Nosy Interview: Chris Miota

Chris sings in Stars and Dust in Corona Australis,  ©CHART32 Team, Processing--Johannes Schedler

I've known Aunt Chris since I was a kid, and though she's not my aunt by blood, she is part of the best-represented family on Nosy Girl (her daughter Katie, son Joe, and niece Jenny have all been featured here), and one of my favorite families on earth. If you can't make it to outer space to hear Chris beautifully belt it out with Freddy and the Blifftones, you can follow the band here and hopefully catch them soon in Milwaukee. 

What do you smell like? 
I smell like teen spirit. I recently joined a fantastic band, Freddy and the Blifftones, as a “chick singer,” as Freddy likes to call it. Total serendipity; long story; dream come true. When I was a teenager, Freddy and the Freeloaders used to play at our high school dances—and now through a series of unexpected confluences, I am in the latest incarnation of the band.  Imagine the smell of that—pure oxygen all mixed up with rhythm and blues, reggae, rock ‘n’ roll, show tunes, folk music, gospel and weekly practices in Pete the drummer’s basement with some of the best people I know.  When I come home from band practice, I smell happy and endorphinized, and it takes several episodes of DVR’d  Real Housewives to un-jazz the musical high. When I come home from a gig, I smell like spilled beer and laughter and sweaty hugs. 

I sometimes smell festive, as when I spring for a real eau de something, usually figgy with an undertone of something else green, like tea or cucumber or peony—my favorite flower. Our old house had a real Victorian garden, with peony bushes, and our rooms were filled with that lushness for weeks in late spring. Now we live in a small condo overlooking beauteous Lake Michigan, with its metro/lakefront smells. I guess I smell urban-y, from walking through the neighborhood of restaurants and bookstores and coffee shops and rich people and skateboarders and people from St. John’s with their garland-festooned walkers and homeless people pushing carts of cans who never fail to wish a good morning and a God-bless. 

What do you like to smell? 
Attics. Basements. Old dimestores. They all make me have to pee. In a good, excited way. Babies’ feet. The necks of my kids, when they were little, after a day of being outside.  Forests. Snow. That wisp of smoke from a blown-out kitchen match. My beloved grandma’s empty real bottle of real Chanel Number 5—because it smells like her, not like the perfume, to me. Our little cottage up north, because it always smells the same when we open it up in April—indescribably ready, steady, and fraught with the unknowability of the season to come—and the occasional dead mouse.

Nosy Interview: Rebecca Scherm

Rebecca in Solar Flare from a Sharper Sun, © Solar Dynamics Observatory/AIA, NASA

Rebecca sent me a delightful e-mail last year (after discovering Nosy Girl through her reading of Alyssa Harad) wondering whether I was still collecting nosy interviews. It was a fine question as this interview space has been woefully under-utilized! But let Rebecca serve as signal flare, launching us back into more regular postings of Nosy Interviews. (I've missed them.) Rebecca's debut novel, Unbecoming, comes out next week and after reading her responses you'll probably join me in jonesing to read it. While we wait, let's visit Rebecca's website and follow her on Twitter @chezscherm. 

What do you like to smell?

I like bracing smells —Aquavit, grapefruit peel, black pepper—and green-grungy smells like moss and damp bark. I love the smell of Sun Bum sunblock, which has the best “postcard from the beach” memory-scent. I love the smell of my gentleman when he has just come in from playing basketball—the fresh sweat of single-minded exuberance. The timothy hay my rabbit eats. Saltwater. Cilantro. And what I sometimes think of as cellar smells: cardboard, wet rocks.

When I was a teenager, I liked all those blue-bottle “clean” scents—Gap Dream and any lotion called “calm” or “serenity.” But one day I was watching a maxi-pad commercial on TV and when they poured the blue juice, I conflated it with all those blue bottles and that was the end of that. Now that I’m older, I guess I like to smell a little dirty.

