'some scent of yourself that you can hold up high'

 [image is a detail from the tour poster, post title is a lyric from "Three Peaches"]

Just typing "I saw Jeff Mangum perform on Friday" makes me tremble a little, filled again with disbelief, but this time at something that actually happened, rather than something I couldn't believe would. Waiting in line to pick up our tickets, I warned my companions that I might start sobbing during the concert. What is it about devotion that can make us sound so disturbed?

When we took our seats in the pews at Sanders Theatre, my friend Dorothy remarked immediately on how amazing it smelled. I agreed; it felt like being inside a roll-top desk: old wood, old books, varnish, worn lacquer, and leather blotter. Plus some dusty human smell that comes from sitting still for long stretches of time.

I was wearing East MidEast that day, but added Avignon because I couldn't imagine not wearing it to this show. The way Neutral Milk Hotel and Avignon make me feel are not similar, but they are related. More and more, this has become what interests me about perfume. Of course I like to smell good, but even more I like what I smell to make me feel a certain way, or think about things a bit differently, and I also appreciate being able to put on a certain fragrance and remember more fully a time or a moment in my life. Avignon, a fragrance that it's easy to feel religious about, now has this added weight for me, having risen from my wrists in the church-like atmosphere of Sanders Theatre during what, in some ways, is the closest I get to any kind of church at all.

Some people find Avignon distant, too dark and cement-like in its heavy Catholic incense, too cerebral, too cold. And some people surely find Neutral Milk Hotel somewhat inaccessible, too strange, too distorted or obscure. But they are two of the most beautiful things I know, and they came together for me, warm as fingertips, in a theater that smelled like a well-loved desk, sitting among one thousand weepy, joyful, reverent people who knew nearly every word.

Nosy Interview: Beth Mattson

 Beth in Hickson 44 in Leo, © Stephen Leshin [BONUS: Nosy Beth gif!]

Beth and I met in Madison, Wisconsin, on the fourth floor of the Memorial Union, in the Campus Women's Center, where we both worked, and where we shared many a meal purchased from food trucks. In Portland, Beth is lucky to still have plentiful food truck access. Wherever you are, you are lucky to have a bit more Beth access in the form of her website and Little Guy Alive, her zombie preparedness guide. 

 

What do you smell like?

*Vaseline lotion in bulk from Costco (the same variety that my mom used to buy in a higher price-per-unit volume from a normal grocery), Kirkland Signature laundry detergent (lightly lavender, biodegradable), some bougie Angel Baby Earth Mama coco butter nipple cream, one of several flavors of name brand Chapstick and Oil of Olay sensitive face lotion and sunscreen. I aspire to wear colognes, but the ones I love are out of my price range.

*The diner where I had brunch in this hoodie. The sunscreen I sprayed yesterday before wearing this hoodie. I used to smell like the camp fire that I sat around in this hoodie. 

*The lip ring-turned-stud just below the corner of my mouth smells a little bit like bellybutton no matter how often or with which soaps I wash it diligently. My mouth may be infected with some kind of plague germ that oozes from my interior through the passage of the stud post and into the air around me. I do not enjoy this particular facet of my scent.

*Here's a quick tip: to get a little, tiny insight into what you yourself smell like, not only can you analyze your commonly used products, but you can just press your nose down onto your upper lip. Your upper lip is likely to be tainted by food, make-up and lotion, but in a different way from whiffing your own pits, shoes, excretions or forearm. Combine all these factors together for an impressionist painting of your smell landscape. And pay attention when you first walk into your bedroom or entire house after a long-enough absence -- you sweat all over those sheets and seep all over those halls.

What do you like to smell?

*Water that dripped off of metal: most often found in cities near where dumpsters get rained on -- which makes it a dangerous smell because ... dumpsters. It is heavily into iron, like red meat and spinach. It makes for very, very richly scented puddles. It is really similar to hands right from the monkey bars or a nice set of keys.

*Wounds: I like the smell of a tiny bit of blood -- not enough to be life threatening -- which maybe means I should seriously seriously discuss my iron deficiency with my doctor. Skin always smells nice and you can make sure that a wound is clean by catching whiffs of iodine, triple-antibiotic, hand soap and fresh gauze or adhesive bandages. Also, if somebody trusts you enough to let you sniff their wounds, you get a cozy feeling of being truly loved. I'm not going to lie ... a small amount of pus as a base note isn't half bad.

