Search Results for: amazon

The Miracle of the Mundane

Sheet music discovered in 2009 identified as part of a childhood creation by Mozart, Kerstin Joensson / AP. Penguin Random House.

Heather Havrilesky | What If This Were Enough? | September 2018 | 16 minutes (3,976 words)

 

On a good day, all of humanity’s accomplishments feel personal: the soaring violins of the second allegretto movement of Beethoven’s Symphony no. 7, the intractable painted stare of Frida Kahlo, the enormous curving spans of the Golden Gate Bridge, the high wail of PJ Harvey’s voice on “Victory,” the last melancholy pages of Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose. These works remind us that we’re connected to the past and our lives have limitless potential. We were built to touch the divine.

On a bad day, all of humanity’s failures feel unbearably personal: coyotes wandering city streets due to encroaching wildfires, American citizens in Puerto Rico enduring another day without electricity or potable water in the wake of Hurricane Maria, neo-Nazis spouting hatred in American towns, world leaders testing missiles that would bring the deaths of millions of innocent people. We encounter bad news in the intimate glow of our cell phone screens, and then project our worries onto the flawed artifacts of our broken world: the for lease sign on the upper level of the strip mall, the crow picking at a hamburger wrapper in the gutter, the pink stucco walls of the McMansion flanked by enormous square hedges, the blaring TVs on the walls of the local restaurant. On bad days, each moment is haunted by a palpable but private sense of dread. We feel irrelevant at best, damned at worst. Our only hope is to numb and distract ourselves as well as we can on our long, slow march to the grave.

On a good day, humankind’s creations make us feel like we’re here for a reason. Our belief sounds like the fourth molto allegro movement of Mozart’s Symphony no. 41, Jupiter: Our hearts seem to sing along to Mozart’s climbing strings, telling us that if we’re patient, if we work hard, if we believe, if we stay focused, we will continue to feel joy, to do meaningful work, to show up for each other, to grow closer to some sacred ground. We are thrillingly alive and connected to every other living thing, in perfect, effortless accord with the natural world.

But it’s hard to sustain that feeling, even on the best of days — to keep the faith, to stay focused on what matters most—because the world continues to besiege us with messages that we are failing. You’re feeding your baby a bottle and a voice on the TV tells you that your hair should be shinier. You’re reading a book but someone on Twitter wants you to know about a hateful thing a politician said earlier this morning. You are bedraggled and inadequate and running late for something and it’s always this way. You are busy and distracted. You are not here.

It’s even worse on a bad day, when humankind’s creations fill us with the sense that we are failing as a people, as a planet, and nothing can be done about it. The chafing smooth jazz piped into the immaculate coffee joint, the fake cracks painted on the wall at the Cheesecake Factory, the smoke from fires burning thousands of acres of dry tinder, blotting out the sun — they remind us that even though our planet is in peril, we are still being teased and flattered into buying stuff that we don’t need, or coaxed into forgetting the truth about our darkening reality. As the crowd around us watches a fountain dance to Frank Sinatra’s “Somewhere Beyond the Sea” at the outdoor mall, we peek at our phones and discover the bellowed warnings of an erratic foreign leader, threatening to destroy us from thousands of miles away. Everything cheerful seems to have an ominous shadow looming behind it now. The smallest images and bits of news can feel so invasive, so frightening. They erode our belief in what the world can and should be.

As the first total solar eclipse in America in thirty-nine years reveals itself, an email lands in my inbox from ABC that says The Great American Eclipse at the top. People are tweeting and retweeting the same eclipse jokes all morning. As the day grows dimmer, I remember that Bonnie Tyler is going to sing her 1983 hit “Total Eclipse of the Heart” on an eclipse-themed cruise off the coast of Florida soon.

Even natural wonders aren’t what they used to be, because nothing can be experienced without commentary. In the 1950s, we worried about how TV would affect our culture. Now our entire lives are a terrible talk show that we can’t turn off. It often feels like we’re struggling to find ourselves and each other in a crowded, noisy room. We are plagued, around the clock, by the shouting and confusion and fake intimacy of the global community, mid–nervous breakdown.

Sometimes it feels like our shared breakdown is making us less generous and less focused. On a bad day, the world seems to be filled with bad books and bad buildings and bad songs and bad choices. Worthwhile creations and ego-driven, sloppy works are treated to the same hype and praise; soon it starts to feel as if everything we encounter was designed merely to make some carefully branded human a fortune. Why aren’t we reaching for more than this? Isn’t art supposed to inspire or provoke or make people feel emotions that they don’t necessarily want to feel? Can’t the moon block out the sun without a 1980s pop accompaniment? So much of what is created today seems engineered to numb or distract us, keeping us dependent on empty fixes indefinitely.

Such creations feel less like an attempt to capture the divine than a precocious student’s term paper. If any generous spirit shines through, it’s manufactured in the hopes of a signal boost, so that some leisure class end point can be achieved. Our world is glutted with products that exist to help someone seize control of their own life while the rest of the globe falls to ruin. Work (and guidance, and leadership) that comes from such a greedy, uncertain place has more in common with that fountain at the outdoor mall, playing the same songs over and over, every note an imitation of a note played years before.

