we others

Ratty & Mole illustration by EH Shepard

My main Mole (he says he's more a Ratty) is rereading The Wind in the Willows, and he read me this passage aloud: 

We others, who have long lost the more subtle of the physical senses, have not even proper terms to express an animal's inter-communications with his surroundings, living or otherwise, and have only the word 'smell,' for instance, to include the whole range of delicate thrills which murmur in the nose of the animal night and day, summoning, warning, inciting, repelling. It was one of those mysterious faery calls from out the void that suddenly reached Mole in the darkness, making him tingle through and through with its very familiar appeal, even while as yet he could not clearly remember what it was. He stopped dead in his tracks, his nose searching hither and thither in its efforts to recapture the fine filament, the telegraphic current, that had so strongly moved him. A moment, and he had caught it again; and with it this time came recollection in fullest flood. 

Home!  

smelliest sentence

Nosy writers! This week's nosy interviewee, Anne, alerted me this morning to a Narrative magazine contest you might like to enter. (Anne wrote here about two stories she recommends from Narrative). The theme of their Literary Puzzler this week is "Sensory Sentences," specifically smelly ones:

The best writing provides great sensory description, but of all the five senses—touch, taste, sound, sight, and smell—the last is a particularly challenging one to describe. How do you morph a specific smell into accurate and captivating words?

This week, Puzzler challenges you to capture that scent on the page with a single sentence about a favorite smell—from nature, from the oven, from memory.

Post your sentence as a comment on our Facebook page, or send it to Literary Puzzler, by Sunday noon, Pacific daylight time.

You can win cash at the end of the year (though I'm not sure how much, or how many other puzzlers you'd need to win to walk away holding the money), and you can count on me to admire your efforts.

magical manure

I'd always assumed that the difference between beautiful (really!) and noxious manure smells was entirely a matter of what the cows ate. But my dad sent me an article this weekend that suggested it's a bit more complicated than that (as matters of poop so often are). If you're not inclined to read a four-page academic report on odor management as it relates to animal waste, let me at least share some highlights:

No single compound has been identified as a good predictor of odor sensation across situations in the field. Because of this, human panelists conduct odor measurements and quantify odor intensity and unpleasantness.

Manure sniffer-and-ranker! My future author-bio could put all those bricklaying, fish-gutting, sex-working writers to shame.

And this:

Based on psychological tests, seven primary classes of olfactory stimulants have been found to preferentially excite separate olfactory cells. These classes are: 1) ethereal, 2) camphoraceous, 3) musky, 4) floral, 5) minty, 6) pungent, and 7) putrid. 

Ethereal in this case refers to Ethylene Dichloride (which the EPA says has a "pleasant chloroform-like odor"), but it's more magical to think of it as that heavenly part of the cow poop. Dirt to dirt and all of that.