I wish you all a happy new year

Year after year
The leaf and the shoot;
The babe and the nestling,
The worm at the root;
The bride at the altar,
The corpse on the bier—
The Earth and its story,
Year after year.

From "The Mystery" by George Francis Savage Armstrong (1845-1906)

Young Bacchus, Giovanni Bellini, c. 1514

Celebrating 2009

Perfumeshrine has kindly organized a little blogfest so we can collectively celebrate stuff that pleased us in 2009. The only rules are that we must write about things we first encountered in the past year, and we can't leave out perfume (as if that would ever happen). Since I'm the critical type who can't seem to adore very many things at once, my list is short--just a couple of books and fragrances. Be sure to click on the links below to see where other people are spreading the love.




Best New Perfume: Moondance from Anya's Garden, of course. This gorgeous white floral proves that a natural perfume can be easy to love and satisfyingly complex. It also confirms that Anya is an extremely versatile perfumer. It's amazing that the same woman who created Temple and Fairchild also produced the ethereal Moondance. You can read my full review of Moondance here.

Best Vintage Perfume: I rarely meet an oldie I can't like, but my encounter with Voeu de Noël, a long lost Caron, was the best perfume experience I've had in a decade. It's a good thing I had only a small sample, because if I owned more I'd just hoard it like an idiot, thus staining my pleasure with guilt. Who needs that? I wrote a few words on Voeu de Noël here.

I can't bear to use "best" in reference to a book, so I'll just say that these are books that delighted me in the past year. It's an odd little list, but I'm an odd little reader:

The Last Witch of Langenburg: Murder in a German Village by Thomas Robisheaux--This account of a 17th century witch trial is fascinating and deftly written. I wrote a brief review of it here. The Literate Housewife has an interesting interview with Robisheaux that will probably do a better job of convincing you to seek out this book than I can.

Blues & Chaos: The Music Writing of Robert Palmer--Palmer was a wonderful writer and a brilliant critic. Anyone who cares about music will find something to love in this collection of his work. You can read my review of it here.

Doctor Sleep by Madison Smartt Bell--I've been meaning to write a real post about this novel, and I may yet do that, but for now I'll just say it's a wonderful book and deserves lots of readers. It's a clever thriller, often quite funny, but it's also a story of spiritual torment and revelation. The perfect seamlessness of the narrative is stunning, and Bell's prose is always beautiful. I'm tempted to start blathering about the ideas Bell explores in Doctor Sleep, but I'll spare you that and just encourage you to get a copy and enjoy.

My fellow Best of 2009 bloggers:

Perfume in Progress

mossyloomings

1000 Fragrances

Ayala's Smelly Blog

Notes on Shoes, Cake & Perfume

Suzanne's perfume journal at Eiderdown Press

Scent Hive

Olfactarama

Illuminated Perfume

A Rose Beyond the Thames

The Non-Blonde

Under the Cupola

Perfume Shrine

Savvy Thinker

All I Am - A Redhead

Notes from the Ledge

I Smell Therefore I Am

Attack of the killer deer pee

In the fall when the deer are in rut there's always a pretty strong smell of deer piss in the woods. Sometimes I'll come upon a fresh puddle and the smell will be overpowering. It tends to linger in the nostrils for quite a while. This is not my favorite olfactory experience. In fact, it makes me faintly queasy--I don't understand how hunters can bear the stink of the store-bought pee they use to lure horny bucks.

By late December the mating business is mostly over and the aroma of love subsides, but this morning I walked into a little hollow where the air reeked of it. I kept walking, thinking I'd get past the source of the smell, but it just got stronger. I felt a little sick, and then a little dizzy. There was no way to get a clean breath so I decided I'd just stop and ponder the experience.

It didn't make any sense for the stink to be so powerful and I wondered if it might be some sort of hallucination. I bet I'm not the only perfume freak who occasionally smells a familiar fragrance that isn't actually present. Maybe the deer funk was a figment of my imagination, aided by sense memory. More likely, though, it was another phenomenon that is common among the scent-obsessed--something I think of as The Blob Effect. That's when a scent that is objectively mild and inoffensive suddenly takes over your environment, smothering you with its presence even though other people might barely be able to detect it.

In any case, the longer I stood there breathing in the aroma of pee, the less horrible it smelled to me. I even began to like it a little. It still made me dizzy, but dizzy isn't necessarily bad. I saw one small doe about 40 yards away, ambling through the trees. She looked so sweet. It occurred to me that I was channeling a horny buck, and that was slightly disturbing so I decided to head back to my car.

More than 12 hours later, as I sit here anointed with perfume in a house scented with candles, I can still smell a faint scent of deer pee. Not so nice, but there are worse things I could be smelling.


Photo by Emery Way from Wikimedia Commons.

In dreams...

Last night I had a peculiar dream that featured a certain well-known novelist riding around the streets of New York (or was it Philadelphia?) on a unicycle. I've been enjoying this novelist's work recently, so it's not surprising that he would turn up in a dream. I can't explain the unicycle.