But human beings are not stupid. We can detect muddled and self-serving intentions in the artifacts we encounter. Even so, such works slowly infect us with their lopsided values. Eventually, we can’t help but imagine that this is the only way to proceed: by peddling your own wares at the expense of the wider world. Can’t we do better than this, reach for more, insist on more? Why does our culture make us feel crazy for trying?

Read more…

Putting a New Stone on the Grave: Sjón Brings the Golem to Iceland

Door to attic of the Old New Synagogue where according to myth the golem rests. Slowcentury / Getty

Adam Morgan | Longreads | September 2018 | 10 minutes (2,560 words)

In the summer of 1990, an Icelandic writer named Sigurjón Birgir Sigurðsson traveled to Czechoslovakia with his friend, the singer-songwriter Björk. Their alternative rock band, The Sugarcubes, was performing in Prague because of the city’s folk status as the birthplace of the sugar cube. But while they were in town, Sigurðsson made a pilgrimage to the Old Jewish Cemetery, where the legendary creator of the Golem of Prague had been buried more than four centuries earlier. After placing a stone on his grave, Sigurðsson asked the rabbi for help solving a personal problem, and in exchange, promised to bring the golem into Icelandic literature.

Today, Sigurðsson goes by the name Sjón. In 2013, when his surreal novels were first translated into English by Victoria Cribb, critics compared him to Borges, Calvino, and Kafka. Most of his books are less than 200 pages, but this week sees the publication of CoDex 1962, a labyrinthine epic that invites comparison to Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. Originally published as three separate novels in Iceland in 1994, 2001, and 2016, CoDex 1962 is Sjón’s fulfillment of the pact he made in the Old Jewish Cemetery almost three decades ago. Read more…

The Constant Consumer

Longreads Pick
Source: Real Life Mag
Published: Sep 10, 2018
Length: 11 minutes (2,798 words)

Arranging Your Body in Space: Talking Identity, Memoir, and Twins with Leah Dieterich

Getty Images

“One-eighth of all natural pregnancies begin as twins,” Leah Dieterich writes in her memoir, “but early in pregnancy, one twin becomes less viable and is compressed against the wall of the uterus or absorbed by the other twin.”

This concept of a vanishing twin, a term coined in the year of Dieterich’s birth, frames the author’s fascinating exploration of love, identity, sexuality and relationships. Though she finds her complement in her husband Eric, the twinship that is their marriage starts to diminish, or ‘vanish,’ just as her body had as a ballet dancer in her youth. Dieterich tries to figure out what drives her to fuse so strongly with certain people, what it is about her that fears being alone, and how individuality vanishes in a union. Maybe she lost her twin? Like the great essayists, her probing mind struggles to understand itself, and she makes fascinating connections between a range of subjects from pop culture to psychology to literature to help figure out who she is and what she wants.

Vanishing Twins is a powerful, poetic memoir, both emotive and cerebral, that casts new light on the familiar issue of relationships, marriage and storytelling, and vividly articulates some of the most subtle aspects of human relationships in a way many readers will recognize in themselves.

When did you start writing about your relationship with your husband and your own identity?

I started writing Vanishing Twins about six years ago, but before that I’d explored some of the same themes of love, language, and identity in fiction. I’d also started a screenplay for a film about a couple trying to define their individual identities while maintaining their bond, who meet a set of identical twins who are trying to do the same. Sexual entanglements ensue. I was really only at the research phase for this film, interviewing a set of twins that my husband was friends with, and I got so into our correspondence and the other research I was doing about twins (and relationships and sexuality) that I realized I needed to pursue this topic in a more essayistic way.

When I tell people about your book, I emphasize not only the subject matter but the way you approached your story. To me, you turn the memoir on its head by staging the text in a poetic way on the page, and by alternating essayistic diversions with the larger narrative to explore related themes. How did you find your book’s inventive form?

I have writers like Maggie Nelson and Sarah Manguso and many others to thank for the form. I really love the numbered aphorisms in Bluets but knew that felt too academic for my project, though I have always loved the way Nelson can synthesize the ideas of great thinkers into her own personal narrative. I assume it means she’s a great teacher, though I’ve never studied with her. I was a private student of Sarah Manguso’s and learned a lot from her about concision and how it is possible to make something very weighty out of only a few words or paragraphs. I like the term “staging” that you use, as well, because I feel that my writing has been informed by my background as a ballet dancer. In dance, you are constantly arranging and rearranging your body in space. This is how I treated the various sections of the book. I moved them around until they seemed fluid like a dance.

You work in advertising, but did you ever formally study writing?

I haven’t formally studied writing in a degree program. I cobbled my writerly education together from a couple of UCLA extension classes, a week-long workshop in Mexico, and two long-term private student relationships, one with Chris Daley who leads Writing Workshops of Los Angeles with whom I met with weekly for two years while generating the first draft of Vanishing Twins, and the other with Sarah Manguso, who gave me notes on two drafts of the book over the course of the following two years.

