a bad object
Sophia Giovannitti's Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex is 5.8 x 8.5 x 0.69 inches & 192 pages.
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I was once minding my own business—by which I mean, I was staying for free in a luxe-ish hotel on a work trip—and feeling pleased with myself, when I looked around my room and saw a bad object. On the desk, in a styled array of four books, was Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. I most detested its blatancy. Yes, of course, a hotel like this was proof of immense capital power, but yikes! That didn’t meant we all liked that about it! How rude to shove that in our faces! When I left the room for my work thing (an interview in a scenic location so I could mention that), I took the book and threw it in a trash can in the park.
By virtue of its subject, Sophia Giovannitti's Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex, has a lot of scenes in hotels, including this one about a proliferation of Ayn Rand novels in hotels:
By complicated inference, I’m nearly certain it’s not the exact same hotel, which makes this even worse.
Sophia’s deft, precise, and intriguing in describing the everyday details of her world—and also floating thousands of feet above and seeing the whole structure move. It’s one of the best things I’ve read recently about labor, commodification of intimacy, manufacture of fantasy, precious time on earth, the list goes on. I wish I’d had it to leave behind in place of The Fountainhead.
And very lucky, Sophia has recommended a Purse Book for us:
I recommend, if you can get your hands on a copy, Cathedral of Violets by Eleanor Bleier, it is the tiniest and most beautiful book I've ever seen! It would fit in even a chic micro-purse. She's a really special poet and artist, romantic and ethereal, and it's a small-edition collection of poetry and drawings put out by F.I.N.E. Editions. A beautiful gift or object to carry around yourself.
And a final line, which I think I disagree with, but I keep thinking about it!!