The first not-food smells I remember loving are grass clippings left on a lawn and the small hardware store, then called Botkin’s, where I grew up. Concrete, dirt, fertilizer, unknown greases and glues. I love the smell of wet paint as you roll it on the wall (the sound, too). Murphy’s oil soap. I love the smell of black mulch and cedar mulch. These are all home-owning smells, aren’t they? I can’t explain it. I don’t own a house. Maybe these are my smells of childhood happiness—the scents of playing outside and then coming home, together.

 

What do you smell like? 
I was an unlikely candidate for perfume. I turn my nose up at “fancy” things, ads that quantify sex appeal, the notion that you can purchase something that represents you better than you can.

What happened was that I was in Manhattan and needing to pee so I went into Bergdorf Goodman, somewhere I only ever go to pee. On my way out, a man waved a fuchsia glass bottle at me and swore I would love it. Instead of just saying no thanks and moving on, I told him that I didn’t like fruity smells. I may have been prickly. I didn’t like how he’d pegged me. Then he asked me what I did like, and I stopped and said “grass clippings.” I guess I thought that would end the conversation. Instead, he leapt to a bottle at the other end of the counter, and I let him spray it on me. I had no idea what I was smelling, only that my skin smelled rebellious—languid, arrogant, humid, and green. The word I always want to use for it is “humpy.” I felt almost stoned.

That’s how it starts, right? I felt transformed, like this perfume had given me some new quiet power. Later, when I held out my wrist to a friend, she recoiled. To her it smelled like a rich old man offering to show us his etchings. I couldn’t believe it! I second-guessed myself and smelled hundreds of perfumes that weekend, but everything else seemed sweet or powdery or like a red scarf thrown over a lamp. But I couldn’t buy Humpy. For one thing, it was $300—which didn’t jibe at all, since to me it smelled like drunken skinny-dipping in a slippery, algae-skinned watering hole. $300 was out of the question, both really and philosophically. It made so mad that I liked it.

A month later, I bought a sample vial on the internet. My feelings about it have changed since that first spell of mad lust. What we have is a summer thing. It’s only Humpy when it’s hot outside, when it mixes with sun and sweat. In the cold, it smells moneyed, and I hate it and don’t get it at all. 

But that was my first bite of the apple. I know I'm still at the beginning of this, and I only like perhaps one perfume in a hundred, but the odds just stoke my appetite. I have to find them. When I do, I feel this rush of both revelation and recognition, as though I’ve found something I was trying to say but could not find words for.

To finally answer your question: I smell of Annick Goutal L’Eau d’Hadrien and Voyage d'Hermes when I’m feeling nice and Creed Original Vetiver (yep, that’s Humpy) when I’m not. I still have only sample vials. But the scent of my truest heart is Wild Hunt, from CB I Hate Perfume. In it, I feel profoundly mine. 

Nosy Interview: Saskia Wilson-Brown

Saskia in NGC 2170: Celestial Still Life, © Ignacio Diaz Bobillo

Saskia is the fearless founder of the awesomely innovative Institute for Art and Olfaction. If you're in the Los Angeles area, you should definitely check out their events and stop in for an open session. No matter where you are, I recommend nosing around (how could I resist?) the IAO website and liking their Facebook page (they post great links!), and not just because I'm proud to be have their support for my nosy research in Rwanda. You can find and follow Saskia (and the IAO) on Twitter, too. 

What do you smell like?  
Right now it's Sunday night, and I think I smell like a day well lived: Sun baked skin, myriad bits of displaced leaves and grass, steer manure (unfortunately hard to remove), a smidge of 'Jeux de Peau' by Serge Lutens, and, inevitably, coffee and cigarettes. Every perfume I buy has to compete with a base of cigarette smoke. It's a unique challenge, but I like to tell myself it makes my life a little more Brigitte Bardot. 

So let's just say I smell like Brigitte Bardot (minus the steer manure: I sincerely doubt she gardened).

What do you like to smell? 
Other than the obvious pleasant smells like flowers and frying onions and such, some smells I've always loved are: Los Angeles after it rains (steaming cement, basically: strangely earthy), sandalwood, grapefruits, tacos, an art studio (oil paints make me nostalgic), chlorine, an empty ski run in freezing weather (solitude!), cigarette smoke after an especially long meeting, jet fuel, the nape of my husband's neck... 