How has your ad career informed your literary ventures?

Advertising writing requires a lot of concision, so it has very much informed my inclination toward brevity in my literary work. Being a copywriter and having my headlines or TV scripts rejected (and sometimes accepted, even lauded) by my boss on a daily basis prepared me well for the rejection I’d have to face on the way to publishing a book.

People often describe writing about our lives as “cathartic,” but that isn’t the point of a lot of personal writing. In your book, you’re searching for answers, for a deeper understanding. Do you feel that you’ve achieved a new perspective on your life now?

I definitely gained perspective on the period of my life that I’ve explored in Vanishing Twins. I always write to understand something, whether it’s something about myself or something about the world at large. It’s the way I process my thoughts. When I’m writing or revising with the intent to publish, I’m always doing so with David Foster Wallace’s intention—that the purpose of literature is to connect, challenge, and ultimately make us feel less alone. So while it’s true that writing about one’s life isn’t necessarily “cathartic,” there is a visceral element (connection with other humans) for both reader and writer when it is done successfully.

Sometimes the people who become characters in our stories feel betrayed or mischaracterized, or feel they get should an editorial say in the text. Has writing about the people in your life caused any tensions?

Of course. But these tensions were an important part of the project itself. I had to find a way to honor my autonomy and my individual voice as an artist, while simultaneously respecting the differing opinions, memories, and thoughts of someone I love deeply. In a lot of ways it’s a continuation of the journey begun by the self who narrates the book. Luckily my husband is an artist himself, and a lover of literature and philosophy, which made the process easier. Many of the events in this book happened more than a decade ago. To have the opportunity, though painful, to revisit them has helped us realize how far we have both come together and individually since that time.

An Immoderate Novel for an Immoderate Season: An Interview with Olivia Laing

The great North American total eclipse of 2017. John Finney / Getty

Bridey Heing | Longreads | September 2018 | 10 minutes (2,761 words)

 

As a non-fiction writer, Olivia Laing has made a name for herself by writing deeply empathic explorations of creativity and the human condition. Her 2011 debut, To The River, situates the River Ouse, in North Yorkshire, within history and culture, from its role in 13th century battles to the death of Virginia Woolf. Her follow-up, 2013’s The Trip to Echo Spring, focused on American writers and alcoholism. Her 2015 book, The Lonely City, interrogated loneliness as a state of being and as a catalyst for art. But with her fiction debut, Laing has pulled back from the closely researched subjects that have been her wheelhouse; instead, she broadly documents a seven-week span of time. And yet her  penchant for research still peaks through — the narrative is written from the perspective of a fictionalized Kathy Acker-esque avatar, whose books Laing kept piled around her for inspiration while she wrote.

Crudo opens with the resignation of Steve Bannon, which Kathy, a soon-to-be newlywed, follows on social media from a Tuscan resort. Her attention ricochets between the rapidly unfolding news cycle playing out online and her private world of friends, her upcoming wedding, and, eventually, adjusting to life with her new husband. As she writes and prepares for her first trip overseas without her husband, Kathy charts the frenetic energy of the summer of 2017, unsure of whether the end of the world is truly approaching.

That sense of confusion was what Laing sought to capture. She wrote the book in real-time, with carefully outlined rules that were designed to ensure she didn’t deviate from the emotional responses to a specific whirlwind moment. Kathy, who is based in part on Kathy Acker, is also based on Laing, who turned forty and got married within the time frame of the novel. Crudo was conceived of as a means of understanding the impossible speed at which the news seemed to move, while also preserving the feeling of instability and uncertainty she saw in herself and those around her. Read more…

The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Perfume

Illustration by Jacob Stead

Katy Kelleher | Longreads | September 2018 | 15 minutes (3,859 words)

If given the choice to smell like whale excrement or delicate white flowers, few people would chose the first option. Bile, feces, vomit, and animal oils sound as though they would smell repulsive. The words conjure up scent memories of that time your dog released his anal glands on the duvet, or that summer you worked by the wharf and the August air was thick with the miasma of oily herring heads. Jasmine, on the other hand, sounds like a love song, a Disneyfied dream. Try, right now, to imagine the smell of blooming jasmine. Your memory, ill-equipped to locate scents in its baroque filing system, might pull up something syrupy sweet or softly floral. Is that how you want your body to smell?

Too bad: if you choose door number two, you’ll walk away reeking of sharp vegetal tones tempered by a slightly earthy, foul scent. Jasmine absolute is an oily, semi-viscid, dark amber fluid that is denser and more concentrated than jasmine essential oil. Essential oils come from distilled, boiled, or pressed plant matter, while absolutes are traditionally made through a processed called enfleurage, which involves submerging the delicate blossoms or spices in fat before extracting their fragrance molecules into a tincture of ethyl alcohol. While it’s a common ingredient in a natural perfumer’s tool kit, jasmine absolute smells strange: complicated, beautiful, not entirely pleasurable. It reeks of indole (rhymes with “enroll”), an organic chemical compound also found in coal tar, human feces, and decomposing bodies.

