Sense of smell

I’m in spinning-head mode right now. Lots on my mind. Lots of it isn’t bloggable, and I haven’t really had the energy to wrap my head around the stuff I’ve been meaning to write about lately. So, in a complete and total non sequitur, I’m writing about a barrage of references to our most underrated sense.

Last night I grabbed our most recent issue of Vanity Fair – and saw this add on the back cover. FlowerBomb? Is it just me, or is FlowerBomb among the worst names you can think of for a perfume? Spoiled Milk would also be bad. Then, this morning, I caught this article about the perfume industry’s fear of bloggers. The people at MakeupAlley don’t hate FlowerBomb as much as I expected them too. It received 4 out of 5 “lipsticks,” which isn’t enough to make me want to try it. One perfumer said that “writing about perfume is like dancing about architecture,” but I disagree. Having also caught my first episode of Top Chef last night, I can’t see why is writing about smells is any stranger than watching television programs about food you’re not ever going to taste. Plus, the Times article makes no mention of the fact that lots of writers have captured smell gloriously on paper. My favorite example is Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. I don’t remember any of the details of plot, but I smell bitter almonds (or was it burnt?) every time I even glimpse the copy sitting on my shelf.

Channel surfing, I caught 2 minutes of an old episode of Scrubs – the one in which JD makes a mistake that causes a patient to lose his sense of smell. The patient is yelling at him saying something like , “When you pick up your grandson for the first time, why don’t you call me and tell me how great his head smells!” It’s chiché, but it’s one of the things I’ve been most enjoying about little LEC. She’s in the cooing stage right now – makes the sweetest little noises – and smells so damn good. I don’t remember how long that lasts, but certainly not long enough.

Finally, our house is located smack dab in the middle of one of those square neighborhoods where living on one side has significantly higher status than living on the other. A new development that includes a Pei Wei has recently opened near the fancy side of our neighborhood. It’s been really windy these past few days. Let’s just say that I’m thankful we didn’t buy any closer than we did.

 

Reading and non-reading 2/15

READING
Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore. (Imitation leather-bound edition!) Cheeky and acutely reverent at the same time. The Biblically literate amongst us have a great advantage for appreciating the subtleties of Moore’s humor in addition to the laugh-out-loud stuff, which is precisely paced. GC and I are reading this one together. Reading aloud (and being read to) is a wonderful activity we’ve inconsistently engaged in for years. I tend to forget how much I do enjoy it when I go for long spells without sharing a book. If you’ve never done it before, try it in lieu of a Seinfeld re-run some evening.

NONREADING
Eric G. Wilson’s Against Happiness, which I heard about on NPR. There are multiple layers to his argument, but the one that is most interesting to me concerns evaluating the cultural costs of systematically eradicating sadness if it is, indeed, a necessary part of the human experience. Will the successful minimization of sadness, angst, melancholy, gloom, and suffering upset the polarity of life (it’s probably actually a dialectic) that makes it, well, life? In Portuguese, saudade doesn’t have the strongly negative connotation its closest English translation (melancholy) carries. In Brazil, saudade is embraced & celebrated — not always enjoyed but almost never pathologized — and it imbues a particular richness into Brazilian culture (i.e., the arts) and daily life. The risk of romanticizing depression and other bona fide illnesses is very real, but Wilson’s is on to something real here – something worth discussing further.

 

Reading and non-reading this week

Tom Perrotta’s The Abstinence Teacher
A real page turner that offered a nuanced and sweet account of the culture wars to someone who doesn’t even believe in the culture wars. Probably coming soon to a theatre near you, but the book is worth it.

