i kept thinking about this book lately and pulled it out today to look through—this retrospective of Candy Jernigan’s work never fails to inspire me, and there are so many aspects of it that feel timely right now.

Jernigan died in 1991 of liver cancer, and eight years later this book was released as a collection of her work and almost as a memorial to her personality. it showcases scavenged collages, installation pieces, paintings, and drawings. there are scientific, specifically forensic, archeological, and mathematical, natures to her work. like her collections of various things found on the streets of nyc include two pieces called “Found Dope” I and II, wherein she collected discarded drug paraphernalia; one of them is accompanied by a map showing numbers of where each “exhibit” was discovered. she kept travel journals which contained “any and all physical ‘proof’ that [she] had been there … anything that would add information about a moment or a place, so that a viewer could make a new picture from the remnants”—including smudge palettes of everything she ate at a meal. she used rubber stamps to number, date, and otherwise “catalogue” the objects she picked up. there is a drawing which outlines all the possible variants of “ham and cheese.” even her paintings and landscapes have meticulous documentary feel to them.

i can’t tell if i inherently understood this approach to documentation before or if studying this book has influenced me, but i feel like i view my surroundings in a similar way. though i have yet to pull it together anywhere near the way she did.

(Louise Varése translation)

i bought this used a few years ago. it’s been kicking around, never read, like a few other books of poetry. supposedly Jim Carroll is reminiscent of Rimbaud, but maybe it is his better known book A Season in Hell. this one seems so rich in allusions with a classical feel and a visionary nature.

the plus of buying used books is finding things like this makeshift bookmark. potentially this book has traveled much further than i have.

i kept hearing about this book and expected to enjoy it more. as i started to read it, the book seemed like a YA novel for adults, and not really in a good way. at first the storytelling seemed really cheesy, and i thought maybe it was just trying to keep the same tone as the original story, which i’ve never read. but in the end it didn’t seem like fairy tale cheesiness, but plain old goofiness. it’s kind of a shame because maybe the parts about the political side of Oz wouldn’t seem so contrived and the poignant parts wouldn’t feel so melodramatic.

well, it’s off my list at least.

incredibly in-depth and well-focused, this bestseller looks at the influence of fast food in the US (and, to a certain degree, beyond). Schlosser starts with a solid foundation of the history of fast food companies and afterwards builds a framework of how the companies and the companies they control run today. only a small amount of this is about the food itself and why it’s unhealthy. most of it is really the role the fast food industry has played in the corporatization of the US—and why that is unhealthy.

i’m impressed by the scope of this book and how neatly and securely it is nailed together. Schlosser’s gigantic research is well-narrated in plain, clear language. all that may be daunting about this book is perhaps the length of it (nearly 300 pages) and the vast amount of frightening insight that may drastically change how you think about fast food chains, corporations, and the food industry as a whole.

as scary and disgusting as it can be, it is also impressive how calmly hopeful Schlosser is about the future, going so far as to dream that the fast food industry may become “a relic of the twentieth century.” he outlines what can be done and how it can be done. he gives as much personal background as possible to remove the text from entirely lofty theoryland to show the dangers of corporate control and globalization.

while reading this i kept finding instances when i could easily relate what i had just read to what i was seeing and hearing in everyday life, not to mention feeling inclined to mention various sections to people, no matter how inclined they were to think about this sort of subject matter. this book is full of interesting knowledge about how the US has come to be what it is on a lot of levels.

people keep talking about this for a reason. it seems a common response to this book is to have a sudden desire to talk about it and share it with others. possibly that hope for an industry of fast food to be a relic is not so unattainable.

subtitled A Woman’s Guide to Promoting Herself, Her Business, Her Product, or Her Cause with Integrity and Spirit

unfortunately this book about marketing and publicity turned out to not be what i was expecting. i saw this mentioned somewhere and remember it as being described with more of a new business slant. this isn’t necessarily not geared towards new businesses, but is geared towards a different type of business than i was thinking it was—that is, one looking for publicity in major media outlets.

i just skimmed through it, read a bit of a chapter, and saw that there wasn’t a whole lot that i was going to get out of this.

my roommate loves Ondaatje and i could only remember being really bored by the movie; i’m glad that was long enough ago that i could read this without seeing those images. it’s really a beautiful story, in the telling and the imagery. an incredible amount of details (often well-researched) packed into this so that several different personal histories are laid out and you can really see the dynamics between everyone.

WWII is ending and a nurse stays behind in an old nunnery outside of Florence to tend to a severely burned man who no longer remembers who he is. a family friend manages to find her, knowing that she must be lost after her father’s death in the war and hoping he can convince her to return home. eventually they are joined by an indian sapper. and “an unlikely bond develops” because “In memory, love lives forever.” (maybe i should write book jacket descriptions.)

i think i read this back when the movie was out, but if i did, i still remember the movie more than the actual book. i read it again when i was staying with polly and feel kind of sad that the movie has stuck in my mind so much. i like this collection of stories about friendship and how things change after high school.

looking through polly’s books reminds me that i meant to read more than just the first volume of Skeleton Key by Andi Watson and never did.

(i realized later that it wasn’t totally random that i picked up this book again since i just saw Lost in Translation
, which stars Scarlett Johansson, who was also in the movie Ghost World.)

after reading Anne Carson, i always have a heightened sense of awareness. this book is a “novel in verse” and much more of a story than the previous books of hers that i read. she has an incredible way of splicing time, in terms of when everything is taking place. it is set like a classical myth (and this even includes a very scholarly preface with appendices) but retold in some kind of modernish times. everything is removed from reality while having such amazingly clear images. she uses such beautiful language, and i love how she pulls the characters towards each other and then apart. plus this story is about a red monster with wings.