If you choose door number one, you’ll be blessed with the kiss of ambergris, a highly desirable natural substance that smells sweet yet rather marine, like vanilla and unrefined sugar mixed with seawater. The scent reminds me a little of the smell of my dog’s paws — pink and light and animal. It smells like cashmere feels. Smelling ambergris is an innate pleasure, one that even an infant would recognize as enjoyable, like the first sip of sweet milk.

For more than a thousand years, humans have been adorning our bodies with animal products like ambergris and putrid-smelling plant derivatives like jasmine absolute. We apply off-putting materials to our bodies to enhance and mask our natural scents. Like dogs that roll in deer carcasses, humans seek to change our olfactory emissions by borrowing from other creatures. It’s not always about simply smelling good: We want to smell complex, so that others will be compelled to keep coming back, like bees to a flower, to sniff us again and again, to revel in our scents, and draw ever closer to our warm, damp parts.

According to natural perfumer Charna Ethier, ambergris can smell like “golden light” or a “flannel shirt that has been dried on a clothes line on a warm summer day.” Although there are several types of ambergris (including gray, gold, and white), Ethier is referring to her own personal sample, which she characterizes as “soft, fresh, and ozonic.” Ethier is the owner of Providence Perfume Company in Rhode Island, and inside her well-stocked cabinet of olfactory curiosities, she keeps a single bottle of the precious stuff. Next to her 100-year-old cade oil (a foul-smelling liquid made from juniper trees, purchased at an estate sale) and below her collection of floral absolutes and herbal essences, she has stashed a bit of ambergris tincture. The clear glass vial contains a mixture of ambergris and alcohol that includes just 5 percent whale matter. In its pure form, this substance is a waxy gray ball of animal secretion, a floating fat-berg that is “more expensive than gold.” Unlike jasmine absolute, which plays a role in many of her perfumes, real ambergris is simply too expensive to use in a commercial product. “It’s considered the miracle ingredient for perfumes,” she says. “It makes everything better.”

It’s not always simply about smelling good: We want to smell complex, so that others will be compelled to keep coming back, like bees to a flower, to sniff us again and again, to revel in our scents, and draw ever closer to our warm, damp parts.

Ethier doesn’t use any synthetics in her perfume, nor does she use animal products, though animal scents are a traditional ingredient in perfumery. Not only are these compounds expensive, but true mammalian products like musk, civet, and ambergris often come at a cruel cost. Whales have been murdered for their oily blubber and concealed stomach bile, civets are caged and prodded for their fear-induced anal gland secretions, and musk is harvested from the glands of slaughtered deer. Many people know that perfumers build their trade on the graves of millions of tiny white flowers, but fewer people realize they also bottle and sell the byproducts of animal pain and suffering. Perfumers who use synthetic materials are exempt, in a sense, as are those who use found or vintage materials. Ethier’s ambergris is “quite old” and reportedly  beach-found (“I hope it is,” she says). But even perfumes that use synthetic compounds or salvaged bile carry the whiff of death; the history of the industry is seeped in it, and that smell doesn’t wash out easily.

There’s a reason perfumers use these notes. They enhance the floral scents, undercutting lightness with a reminder of darkness. Animal products are the antiheroes in this drama — even when you hate them, you still, just a little, love them. That’s how siren songs work, and ambergris sings the loudest. Once, Ethier made a perfume using her most prized ingredients. She mixed 100-year-old sandalwood essence with ambergris tincture and frangipane and boronia absolutes, two flowers native to Central America and Tasmania, respectively. It was the first time she’d used ambergris, and this one-off perfume was so lovely that “it was like gold-washing something.” She remembers wistfully, “It was so beautiful.”

* * *

Smell is the most underrated and mysterious sense. In her 1908 autobiography, The World I Live In, Helen Keller called scent the “fallen angel.” “For some inexplicable reason, smell does not hold the high position it deserves amongst its sisters,” she wrote. Keller mapped her world by smell — she could smell a coming storm hours before it arrived and knew when lumber had been harvested from her favorite copse of trees by the sharp scent of pine. In contrast to touch, which she called “permanent and definite,” Keller experienced odors as “fugitive” sensations. Touch guided her; scent fed her. Without smell, Keller imagined her world would be lacking “light, color, and the Protean spark. The sensuous reality which interthreads and supports all the gropings of my imagination would be shattered.”

We don’t often think in terms of color and light when it comes to smell, perhaps because we have so few words for scent that we borrow from the lexicons of our other senses. Despite the fact that smell is our most ancient sense — our so-called “lizard brain” is also sometimes termed the rhinencephalon, literally the “nose brain” — it is also one that seems to elude language. “Smell is the mute sense, the one without words,” wrote Diane Ackerman in A Natural History of the Senses. “Lacking a vocabulary, we are left tongue-tied, groping for words in a sea of inarticulate pleasures and exaltation.” We’ve had eons to come up with words for the precise smell of fresh-turned earth or the exact scent of a blazing beach fire, and still the best we can do is earthy and smoky.

