On Pins and Needles: Stylist Turns Ancient Hairdo Debate on Its Head - WSJ.com
Love this…hairstylist by day, hair archeologist by night!
“Last month, at an Archaeological Institute of America conference in Seattle, Ms. Stephens says, a woman doing a dissertation on Vestal Virgin hair took issue with her argument that the Vestal hairstyle was built out of seven separate braids—not six as long believed.
‘I walked her through it,’ Ms. Stephens says. ‘There’s a logic to hair.’”
Congrats to Joyland contributor Tamar Halpern on finishing her latest feature film (co-directed with Christopher Quilty). It’s a very intriguing looking documentary on artist Llyn Foulkes:
This feature documentary follows the painter and musician Llyn Foulkes from age 70 to 77 as he struggles to be acknowledged. During the seven years chronicled in the film, Foulkes creates, destroys and recreates a pair of large-scale, three-dimensional paintings, one that costs him his marriage, all while trying to keep a toe hold in the art market. With commentary from Dennis Hopper and George Herms, it’s revealed how Foulkes has avoided “selling his soul”, setting the tone for the next fifty years of his uncompromising, up-and-down career.
You can also read Halpern’s Joyland story here.
“Like Shirley to Laverne, or Marcie to Peppermint Patty, I had always been the sensible brunette friend.”
Joyland is happy to announce our first non-fiction piece today, “The Blond Inside of Me” by our own Emily Schultz. First published in Elle, the essay details how, after a lifetime struggle as a hair outsider, Schultz turned blond for four months and entered an unsettling odyssey of identity.
For more information on submitting non-fiction to Joyland, please see our submission guidelines.
Some of you may have heard me talk about this piece I wrote for Elle. They generously let us republish it on Joyland. You can find out my entire tormented hair biography, and its influence on my novel.
Scents of the Nineties That Need to Come Back - The Cut
It’s back…my shampoo from the ’90s! Would I use it today? That is the question. I recall the original Herbal Essences as being like drinking a cup of camomile tea in the shower. It appealed to the hippie in me during my university years. It really did little for my hair, and like much in the ’90s it was more about the marketing. Remember Fruitopia? As the joke on The Simpsons went, “The iced tea made by hippies, but distributed by a heartless multinational corporation.”
I remember with my first job in high school, I used to put aside $30 a week from the $99 I made to go shopping for hair and beauty products. The priorities of a teenage girl. Imagine if I spent a third of my income today so frivolously!
The Composites and my year in reading for The Millions
I went through a lot of books in the last year doing this project and The Millions asked me to write about what it was like to give my choices over to Tumblr users.
Reading The Hunger Games the same month as William Gaddis? Yes, it was that kind of year for me and I talk a little bit about the tension between popular and unpopular fiction. Read the full article here as well as others in The Millions always-excellent Year in Reading series.
I’ve also reposted several of the referenced composites above.
For followers in the Dublin area, The Composites exhibition will be opening at the Illuminations Gallery at the National University of Ireland-Maynooth, January 28th through February 21st. You can find more information here.
Extinction’s Effect on Childhood Toys - NYTimes.com
Joyland contributor Lydia Millet’s stunning meditation in The New York Times on childhood toys, animals and extinction.
November is Historic Bridge Awareness Month
Pedestrians on the upper deck promenade of Brooklyn Bridge, New York City, ca. 1910
The Brooklyn Bridge is a perennial hit — but what’s your favorite bridge?
Had to share this since I’ve long been researching bridges and their construction for my next novel…
(via npr)
Steinur Bell’s award-winning story How We Arrive had the distinction of being the last post to go up before Sandy hit. (And Joyland’s home office neighborhood of Greenpoint was mostly spared while we were stuck on the road touring Emily Schultz’ novel The Blondes). You may have missed…
Blonde 23: Amy Schumer
Just saw her Comedy Central special and I love this lady.
“Plan B-izzle, who’s taken it…? Who’s taken it? …Oh, sorry, a room of heroes.
…They were like, you’re gonna feel nauseous. I took it. I felt fine. I went to yoga. I’m like: Can these people tell I’m, like, mid-aborsh right now?”
—Amy Schumer in Mostly Sex Stuff
In Emily Schultz’s novel, The Blondes (Doubleday Canada 2012, and St. Martin's Thomas Dunne 2014), Hazel Hayes is a grad student living in New York City. As the novel opens, she learns she is pregnant (from an affair with her married professor) at an apocalyptically bad time: random but deadly attacks on passers-by, all by blonde women, are terrorizing New Yorkers. Soon it becomes clear that the attacks are symptoms of a strange illness that is transforming blondes—whether CEOs, flight attendants, students or accountants—into rabid killers.
With echoes of White Noise and a biting satiric wit, The Blondes is at once an examination of the complex relationships between women, and a merciless but giddily enjoyable portrait of what happens in a world where beauty is—literally—deadly.
EMILY SCHULTZ's first book, Black Coffee Night, was a finalist for the Danuta Gleed Award. Her recent novel, Heaven is Small, was a finalist for the 2010 Trillium Award alongside Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Ian Brown, and Anne Michaels. Her writing has appeared in The Globe and Mail, Elle, The Walrus Magazine, and several anthologies. Schultz is also co-publisher of Joyland, which publishes short fiction from across North America. A best-seller in Canada, The Blondes will release in 2014 in the USA. Schultz lives in New York.