*Old men in elevators: a grandpa wearing a sweater or button-down shirt in an elevator is usually headed some place vaguely formal, so he has recently showered, shaved and put on clothing that may have lingering traces of his awesome smell from last time he wore it. He is in a confined space that makes sniffing him much easier than when he walks past in an open space with his wife, who usually smells stronger than he does. I wonder if I like a combination of some common old man products -- perhaps Stetson, Gillette and ... what do grandpas use for shampoo? I would investigate the specifics, but no matter how friendly I am, I'm fairly certain that sniffing their faces, necks and wrists is a faux pas and that I would not be able to stop myself at a basic question of "Do you mind if I ask what your cologne is? I love that smell," and I would stumble into "And your shaving cream, sir? Do you use your wife's shampoo? I don't want to presume that you don't help with laundry, but do you know what kind of detergent she uses? What kind of closet, dresser or chest do you store your vaguely formal clothing in?" So I hope to personally replicate their smell through sheer luck.

*Everyday things that I like to sniff: blooming jasmine, lilacs and roses. Food being baked or cooked, for both the pure enjoyment and, more importantly, the technical aspects of whether or not it is finished and which other ingredients it may benefit from. Books, old and new, as I aspire to collect knowledge of binding glue, paper stock and ink type in addition to storage factors such as sun, damp or dust. My baby when he is not covered in his own bodily functions. My partner's armpits and neck, because it drives him slightly nuts and makes him worry about stinking, but of course I love his smell, except when he was made nervous by a power meeting.

tree tomato

Before

I had never eaten a tree tomato before visiting Rwanda, but I would happily eat one every day from now on if I could. Tree tomatoes taste tart and sweet, like hibiscus and tomato leaf and maybe pomegranate (though that could be the texture talking). In Rwanda, I also saw them referred to as a plums, 'Japanese fruits,' and prunes. A little online digging reveals they're also known as tamarillos and love fruits. Preeta says that in Malaysia, they eat them by biting off the top and sucking out the seedy insides. I consumed them mainly in juice form, but also as part of fruit salads, and in messy little piles, all by their tangy selves.

One of the best smells I experienced in Rwanda is related, though I don't believe it came solely from tree tomato trees. A powerful tomato-leaf-esque smell seemed to emanate from the hills themselves. I noticed it in particular when riding a bus with the window open or, even better, riding a moto and letting the breeze carry this scratchy green smell straight to me. In the evenings, there was sometimes a nightfire smell that mixed that same tomato leaf aroma with smoke and wood and a little bit of eucalyptus. Green and heady and rich enough to calm you no matter how fast the automobile carrying you is going.

After

Nosy Interview: Elizabeth Mathews

 Elizabeth in Galaxy NGC 474: Cosmic Blender, © P.-A. Duc

I was lucky to join a Seattle writing group that Elizabeth started, and though she was away at graduate school during much of the time I was in the group, I did gain the nickname Shiv to avoid the inevitable confusion associated with having two Elizabeths-who-go-by-Elizabeth in one group. 

What do you smell like?
When I smell myself, I smell like skin and oil and sweet, tangy sweat. I like to pretend that other people can't smell me, or that if they can, they smell my soap (lavender) or shampoo (peony, I would guess, not knowing what peony smells like). But really they probably smell sweat sunk deep into fabric and rewarmed, except when I wear jasmine essential oil, and then they probably smell jasmine floating deceptively over sweat. Last winter I think I smelled like mildewed sweaters for months. That was a tough time.

I just asked Nick what I smell like, and first he asked what he smells like (rich, good sweat and skin), then he hesitated and said he'd have to think about it (he knows that women are supposed to smell like flowers), but when I told him what I smell like to myself, he got really excited and said "Yeah! We both smell like sweat. But nice sweat." My sister told me about a study that said that women can smell when a man has the right kind of genetic makeup to boost their immunity and make strong babies. I don't know how scientific this is, or how it accounts for attraction to people when baby-making isn't the goal, but I like the idea that the body seeks out what it needs in another human being by smell. When Nick and I met, he was wrapping book gifts in a hot little room all day, and not wearing deodorant. I think a lot about how I knew instantly that I wanted to be with him, and it might have been simply because of his BO. I do get a lot fewer colds than I used to. I wonder what else can be communicated by smell. Body language gets a lot of credit for sending nonverbal signals, but do I sometimes like people for their scent alone? Do my favorite qualities transmit themselves chemically? Can I smell concern for animal welfare? Can I smell kindness or love of books by tormented authors?

What do you like to smell? 