Perfumers have their own language, but their words have only recently begun to trickle down into popular culture through beauty magazines and blogs. Not only do perfumers and their superfans speak of absolutes, oils, and tinctures, but they can also rattle off compounds like coumarin and eugenol. A trained master perfumer (or “nose”) can pick out precise scents within a layered perfume. They don’t just call something foul — they can pick out the pungency of musk or the reek of tobacco, ingredients that are delicious in small doses but overwhelming when used out of balance.

In my quest to understand the appeal of seemingly repugnant ingredients, I spoke with doctors who study the nose, perfumers who feed the organ, and even a zookeeper who spends her days breathing in the pure, undiluted scent of civet discharge. While they had various theories as to why darkness seems to be an essential element of beauty, they all agreed on one thing: It’s all about context. In the right context, even the smell of death can be appealing. In the right context, vomit can be more desirable than gold. In the right context, with the right music playing in the background, you begin to root for the glamorous hit woman or the sardonic drug dealer.

They also agreed that sex is part of this equation, and it’s the easiest explanation to trot out. But perfumery is also about more than just smelling nice and attracting a mate. It’s about aesthetics, taste, and desire in a more general sense. We want to smell intoxicating, and truly intoxicating things are often a little bit nasty — they have an edge that cuts deeper than simple sensory pleasure. And despite how it may seem, encounters with the beautiful are rarely entirely enjoyable. If that were the case, Thomas Kinkade’s light-dappled cottages would be considered the height of fine art, and we would all walk around misted lightly with synthetic jasmine and fake orange blossom. Instead, we adore the luscious gore of Caravaggio’s canvases and dab our pulse points with concoctions containing the miasma of swamp rot, the cloying smell of feces, and the pungent, tonsil-kicking fetor of death. Beauty is sharp, it is intense, and it comes at a cost. Just as desire and repulsion walk through the same corridors of our minds, so too do beauty and destruction move hand in hand. Whenever you find something unbearably beautiful, look closer and you’ll see the familiar shadow of decay.

* * *

One of the first known perfumers in history was a woman named Tapputi-Belatekallim. According to clay cuneiform tablets dating back to 1200 BCE, Tapputi lived in ancient Babylon and likely worked for a king. The second part of her name, “Belatekallim,” indicates that she was head of her own household, in addition to holding a valued position at court. Thousands of years before the advent of the “SheEO,” Tapputi was leaning in and bossing around underlings. She was a master of her craft, and recognized as such by her peers. Much of what we know about her comes from secondary sources, but the process of distilling and refining ingredients to produce a fragrant balm — oil, flowers, water, and calamus, a reed-like plant similar to lemongrass — is described on surviving clay tablets. It’s miraculous how modern her scents seem — or rather, it’s surprising how little has changed. Tapputi used scent-extracting techniques like distillation, cold enfleurage, and tincture that natural perfumers still use today. She also mixed grain alcohol with her scents, creating perfumes that were brighter, lighter, and had more staying power than anything else available at the time. These scents may have played a religious role in ancient culture, but they may have simply been another way to prettify the body and please the senses.

Beauty is sharp, it is intense, and it comes at a cost.

Unfortunately, Tapputi’s story is a fragmented one — she’s possibly the first female chemist, and yet she’s been lost to history. There is much more evidence available about the perfumes of ancient Egypt, Persia, and Rome. In 2003, archeologists unearthed the world’s oldest known perfume factory in Cyprus. Archaeologists theorize that this mud-brick building and the perfumes it produced caused Greek worshippers to begin associating the island with Aphrodite, the goddess of sex and love. (Born from the magical remnants of the sky god’s testicles, which had been separated from his body and cast into the sea by Cronos, the Titan god of harvest, Aphrodite supposedly walked from the foaming waters of the sea and onto the beach at Paphos, an ancient settlement located on the southern coast of the island.) Analysis of the material found on-site revealed that these ancient perfumers were using plant-based ingredients like pine, coriander, bergamot, almond, and parsley, among others.

These perfumes all sound rather pleasant, don’t they? I can imagine dabbing almond oil mixed with a bit of bergamot on my wrists, catching a botanical draft of scent here and there as I move. It seems terribly obvious that people may want to smell like plants. Some of the earliest pieces of art represent flowers, leaves, and trees. Studies have shown that we crave symmetry on an unconscious level, and we’re drawn to color, so it makes perfect sense that flowers would hold our attention with their Fibonacci spirals and vivid hues. I can even understand why curiosity might compel someone walking along a beach to pick up a chunk of marine fat and sniff it. It’s a bit harder to understand the moment when medieval perfumers made the conceptual leap from smelling the glandular sacs of dead musk deer to dabbing it on their pulse points. Yet at some point, this must have happened, for starting after the Crusades, Europeans became obsessed with musk.


Kickstart your weekend reading by getting the week’s best Longreads delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon.

