late-fall reading list

What are you reading? I have four end-of-fall recommendations, all from Nosy Interviewees (all fragrant, foxy, and friendly):

oxes on the Trampoline by Charlotte Boulay
Charlotte, the first-ever(!) nosy interviewee featured on the site, published her first book of poems and it's gorgeous, funny, and brilliant. It gave me chills on a 90 percent humidity day this summer in Boston and now it's giving me comfort as the days grow short, and cold. You can read Charlotte's poem "Scientists Have Discovered," on your phone right now, as you walk to the bookstore to buy her book.

riendship by Emily Gould
Read the first chapter of Emily's lovely and funny and bittersweet debut novel here, and     then get into it with Bev and Amy as they sort out their lives in contrast to and connection with one another in a way that is so welcome.  If this list has you hankering for still more book recommendations, hightail it over to Emily Books and subscribe to receive one great ebook each month for a year.  (Emily, self-proclaimed perfume nerd, also has a great review of Mandy Aftel's Fragrant, next on this list, at Bookforum.)

ragrant by Mandy Aftel

That cover! It matches the amazing packaging Aftel uses in her shop (where you can buy the companion kit to Fragrant and "smell along" as you read), and you can bet what's inside this book will be more beautiful still. How have I not read this yet?!? I revere Mandy! It tops my to-read list, and here's a taste from the jacket copy:

In Fragrant, through five major players in the epic of aroma, she explores the profound connection between our sense of smell and the appetites that move us, give us pleasure, make us fully alive. Cinnamon, queen of the Spice Route, touches our hunger for the unknown, the exotic, the luxurious. Mint, homegrown the world over, speaks to our affinity for the familiar, the native, the authentic. Frankincense, an ancient incense ingredient, taps into our longing for transcendence, while ambergris embodies our unquenchable curiosity. And exquisite jasmine exemplifies our yearning for beauty, both evanescent and enduring.

he Self Unstable by Elisa Gabbert

Elisa's writing is so smart and funny and humane and it will get under your skin in a good way and change the way you see. The cover makes me a little bit dizzy, but champagne-dizzy, where everything holds so much promise and sparkle, and everyone is wittier and more beautiful than they were just a few hours earlier. Elisa makes it so.


{All the pretty drop caps are courtesy Jessica Hisch's Daily Drop Cap.}

nosy recommends: burt's bees baby bee multipurpose ointment

This smells so sweet! Not sweet like frosting, sweet like darling. Burt's Bees Baby Bee Multipurpose Ointment just smells adorable. It's light streaming in the open windows in the farmhouse bedroom where your white sheets were just air-dried the day before and the host, one of your oldest friends, left a little mason jar full of gummy bears on your bedside table (just the orange, yellow, and adhesive-colored ones). This tub's pudding is cuddly but not cloying, and comforting with a chewiness I associate with that tantalizing pull to bite the brand-new nub of pink eraser on a fresh yellow No. 2 pencil (it doesn't smell like that eraser, but like the feeling you imagine it will have between your molars). Even though I've learned that petitgrain is a bitter orange note, there's a homier smell I associate with the word petitgrain that comes to mind when I sniff this ointment. I would like to smell coumarin (one of the ingredients listed, along with shea butter, almond oil, beeswax, and coconut oil) and see whether the compound accounts for the dollop of countryside I'm getting, since its Wikipedia entry says coumarin is "readily recognized as the scent of new-mown hay," and is found in plants like tonka bean, vanilla grass, sweet woodruff, sweet grass, cassia cinnamon, Deers Tongue and sweet clover.

You can use this ointment, intended for babies' bums, however you might use Vaseline, and it's especially nice on rough heels (sandal season is officially over here in Cambridge) and dry elbows (the season for which is fast approaching). I mainly use it at night, but it's subtle enough that it doesn't interfere with perfume.

 "Mr. Autumn Man, enjoying a seasonal stroll." --The Onion 

Other things I recommend right now, from past Nosy Interviewees and from the planet: 

• Elisa has been doing some great perfume writing on her blog lately, on her new favorite leather, lilies, and underwear perfumes. I loved this line: "From a distance, the impression is not unlike my vintage Shalimar – a powdery floriental with a smoker's cough." Elisa and I disagree about Agent Provocateur, which she thinks goes from uptight to dirty, and I believe to be so raunchy in its opening that I leave a small grace period before leaving the house with it on. 
• Rebecca has a wonderful poem, "Self-Portrait at San Carlito," up at Verse Daily (and a book coming out in 2013!!!).
• Natalie wrote an excellent review of Zadie Smith's NW for Fiction Writers Review, and highlighted one of the book's best lines: "Overnight everyone has grown up. While she was becoming, everyone grew up and became."  
• FALL! I am definitely a shameless version of Ms. Autumn Woman, and if you encountered me on the street yesterday, you would have been subjected to a six-minute (minimum) reverie on how incredible fall smells and feels and looks. I like to celebrate its arrival with an annual reading of Colin Nissan's brilliant "It's Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers," and suggest you do the same, whatever the weather where you are.