What I always enjoy spending nose-time on is an unfolding idea. I've never had a hyper-developed nose like so many folks who are into scent. For me it's been an extremely strange process of learning how to identify and put words onto what I'm smelling. But the concepts behind the scents are what really get me. When someone is using scent as an art medium, and can use elements in a symbolic way-- when a perfume becomes an illustration of a concept or a story. So I guess I love the smell of a good story.

Nosy Interview: Marc Mazique

Marc in the Porpoise Galaxy from Hubble, © NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team

Marc and I were in a writing group together, in Seattle, along with Elizabeth, Cienna, and Steven. We met mainly at the Stumbling Monk, which I recall smelling of cement and wood and beer-wet napkin. I loved that place! You can help Marc's rad & radical musical group, Movitas Marching Band, make it to BAM! (Bands Agitate and Mobilize!) by donating here. 

What do you smell like? 
I smell like peanut sauce mixed with old books with yellowed pages.  

What do you like to smell?  
I like to smell peanut sauce mixed with old or new books, along with lavender. 

Nosy Interview: D.S. & Durga (David Moltz and Kavi Ahuja)

Kavi & David in The Large Magellanic Cloud in Ultraviolet , © NASA, Swift, et al. 

Regular readers will know I'm an ardent fan of D.S. & Durga (a.k.a. David Seth Moltz and Kavi Ahuja), a perfume line whose storytelling I appreciate and whose scents I adore. East MidEast and Sir are my enduring favorites (When I learned that the former was being discontinued, I enlisted understanding friends around the country to scour their local Anthropologie stores for the precious remaining vials), but I'm eager to learn whether either will be unseated by one of the dreamy-seeming new offerings in their HYLNDS series. I'm delighted to share interviews from both D.S. (David) and Durga (Kavi) here.

D.S.'s responses: 
What do you smell like? 
Usually a combination of 4 different trials - 2 on each arm.  Sometimes three.  Thus, it varies!  If I'm going out at night, I wear our "SIR" - a rich rose/jasmine chypre.  Sunny weekend days, I like cologne water (one I made, but not released).  I like to wear pure sandalwood oil from Mysore.

What do you like to smell? 
Almost everything. There is something interesting to smell in most aromas...I like to pick apart what I am smelling.  I love the smell of good tea: most of the high grade chinese "red" (black) teas, tung ting jade Oolong from Taiwan, Gyokuro from Japan, first flush Darjeeling from Margret's Hope plantation.  I love the smell of Glenlivet 18.  The smell of my home town in New England--ocean and forest combined.  The beach roses that grow on Phillips Beach in the summer.  The "bacon" smell my cat used to have when he would cold inside after being outside in the cold winter night.  Clover.  Good patchouli.  Leather.  Mandarin.  My 2 month old daughter's pure breath.  Hibawood.  Wild olibanum (frankincense) from Oman or Kenya.  Motorboat exhaust over the water in the summer.  Hyssop. Ground Ivy.  (those two very similar).  Orange blossoms on the Cote d'Azure.  Eastern Hemlock Spruce.  Haitian Vetyver.  Bonfires.  Tobacco.  Motia (jasmine sambac).  Any white flower in the real world.  Most any flower.  Lilacs! Lilies obv. English Roses.  Endless.


Durga's responses: 
What do you smell like? 
Whatever D.S. has last created and we are testing out.

What do you like to smell?  
All sorts of things. Fresh lilies, tuberose, cut grass, peaty scotch, bread baking, the beach. 

Nosy Interview: Victoria Frolova

Victoria (whose blotters from the original photo were burned up by the sun) in Blue Sun Bursting, © Alan Friedman  (Averted Imagination)

Victoria has taught me so much about fragrance that I should probably pay her some kind of tuition. Instead I asked her for still more of her insights in the form of a nosy interview, and, lucky for all of us, she obliged. Bois de Jasmin, Victoria's wonderful blog about "perfume and other fragrant pleasures," is an absolutely essential resource for anyone interested in perfume. I have so much faith in her taste and expertise that I should probably also warn you about her blog, as regular reading may lead to a serious uptick in your perfume cravings.

