Kranglefanter

Today KE and I had a bit of a dustup. It is certainly to be expected. We don't fight very often, but we both have a pretty "lav terskel" or "kort lunte" (whatever that is in English--"low tolerance" I guess), so it doesn't take much to escalate into a pretty bitter argument.

As is typical for us, it had to do with the way we communicate rather than an actual disagreement. We've been together almost six years now, but we don't ever seem to get past the same issues, which is a little disheartening. But it actually resulted in a really good discussion after we both had sulked for a while, so it was probably really necessary.

Otherwise, I spend most of the day reading and thinking about a little project I have promised to complete for a friend of mine. He is putting together an anthology of articles on Nordic crime fiction, and the publishers wanted something more on Norwegian material than he had originally proposed, so I offered to write something about Anne Holt. For a long time I've been regretting it, but just in the past few days my ideas have started to come together, and I may be able to pull something off by the end of this month after all. I still have one more of her novels to read, but the one I finished today gave me a lot to think about, and sort of focused my approach. I was originally going to write just about the fact that Anne Holt's books both feature a lesbian protagonist and are one of Norway's best selling series of all time. Something tells me that would never happen in the U.S. But the more of the books I read the more I am struck by Holt's decision to make the protagonist a huge fan of the U.S. That seems paradoxical to me in some way that I can't quite put my finger on. So in the article I'm going to try to combine these two themes with Holt's (or at least her protagonist's) similarly strong pro-immigration stance.

There's a long history of reading crime fiction as social criticism, so I guess this project will fall under that rubric.

In terms of knitting, I've slowed down a bit, what with having to work and all (perish the thought). I knit E a pair of wool socks over the weekend, and am close to finishing the first sleeve on the raglan sweater I'm working on. The body is done (in the round) up to the underarm. It's a little sad to end a blog post on the word "underarm," so I'll just add that we did major grocery shopping today, after squeaking by on a minimally stocked kitchen. Feels good to have good and healthy food on hand.