8/22

I still intend to write posts about my trip, but I wanted to get some flotsam out first.

Over the past week, I read a second Sookie Stackhouse novel and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. A couple of months ago now I purchased Oxygen, a literary novel about medical malpractice, but every time I pick it up to start it, I put it back down again. It’s a subject that interests me, and the book is by all accounts quite good, but something just keeps warning me away. I am not in the mood for dramatic literary fiction, or even what gets by as such on the American bestseller list, and so I keep gravitating towards the kind of populist stuff that would make my mom ashamed of me. She is much more of a snob than I am, and the only value she sees in pop culture is anthropological. I disagree, and think that a lot of pop culture is worth enjoying for its own sake; Ke$ha’s songs are enjoyable because they are meant to be, meant to catch the ear of a wide range of humans, and I’m not going to close my ears to her just because I’m somehow better than the mass taste. That’s stupid, because I’m not.

But I’m getting sidetracked from the book thing. I used to read a couple of “serious” books, and then I’d go back and read some V.C. Andrews or some 80′s King, and I’d swap back and forth that way to keep from burning out on one style of literature or another. Lately it’s been all pop, all the time. I think this dates from reading The English Patient, which – while beautifully, poetically written – was a literary fugue state, and only served to confuse and frustrate me. What happened in that book? Was there an affair, or several? Who died, and when? Was any of it real, or just a fever dream? Interpreting poetry is my weakest point in the humanities, so I guess it makes sense that I just failed entirely to enjoy that book (or maybe I’m just not that bright). Uncertainty in film I can deal with, but I want my books to explain all, not leave the plot largely up to me to interpret. So I think that because of The English Patient I kind of lost interest in modern literary fiction altogether.

So I’m romping through vampire mysteries instead, and now I’m 60 pages into the second of Stieg Larsson’s books. Although I simply had to buy the sequel, to see what happened to Lisbeth next, I’m still…not entirely sure what I thought of Dragon Tattoo. It reminded me of Fincher’s films (appropriately, since he’s directing the American version of the film adaptation) – ugliness, especially against women, to the point where you start to wonder just what is going on inside this dude’s head. The generally accepted version is that Larsson was a feminist trying to make a point, but the violence is extremely brutal and lovingly described, so I was left uneasy and with horrible images in my mind after the book concluded.

I was still racing to get to the next page during the reading of it, though. Aside from a section in the beginning describing some of the workings of finance in Sweden, a section so boring I nearly gave up altogether, the book definitely urges the reader onward. I just wish that it had been more carefully edited. I don’t know if it was Larsson’s sudden demise that caused this problem, but man. This thing really could have used a machete-wielding editor. Larsson writes rings around Grisham and Crichton, I must say, but it’s way too long and exceedingly convoluted at parts. And jeez, does every main character have to have sex with every other one? It’s like Friends with the bed-hopping.

I don’t know if I’m stuck with mysteries and thrillers for the remainder of my reading life. I hope not. I’m not quite ashamed of myself – getting involved in books again feels better than a cool shower after a hot day, better than stretching into a backbend, better than dessert, almost better than anything I’ve felt since that evening in February when BF asked me to marry him; and I’m willing to read virtually anything that will give me that feeling – but I don’t want to give up literary fiction entirely. What I write myself is closer to literary than to genre, and I need to keep up with my field if I’m going to have any hope of publishing again.

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BF and I had our first dance lesson yesterday morning. The first of what I hope will be many. We both really liked the instructor, and although our levels of enjoyment were significantly different, I think it’s something that we can eventually enjoy together. I didn’t realize that BF had to work so hard in order to do this – he has to calculate where we’re going to go next, and what the step is going to be, and then give me subtle signals to explain what we’re going to do, all in a few seconds. This is known as “leading”, which I obviously knew about, but I didn’t know it was so complicated.

I had a WONDERFUL time. Amazingly wonderful. I didn’t do everything right by a long shot, but when I was paying enough attention to BF’s signals to get the steps right, all I had to do was look in his eyes and move my feet, and we were dancing together, the two of us, moving together, looking straight at each other with nobody else in the world (although the instructor was back there somewhere, counting off “slow…slow…quick, quick” while Sinatra sang about taking it nice and easy and we fox-trotted awkwardly around the floor). It was so, so, so, so great. BF said he had an okay time, but he did have to do a lot of focusing and concentrating, more than me. From what he said, though, I think he got glimpses of the enjoyment that could be ahead.

We’re going back for our next lesson in two weeks. The learning curve is steep. Our instructor said she usually gets calls from couples a month before the wedding, and they just want to be able to get through three minutes of their song, so she’s on a timetable and rushing. I explained that about half of the music at our reception will be big band or swing or 30′s music, and I wanted to be able to dance to a lot of them with BF, so I didn’t want to just be able to get through two minutes on the floor, but to step up and dance whenever a song came on that I wanted to dance to. I wanted to make BF comfortable enough to lead me around the floor when the mood struck me or him or both of us, and not to feel like he was sweating and awkward while doing so. I explained all this, and she said that was great, and we had lots of time to do it.

The private classes are pricey, but after this first one, I have a hard time saying that they’re not worth it. I don’t think that either of us is ready for the group classes this lady also offers, me because I keep screwing up the footwork and BF because he’s shy, but eventually I hope we can get up to that – they’re significantly cheaper. Overall, oh, I had such a good time, despite hurting feet and feeling messy-uppy. I wanted to practice again this morning. (I certainly have enough fox-trot music.)

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This morning I taught, and had two students: one of my regulars, and a woman who’d had lymph nodes removed from her right arm and could not put any significant weight on it. Sun salutations are pretty impossible to do without at least some weight on both arms at certain points. So I threw out my plan for the class partway through and did my best to teach without salutations. I wouldn’t necessarily have done this if there had been more students – she seemed to be modifying all right, although ther was definitely some weight going on the injured arm with those modifications – but she was 50% of the class and I felt bad. I really was at a loss as to how to help her modify.

Oh well. There’s only so much I can do.

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Now it’s chore time – laundry, grocery list, etc. Probably more reading. Possibly a documentary on Lisa Gerrard. Definitely listening to a big band CD I bought at Target yesterday. Slow, slow, quick-quick…