Sign up


Like many prized spices, fabrics, and luxury items, musk came to Europe from the Far East. Derived from the Sanskrit word for testicle, “musk” refers to the glandular products of small male Asian deer. These little sacs of animal juice were harvested from the bodies of slain deer and left to dry in the sun. In its raw form, musk smells like urine, pungent and sharp. But after being left to dry, musk develops a softer scent. The reek of ammonia fades, and it becomes mellow and leathery. It stops smelling like piss and begins to smell like fresh sweat, or the downy crown of a baby’s head. It gained a reputation as an aphrodisiac; according to some legends, Cleopatra used musk oils to seduce Mark Anthony into her bed. The size of musk molecules also contribute to its perfume popularity: Larger molecules oxidize slower, so musk’s comparatively large molecules last longer than other odors and allow it to extend the life of other scents. Its fixative property means musk is a base note in many perfumes, even ones that don’t smell overtly musky.

In 1979, musk deer were listed as an endangered species by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES), so it’s no longer legal to use natural musk in commercial perfumes. However, Tibetian musk deer are still killed for their glands, and a brisk trade in poaching has resulted in some illegal musk showing up online. Musk is also used in some traditional Chinese and Korean remedies, which helps the substance remain one of the most valuable animal products on earth. In his book The Fly in the Ointment, Joe Schwarcz, director of the McGill University Office for Science and Society, points out that musk is “more valuable than gold.”

Civet is a more unknown fragrance, though it also appears frequently in perfumes. Made from the glands of a mammal that shares the name of the scent, civet is similar in structure to musk on a molecular level but smells even more animalistic, according to people who have actually sniffed it. “They have a general odor about them that is very pungent,” says Jacqueline Menish, curator of behavioral husbandry at the Nashville Zoo. Civets are uncommon zoo creatures. They are neither felines nor rodents, though they’re commonly mistaken for both. Although few visit the zoo just to glimpse these odd little nocturnal creatures, the Nashville Zoo has several banded palm civets because the zoo director “just loves them.” (You may have heard of civet coffee, a product made by force-feeding Asian palm civets coffee beans, then harvesting them from their poop. Society, it seems, has come up with several odd ways to make money from civet asses.) When they are startled, frightened, or excited, civets “express” their anal glands, and the greasy liquid “shoots right out.” The scent hangs in the air for days. “I guess I could see if it was diluted it might not smell as offensive,” Menish concedes. “But it can be really bad if it hits you.”

Unlike musk, civet can be collected without killing the animal, but it’s not a cruelty-free process. Civets are kept in tiny cages and poked with sticks or frightened with loud noises until they react and spray out their valuable secretions. Commercial perfumers no longer use genuine civet in their fragrances, but James Peterson, a perfumer based in Brooklyn, owns a very small vial of civet tincture. “It smells terrible when you first smell it,” he says. “But I have some that is five years old, and it gets this fruity quality as it ages. In a tincture, it gets this rich scent that works wonderful with florals.” On a few occasions, Peterson has used genuine musk or civet to make “tiny amounts” of specialty perfumes, and the resulting blends have an “intensely erotic draw.” Customers report that these dark and dirty smells are potent aphrodisiacs. “When it’s below the level of consciousness, that’s when it works best,” he adds.

The reek of ammonia fades, and it becomes mellow and leathery. It stops smelling like piss and begins to smell like fresh sweat, or the downy crown of a baby’s head.

Like musk and civet, ambergris comes from an animal, but making it doesn’t necessarily involve murdering whales. Whales have historically been killed for their bodily products, including their oil, spermaceti, and their stomach contents, but it’s more likely now that ambergris is beach-found since it is only produced by an endangered species, sperm whales. The waxy substance forms in the hindgut of a sperm whale to protect their soft interiors from hard, spiky squid beaks. According to Christopher Kemp, author of Floating Gold: A Natural (and Unnatural) History of Ambergris, ambergris begins as a mass of claw-shaped horns that irritate the whale’s digestive systems. As the mass gets pushed through the whale’s hindgut, it grows and slowly becomes “a tangled indigestible solid, saturated with feces, which begins to obstruct the rectum.” Once it passes into the ocean, it begins to slowly mellow out. The black, tar-like wad is bleached by the ocean until it becomes smooth, pale, and fragrant. It ranges in color from butter to charcoal. The most valuable ambergris is white, then silver, and finally moon-gray and waxy. It’s believed that only 1 percent of the world’s sperm whale population produces ambergris. It’s very rare, very bizarre, and very valuable.

The human appetite for ambergris dates back to ancient times. The Chinese believed it was dragon spit that had fallen into the ocean and hardened, and the ancient Greeks liked to add powdered ambergris to drinks for an extra kick. King Charles II of England liked to eat ambergris with eggs, which was apparently a fairly common practice among the aristocracy in England and the Netherlands. It shouldn’t be surprising that people engaged in some light coprophagia — smell and taste are so deeply linked, and while I can’t attest to the taste of ambergris, I can say that it smells beguiling. Given the chance, I would sprinkle some silvery whale powder on my eggs, just to see what it was like. (It’s certainly no stranger than eating gold-coated chicken wings — another practice seemingly designed to destroy value by passing the desired object through a series of rectums until it reaches the inevitable white bowl.)

