Things I Love (v-day, a day late)

Fontina cheese. Talking Heads. Kurt Schwitters. Kalamata olives. David Markson. Peonies. Santa Fe. The Greatest. The oceans. Bidú Sayao. Villette. Rioja. Gingham. Good Reads. Paul Klee. Almonds. Dusk Litany. Black-eyed Susans. Titled. Lichtenberg. Brown paper. Brattleboro. Mairead Byrne. 72 Fahrenheit. Candles. Babies. Dachshunds. My Dead Friends. Fernando Pessoa. Fondue. Rucola. BWV 82. Norman Dubie. Teal. Marimekko. Fireplaces. Affentor. Tapioca pudding. Brittany. Chanel 5. Garamond. Meryl Streep. German. Acorns. Daunt Books. Lavender. Bath bombs. Barrister bookcases. MoMA. Collage. Garlic. Satie. Street cars. Tidiness. The glottal stop. Book art. Complex plots. Warm washcloths on airplanes. Adjectives. Szymborska. Steak. Alexievich. The Jackson 5. Birdsong. Kimonos. Wooden matches. Emily Dickinson. Naples. Calligraphy. Upscale hotels. Aspirin. Lake Constance. Breast feeding. Spoons. Pocket knives. WS Merwin. Snow. Persimmons. Apollinaire. Burt Bacharach. Camper shoes. The Owl and the Pussycat. Pipe tobacco. Bright Pittsburgh Morning. Licorice. Wattwandern. Popcorn. Aprons. Hans Arp. Swann’s Way. Dark blue velvet. Chai latte. Chuang Tzu. Lord of the Rings. Pocket watches. Clouds.

Visiting America I decide to reconsider my disdain of scented candles

Blue Lavender
I’ve spent years overdosing on lavender in the form of soaps, sachets and lotions but this candle came with a wooden wick that promised to crackle. Open mind, I told myself, not every scented candle wants to strangle you with apple cinnamon. And unlike the ubiquitous pumpkin clogging the American esophagus, this was the scent of cottonballs and vaporous soufflés, of swans and a pale lilac sunset that glows for approximately 33 hours.

Mystery Collage by Valerie Roybal

Sandalwood
This wore a distinct masculine cast. Black wax and black glass, it purported to be aromatherapy and gullible woman that I was I bought it. It sat knobby in its chamber; the flame elicited beads of moisture, exuding an unctuous smell, like a mix of 1) burning tires and 2) sweat in a smoky, upholstered club that hasn’t been vacuumed since Adam. Womanly goodwill aside, I didn’t want such an atmosphere roasting my clothes and, dear reader, I tossed it. 

Wild Bluebells & Jasmine
When I had to whittle the cargo down for the sake of my suitcase this is the bouquet I almost manned overboard. Wild bluebells and jasmine, I said, how ridiculous. Do bluebells even smell? Is it just girlish, poetic marketing? But the candle was small, the color a robin’s egg blue, so I tucked it inside a sock in a side pocket. And in truth it became my favorite, because it said snow-capped mountains to me. It said bells of alpine goats who’ve been freshly shampooed. 

Atomizer

In the book I’m reading, a character who is much belittled wears the same fragrance I do, and I can’t help but feel insulted. The character, Sylvia, is the sister-in-law of the protagonist of Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively, a novel about a historian ruminating on her past from a nursing home bed. 

Sylvia “has devoted herself to children and houses. A nice old-fashioned girl, Mother called her, seeing quite correctly through the superficial disguise of pink fingernails, swirling New Look skirts and a cloud of Mitsouko spray.”

Mitsouko, I gasp. I wear Mitsouko! And the thing about Mitsouko is it’s ravishing. Ingrid Bergman wore it. Anais Nin wore it. Jean Harlow wore it, and her husband doused himself with it before committing suicide. So, you know, I’m kind of feeling that Mitsouko hardly needs me to defend it. Undeterred by a few raised eyebrows, even Charlie Chaplin was known to splash it on. 