I just smelled a woman at the grocery store who was wearing lots of musky vanilla perfume, and that was really nice. I like food smells in general-soaps and essential oils that smell like almond and coconut and cucumber, and smells attached to things that are actually consumable, like coffee, wine, bourbon, vanilla pipe tobacco, baked things, garlic and onions, cilantro, basil... I also like the smell of a lot of toxic things, like gasoline, which reminds me of being a little kid riding around in the backseat of my mom's huge blue Dodge Dart, or darkrooms, which smell like magic. There are scents that make my heart beat fast, like thrift stores and libraries and schools, and there are scents that make my heart expand, like my nieces' scalps when they were babies, or my cat Sam, who smells like woodsmoke. I have a pretty faulty memory, so I love walking down a street and being jarred by red cedar, which smells like my favorite elementary school teacher and the bent-wood boxes he taught us to make, or my first boyfriend's cologne, with its accompanying rush of teenage hormones and newness. I almost never smell dry pine needles since leaving Washington State, but when I do, I am full of nostalgia for my grandma's rickety little cabin that her father built in the mountains near Lake Wenatchee, for days of hiking and hunting for tree frogs and swimming and luxuriating in boredom while waiting for an adult to drive us to Leavenworth, the Disneyland of Eastern Washington. California bay trees are the smell of the campus at Mills College, of sleep deprivation and my brain opening up. Now that I've moved away from Oakland, I'm sure every time I smell night-blooming jasmine or lemon blossoms or marijuana in open air, I'll be homesick.

Even though I can remember liking certain scents as a kid (light blue Mr. Sketches, grape Bubble Yum, the perfume inserts in magazines) and as a teen ("Smells Like Opium" room spray, Clove cigarettes), I am only just now learning to be a curator of my own scent experience. I grew up in an unscented world. My dad had asthma, so we never burned candles or incense or made a fire in the fireplace, and he had sensitive skin, so we used unscented soap, unscented shampoo, unscented laundry detergent. And my mom is a supersmeller who is prone to headaches, so she banned any pungent scents (we had to go outside to chew gum). I learned to seek out a ghostly underscent, to love Dove unscented soap's thick sweetness and hate Ivory's astringency. When my beloved oldest sister started college and moved across the lake to Seattle, she began wearing Sung by Alfred Sung, and every time she opened the front door to pick up some of her things, the whoosh of citrus and flowers and mystery reached me all the way at the back of the house, and the overload to my scent-deprived brain was intoxicating. When I moved out years later, my older sisters gave me scent-gifts like a patchouli plant and apricot incense, but before long I lapsed into my native scentless state. I'm making progress, though. My most recent good scent choice was to move to Long Beach, where the sweet leafy air that gusts in my bedroom window has a trace of the ocean.

programming note no.3: nosy hiatus

Nosy readers! I'm taking a trip to Rwanda and my internet access is taking a dive. The once-weekly Nosy Interview posts will resume on the first Tuesday in September, after I return (hopefully having smelled things I've never smelled before).

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) 

Nosy Interview: Christine Hebl

Pika and Christine in Aurora Over Norway, © Ole Christian Salomonsen

Christine and I met through our mutual friend Tina, and I've gotten to know Christine (now a Minneapolitan once again!) better in recent years by reading (and gazing at the lovely photos on) her blog, Pinyon Pines.

What do you smell like? 

I would love to answer this question by saying I smell of a most exquisite and unique eau de toilette, but I cannot. Truthfully, I cannot say I smell of something even arguably delightful. Odiferous compounds make my husband's left elbow hurt. Even a stranger drizzled sparingly with Chanel No. 5 has the potential to set off my partner's left arm joint, if she is within a very vague vicinity of him.  Perfume is not an option for me.

If not a classy aroma, what do I smell like?  I am quite sure my skin and cotton apparel always smell like sweat. I live in Texas, and most of the time the heat index is worse than intolerable. On top of that, I spend considerable portions of weekdays outside with young students. I like the robust smell of sweat, though; it makes me feel like I could actually possess some kind of prized American work ethic.  In addition to perspiration and hard work, there is no doubt that I smell of coffee. I drink lots of it. My breath and my fingers smell like high-quality, snobbish, expensive fair-trade deliciousness. Then, there's my hair, which is plentiful and straw-like and has a tendency to pick up random odors from the day's activities. "What is that smell emanating from me?" I ask myself. I grab a wad of my medium-brown strands for answers and take a big sniff. "Ohhh yeah, I live in Texas, so it's that massive chunk of beef that my neighbor was barbequing in the courtyard adjacent to my apartment door." Or, "that's right, it's the whiteboard markers used by the kiddos in class today." Or, "uh-huh, it's the pickup truck exhaust from that obscenely long red light on my bike commute home from work."

Hmmm, I'm starting to think that I don't smell of anything close to exquisite or delightful.  I have a mate and an acceptable amount of friends, though, so I guess my smell is nominally tolerable.

What do you like to smell?

My dog and I like to smell things. Often, my dog likes to smell different things than I, but it's clear we both rely on and enjoy using the olfactory sense. I respect the fact that my dog smells stinky things impartially; bad smells do not make her gag, but they do make me gag. Even though overzealous smelling of my environs can lead to the occasional, rogue, repulsive odor and a subsequent gagging reflex, I love my sense of smell.  I feel that I have a good smell memory.  The best smells are the sentimental ones. For instance, a whiff of a chlorinated pool has the potential to conjure up good memories involving underwater handstand contests, neon swimsuits, and Ace of Base tunes.

