even*cleveland: imaginary outfit: quick trip

imaginary outfit: quick trip

I've had the great good fortune lately to have work, and what's more, work that I enjoy and that sometimes means I get to travel. Tomorrow, I'm flying to New York for the quickest of visits, barely a day, to celebrate Issue 04 of Broccoli magazine. (If you'd like to celebrate too, come by the Rachel Comey store between 7 and 9 pm and say hello.)

I'll have a couple of hours free to myself, and although I probably should find somewhere to hunker down and work, I've decided to have the car take me right from LaGuardia to the main branch of the New York Public Library. I'm going to take an hour to breathe in book-filled air and look at Anna Atkins cyanotypes before I get a pretzel and wander down a quotation-filled sidewalk. I might go and peruse fancy ribbon, too. (They make the best bookmarks.)

Pictured: Pas de Calais wool and linen checkered coat / Lauren Manoogian sweater dress / Paloma Wool earrings / aëdle VK-1 headphones / Shinola Muldowney watch / Baggu gingham pouches / The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt / Lipault Plume spinner (my friend Amanda recommended this bag and I love it) / Antipast socks / Birkenstock clogs.

I am trying out a new imaginary outfit technology ... so far, not too bad!

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

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