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Men Who Hate Men Who Hate Women

Last month the book club I joined read Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and I have a few things to say about it.

SPOILER ALERT. Those who have not read or are in the middle of the novel will not want to read this post.

Perhaps I have a hitherto unknown proclivity for mystery novels, as I really got into the mystery of Harriet Vanger's disappearance in TGWTDT. But I found the resolution of the mystery a little anticlimactic, and Harriet's miraculous reappearance at the end was a bit hard for me to swallow.

A friend who heard I was reading the novel told me, "I didn't like it, because I felt like Larsson was a misogynist." Now, it's true that the original Swedish title of the book translates literally to Men Who Hate Women. But would someone who really hated women give his book that title? I didn't feel that Larsson was a woman-hater, reading the novel....a womanizer, maybe. What I did feel was that his female characters were two-dimensional. I found it hard to believe in them as real human beings. Maybe, for a variety of interesting reasons, it's difficult for a straight man to create convincing female characters. (Though certainly not impossible.) To make a comparison - last month my book club read Patricia Highsmith's novel (and Hitchcock film inspiration) Strangers on a Train. I felt that Highsmith was much better at creating believable male characters than Larsson is at creating believable female ones.

Lisbeth Salander, the titular girl with the dragon tattoo, was the sort of angsty, angry, tattooed, pierced, antisocial alternative girl-fox that I've encountered so many of in my adventures through the various alternative scenes and subcultures of the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere. And the way Larsson created her in his book, she had more in common with an adolescent boy than with most women I know, which could lead to an interesting psychoanalysis of the author, which I will refrain from attempting, because as an author myself I know that shit is annoying. The additional element of Salander being a brilliant computer whiz, hacker and personal background-checker - sort of an idiot savant amateur private investigator - was also a little tough to take, but not completely beyond the bounds of credibility.

I am in the middle of watching the film version of TGWTDT right now on Netflix. For the most part it remains faithful to the novel, so far, but there's something a bit lackluster about watching a film version of a mystery novel for whose mystery you already know the answer.

The God Question.....and the GlamRockTiger Answer

I want to be a good strictly rational scientific agnostic/pantheist, but I'm also drawn to mysticism at times. So I've decided: From now on on WEEKDAYS I will quote Richard Dawkins, scoff at those who read horoscopes and openly mock followers of organized religion. (You can mock me back...that's fair.)

On WEEKENDS I will express expansive feelings that "SOMETHING is out there," delve into tarot cards and numerology, and possibly even attend a Sunday Celebration at Glide Memorial.

As for HOLIDAYS....on Holidays I will just be drunk, and God, whether he exists or not, will be irrelevant.

The pope's comeuppance?

Atheist authors Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins want to arrest the Pope when he visits England in mid September. Wow...if they were to pull this off, it would be such a media spectacle. Godspeed you, my friends, I wish you the utmost success! Lord knows I would love to see that sick, creepy, pompous little degenerate get his comeuppance!

Chinese Laughter

Tonight I again attended one of my favorite events, Pub Trivia at the Presidio Cafe. It was so much fun. We just missed placing in the top three this time. I didn't drink a drop of alcohol. And still I'm so glad I went.

I have a team, and they are a fun group. One or two change each week, but there is a stable core of which I am, or am becoming, a part. We learn, we laugh, we eat fairly decent food, some of us drink, some of us don't. And usually we come in the top three.

I now know that the Statue of Liberty is the heaviest statue in the world, the U.S. is the biggest exporter of grain in the world, and the first woman to climb Mt. Everest was Japanese.

Although there seems to be some debate over which country has the largest standing army - China or North Korea.

I joined the team thanks to Bay Area Linkup.

On the bus ride home I watched the Chinese people enjoying a joke together. Even though I didn't understand a word of it, seeing them laugh, I laughed too. Which reminded me how unimportant spoken language can be to communication.

Bouncer Redux

Katy St. Clair got a bunch of hate mail in last week's SF Weekly for her previous "Bouncer" column in which she dared to question gay men's musical taste, based on the bland, formulaic, so-not-rock-and-roll music that is played in typical gay clubs. I thought she had a good point. And this week's "Bouncer" is really good, too. And really funny.

"No one wants to drink alone. Except George Thorogood."

"I was like a ronin grandma: I get to play with kids and then hand them over to their parents after about 40 minutes."

"All of this reuniting was of course facilitated by Facebook, that site we all love to hate, but check several times daily."

There's a part about how good babies smell, which includes this:

David's 11-year-old daughter thought this was weird. "He doesn't smell good!" she laughed.

"Oh, indeed he does," I said, like a wise old sage on the mountaintop. "When you get older, you take the time to stop and smell the babies." She nodded, no doubt edified by my wisdom.

Read the whole column here.

My version of AA's Serenity Prayer...

God grant me
The profanity to bitch about the things I cannot change,
The fierceness to change the things I can,
And the sexiness to know the difference