shared flavors

Image via

Nosy friend Christine sent me a link to this beautiful flavor network (a portion of which is screencapped above) created by Yong-Yeol Ahn. Read more about how this network was created, and explore the full-size version here. I think it's beautiful to look at. Also beautiful to look at are the three poems linked below, all from past Nosy Interviewees. April may be over, but that's no reason to stop reading a poem each day:

• Elisa Gabbert's "Semi-Aubade" on the Rumpus 

• Rebecca Hoogs'  "The Muses Narrate a Slideshow" on the Far Field

• Nancy Lili Gonzalez's "Cootie Shots" in The Broken Plate

Nosy Interview: Courtney Mandryk

 Courtney in HH-222: The Waterfall Nebula, © Z. Levay, T.A. Rector, & H. Schweiker

Courtney and I met at the University of Michigan, probably first at a welcome-students barbecue. But I better remember a later barbecue where she gave me one of the nicest compliments I have ever received, one that managed to be both morbid and effusive (a combination I often aim to achieve). She makes beautiful things; you can see for yourself at MOTHDRAWN.

What Do You Smell Like to Smell

Cilantro of August, calendula into September,

the pink cream I rubbed on the bites of October.

Now the leaves are holding onto their sugars,

the leaves are letting go of their branches.

The fire is lit. My black dog's warm fur-smell

is of fleece blankets inside of a dryer, a womb.

My gun dog has always smelled like the pound she came from.

I wonder if the dogs smelled the baby through my skin.

My boy was born already not smelling like me.

He smells warmer, a smell beyond me: church incense under Burt's Bees.

Today he made a painting using apples for a brush,

the smell of apple juice and tempera heart-shapes on paper, 2011.

I am the dirt the rain kicks up.

I used to press my nose to window screens in a storm

when I thought rain was the smell of its metallic mesh.

I smell like sun-dried clothing - I smell like clothing half-dried in the rain.

I smell syrup and chlorine on my wrists when I'm afraid.

I dislike the smell of hamburgers and teenagers

and teenagers' painful perfumes even though I have smelled that way.

Stephen smells like a pencil box.

I have never owned a pencil box. I never knew him as a teen.

I never knew him in his twenties.

My furnace husband, the stronger heart that heats a room.

He is right now somewhere in the fields

tending a fire in the rain, rain-face dripping.

I want to be the smell of ginkgo and coconut but I am not that coconut girl,

though sometimes I want to take my arms and whip them around

and around like a helicopter.

I am the smell of skunks far away on a summer night's drive.

I am tomato plants bowing in the garden.

I am leaves loud on the sidewalk.

Original chapstick. A match just blown.

When I smell basil I know I am home.

Now the gun dog smells of rot she found by the pond.

The boy smells of pee and a hot Midwestern sky,

his breath the scent of Elmer's glue.

Now there is a flower blooming that smells like the day is done

but I can't find it in the fields to cut it down.

you can almost believe

Philip Levine is the new poet laureate! Read this:
 
Our Valley

We don’t see the ocean, not ever, but in July and August
when the worst heat seems to rise from the hard clay
of this valley, you could be walking through a fig orchard
when suddenly the wind cools and for a moment
you get a whiff of salt, and in that moment you can almost
believe something is waiting beyond the Pacheco Pass,
something massive, irrational, and so powerful even
the mountains that rise east of here have no word for it.

You probably think I’m nuts saying the mountains
have no word for ocean, but if you live here
you begin to believe they know everything.
They maintain that huge silence we think of as divine,
a silence that grows in autumn when snow falls
slowly between the pines and the wind dies
to less than a whisper and you can barely catch
your breath because you’re thrilled and terrified.

You have to remember this isn’t your land.
It belongs to no one, like the sea you once lived beside
and thought was yours. Remember the small boats
that bobbed out as the waves rode in, and the men
who carved a living from it only to find themselves
carved down to nothing. Now you say this is home,
so go ahead, worship the mountains as they dissolve in dust,
wait on the wind, catch a scent of salt, call it our life.

(From Levine's 2009 collection, News of the World) 

excessive heat warning

[via Thessaly]

My popsicles melted completely on the one-block walk home from the store (they're reforming themselves now, filling the puffed tubes of their containers). I'm starting to think the acrid smell is the air itself. So thick! When I'm complaining after weeks of slush and ice this winter, feel free to point me in the direction of this post and tell me to suck it up, that thin air, that barely-there air.