26th
airports and the carnivalesque
When I left grad school I made a point of trying to forget all of the oh-so-chic lowercase T theory learned at rhetorical gunpoint. Bakhtin’s concept of “the carnivalesque” was one of my pet peeves. Actually, it wasn’t him so much as everyone who misread him. But who cares! I think the reason people invoke the trope of the carnivalesque so often is that it’s cheap and easy literary analysis to say “Woo-boy, the reason ______ did ________ to _________ is because the metaphorical carnival was in town and she just lost her shit in all that excitement.”
I want to call bullshit, and yet when I was in the Minneapolis airport on Wednesday I:
a) Spent almost $60 at The Body Shop. WTF? I don’t even like The Body Shop.
b) Bought chocolate and mint-flavored water. You know how sometimes you’re traveling somewhere you can’t drink the water so you have to brush your teeth with bottled water but then the rest of the bottle tastes like toothpaste afterwards? It was like that.
c) Bought Allure and a Sudoku book. WTF? Again, not me. I should have gone for US Weekly and Dell Jumbo Crosswords.
d) Came perilously close to purchasing a Nintendo DS from a vending machine.
e) Came perilously close to purchasing sushi from Wok ‘n Roll. Airport sushi!?! Nooo.
f) Actually did eat at the Wok ‘n Roll. Not smart.
