It’s a rare privilege to live near an independent bookstore and I cherish mine. I shop there even if the book costs thirty cents more than the big box store a four dollar bus ride away. 

Yesterday, I had just stopped in to snag a copy of the Rational Purview, a quarterly devoted to rather advanced thinking in the fields of human destiny – you probably haven’t read it. The series “Is Hegemony Cricket?” was to conclude with its third instalment and I had been hungrily anticipating the thrilling conclusion of the periodical’s most gripping narrative to date. 

The series is penned by Walter Desnaeis, a leading thinker of the highest intellectual magnitude, and promises to be a juicy indictment of feminism’s failure to assert itself in the postmodern age. Anyway, he’s got a rollicking style and couches his argument inside a deceptively simple analogy. It’s great stuff.

On the surface, the commentary tells the classic wild-west story of a barroom diva whose feminine influence is disregarded in a frontier town where no rules apply. There are a lot of bossy men in black hats who appear to be running things, with no little fighting among themselves, and all of them believe themselves of a higher rank than her. It’s all very symbolic and metaphorical and stuff like that.

Minnie, our heroine owns the town bar and we are given the impression that, in this position of power, she deserves but is deprived of equal sway in the outcome of the town’s capitulation to the demands of the railroad company (representing Manifest Destiny’s dependency on a robust transportation industry), the mining company (whose extraction of natural resources fuels the country’s robust economy), the ranchers (the landowners as a necessary holdover from a shamelessly robust agrarian past), and the entrepreneurs (the looming presence of a robust military-industrial complex) who want to build a gun factory right between the tracks, the oil well and a cattle trail vital for to get them dogies to market. I mean, what’s a girl to do?

The first instalment ends with a stranger’s silhouette emerging from the setting sun, a lonesome cowboy (the freedom-seeking individual – the hero but for that low-down Texas whiskey) has arrived in town. Things get complicated in the second instalment with the cowboy managing to alienate each of the major bullyboys due to his penetrating questions into their motives. Minnie the diva sees it all transpire and finds herself drawn to the newcomer – intellectually, of course, The Rational Purview publishes only the most cerebral gist although things do get a little plummy if you read between the lines. Minnie’s mounting desire for the knowledge the cowboy keeps close to his chest, under his hat and stashed beneath a bag of jerky in his saddlebag is awakened in his virile presence. She begins to yearn for the sound of his voice as she loves to hear this man explain the plot of the story they’re in. Instalment three is to pick up the action from there, you see, and I was eager to take the magazine home asap.

Hillary was on duty at the cash register – just my luck. I have problems with Hillary, she intimidates me. She owns the bookstore, has the calm demeanour of one who has read it all, baby, that life has no surprises for her. She has a cultured, quiet elegance, the kind that loosens the flesh around my mouth, not unlike the freezing employed by the dentist across the street. My elocution turns to a mushy, flabby series of putt-putt farty distortions of the enchanting phrases I keep at the ready.

Hillary designed the bookstore, it’s an extension of her vast intellect and I like very much being in there but I cannot converse with the woman. Too much for my delicate psyche is the obsession to picture her towering over me as a Wagnerian dominatrix, wielding a broadsword or a battle-axe, corseted in a steel bustier, her long blonde hair in coarse braids flowing past her shoulders over diaphanous chainmail, her firm muscular arms exposed to the storm that surrounds us, lightning flashing and thunder bounding. I tremble beneath her at the block. Her sandal fits the crook of my neck perfectly. 

How does one engage in small talk with a valkyrie like Hillary? No one can tell me. I genuflected and tendered my credit card.

Imagine, then, my shock at seeing in front of me on the counter not the Rational Purview’s plain typeset cover but the garish, manipulated photography wrapping the latest Canadian Living – this month touting its feature article, The “Busty Babes of the Wild West; Ten Powerful Women Behind the Calgary Stampede.” The cover displays, beneath the brazen text, shapes both bulbous and lurid and there are big white teeth and cowboy hats. 

“That’s one of their better editions.” Hillary said with the air of one in a position to judge. “There’s an article on hegemony in the tar-sands. Terrific cleavage. You’ll like it. It’s about the failure of feminism in these postmodern times….”

I tried to listen and nod in the right places but her words were buried low in the mix of blood pounding in my ears and the opera’s lush orchestration as Hillary (playing Brünnhilde, daughter of Wotan, ruler of men’s souls) slid the magazine into a  brown paper bag. 

Our transaction complete, I took the bag to the bus stop and paid the four dollar fare to the big box bookstore downtown.

You’ll be happy to know that a triumphant Minnie brings the villains to their knees and no one is spared. Even the lowly blacksmith (representing the fading Stalinist inclinations of the corrupt trade unions) gets spanked good and hard. In this stunning turn, Minnie stands as a feminist demigoddess, postmodernism is vindicated and, in a sweet denouement, Mr Desnaies postulates our heroine’s gentler side: Minnie, in a show of tenderness, forgives the bar debt of an elderly immigrant. His name is Guiseppe, he’s a gifted carpenter  (enigmatic personification of traditional trades and the purity of a bygone era) who is rumoured to possess a matchbox containing some kind of musical grasshopper or locust or something. 
That last part is lost on me but I can heartily recommend Canadian Living’s “10 Wagnerian Tailgate Recipes for Today’s Girl Who Will Have It All.” 

I’ll see you at the stampede, Parking Lot #23. I now have a hot sauce that’ll have you whistling dixie.