What do you smell like?

Cacophony! Since I work with perfume and research raw materials, by the end of the day I smell like a mixture of things, often strange ones. If the project involves gourmands, I come home smelling like a cotton candy factory. If I’m working with aldehydes, I smell of snuffed out candles and dirty hair. I suppose, if you still love perfume after this kind of experience, you’re either very passionate or crazy. Or both!

Off-duty, I smell of whatever perfume I’m infatuated with at the moment. I also like to spend at least one day smelling of nothing to give my nose a rest. Plus, in the spring, there are so many great scents in the air that you don’t even need to perfume your skin. On the weekend if the weather is nice (and this is not a given in Belgium), I’m usually outdoors soaking up the sunshine and the fragrance of magnolias.

What do you like to smell? 

Anything at all! My husband is used to it, but whenever I go for walks with my friends, they’re often surprised that I pick up various leaves and pieces of bark and smell them. And although they find it an eccentric habit, they always join in, because smelling is so enjoyable and we don’t do it consciously often enough.  

If I’m to name my favorite things I love to smell, I risk boring you, since my list would be too long! But bread and jasmine are among my absolute favorites. Whenever I walk past a bakery and notice the smell of freshly baked bread, I instantly feel happy. It’s such a comforting, cozy scent.  At home we never baked bread, but my grandmother made a brioche-like Easter cake, and when she prepared it, the whole house smelled of yeast, nutmeg, vanilla, and rum soaked raisins.  

Jasmine is another scent that makes me happy (hence, the blog name). It’s such a strange smell if you think of it—apricot jam, horse sweat, white petals, but it’s incredibly sultry. On another level, it reminds me of my childhood summers.  Since my family is scattered all over the world, I miss them very much. Thinking about the time we spent together and recreating some of it through scents and tastes is how I approach my nostalgia.

I also love catching a whiff of perfume on people around me. It doesn’t matter what fragrance they are wearing, even if it’s something I don’t like on myself, it’s always a pleasure to notice what others are sporting and what they pick for different occasions.

Nosy Interview: Gina Balibrera

Gina in The Horsehead Nebula in Infrared from Hubble, © NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team

Gina and I have not yet met, but she left a lovely, smell-related comment on a link to V.V. Ganeshananthan's interview and, when I immediately pounced, asking if she'd be willing to write more on fragrant matters, she was gracious enough to accept. (Readers, please remember that I welcome your nominations for potential nosy interviewees!) Gina is currently at work on The Volcano-Daughters, a novel set in El Salvador, Hollywood, and France, during the 1930s and 1940s. While you wait, you can read more of her nonfiction on the Michigan Quarterly Review blog.  

What do you smell like? 
I consulted several close friends to answer this question, and the consensus was nearly unanimous: rose. (My sweetheart, however, said that I smell “nice,” and “like the best.” Outlier). This rosy ruling flattered by vanity. My efforts have been rewarded! I tend to spray myself several times a day with a neon-pink plastic bottle of rosewater that can be found in many health food stores. The mysterious text on the bottle’s label reads: “Recommended in the Edgar Cayce Readings” and “Vor-mag Water (water that has been vortexed and magnetized to raise the energy to a higher vibration that we believe to be more beneficial).” Beneficial for what purpose, I am not sure. But I do find it refreshing, and I am fond of its reviving, rosy scent. I use this magic water in lieu of hairspray, and, often, in lieu of smelling salts. I use a German rose oil in a green glass bottle on my body instead of lotion, and I like rosehip oil on my lips. In a pharmacy in Geneva, I bought two cheap, tiny vials of perfume oil, which I like to dab on my wrists and neck after the shower: one is amber, the other vanilla. I love that amber in a glass bottle looks exactly as it should, honeyed and luminous, and smells just like the color of the veined golden stone. There are no cheap and luminous vials of perfume oil in the pharmacies of Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I now live. A dear poet friend of mine, Gala Mukomolova, who smells like sweet milk, told me that in addition to roses, I smell of baking bread. Perhaps this is also true. In the grocery store’s personal care aisle, I like to pick up those expensive handmade bars of soap and hold them to my nose--I usually go home with almond or bee pollen or camomile or red clay with rose, or sometimes, more rarely, cucumber. My very favorite soap is made of sandalwood, but I’ll get to that in the next question. 

