blue tile in the kitchen and paint in the living room (I loved it!), and they particularly hated the built-in bookshelves that the previous owners had put into a home office/library. (Whereas their first act was to install a wet bar into the house.) Anyway, they tore out all the bookshelves, put up a couple computer desks, and said with conceited smugness that they were going to write, not read there.
It got me thinking. Not long ago, you’d pretty much assume that a writer was also a reader. It used to be that the two went together for a person who likes words, lives for words, deals in words as their primary medium. But now, with instant computer access and blogs and ‘zines all over the place, I think that maybe the two concepts are diverging. “Writers” can be completely uninformed but have a clever, snappy and “snarky” way of putting things, and might not have any real literary knowlege to back them up. And readers, since books are difficult (though not impossible) to read online, tend to be a little behind the times, and if they do decide to write a novel, it’ll be something that takes a while and isn’t snappy and 2,000 words off the top of their head.
Are we killing off literature with online publishing? Just a thought…
Posted by Kjirstin 
