Ticklish Ideas

Mr Defective Yeti, Matthew Baldwin, published this article of excruciating silliness today. It's a digest of one-star (out of five) customer comments left on Amazon.com. Here's an excerpt:

The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

Author: John Steinbeck

"While the story did have a great moral to go along with it, it was about dirt! Dirt and migrating. Dirt and migrating and more dirt."

This particular quote struck me as very, very familiar, and it took me a few minutes to remember why. I have an acute case of just-been-dumped illness, and I am self-medicating with extreme self indulgence treatment. Because I find words and ideas soothing, my treatment has included devouring the archives of several favorite websites including briantology. Check out these comments from May:

All I have to say is that parenthood is magic and unicorns.
That is all.
Enjoy! Posted by: melissaS at May 25, 2005 12:42 PM

MAGIC AND UNICORNS? No no no. It is screaming pooping screaming screaming and pooping and screaming. Posted by: jess at May 25, 2005 03:22 PM

See the similarity? It's one of those times when the tickling of ideas is almost literal.

The book reviews are funny in several ways at once - I'm laughing at the ignoramuses (or is it ignorami?) and at the same time I agree with a lot of the statements. I choose not to read Toni Morrison because I don't want to put mental images of a hundred different kinds of sexual violence into my memory. And I thought Holden Caulfield was lame and his story was boring.

Any minute now, a torch-wielding mob of liberal arts graduates and unemployed philosophers will arrive to break down the door and to proclaim (over my sob-wracked form) that I have been found guilty of literary blasphemy. I expect I will be given a choice between exile and death.