In perfume, ambergris is often used to boost other scents. It plays a supporting role rather than a starring one, for although the smell is fascinating, it isn’t very strong. It has an unearthly fragrance. It smells like the sea, but also like sweet grasses and fresh rain. It’s amazing that something made in the bowels of the whale could smell so pure. If you found fresh ambergris, midnight black and sticky and stinking, perhaps you wouldn’t want to eat it. But with distance and dilution, ambergris is transformed from animal garbage to human ambrosia.

* * *

Schwarcz’s book offers one reason why we’re drawn to these scents, citing studies that suggest people with ovaries be more sensitive to musk, particularly around ovulation. He cautiously speculates that musk might resemble chemicals produced in humans to attract potential mates.

Over the phone, he is even more wary of speculating about a possible evolutionary explanation for our fragrance preferences. “The sense of smell has been studied thoroughly with surprisingly little results in terms of what we actually know. It’s such a complicated business,” he said. “We don’t know why musk is more attractive to some people than others. We don’t know why it smells differently when it’s diluted, but we know that it does.” When I asked whether we like musk because we’re programmed to enjoy the smells of bodies, he was quick to turn our talk toward the “issue of pheromones, which “may not actually even exist at all” in humans, despite our desire to attribute various observed phenomenon to the invisible messengers. According to Schwarcz, much of what the general population knows about pheromones only applies to certain nonhuman species. For instance, boar pheromones are well understood, easy to replicate, and used by farmers to increase the farrowing rate amongst their stock. Some of the perfumes that boast “real pheromones,” like Jovan Musk and Paris Hilton’s eponymously named scent, may contain pheromone molecules — ones that pigs would find very enticing.

But where science fails to offer a satisfactory explanation, artists can step in, providing an illuminating tool to help understanding our relationship to desire and aesthetics. For perfumer Anne McClain, co-owner of MCMC Fragrances in Brooklyn, it is the tension between foul and sweet that elevates a fragrance from consumer product into the realm of art. This is key when it comes to repugnant ingredients, from indolic florals to musky secretions. The indecent element becomes a secret of sorts, a gruesome piece of marginalia scribbled alongside the recipe, visible to only those in the know but appreciated by all. The foulness whispers below the prettiness, and combined, these various elements create a scent that smells paradoxically clean and dirty, light and dark.

“Indole is what makes the scent of jasmine interesting,” she says. “It makes you want to come back and smell it again — it has an addictive quality to it.” Unlike citrus scents, which are one-note and rather simplistic, florals have an element of decay, a whiff of putridity. McClain rightfully points out that this is part of what makes flowers themselves attractive to bees and other pollinators. Corpse flowers famously smell like dead bodies, but so do many other blossoms, just to a lesser extent.

Plus, humans are by nature “just a little bit gross,” McClain says. Like civets, musk deer, and whales, we shit, we secrete, we mate, and sometimes we vomit. But we also give birth and create beauty, and for McClain, it’s this life-giving ability that links blossoms and humans. “I think there is a depth to anything that is made of life and creates life. There’s something inherently sexual in that,” she says. “Even though something like civet will smell gross on its own, it adds an element of reality.” When layered properly with other olfactory delights, this can create an evocative smell, one that you want to return to, to interrogate with your nostrils the same way you might pore over a painting. Through layering pleasure on top of disgust, perfumers can create something that resembles life — exquisite, fleeting, and mysterious.

* * *

Katy Kelleher is a freelance writer and editor based in Maine whose work has appeared in Art New England, Boston magazine, The Paris Review, The Hairpin, Eater, Jezebel, and The New York Times Magazine. She’s also the author of the book Handcrafted Maine.

Editor: Michelle Weber
Factchecker: Matt Giles
Copyeditor: Jacob Z. Gross

Sabrina

Drawn and Quarterly

Nick Drnaso | An excerpt from the graphic novel Sabrina | Drawn & Quarterly | May 2018

This is what it means to be a man.

SABRINA.interior109-1.jpg
SABRINA.interior109-2
SABRINA.interior109-3
SABRINA.interior109-4
SABRINA.interior109-5 Read more…

To Post, or Not to Post?

Illustration by Natalie Nelson

Eloghosa Osunde | Longreads | September 2018 | 18 minutes (4,515 words)

 

It’s another day with tragic news — as are most days these days. It’s always something. If not race-related violence in America, it’s suicide-bombings in northern Nigeria or the massacre in Plateau State or a trailer falling over a bridge in Lagos and crushing people to death; or that fuel tanker exploding on Otedola bridge, eating multiple vehicles and people in a billowing tower of black smoke; or it’s another #metoo story; or some more violence against LGBTQIA+ people across the world. Or it’s the suicides. Those backtobacktoback suicides.

