Pax Ex, it's the Summer Holidays

What's up Homo? It's the Summer Holidays!! So much fun to have but also so much studying do get done. So, what will you be reading over the holidays? The last two books I read were Playing Beatie Bow by Ruth Park and Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua. 

The previous (and first) time I read Playing Beatie Bow was in Year Six. I must have been the only person who liked the book. Every week we read a couple of chapters and over the weekend we had to write a couple of pages long reading response - oh! the tears shed getting it done! In retrospect, I think that when we were ten/eleven/twelve, we really didn't get the book, especially the main character Abigail, who was fourteen. She was super Indie, okay, she was into vintage things and was a "weirdie". Dude, you could so hate that book because no one says "weirdie", it's "weirdo". We were too young to understand Abigail throughout the whole book and also the journey she undertook. In retrospect, it's ironic because we now can see ourselves in Abigail and can see how teen-angsty she was, and also how like her, we thought we knew everything. Read it.

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother was so funny!!! I thought it would be really terrible because I first heard about it earlier this year in Singapore where they made a big hoo-ha about it and every review was negative. The author is this Chinese-American writing about being a Chinese mother to half Chinese children. It's Indie - the children were also Jewish. The story is crazy and her writing is honest. They must have hated the book in Singapore because she was hanging out the dirty laundry about Chinese parenting!!!! 

What I will be reading these holidays (I've actually already started You'll be Sorry When I'm Dead by Marieke Hardy and it's funny) is Tell Me if the Lovers are Losers by Cynthia Voigt. Yes, the name is weird, but it's extracted from a poem. I guess this book is Indie because I've never met anyone who's read it. (Or maybe I'm just Indie?). The story is set in Stanton College in the sixties and is about the friendship between these three roommates. The three girls are very different in character and extremely vividly created. One really feels the changes in dynamics between the friends and all characters. I fall in love every time I read it, which has been every year, starting in 2007. If you liked Home Coming, you'll like Tell Me if the Lovers are Losers and if like me, you couldn't get into it, you'll like this book even more. Oh, and the book is so preppy.

This makes me reflect on friendship. I love my friends (yes, also the TV series) so much and now I've made new ones at my old/new school (weird feeling because I was only there for six weeks) (and I plan to make new ones at my new school next year. LOL.) At my old old school (I'm technically between schools right now, right?) we had a colour group, which was a class/group of girls having four subjects together. This spanned two years. Dude...so close...the sisterhood of Colour Group Four! We were always bragging about having the best colour group. This time last year (end of Year Nine) was emotional because so many of us were leaving the school.

Message of the story? Remember the ultimate girl-gang, better than all those mentioned on RookieMag last month. Last year, the colour group came together in song to this in the pool change rooms:

Now I will go and clean my room and stop being weird.

Where to start on the Indieness of Audrey Hepburn - Holly Golightly?

50 Years Of Breakfast In A Little Black Dress

by SLOANE CROSLEY

EnlargeChristie's Ronald Grant Archive/ AP

This photo released by Christie's auction house shows actress Audrey Hepburn in the 1961 film, Breakfast at Tiffany's. The black Givenchy dress worn by Hepburn sold at auction for $807,000.

text size A A A

October 5, 2011

Sloane Crosley is a writer. She lives in New York City.

Here is what you can't do anymore in New York: climb the Statue of Liberty's torch, gain access to Gramercy Park without a key, or sip a martini in The Oak Room at The Plaza Hotel.

Now here's what you can do — and just about every little girl in Manhattan knows it: You can always have Breakfast at Tiffany's.

It's a perfect combination that exists so long as the demand for jewelry stays as consistent as the demand for breakfast pastry. And today that pastry should have a birthday candle in it.

For today marks the 50th anniversary of Holly Golightly. Rather, it's been 50 years since Audrey Hepburn brought her to quixotic life in the award-winning film.

Novella Holly (the Holly of Truman Capote's novella) was introduced to the world in 1958. Therefore America's most beloved style icon has just a few more wrinkles on her. But who's counting? Especially when it's the movie that sticks. And I mean that literally. For every boy with a poster stuck to his dorm room wall bearing the image of John Belushi in Animal House, there is a girl down the hall with a Breakfast at Tiffany's movie poster tacked above her bed.

Now, at first glace, the human beings sleeping beneath these images have as much of a shot at dating each other now as John Belushi and Audrey Hepburn had when they were alive. Let thatvisual sit for a second. If a romance between them seems unlikely, the book is not to blame. It's those first images from the film.

Skye Parrott

Sloane Crosley's most recent book is How Did You Get This Number, a collection of humor essays.

You know that romantic sequence of events in which a taxicab pulls over on Fifth Avenue and releases a Holly Golightly into our imaginations? She's a vision, holding coffee in her gloved hand, engraved in our brains like letters on a ring from a Cracker Jack box. She is in the midst of the single most famous walk of shame in cinematic history.

Holly Golightly may have had a place at the fraternity house after all.

Yet when we think of Breakfast at Tiffany's, we choose not to recall the no-name slobs or minor league prostitution. Sure, those come to mind when we sit down and think about it. But today, you'll remember, is supposed to be a birthday party. A celebration.

And after 50 years of trickle-down iconography, we have come to know the guest of honor largely by her packaging. But remember — she is not so unlike the Statue of Liberty's torch or the gated Gramercy Park. Just because you can no longer get inside doesn't mean it's not there.

http://www.npr.org/2011/10/05/141080177/50-years-of-breakfast-in-a-little-black-dress?sc=fb&cc=fp

Playing Beatie Bow

deconstructing and drawing inspiration