And yet here is Sylvia, the wife of a man who works “himself into the ground, when it is a matter of the intellect. His laziness is more subtle than that, it is a laziness of the soul, and Sylvia is its manifestation. Gordon needs Sylvia like some people need to spend an hour or two a day simply staring out the window…”

Of course I see that Mitsouko was considered part of a disguise, being, I suppose, more sophisticated than Sylvia. Perhaps as the book progresses and the true Sylvia emerges wearing a stodgier scent, I won’t feel so intimately wounded.

Ghost Fragments

When I try to speak French, Italian spooks me,
less the form than the mood of it, the flighty rise and ebb.
*
People talk about phantom limbs, but rarely of the phantom itch.
The itch occurs, but what’s under it?
*
At the Salvation Army there’s a ghastly rack
of coats, the line-up of might-be ghosts
*
I know a slender woman haunted by her former heavy self.
The body has been exorcised; the spirit will not let go.
*
The song in my head this morning, a song I didn’t know I liked.
*
The typewriter, too, is not extinct. It lives on
in street work, factories, rivers, in feet descending stairs.
My father’s boxy black one.
My electric Brother.
*
in love, the ghoul of hate
*
When I was in high school, a boy in the next grade
was decapitated by a train, stumbling home drunk
by the overpass. Charlie. Everyone knew the story.

I can’t go through that part of town without thinking of it.
As if I'd been there. And it’s not Charlie who haunts
that part of town, but what happened to Charlie.
*
The parts haunt the sum.
The choir in the ostrich.
The goon in kangaroo.
*
the past / the smell of lavender / a stroke that stays in the bones / trauma /
fog / exhaust trapped in the atmosphere / abortion / childhood /
perfume / regret
*
We’re all haunted by Auschwitz, even the deniers.
We all stand here shoeless in the Polish snow.
*
to say nothing of graveyards
only the dead really give up the ghost
*
As a noun, “haunt” refers to a place a man can frequently be found.
He occupies it, fills and inhabits it, seeking
something he’ll never come home with.

(in response to Dave Bonta's post at Via Negativa)

Vialence

I put on Shalimar this morning.
It takes a lot of nerve to put on Shalimar before going to work.
In the morning!
But I did. A drop here, a drop there. Ping, ping.
As far as I'm concerned there's nothing more I have to do.

Aloft and found

I find the department store ladies who want to spritz you with perfume menacing. Sometimes they don’t wait for you to say yes or no, they just start squirting. These ladies are required to be very made-up and lipsticked, and wear high heels. They’re scary. And armed with something potentially awful.

I don’t spritz perfume directly on my skin. I spray it in front of me and dash through the mist. I call this the lion-through-the-hoop method of perfumery. Subtle, no? Sometimes I spray it straight up towards the ceiling, close my eyes and let it fall on me. I haven’t got a name for this. My husband laughs. Apparently there’s a joke about the Italian police doing the same thing. I don’t get this joke.

My perfume is Guerlain’s L’Heure Bleue. I like pretty much all the Guerlains, in fact, but there’s gluttony to think about. Today at the store I spritzed myself with Mitsouko, a fragrance that reminds me of almonds crushed in warm milk. I think that’s what it is. I could concoct it at home. Ignore all that talk about bergamot and oakmoss.

Another scent I like is garlic being sautéed in oil. And gasoline. Bacon. Cake baking. Campfire. Marijuana, too, though I abstain. Also the smell of those mimeographs that have become obsolete.

rain rubs the spoons

There's a tea shop in town that sells the very sexy teas of Mariages Freres. I visited there often about a year ago just to smell the teas, and rub the leafy crumbs around in my fingers. I wrote some poems about the different varieties, but then threw most of them away, leaving a series of fragments. The short series is up today at Fraglit, a journal of fragmentary writing.