My forever favorite smells: freshly cut watermelon, dandelions, the ocean, cardamom, dusty LP sleeves, thyme, library books, my husband's face, ginger, rain, lemon zest, my husband's cooking, and the multifarious array of smells associated with hiking around a place like Mount Rainier.

smells like teen mom

 Leah & Amber and Farrah & Sophia and Tyler & Catelynn and Bentley & Maci

Farrah 

Sickly sweet perfumes, fruity-floral body sprays, and Victoria's Secret lotion--too much of all three. Antibacterial gel from a pump. Packaged foods. Tomato sauce. Sweet baby powder. Wood cleaner and the dry hay smell of the underside of an oriental rug. Hair product and lycra. Laundry detergent. Paper towel. Sometimes plum. 

Maci 

Ointment. More fruity floral perfumes, maybe some citrusy ones, too (ck one would suit her). Cut grass and other lawn smells, dirt and gravel. Denim and sweet lotion. That awful ex-boyfriend of hers probably smells amazing to Maci, and it's probably a challenge for her not to lean in and smell him when she puts their son in his arms, forgetting for a second what a jackass he is, until he opens his mouth. Then whatever he smells like, looks like, doesn't matter, he's brick for brains, and mean. Old gum and chewing tobacco. The new car smell of his truck preserved with the help of a rearview mirror ornament in the shape of his own fine face. 

Catelynn 

When Catelynn's fiancé Tyler interviews for a job at a local pizzeria, he's asked why, if his five-year plan has him graduating from college, does he want to work at this dinky pizza place, and he answers that he loves pizza so much. The owner protests, But you're too skinny! Tyler laughs, No, I love it! I eat it all the time. He smells like teenager deodorant and mint and clean sneakers. He also tells the owner, You gotta start somewhere, right? And when Tyler later gets the call saying he got the job, he beams and claps his hands together and says: I'm excited because I just love pizza so much! (Adorable.) So Catelynn and Tyler's apartment smells like day-old pizza. Oily cardboard, parmesan sprinkles, bits of garlicky crust. Warm.

Amber
Flypaper and vinyl, crumb-y carpet, self-tanner and all the associated products meant to elongate its cling. Mascara and huge plastic cups of soda, gone flat. Damp winter coat and aloe vera baby wipes. That one sad candle that Gary bought Amber when he tried to win her back in an earlier season, when he brought takeaway Cracker Barrel meatloaf and the scented gift-shop candle and set them up on a table in that terrible hotel room. And Amber said, Mmm, that smells good, Gary, and it was, as it always is, very difficult to watch.

Nosy Interview: Raymond McDaniel

Ray in Abell 2744: Pandora's Cluster of Galaxies, ©NASA

I met Ray on the mean streets of Ann Arbor, and though he was without the "Jesus-grade hair" he mentions below, he had the definite aura of a guru. Purchase Ray's latest book of poems, Saltwater Empire, and read his poetry reviews on the Constant Critic.  

What do you smell like?

Since I can no better determine my own scent than know what I look like when I'm not looking at myself, I had to consult others. There are conflicting reports.  

Some say I smell like summer: Queen Helene's Cocoa Butter and salt. Some insist I smell like cashmere: cream and cardamom. Yet others suggest I smell like suede and book dust. One claims I smell like a weak solution of Halloween, payday and lust. You can take from the variety of these answers one of two things: you can imagine I smell like eating a vanilla cupcake on the beach while reading a used copy of Ficciones, or you can simply imagine that I smell Good, whatever Good smells like. 

What do you like to smell?

Sadly, my sense of smell has deteriorated over the years. I blame this on living in Michigan, where for vast, icy stretches of the year I cannot smell at all, because my nose is clotted with frozen snot. That said, I still have fond recollections of many scents, as per Proust's famous madeleine. I love the smell of things in transition, of matter as it changes form - how a tangerine aerosolizes when you peel it apart, how cedar turns in fire, how rain activates soil by turning it into mud. I know it's merely chemical, but what is more magical than science? There's something about the way scent seems to hide until some action reveals or releases it that has always struck me as essentially erotic. My favorite example of this is the unbinding of hair. Once, many years ago, unbelievably, I had long, thick, Jesus-grade hair, and at the end of the day, when I took it down and shook it loose, there would issue an olfactory cascade of whatever product I had a washed and conditioned it with (usually Aveda, bless its botanical heart). Nose-thrilling! Nose-enthralling! Even now, when on those rare occasions I find myself in a grocery store, I will loiter in the shampoo aisle and surreptitiously sniff from the array of products, each of which might as well be bottled nostalgia, stamped with years and memories otherwise inaccessible. Smells are the external hard drive of experience, the horcruxes of days past. I wasn't drinking when I wrote this, but now I'm drunk. How did that happen, Nosy Girl?