comp lit and mediaphilia
Today I’m one of the hosts for the Dear Teen Me blog tour ! Edited by E. Kristin Anderson and Miranda Kenneally, the book, based on the blog of the same name, is exactly what you’d expect from its title–people write letters to their teen selves. After many, many entries on their site from various YA authors, they turned 70 of the letters into this anthology from Zest Books, coming out October 30 (you can pre-order it from Amazon here , or you can ask your local independent bookstore to get a copy for you and a few more for their shelves).
I’m enjoying the book so far. I haven’t finished it, partly because it’s hard to finish pleasure books quickly these days, since I’m reading a million novels a week for school, and partly because this book isn’t one that you want to just race through. Kind of like with poetry, where I like to only read a couple poems at a time, maybe right before bed, this is a book you want to keep on your nightstand for awhile so that you can read pieces at a time. It’s something you want to absorb, to think about. And if you’re a writer, published or not, it’s probably something that will inspire you to do some journaling or come up with a new idea for a story. Also, this book is extra awesome because it’s glossy-paged and in full color. Win! Continue reading →
Posted in books
Tagged adolescence , blog tour , blogging , books , nostalgia , review , writing , YA
Oct · 23
Again I went to NetGalley and requested a book that I thought meant that one of my favorite nineties authors was coming back, only to find out it was a reissue. Thankfully, though, this one doesn’t seem to have random cell phone references thrown in, so it still works. It’s Fog by Caroline B. Cooney, of The Face on the Milk Carton awesomeness. I guess they wanted new reviews to celebrate that they were putting it back “in print” by making a Kindle edition of the book (and also packaging it and its two sequels into one paperback ).
So I had no idea what the plot of this book was, and I didn’t care. I wanted to read it solely because the author wrote awesome books that I read as a kid. I think they were supposed to be YA back then, but I’m pretty sure you’d find the Janie books in the children’s section now, and you would definitely find this one, even though as thrillers go, it’s a little disturbing and made me quite angry because I couldn’t quite grasp what I was supposed to think about it. Continue reading →
Tagged books , middle grade , nostalgia , review
Oct · 18
Somehow I came across Polyvore four years ago. I joined, tried it and wasn’t very good at it, and mostly forgot about it as a social site or a creative site and just used it a couple times a year if I was looking to buy something. It’s really useful for shopping for something in particular, whether it’s an exact product or if you’re just looking for “light green scarf with fringe” or “cotton/poly leopard print blouse” or something else super specific because you have your reasons. Anyway, it’s great, especially when you are on a crusade to be grown up and have a set style and a decent, career-appropriate wardrobe like me, because you can rip things out of magazines, paste them into a journal, and also look up the exact things on Polyvore, where you can find out where you can buy them and (I think) sign up for sale notifications. Wins all around.
Image via CrunchBase
But really, Polyvore is this vibrant place where people who are really into fashion and makeup and interior design and also have an eye for it (i.e. not me, but I love swooning over it) can make “sets” that are like virtual collages of products, magazine cutouts, words, music, etc. They’re pretty brilliant, and there are a lot of people who are fucking amazing at it. You can get lost forever and wonder how some people just have an eye for the layering of items and laying out of items and on and on. I am jealous. Really.
As you can see, I did not quite get that the point was to saturate your set with things, not just make a really simple outfit. Continue reading →
Posted in fashion
Tagged books , fashion , growing up , inspiration , makeup , nostalgia , review , shopping , style , the good the bad the fashion , websites , writing
Sep · 27
Source: Cherry Meltdown
In intermediate school (third to fifth grade), I loved Archie comics. I also loved paper dolls, and I hated that my friends never wanted to play them with me. One day I saw an opportunity and took it. After a good friend and I had made a killing (by fourth grade standards, at least–probably like $5-$10) selling the “fashion” trading cards we invented and drew together, I thought I would make photocopies of Katy Keene, an Archieverse character who was a fashion model, and then make clothes for her with little tabs so that they could be paper dolls. As I had secretly hoped, a lot of the girls in my class thought it was awesome, so I photocopied more for them, someone came up with the idea of using Katy’s body and making our own faces for a cast of characters, and then we had a great game going. I was far from the most artistic or fashionable of the bunch, but still, I started it . Also, I thought I was pretty awesome for just making variations of jeans with T-shirts using different “cool” symbols like peace signs, happy faces, and aliens, as were popular in 1998-9.
(Oh, hey, by the way, if you’re lame and uncreative and also independently wealthy, you can actually buy Katy Keene paper dolls made by professional comics artists, or at least upcycled items featuring old Katy Keene fashion pages. I won’t lie; I loved making my own but I would still love these.) Continue reading →
Tagged art , childhood , comics , creativity , fashion , nostalgia , the good the bad the fashion
Sep · 13
My mother likes to tell the story of how my sister, who is mixed but way, way güera , was assigned in elementary school to do a self portrait and colored herself with dark brown crayons, because the children she was friends with were brown, so she assumed she was, too. I like to not think about every time I’ve bought makeup and either bought it way too light because I tend to forget I’m not white, or I’ve bought it too dark because I go, “Oh, wait, I’m black,” but I forget that actually my skin is not the darkest of dark.
Backtrack. Yesterday I found this graphic narrative at Sadie magazine, and while it’s really not about this subject at all, it does bring up an episode from a Babysitters Club book in which Claudia recalls being assigned a self portrait and not knowing what the phrase means. So she draws herself as a colorful butterfly, because that’s how she sees herself, and she gets ridiculed by her teacher and classmates for it. Continue reading →
Posted in the diet
Tagged art , beauty , body image , books , childhood , comics , identity , nostalgia , race , the diet
Aug · 26
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