So tacky! (Warning: PG13)

Yesterday I finally finished grading the final papers for my class (as any of you who have ever graded anything know, it is a giant pain in the ass, even when papers are good, as these ones were). Now that I live in the postage stamp, I no longer have dedicated office space, and I don't love my kitchen table as a place to work, mostly because it means sitting and facing a wall just three feet away. So the grading I didn't manage to do on the plane ride home and back last week (Dad's medical procedure ended up going very well, btw) I ended up doing this weekend on the couch, which has a niceish view of my balcony and of northwest Spookytown. Of course, this meant that I needed something to lean on, so yesterday while reading the opening lines of Paper Three I absentmindedly grabbed a book from the oversized book section, bottom shelf of Bookcase One, and proceeded to sit on the couch with the boys and read all about my student's mini-fieldwork project and data analysis. I was pretty immersed in the reading and reviewing, so imagine my surprise when I finished the paper, gave it a grade, and put it on the coffee table, revealing that my book support during grading had been this:
Yes, even those of you who don't read Russki can probably figure out that this is an Illustrated Kama Sutra with 250 photographs, and (as written in red), a "textbook of love." This was a New Year's present given to me almost exactly 6 years ago in a foreign land (6 years already! No wonder my language skills are kind of rusty). It is, without a doubt, the tackiest book I own -- and the pictures inside are even worse, looking like stills from a low budget porn film (oh, I guess as opposed to those super-high-budget looking ones) and with the most pained and depressed-looking expressions on the woman's face. In fact, I have many critiques I could make of the book and the exoticizing Orientalism and anti-feminism found at my old fieldwork site and its environs, but all I'll say is that I hope none of the book contents rubbed off in any way on the ascetic, pristine, and highly intellectual content of the papers that were resting on it for most of yesterday. Yipes!