& in case the tea's too bitter, have it with some hilarious cake.

and all the blackbirds

I had a freeing experience the other day. I heard about a woman who married the Eiffel Tower. She belongs to a small group of people in love – committed, romantic love - with objects. This interested me. I felt the whole world open up. I figured that although I’m married, I could enter into tantalizing, emotionally uncomplicated affairs. For example, there’s this green Mercedes sometimes parked around the corner that I adore. I say it offhand – love - but I don’t even like Mercedes and, usually, if you told me your car was leafgreen I’d say you’re a twit. I am also a lifelong lover of Chanel 5 and it occurs to me now that if I had married this fragrance instead of a man, I might have gone more lightly and confidently about life. There are a number of poetry books I’m secretly and repeatedly seeing on side, i.e. no matter what the main course is, one of these is tucked in my purse or bookbag or next to my bed. There’s a Syrah I could without qualms promise to love, honor and obey. The smell of gasoline. A certain watering can. Chagall’s “I and the Village.” The Great Wall of China. Seriously, I’ve found a new frame for these enriching relationships. It’s like I could live many times, or all over again.

what it was supposed to be like

It was supposed to be a cool, shadowy hallway laid with an oriental runner. Doors would be open up and down, and sometimes the scent of something – say grapefruit or paraffin – would move through like a passing mood. But of course it wasn’t like that. Often it was noisy, and smelled of glue or smoke, or burnt milk.

I stopped at the perfumerie

I’d written down some scents I wanted to try but of course didn’t have the scrap of paper along. At least one of them was from Guerlain, so I headed there. I didn’t recognize any names so I tried L’instant Magic. I liked it. Then I tried regular old L’instant and it seemed chemically. I switched back to L’instant Magic and suddenly it smelled like Play-doh. Cute bottle, but it was over.

(I read an NYT article recently where a perfume maker refused to send samples to a particular critic because “writing about perfume is like dancing about architecture.” I thought that was wonderful. I would like to see someone dance about architecture. But only for like 5 minutes.)

My perfumerie is big but it doesn’t have many smaller perfume makers. They have a section of Jo Malone, which I wasn’t familiar with. Right up I should mention that I insist I won’t wear anything that smells even remotely of food, or use vanilla bathgel, for example. (I also refuse to eat food made to look like other objects, like carrots cut and curled to look like roses. Oh god… that gives me the willies.) So I don’t know why, but I tried Blue Agava and Cacao and just swooned. I’d never heard of agava before. I hoped it wasn’t some South American bean. I’ve since googled it – it’s a flower. I was lucky, too, because shops never give away samples in Germany unless you’re making a purchase, but I left with one. I also tried Vetiver, which was nice, but by then my nose had had enough. In a half hour I figure you should smell only three at most four fragrances before you hit olfactory overload.

I almost never buy perfume. Mostly I just stop in and enjoy. At home, I have Chanel no. 5 and Clinique Aromatics Elixer, both of which I love. And I can’t get away from them because my mother knows I wear them, so I have an ever-elapsing lifetime supply. I’ll buy something new if it’s drop-dead gorgeous, though. It just takes a number of tries to establish that.

Ironically enough, Jo Malone’s website says Blue Agava and Cacao is inspired by Latin music. So I guess perfume can smell about dancing.

friday confession: recidivism

Our faucet is broken. It seeps from the base of the neck, slowly flooding the countertop. I said to my husband, “We’ll go to Hornbach (Germany’s Home Depot) and get a new one.” He said he hates Hornbach, probably because he read something today saying such hardware stores are the equivalent of perfumeries for women. He wasn’t sure if that was a jab at men or women. I said probably men. Because I like perfumeries, too. I stop by a lot after work and spritz myself with something. Often it’s Mark Jacobs or Mark Jacobs’ Ivy. Today it was Ivy. I rationalize that I’m still trying them on, and can’t commit yet. Too bad I have only two wrists, and one nape to seep from.