8.9.01

i finished reading Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicle last night. what a weird trip. i highly recommend it, although there was something about the end of the book that left me feeling dissatisfied – i can’t quite put my finger on it, and i’m not at all sure that feeling wasn’t cultivated on purpose, since it’s a novel about transformation and loss. at any rate, the book fucking rules. next up: Love in the Time of Cholera. with a brief intermission to read cosmo, i think. cosmo is my guilty pleasure, my literary weakness. i can’t stand women’s magazines as a general rule – they’re insipid and socially/culturally damaging, promoting a creepy sort of 1950’s-style subservience only updated in a far more insidious way – trapping women in the cult of success, making them feel that they have to be perfect mothers and perfect lovers and perfect career women and perfect housekeepers and fashionably dressed and be fit and healthy and mentally positive and organized and frugal yet carefree and a real go-getter. i mean, what a way to protect your magazine sales – make women feel inadequate so that they’ll keep looking to your magazine for tips on how to be come the Super Woman that you say every woman has the secret potential to become. yuck. that said, i put cosmo in a completely different category. cosmo is really just about the sex. no one buys it for the fashion tips, do they? plus, their use of alliteration and image-laden language is so profuse it borders on their absurd. for example:

(open to a random page, select first paragraph)

“…We’ve all heard the song “It’s Raining Men.” That tune may be the ultimate celebration of the wacky-yet-wonderful phenomenon when – wham – there’s suddenly a deluge of dudes showering you with attention. True, these mansoons can sometimes seem as random as the weather, but you can stir up your own dating storm…”

okay, lets review. in three sentences we had 7 references to storms or weather, including one of my personal favorites, “MANsoon.” i mean, isn’t that carrying the analogy a bit far? and that was just the warm-up round. there was one good sample of the gratuitous alliteration – “Wacky-yet-Wonderful phenomenon When – Wham”. the use of internal rhyme is also interesting, and certainly not accidental:

“Want to score a permanent spot on his speed dial? Drop some let’s-go-on-a-date bait but resist the urge to ask him out.”

or,

“So what do you do when your Prospective Paramour is a habitual down-to-the-wire dialer?”

here we’ve got alliteration, internal rhyme with a bit of a stretch, and again, that amazing use of the hyphen. damn, they should hire me to write this stuff.

the albertson’s in my conservative boise suburb actually has one of those special porn magazine racks with the opaque cover that shows only the title of the magazine for the cosmos, so that the racy covers of women bursting out of their bodices don’t offend young eyes. this amuses me. next door to the albertson’s, between the tanning salon and the Mail Boxes Etc., there’s a friendly neighborhood gun store. that’s right. a gun store. with all sorts of hand guns and rifles and camo gear vividly displayed in the window. doesn’t seem kind of weird that it’s okay to display and sell weapons for killing people at the grocery store but not a woman’s magazine? i mean, boobs don’t hurt anyone. really.