What do you like to smell?
I love smelling cardamom and real vanilla, good gin that is particularly rosy, honey, honey, honey, Mysore sandalwood soap that comes in a red cardboard box with pink roses and a tiny elephant, amber oil in the glass bottle, violets, the Redwood forest, the sunwarmed calico head of my favorite cat, Olive, olive oil, truffle oil, creosote, a Sonoran desert plant that smells just like summer monsoons, and fresh rosemary.  Leather guitar cases (and the shiny wood  and inner felt and nylon strings of a classical guitar), a special tea made from bergamot oil and sage. Library books, of course, who doesn’t? Especially in the spring and summer, I love the scent of a golden hour picnic on a wooden porch: rosé, cantaloupe, strawberries. Also, lavender, champagne, fistfuls of mint, purple thai basil, lemongrass, cherries, and ruby-red grapefruits sliced in half. I am pleased that my plan to smell like roses has succeeded in the noses of my friends, because I like the smell of large, velvety roses in surprising colors--violet-streaked, magenta, and cream--best.

I like the smell of a new broom, which I suppose is just straw. My friend, fiction writer, Jide Adebayo-Begun, told me about a Hausa idiom which means the knot at the center of the straw broom, typically referring to a deep and lasting bond of friendship or love between people. There’s also the tinny, winterfresh smell of cheap men's shaving cream, but only on the skin of my sweetheart. A few years ago, I gave him one of those fancy-hippie shaving kits that smells of cedar and pine and the earthiness of some sort of real hair that was collected to make the brush. He didn’t really use it, and his beard smells sometimes like Walgreens shaving cream, when it is neat, and like a dense human forest--rosewood, clean wool sweaters, and river stones--when it is tufty.
 
In childhood, I was fond of a particular marker, a bright, Lisa Frank turquoise, that smelled precisely as that color should, like the Pacific Ocean, juicyfruit gum, and strawberry lipgloss, but was named, curiously, “mango.” Another strange dissonance: as a kid, I used to walk up a hill to eat ice cream, past an auto body shop with oily rainbows on the sidewalk. Then and now, the smell of diesel exhaust makes me crave ice cream, usually cherry.

When I was a bad teen, I would go to bonfires on Ocean or Baker Beach, and return home smelling exactly like a Honeybaked Ham. What did you do tonight? My parents would ask. Nothing, I would say. Once or twice I smoked those clove cigarettes, to which many sensitive, melancholy teenagers find themselves drawn for a quick moment of cliché, and which are terrible, but which attempt to smell, via crude, poisonous, chemical shorthand, mystical and leathery and like a good autumn cake. These days, when my nose desires such fiery warmth, I prefer the scent of lapsung souchang tea, which is campfire smoke and spice, or the scent of actual autumn cakes baked in my oven with real cloves and cinnamon and cardamom.
 
Two old chestnuts most everyone enjoys smelling: chestnuts roasting beneath beaten-up pans on chilly city street corners and hot coffee. Right now, I’m working on a novel in which coffee plays an important role. Coffee is magic and nose-magnetic in the cup, but in the fields of El Salvador, just after the harvest, the rotting berries smell truly terrible, in a bodily sense. I was on a train there a few years ago, and the ticket-collector arrived beside my seat, a gust of something truly foul blew in through the window, and for a moment I thought that the ticket-collector was ill. But that foul gust was the coffee outside, those soft, red berries. 

Nosy Interview: Eli Hastings

Eli in the (stretched) Sun with Solar Flare, © NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory

Eli and I met in Seattle, where, through the Writers in the Schools program, I got to watch him work a kind of wake-up magic on formerly-groggy high school students. His latest book, a memoir called Clearly Now, the Rain, was just released last week, and you can learn more about Eli, his writing, and his adorable "nutcase toddler" here. 