“Watch out for your faves who are quiet on this matter,” says the tweet, “because silence is complicity.” I scroll down two more to figure out which of the matters we’re discussing now, even though I know I shouldn’t have. As I suspected, it’s a noisepool of rage, triggering links and photos attached. But I’m in it now.

“‘Your silence will not protect you, it’s better to speak knowing that we were never meant to survive – Audre Lorde.’ #enoughsaid,” says another tweet. “Share your stories, let’s name and shame these monsters. By not sharing, we’re giving them more power and they might do it to someone else!”

“People are literally dying” says a tweet linking to a video of a woman with a great body, in a neon dress, “and children are being put in cages!” 1.4 thousand likes.

I scroll faster.

Further down, an author is announcing their publication date but prefaces the thread with an apology. “I know this is a difficult time, and I feel bad having to do this now but please —” It’s not the first time I’ve seen this, either. It’s been less than 10 minutes on the app, and between those minutes and these tweets, there’s now a brick tower of anxiety in my chest.

On Instagram: “If you ever wondered what you’d have been doing during slavery or the holocaust or the civil rights movement, you’re doing it right now.” Following that, information about another tragedy. Do something! the post adds. It takes less than ten minutes!

In response, I go madder. I think to myself that if I’m feeling this from the comfort of my bedroom, then what everyone in the bloodshot eye of each violence must be experiencing must be a million times worse, and it makes me hate the world even more strongly. So, I retweet, repost, retweet people talking about each issue, even though I know I won’t be able to look at my profile afterwards. It’s all fury now, fueling and felling me at the same time. I’m thinking (knowing?) — obsessively, manically — that the world is drooling at the mouth with wicked intention for all of us, that nowhere feels safe, no one is safe and we’re all fucked. That voice settles in me, grows a sturdy femur, and I feel it happening: that indifferent stroll towards the cliff that my brain does. There’s no point being here, it tells me, sounding bored and done, let’s go. My brain means it. And that’s how I know I’m in trouble.

Read more…

Above It All: How the Court Got So Supreme

Robert Alexander / Getty

David A. Kaplan | The Most Dangerous Branch: Inside the Supreme Court’s Assault on the Constitution | Crown | September 2018 | 19 minutes (4,985 words)

Nine mornings after Antonin Scalia died at Cíbolo Creek, the justices resumed work without their beloved, blustery colleague. The rich traditions of the Court continued unabated. After the justices all shook hands in the small robing room across the hallway from the back of the courtroom, they lined up to await the gavel of the marshal. The assembled throng grew silent, then arose. “Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!” the marshal chanted at the stroke of 10, as always. The eight justices emerged from behind the tall crimson velvet drapes and somberly took their upholstered swivel chairs on the bench. “All persons having business before the Honorable, the Supreme Court of the United States, are admonished to draw near and give their attention, for the Court is now sitting,” the marshal continued. “God save the United States and this Honorable Court!”

It’s an opening worthy of “Hail to the Chief,” the introductory anthem for the leader of another branch of the federal government. It’s all carefully choreographed. The justices don’t merely walk in, and they’re not already seated when Court begins. From different curtains, they materialize in unison, in three groups based on where they sit. As institutional stagecraft goes, the Court puts on quite a show. Read more…

Not Quite Democracy: Lucie Greene on the Civic Aspirations of Tech Giants

Bettmann / Getty

Bradley Babendir | Longreads | September 2018 | 12 minutes (3,248 words)

 

At this point it seems self-evident that as the major technology companies like Facebook, Uber and Google continue to grow, they are gaining more influence over public life, while the ability of regular consumers or even governments to push back is diminishing. In Silicon States: The Power and Politics of Big Tech and What It Means for Our Future, a new book by Lucie Greene, the past and future consequences of this rapid change are laid out, and there’s plenty of bad news, from the decline of journalism to the rise of gender inequality, from endangered democracy at home to the new “tech imperialism” abroad.

Greene is a futurist for the in-house think tank at J. Walter Thompson, a historic advertising agency that is now a marketing communications company and a subsidiary of a multinational conglomerate, which has large and likewise historic accounts such as Unilever, Kraft, Nestlé and Kellog’s. Her professional focus is, as she put it, “connecting emerging cultural change in consumer sentiment to brand strategy” — that is, concerned more with stock futures than science fiction ones, and not typically the vantage point of someone you would expect to become a Cassandra warning against the deleterious effects of an entire industry on our civic life. Indeed, one could argue that throughout the 20th century and up to the present day, some of her company’s clients, or similar large multinantionals, have engaged in a great deal of political manipulation. But her argument — that the tenor of the tech companies’ rhetoric and goals are different, somehow more all-encompassing — is a compelling one. The book is a bracing read, and arguably her expertise makes her well-suited to write insightfully about the biggest brands with the most consumers.

Silicon States is a book fundamentally about the danger of concentrating so much power in so few hands. We spoke by phone about the people who have amassed huge amounts of wealth, the companies they run, what they’re doing with their money, and why they’re doing it. Read more…