tango paranoia

returned to me last night. Ive been out quite alot and danced.most dances have been o.k. but I havent yet had any moments of it feeling really good. Even when you do dance this place (Buenos Aires) seems so precious and up its own arse - the tango scene is very close knit and difficult to penetrate , enough to make an outsider squirm each time he puts foot onto the dance floor.I am going to start writing again today - if I can stay awake for long enough.

Although Ive not been writing for a week I have been making notes on character and setting for short story ideas (about Buenos Aires)...mostly Ive been doing this in cafe's when Ive been having lunch on my own. It is very tempting to commit to writing a new short story or two. Of course this genre has different kinds of challenges but you do see an end result fairly swiftly and I find the process very satisfying. Like dancing tango if you dont often get to feel good about your writing even now and again your self belief system can get badly messed up. A few people have been asking me about my writing here, "oh, you write!"( yes, I write) - ..."what do you write about" (fiction, what ever takes hold of my interest, I've written short stories in the main but am trying to finish my first novel at the moment). The word 'novel' almost always triggers the enquiry" Are you famous?"(no, I'm not famous - I only began to write 3 years ago) ..."agh - so what's your novel about then?"(Nothing to do with Buenos Aires - its about an immigrant from Kosovo who gets a job as a street sweeper in London and tries to build a new life but his past comes back to haunt him, basically...)"Oh. Interesting"...(at this point the conversation sometimes concludes but sometimes it does continue and we talk about writing, ; the Aladdins cave-like book shops here,South American writers - some of whom Ive not heard of. I shared a cab back from the tango class yesterday in Abasto with a local psychoanalyst who - like me - is frustrated by tango dancing and we got talking - during our fifteen minutes in the back of that cab - about the creative process, Borges, Allende and Lorca( whom she had notheard of - even when I mentioned 'Blood Wedding').I said how wonderfuly poetic some of the lyrics are in tango - especially the early tango, from the 1930's and early 40's) and how I wish I understood more spannish. We exchanged email addresses.

BG