What do you smell like? 

I smell like dried spray paint and midgrade aftershave lotion.  I think.  But I’ve never really checked, I just make that assumption because I have to shave everyday or I look weird and I spend a lot of time in my “garoffice”/mancave, which is heavily tagged—though with words of wisdom not the scrawled hubris of taggers (that was way earlier).  Lately the scent of raw garlic is always on my fingers because my wife is a doctor and I am not and so I have had to learn to cook and garlic disguises the fact that I am, at best, learning.  To be honest, I probably smell like old dog (that’s dog + dust and decay) because I am overcome with love for my 14-year-old golden and embrace her unreasonably at least a few times a day.  I probably smell slightly like pee in the mornings because I often have to sleep with my 3-year-old dervish. 

What do you like to smell? 

I like to smell many things that rather universally are inviting: fresh ground coffee brand spanking new azaleas and whatnot.  But I also enjoy scents that may be more subjectively pleasant: gasoline, fresh tarmac, wicked cheese.  My favorite smell in the world comes in August in the north Cascades where my mom lives.  It’s an invasive plant of some kind that sprouts in spring and starts to dry on the vine as the sun slams away the weeks and is pungent and spicy by the end of summer and looks a lot like marijuana (I’m told), but is not.  I swear.

Nosy Interview: V.V. Ganeshananthan

V.V. in NGC 3132: The Southern Ring Nebula, © Hubble Legacy Archive, ESA, NASA

Sugi and I have met in person fewer times than I would like, but she dramatically improves the quality of my Internet experience with her intelligence and insight, and has been doing so since before we ever met, when a mutual friend pointed me towards her harrowing and beautiful essay, "The Politics of Grief," in Granta. Allow her to her improve your reading life by following her @vasugi on Twitter and buying her novel, Love Marriage. 

What do you smell like? 

Varieties of perfume, food, spices, and caffeine that depend on the moment and the country.

Caffeine: black Ceylon tea with milk; Bru instant coffee with milk; a soy latte from Comet Coffee; a soy latte from Mighty Good Coffee; spicy hot chocolate.

Food and spices: brioche; strawberries; curry powder; chili powder; mustard seed; fennel seed; fenugreek; cumin seed; crushed red pepper; freshly ground black pepper; cinnamon; ginger; recently consumed cookies and dark chocolate. (Probably sometimes all at once.)

Perfume: amber; jasmine; stargazer lilies; white ginger; lemon verbena; lemon and sugar soap; Rani sandalwood soap; rosewater. (Hopefully never all at once!)

And the miscellany: clean laundry; soccer or tennis or gym sweat; a certain Hindu temple and its holy ash; airplanes and airports.

What do you like to smell? 

A new can of tennis balls. Sweet potato fries. Pizza. The generous and gentle little cheeks of children to whom I am related. The turf of an indoor soccer field. Baseball fields. Parks. Grass. Mangoes. Ginger. Oil of Olay and Chanel No. 5. Yardley’s powder: jasmine and English lavender. An English garden I know in Harrow. Reed’s or Blenheim’s ginger ale, spicy. Cookies, called biscuits. A warm Zingerman's ginger scone. Hazelnuts. Snow. Panikkaipaniyaram, which is a kind of sugared donut made with the pulp of a fruit. Shrimp curry. Crab curry. Chicken curry. Curry. Koththu roti. Thosai. Books. Rain. Tiger balm. Espresso-based beverages. Head and Shoulders shampoo. Clean pillows.

Nosy Interview: Ted Ollier

 Ted in Light Echoes V838 Mon, © NASA, ESA, H.E. Bond

Ted is the captain of Bow & Arrow Press, the swell letterpress studio in the basement of Harvard's Adams House. I took his introductory letterpress course last semester and he helped me make some Nosy Girl note cards, among other ephemeral treasures. Visit Ted's web site, mindhue studio, and peek into Bow & Arrow Press via its Twitter and Facebook pages.

