A previous customer described Jackie under My Skin as perfect bathroom reading. At first that was more or less how I, too, attempted to attack this book, but even short passages began to test my nerves, and I soon found myself skipping ahead, looking for the meat of the book. Of course, there is no meat, there are just pages and pages of what happens when an academic tries to write about kitsch----meat-flavored cotton candy. Well, not quite, but something just as empty, incongruous and unpleasant. The author fails to connect what eventually comes across as self-obsession and vanity with the book's supposed subject, and as a result it is not successful as academic writing, as sociological or media study, as biography, or, most importantly, as entertainment.