Sunday, March 11, 2007

Pierre Berton on Vogue

Blood sugar finally doing a swan-dive after hours of battling the sick-stress sugar secretions from my liver (which doesn't yet have a name...maybe "Parker?"). 53 pages and I'm in love with Mr. Berton. On women in Vogue magazine:
At the end of the neck one finds a face that has overtones of Buchenwald about it--chalk-white and haggard. Vogue women do not have noses, only nostrils. Their eyes are enormous and decadent, their lips thin and solemn. Their hair is always quite odd. They are shown thrust forward in inscrutable positions that suggest some curious doe-like animal at feeding time.

They always look terribly thin and hungry, and slightly haunted. They stand about in the queerest attitudes, modelling this and that. They do strange things with their stomachs. They perform the most amazing contortions with their feet, forcing them into positions that would bring the green blush of envy to a Chaplin's cheeks. The Vogue stance has got to be seen to be believed, but I have never encountered it outside the pages of the magazine.

Vogue women suffer terribly from curvature of the spine. Their smiles are enigmatic; their eyes are soulless; and their faces are drained of all expression. But they are always perfectly groomed; indeed, it seems to me, they have had the personality groomed right out of them.

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