What do you smell like? 
You would think that people wouldn't really notice how they smell, the scent being all around them and part of their basic chemical makeup. But the glomeruli cannot be denied, so one's skin has a definite smell that is obvious and familiar. I can't say it's the best smell ever or an amazing smell, but it's me. It would be interesting to find out if there are people who hate their own scent. Caveat: I'm going by the smell of my arm or hand skin, because that's something of a generic scent area and not a place, like the armpits or groin, which have been designed for more specific scent generation.

For a description, I have to use words related to food, maybe because we're really talking about raw bushmeat here. Maybe not savory, but fleshy, a touch mushroomy, maybe a hint of pepper or spice in there, some salt, some salami, and a fillip of musk. There are also non-scent words that come to mind: basic, satisfying, comforting. And finally, I get into synaesthetic terms: golden, orange, crenellated, curved, looped, and laminated.

What do you like to smell? 
As a hominid, I've traded quite a bit of my natural mammalian olfactory talents for binocular color vision. For myself, this already-stunted smelling equipment has been further compromised, either by allergies, lack of attention or just additional deletions to the detection genome. I can smell, just not very well. Because my smell channel is relatively quiet, any strong smell is anathema to me. So... smells I like are muted and layered, with no one note predominating. Food scents are fine when I'm hungry, any other time they can be annoying and pushy--although herbal and spicy scents are fine, as they are not food in and of themselves. Floral scents have to be subtle and unobtrusive if I am to co-exist with them. Spring is my least-favorite time of the year, because of all those damn flowers. The habit of burning incense I consider an abomination unto the Lord. Non-volatile industrial scents are fine, too--like the smell of oil-based printing ink, or Simple Green, or freshly-printed photographic paper. But mostly I prefer very little smell to intrude on my sensorium.

Nosy Interview: Ariel Djanikian

Ariel In the Center of the Lagoon Nebula, © A. Caulet (ST-ECF, ESA), NASA

Ariel and I were classmates at the University of Michigan, where I quickly learned that she is the sort of person you delight in having on your end of the table, whether it's in workshop or at dinner. Her debut novel, The Office of Mercy, comes out this Thursday. While you're waiting to get your hands on it, visit Ariel's web site and follow her on Twitter. 

What do you smell like?
I smell like the coffee shops I frequent on a daily basis. Boots. High Efficiency Tide. Sharpie pens. My hair will net any ambient scent in its clutches: in the morning, that’s soap, but by night I’m frizzed out with the smell of pasta sauce and grilled whatever. Scrubbed clean, I think I smell like the high altitude air around the Caucasus Mountains touched with the verdant woodlands of Pennsylvania. 

What do you like to smell?
Baby spit up, the lingering scent of baby shampoo, the warm baby smell beneath folds of baby fat rolls, the ripe ambrosias of a soiled diaper, detected at close range through terrycloth pajamas. Old guitar strings. (Not that I play.) The stairwell in gyms. (Not that I go.) Decrepit rubber keys on an ancient Casio calculator. Yoda figurines. I like the smell of my house: dusty carpeting and tomatoes. Swimsuits drying on a bathroom hook. Bus exhaust, like from the school buses that used to line up beside our high school every afternoon. Plus the usual: onions frying, garlic roasting, pretzels from street vendors, masking tape, the sweetness of a heavy July afternoon just as it’s beginning to rain, poppies, kindling, acetone.

Nosy Interview: Sierra Nelson

Sierra (photographed by Rebecca Hoogs) in A Beautiful Boomerang Nebula, © Hubble Heritage Team 

Sierra's praises are sung so sincerely by Seattleites I hold dear that it is easy to feel fond of her despite the fact that we've not yet met. She seems to possess that rare stripe of real kindness that radiates even via e-mail. I Take Back the Sponge Cake, her poetry and art choose-your-own-adventure book collaboration with the artist Loren Erdrich, can be purchased here, and her new chapbook, "In Case of Loss,"can be found nestled in the Toadlily Press Quartet, Embark. Sierra is co-founder of the Vis-à-Vis Society, a collaborative poetic team; if you live in Seattle, you can see Dr. Ink (a.k.a Sierra) and Dr. Owning (a.k.a Rachel Kessler) in action and get some poetry-science inspiration at MOHAI this Thursdsay. 

