even*cleveland: imaginary outfit: scary movies on the couch

imaginary outfit: scary movies on the couch

I love Halloween. Always have. It was a night of perfect freedom - freedom to roam the neighborhood past dark, to run across yards and bang on strangers' doors, to dress up and to eat an outrageous amount of candy. Grown-up Halloween is decidedly disappointing in comparison, but even Halloween for kids today is not what it was for me - anxiety is winning. Kid Halloween is becoming an increasingly controlled event, and the madcap magic is being drained away.

Fortunately, I have my memories. And I like to take Halloween night wrap in their cozy embrace - to wear too many sweaters and funny socks, and curl up on the couch with blankets and a stack of DVDs (this list is a good place to start) - whatever is old and creepy. But scary movies aren't the key to capturing the spirit of Halloweens past - it's Tootsie Rolls. Whenever I bite one, I'm ten again with a candy-laden pillowcase banging at my shins, deliciously spooked at the dark neighborhood streets.

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.

V. Woolf

Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful for me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.

Italo Calvino

Why didn't she try collecting something? It didn't matter what. She would find it gave an interest to life, and there was no end to the little curiosities one could easily pick up.

Henry James

imaginary outfit: scary movies on the couch

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