Random, Iberian literature, and Arafat

Well, Queenie’s been sitting in bed with her laptop for about thirty minutes now, fiddling away, finding radio stations and checking other people’s blogs and messing about with her own layout and then deleting it. Because she can’t think of anything to write about today.

OHMYGOD, I forgot to check my site meter… hang on a tic.

That’s better. Checking the site meter – the last bastion of the lazy blogger. I do it for two reasons. One, some day, I will break the invisible twenty five visitors a day barrier the blog seems to have erected.

Why twenty five? It’s so random. And yet so predictable. Does that prove or disprove creationism? The apparent pattern in random circumstances. Or is that chaos theory? If it is chaos theory, that disproves it, doesn’t it? Unless the benign God created chaos theory. People who believe in creationism should read accentmonkey is ainm dom’s latest post.

Or does chaos theory have anything to do with creation?

Queenie has a little brain fart as she realises she has come up against another of the black holes in her knowledge.

Mental Note No. 5,426 to self – read up on this ‘how the earth was created’ shit for once and for all. Or get Myles to explain it to her. Again.

The second reason I check my site meter is because it is very interesting to see why people happen upon my site. Today it was someone looking for a Shakespeare quote that I had used recently. But it can be totally random – either something I mention that they are searching for, such as Jester’s, Bordentown, or Michael Waldhuber.

Islamic jihad for Dummies.

Let’s see how long that will take to hook some unsuspecting fish in Colombus, Ohio.

I have a lot of fans there you know.

I just finished reading a twenty page article in The Atlantic on Yassir Arafat’s legacy, which focused a lot on how he systematically beggared the Palestinian Authority and its citizens in order to be Abu Ammar. At the end, less than 10% of the money pouring into Palestine was being spent on the people there in ways those of us in the West would accept as 'proper governance'. The rest was being siphoned off and funnelled back in through the Fatah network.

Did you know that Fatah spelt backwards is a word for death?

And that Arafat spent an hour every day arranging his kaffiya into the shape of Palestine.

I don't believe that myself.

The article also included the best description of Ehud Barak that I have ever read:

He combines the hyperactive, engaging manner of the smartest ten year old boy on the planet with a cold, analytical way of describing events that suggests the personality of the computer HAL in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I have decided that The Atlantic is the best magazine in the world bar the London Review of Books. But it’s okay because they are complementary. I found a big stack of back issues in the filing room in work today, so that’s the rest of the week sorted, bus-wise.

I have also decided that the reason why I like it so much is because I am a total girl when it comes to non-fiction. Give me a twenty page article on a person or an event that paints the scene in journalistic sentences and I’m happy. Make me read a full length book (unless it is the biography of some writer I really admire) and I’m a bored little Queenie.

Occasionally, I make an attempt to change this. Take down Mental Note No. 2,356 and brush the dust off it. I went into Dulles Books on Barrington today full of good intentions. I was going to buy TWO non-fiction books and I was going to read both of them to the end and I was going to remember some of them and I was going to be ERUDITE.

It took all of twenty five seconds for me to drift over to the Literature section.

Another twenty four minutes and thirty five seconds later, I was standing at the bus stop with an Arturo Perez-Reverte I hadn’t managed to find previously, The Flanders Panel, and a novel called Fugitive Pieces, by Anne Michaels, of whom I haven’t heard before.

The Flanders Panel is a mystery, as all Perez-Reverte’s novels are (apart from series about the sword guy, or the Viggo series, as I now call them). It is an art mystery, involving an inscription on a 500 year old Flemish triptych and an attractive young restoration expert.

A well-worn groove for Queenie.

The other might be a bit different, who knows. And I still have Shalimar the Clown, which I am savouring the thought of rather than reading, as I know when I read it I will immediately want to go to Kashmir, and I can’t do that just yet.

Peres-Reverte is one of my favourite writers. God bless Harvill Press and Jersey Girl, who pointed it out to me one day in a bookshop. Speaking of, I just finished Jose Saramago’s The Double. I discovered Saramago, who is Portugese and who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, using the Harvill Press method of buying books.

The Harvill Press method of buying books

Go to a bookshop. Go to the fiction section. Stand at A. Turn your head sideways. Scan the rows of books until you see the Harvill spine (black with a little lion logo). Remove book. Continue until you get to Z. Figure out how many of the books you can afford. Spend an hour trying to get the pile down to an affordable size. Leave the rest on the Special Offer table. Pay for your books. Go home. Read. Repeat as necessary.

Anyways, I had discovered Saramago a few years ago one day when I realised I had gotten to S and had read most of the Harvill books. But I had bypassed him a couple of times. So I brought home The Gospel according to Jesus Christ, against my better judgement, which turned out to be a pile of cack anyways, as the novel blew the top of my head off at the time.

Turns out Sr. Saramago was born in 1922 and only achieved literary success in the eighties, after the military junta in his native Portugal was dismantled. He now lives in Lanzarote, which I have visited a few times, but I have never been able to locate him there.

In fact, he might even be dead now, I have just realised I don’t know.

So many gaps in my brain coming to the fore today.

Anyways, I am digressing terribly tonight due to my lack of a theme for this post. Jersey Girl gave me The Double when I was leaving Jersey this Christmas and I have only just finished it.

Oh my.

What a slow burn.

I kept thinking about it all day today. About who were the bad guys, and who were the victims. And when I started it, the first thirty pages were SO annoying I ploughed through them only because I like Saramago and I respect JG’s judgement in the life of the page.

It’s about a mild-mannered history teacher who is suffering from that peculiar male ennui that comes from being middle-aged, divorced and bored. A friend gives him a video to watch. He notices that one of the supporting actors is his double. He decides to track him down.

As one of the quotes on the back says, Saramago is so talented, he can write about nothing as if it is the most important thing in the world and make it so (I’m paraphrasing here).

A definite recommendation, if you ever spot it.