The dream has been in the back of my mind, providing a nice little note of absurdity in a dreary day--which is what prompted me to click on a link to the World Dream Bank when it popped up during my Google search for Irish music (can't explain that either.) It's a fun site, well worth some time if you have a weakness for peeping into strangers' psyches. The Bank's creator, Chris Wayan, is an artist and a furry. You can read an interview with Wayan here.

Happy peeping. Enjoy your Monday.



The Dream of the Doctor (also called The Temptation of the Idler), Albrecht Dürer, 1498.

A little antidote...

...to all the Christmas cheer.

Demon, Mihály Zichy, 1878

In honor of Christmas...

...and those who celebrate it, here is my favorite depiction of the Nativity. You can read an analysis of it here. Click on the image to enlarge it.

Mystic Nativity, Sandro Botticelli, 1500

"the still point of reality..."

You realize that in silences
things yield and almost betray
their ultimate secrets.
At times, one half expects
to discover an error in Nature,
the still point of reality,
the missing link that will not hold,
the thread we cannot untangle
in order to get at the truth.

You look around. Your mind seeks,
makes harmonies, falls apart
in the perfume, expands
when the day wearies away.
There are silences in which one watches
in every fading human shadow
something divine let go.

From "The Lemon Trees" by Eugenio Montale, translated by Lee Gerlach. The complete poem is here.

A little Christmas rant

I was in Nashville’s most popular bookstore today, looking for gifts. I was happy to see that the place was fairly mobbed with shoppers. I enjoyed browsing, although as usual half the things I wanted weren’t in stock. Every time I go searching for titles in a brick and mortar store, I am amazed at all the good books that don’t merit shelf space. And all the crappy books that do.

After diligent hunting I did find suitable books for all the adults on my list, then I ventured into the children’s section to get something for my niece’s little boy. He’s almost nine, and I was happy to see that there was a whole wall devoted to fiction for kids his age. He loves sports, has been an amazing little athlete since he was a toddler. Surely there would be plenty of things to interest him.

Nope. There were precious few books about sports, or anything else that would appeal to a kid like my great-nephew. Instead there was volume after volume of what can best be described as the demon spawn of Harry Potter. I swear more than half the books were blatant Potter rip-offs. It was ridiculous. I felt a faint sympathy with the Christian loonies who rail against J. K. Rowling. Hell, I’m a witch and seeing all those books kinda gave me the creeps.

Believe me, I’m not opposed to magical fantasy for kids. I wish there had been more of it when I was a girl, I would have loved it. I just don’t think a steady diet of it is necessarily a good thing, especially when everybody’s getting a steady diet of it. It’s all a little too grandiose, too fixated on power struggles. I think it encourages an unforgiving, oppositional view of the world.

Of course, you can find fault with just about any literature for children. When I was ten I loved Black Beauty, which is a pretty twisted book in its fascination with cruelty. But the shelves in libraries and bookstores weren’t filled with dozens of Black Beauty clones. When I’d wallowed in all the suffering I could stand, I moved on to something a little happier—I had to, if I wanted to keep reading. Kids now could read nothing but wizard fantasies, and obviously a lot of them do or the store wouldn’t keep so many in stock.

Another problem with the glut of Potteresque books is that they don’t leave much space for books to suit kids whose imaginations don’t run in that direction. Not every kid digs wizards. Think how disheartening a visit to the bookstore would be if you were one of those kids.

I wonder what those of you who have young children think about this. What do your kids read? Am I being unnecessarily cranky?




Illustration by Jessie Willcox Smith for A Child's Garden of Verses, R.L. Stevenson, 1905.

"Thy sunbeam comes upon this earth..."

Thy sunbeam comes upon this earth of mine with arms outstretched and stands at my door the livelong day to carry back to thy feet clouds made of my tears and sighs and songs.

With fond delight thou wrappest about thy starry breast that mantle of misty cloud, turning it into numberless shapes and folds and colouring it with hues everchanging.

It is so light and so fleeting, tender and tearful and dark, that is why thou lovest it, O thou spotless and serene. And that is why it may cover thy awful white light with its pathetic shadows.

From Gitanjali, Rabindranath Tagore, 1913

The Angel Standing in the Sun, William Turner, 1846

Winter Solstice

Sometimes, usually on days that are very cold or when a storm is threatening, the birds and animals hide themselves, and the woods go very still. That’s when the spirits come out. They’re not bold. They reveal themselves in brief glimpses—a shadow that appears for a moment, or a fleeting image that forms on the ragged bark of a tree. When I was a little girl I used to pursue the spirits and try to capture them in my sight, but it never worked and I learned to let them be.

When I got a little older I began to fret about whether they were real or just something I imagined. Eventually I came to understand that my question was a mistake, the result of my training in how to chop the world into pieces. Growing up, for most of us, means forgetting how to see the world whole. My Yuletide wish is that we seek to remember.


Waldlandschaft im Winter, Conrad Alexander Müller-Kurzwelly (1855-1914)