short hair love affair

Can I just tell you how much I am loving my short bleached hair? Chopping my hair has inspired wardrobe choices as well. I'm dressing more and more for fun and attempting to veer away from boring basic, though my uniform most days is still jeans and a t-shirt. Take these overalls, above. I hesitated over buying them (on super sale), but am so glad I did. They're amazing. When I wear them with my high-top chucks I do feel a little bit like my 6th grade self, but I bet she'd high-five me for my awesome outfit.

Anyhow, back to short hair. Every day I wake up loving it all over again... until it needs to be cut, which is where I'm at now. I'm looking forward to having it reshaped and re-bleached next week. Here are some short haircuts I'm currently smitten with:

And how amazing is this lady's hair? In LOVE.

[images: pinterest]

longbourn

Last night I finished Jo Baker's intensely readable and richly detailed novel Longbourn. In it, Baker elegantly refocuses the lens of Austen's Pride and Prejudice from the Bennet sisters to the plight of their maid, Sarah, and the inner workings of Longbourn. Behind the scenes at Longbourn there are are clothes to be scrubbed and mended, tea to be served, ladies to be dressed and coiffed, and chamber pots to be carried out and emptied.

I hesitated before cracking open this book, I'll admit. Too often re-imaginings of classics fall sadly short. Either the writing is horribly off, or the plot veers to sickly sweet romance or zombies. Longbourn exceeded my expectations. While honoring Austen and the world she created at Longbourn, Baker successfully airs the day-to-day drudgery and maintenance of that world without the original story ever becoming tarnished. Instead, we are privy to secrets, conversations, and facets of the Bennet household that enrich the story and amuse the reader at every turn. 

All in all a wonderful read...

NPR Q&A with Jo Baker

tara donovan's cups

Tara Donovan

Untitled, 2003
Styrofoam Cups, Hot Glue
Dimensions Variable
Ace Gallery Los Angeles, 2005

the plot is not my own

I haven't read poetry in a long time. Not because I don't love it, I do. 

Most of it.

It's more that most poetry doesn't fulfill me in the way that fiction does. It doesn't transport me so completely. And at this point, if what I'm reading doesn't transport me, doesn't transfix and insert me into the easy machinations of the story, I don't have the head space for it. I want to be transported, taken into another world, another life.

It's not that I don't love my life. I do. But at the end of the day, I want to experience something else, something fresh and unknown. Even if the story or the characters aren't fresh, they're new to me. The plot is not my own.

But tonight Djuna pulled Turneresque by Elizabeth Willis off the shelf and brought it over for me to read to her. This is her new thing. She brings me books, plonks herself in my lap, and sits still for 5, 10, 15 second stretches before she's off again, in search of the next book. (We are raising another reader for sure).

So as I flipped through pages of my old poetry teacher's book, I happened upon a poem that reminded me of being in my early twenties again. Of that feeling that I was living with all the unknown ahead of me. Every day an adventure, every book or movie or song a life I might live or emulate.

untitled by Elizabeth Willis

The day left off with a kind of singing "bang." Golden-
rod in a small sea-like air, specific and unbroken. I cannot
favor hunger or its alternatives. I cannot describe salt. In
a parallel universe does anything intersect the confused
blossoming blueness of a wall that is not sea, not golden-
rod, but the paper fastenings of you, standing against it?
I favor concrete between our rage and its mirage. Its
broken line. Catch the flying saucer but spit out its metal
mystery. Adore the big green nothing of the past, the
rationing of calm late in the century, like the arches of a
brick heart, letting go.


[image: Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851), The Burning of the Houses of Parliament, from Old Palace Yard, with Westminster Abbey, c. 1834; watercolor and gouache with scraping-out and stopping-out on paper, 55 x 80]