Women who write

I’ve been a Heather Havrilesky fan for some time, or maybe aficionado would be more accurate. I was happily reminded of HH’s great good work by RageBoy, in his hyperlink today to her column titled “Shark Week” at Salon. In that column she segues nicely from an informed discussion of sharks in the water to critical observations regarding the new season of Project Runway. She says,

But who are the big, predatory fish in this school of whimpering, insecure nail-biters? Personally, I fear Suede, the 37-year-old designer from Ohio who won last week’s cocktail dress challenge, the way I’d fear anyone who refers to himself repeatedly in the third person. “It is going to be a long night for Suede.” “Suede’s a bisexual Sagittarius and loves long walks on the beach!”

The “long walks on the beach” reference ties nicely to RageBoy’s observations regarding Joan Walsh, whose biography reads: “I love baseball, Bruce Springsteen, Stephen Colbert and long walks on the beach.” The reader is left with no more than some broad clues regarding sexual preference in that squib, and no indication of Ms. Walsh’s sign of the zodiac, but I think the parallel calls into question Locke’s assumption that Ms. Havrilesky wasn’t really writing in code about Joan Walsh. The “…long walks on the beach” cliche, floating out there like chum upon the waters of Salon, provides the reader with a happy juxtaposition between Hravilesky’s intentionality and Walsh’s carelessness.

Technorati Tags: the fonz in his leathers, Suede, Heather Havrilesky, Chris Locke