What do you smell like?  
For many years I smelled like bread because I worked in a small collectively run bakery in Seattle (Touchstone). That bakery no longer exists, and I think the smell has probably worn off by now. Too bad.

And for a short while, also years ago, I drove a '73 Plymouth Gold Duster: original gold paint on the exterior, front seat an amazing sky blue.  She was so beautiful, and broke down almost constantly; I never knew enough about car repair to keep her happy, or maybe nothing could.  She always smelled faintly of gasoline, a smell that I like, and during that time we were together I'm sure that smell rubbed off on me as well.

I like the idea of perfume but rarely actually wear it. Last summer I was on the small Italian island of Ischia and I was taken with a perfume that smelled warm and green to me, something like cut grass. My Italian is only so-so, but I'm pretty sure the man at the counter commended my choice of "scent of a man." Maybe that's why I liked it! I don't wear it often, but when I do, I find myself surreptitiously putting my nose to my wrist like I am receiving a message from a secret agent.

People have sometimes described a smell they associate with me, and for a long time I wasn't sure what it was because I wasn't wearing a particular scent.  But through some sleuthing I think I've traced it, at least in part, to a leave-in conditioner that lists its main ingredient as avocados but actually smells like honey.
 
What do you like to smell?
I like to shake hands with rosemary when I pass by, especially when it's growing in a gigantic bush as it often does in the Pacific Northwest (including in my front yard). I also really love the smell of sagebrush just after a thunderstorm (I did a lot of my growing up in Nevada, so the scent is nostalgic for me of the silver-grey mountains in Reno and Carson City).  I love the warm, dusty smell of typewriter keys (especially on an old electric that really hums and heats up).  And the red-green smell walking through a cedar forest.  I used to live in a building that always smelled deliciously like laundry soap (the basement laundry room windows were right by the front entrance). I like the progression of smells when making soup (onions and carrots, chopping fresh herbs, how everything smells as it's simmering together).  I love the briny blue smell of the sea, especially when it appears somewhat unexpectedly (like from a seashell picked up from a windowsill, or on a city street when the wind shifts just right). 

Nosy Interview: Roland Satterwhite

Roland in Zeta Oph: Runaway Star, © NASA, JPL-Caltech, Spitzer Space Telescope

Roland contacted me after Ayla Peggy Adler's interview was posted, nominating his sister, Zanna, who he describes as having an amazing sense of smell, for an interview (Zanna, I hope you'll share what you're smelling one of these days). He was kind enough to submit to a nosy interview himself (one  hazard/benefit of nominating anyone is that I will definitely ask you what you smell like, too). Visit Roland's web site here, and check out his Facebook page to learn more about his music and upcoming performance dates. 

What do you smell like?
it is hard to answer the question what i smell like. but mostly i smell like my armpits because i usually don't wear deodorant, unless i'm going on a date, or know that i'll be nervous....i like my armpit smell.  the truth is that i like it more, the longer i don't shower, but i love to shower, so it usually doesn't collect more than 24 hours. My dream is to have BO that is as good as some people i've met.  I can't figure out if it is their diet, or their genetic makeup.....i think cumin/curry is the flavor of BO that is my favorite...you know what i mean?

What do you like to smell?
i love the smell of:  
gasoline,
paint thinner,
permanent marker,
cow shit, 
straw bales,
pencil shavings, 
graphite dust, 
stinging nettles,
blackberry bushes,
railroad ties,
wet asphalt after a long dry spell,
i love the smell of outside--after emerging from an underground car park, which for me is nauseating,
gillette shaving cream,
smell of my armpits in the morning if i slept long and well,
a lot of pakistanis i know,
the senegalese guys at mariana's restaurant on reichenberger street,
onions frying in olive oil,
tomato plants,
pine needles,
book binding glue is deliciously whiffy,
puget sound (Puuuuuuuuget sound),
the lungs of a lover,
any cotton that has spent the night outside,
rain,
my old polyester shirt,
bleach, when it is faint,
her shampoo, when a woman with long hair jogs in the opposite direction,
cumin