booknotes

As I may have mentioned twelve or a hundred times, the sweet spot where smells & stories meet is where this website wants to live. So I thought I'd try to get in the habit of sharing striking smell moments from the books I read. You should always feel welcome to e-mail me snippets of scent description from whatever you're reading these days.

I recently read and adored It Chooses You by empathy superhero Miranda July, and it contained this passage:

The address was a giant old apartment building on Hollywood Boulevard, the kind of place where starlets lived in the '30s, but now it was the cheapest sort of flophouse. It's not that my world smells so good--my house, the houses of my friends, Target, my car, the post office--it's just that I know those smells. I tried to pretend this too was a familiar smell, the overly sweet note combined with something burning on a hotplate thirty years ago. I also tried to appreciate small blessings, like that when we pressed 3 on the elevator, it went up and opened on a floor with a corresponding number 3.

Now I'm reading Carol Anshaw's Carry the One and have already encountered some great smell moments, particularly when it comes to Alice, and her consuming desire for Maude: 

...Standing in the shadows between streetlights was a tall blonde who, as she looked up,  revealed herself to be Maude.

Alice got stuck for a moment, then went to buzz her in. This was a completely surprising event. Since the accident Alice had only seen her once, at the baptism of Carmen and Matt's baby, Gabriel. They gave each other a wide berth. Now here she was in some agitated state, in jeans and a sweatshirt turned inside out. Ten feet tall. Hair a tangle, expression feverish, smelling like lilac and biscuits. If Alice believed in a God she would have asked him: Please give me this.

you smell cro-magnon

My friend Britta first introduced me to Yosh Han's perfumes with the gift of a six-piece sampler set. I fell hard for U4EAHH!, with its batty name and sweetness so fresh it seemed just-squeezed from some kind of maniacally-relaxed melon who surfs a lot and has the perfect sprinkling of discrete nose & cheek freckles. (It's more pear than melon, but somehow melon seems like the more laid-back fruit to me. Can you picture a pear on a surfboard?)

this guy looks pretty laid-back, though

The title of Mireille Silcoff's post (discovered via Elisa), "Smell is the nearest thing we have to bottled time travel," reminded me of how much I want to get my hands on another Yosh sampler set: the Timeline of Frangrances she created exclusively for 826LA's Time Travel Mart. I'm such a sucker for lists of notes in fragrances, especially when they include inscrutable things like white pearl and sparkles:

Caveman (34,000 B.C.E.) — notes of: earth, washed suede, galbanum
Sheherazade (818) — notes of: African musk, opium, cardamom, rose
Silk Road (1280) — notes of: bamboo flower, peony, China lily
Aztec (1494) — notes of: chocolate, rose, nutmeg, pink pepper, cardamom
Gold Rush (1849) — notes of: musk, denim, pink pepper, river
Victorian Violets (1888) — notes of: violets
Studio 54 (1977) — notes of: white pearl, juniper, coriander, lime, champagne & sparkles
2012 (ditto) — notes of: Egyptian musk, blue tansy, peppermint
Utopia (77777) — notes of: French vanilla, nectarine blossom, cassis, green tea
Dystopia (77778) — notes of: kukui nut, foraha, tobacco, peppermint, peach, galbanum

 image via

I looked up foraha; supposedly it smells like pecan ice cream (what, no butter in the dystopia?). The lack of a shared language for scents allows for some beautiful imaginative leaps. What does denim smell like? Indigo dye and cotton? Or like jeans? Metallic zipper & button, detergent, dirt.  And corduroy--what is its smell? Velvet & heat, tiny rhythmic burnings. Silcoff:

We all know that scent is the most emotional of the five senses, and linked to memory like none other. We know this because we have all smelled fresh-mown grass or the hair of a passing person on the street or the notes of a shot of Jägermeister, and been instantly transported back to a childhood summer in the country or the arms of the first person we kissed or some bender weekend that occurred over a decade ago. There is a certain uric smell in certain London Underground stations that can literally make me cry from the number of stacked emotions it brings up. Ditto for the smell of Dove soap with Listerine and corduroy, which is the smell of my grandfather.