Eric Finklestein’s The Fattening of America: How the Economy Makes us Fat, If it Matters, and What to Do about It
Though I probably won’t actually read TFOA (it’ll go into Bayard’s “known books” category), I’m sure to be bringing up Finklestein’s argument in conversation during the course of the next few weeks. He argues that our economy incentivizes sedentary productivity over health maintenance. The argument is subject to many different criticisms, and in typical economist form, Finklestein doesn’t actually seem to have talked to real people about his claims. But he does make some excellent points and provides a welcome relief to the silly Freakonomics-style arguments about incentives. Yesterday’s interview with Finklestein on the Diane Rehm Show was excellent.

 

Scheisskopf’s wife

It may be true that the world today is no better or no worse than it’s ever been, but it’s still not good. The other day, between entries about a baby learning to walk, a genocide, and a Superbowl (what was I thinking?), I even referenced my own understanding of “God’s plan” on this blog, which, for a variety of reasons, cracks me up. The combination of thoughts and emotions brings to mind my favorite passage from Joseph Heller’s “Catch 22″ – an exchange I think about frequently, particularly when I’m feeling discouraged about the state of the world. It’s the scene where Yosarian and his mistress, both atheists, are lying in bed and have a heated argument over the always-relevant question of how a so-called good God can allow such terrible things to happen in our world. And it’s Thanksgiving.

“What the hell are you so upset about?…I thought you didn’t believe in God.”

“I don’t,” she sobbed, bursting violently into tears. “But the God I don’t believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He’s not the mean and stupid God you make Him out to be.”

Yossarian laughed and turned her arm loose. “Let’s have a little more religious freedom between us,” he proposed obligingly. “You don’t believe in the God you want to, and I won’t believe in the God I want to. Is that a deal?”

I identify with her – the nameless Lieutenant Scheisskopf’s wife – a little too closely sometimes. Days like today. And I can’t believe that such a great character never even got her own name.

 

Everyone (including sociologists) weighs in on food

It seems that absolutely everyone is talking and writing about food right now. I heard this interview with sociologist Barry Glassner on Marketplace yesterday. His new book promises to be just as good as his old one and way better than The Omnivore’s Dilemma. I really admire the good scholars who make their arguments both relevant and available to the public. I also imagine that he, unlike most academics, makes quite a bit of money from his book sales. Note to self.

Other food-related insights on culture I’ve come across recently-ish:
- Americans are becoming olive oil snobs
- Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson’s book “Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine“
- Silicone kitchen tools (which I already mentioned yesterday in a fit of rage)
- That French Food Bricolage ASR article
- Cotton candy paper – a 10 for creativity, but I’ll pass.
- The author of “The United States of Arugula” on tonight’s The Colbert Report
- My own post on Food Drama in 2006, lest I forget

 

Preparing for marriage

Somewhat curiously, this article about questions couples should ask before marrying has been on the NYT’s most emailed list for almost three weeks now. If you look at the list, you’ll probably think the same thing I thought: duh. On the other hand, lots of well-meaning friends and aunts and uncles and sisters sent this article to their recently-engaged and soon-to-be-engaged and recently-married loved ones, and I guess there’s nothing wrong with that. I’d like to announce that although I email NYT articles to friends on a daily basis, I DID NOT send this one to anybody. I’m very deliberate about not becoming a “smug married” and try to avoid doing the things that can be irritating in this arena. However….

The NYT article suggests to me that there’s a very high demand for short, snappy marriage advice, so how can I resist adding my own two cents? Almost seven (gulp) years ago, GC and I were going through the process of preparing for marriage. The official protocol was a series of six meetings with our priest, who also happened to be a theology professor at our university. We had an assignment before each meeting, but I only remember three of them: reading the beginning of Genesis (to prepare us for a total re-education in that text), watching the film “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe” and reading Madeline L’Engle’s Book “Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage”. There were no cheesy compatibility tests, no inquiries into our sexual histories, no condescending lectures about never going to bed angry, and no list of questions. Thank God.

About three months after getting married, GC and I got on a plane for Brazil. This was not our honeymoon – we were going to spend a year in a place where we didn’t know a soul, didn’t know the language, didn’t know what we were doing, and didn’t have nearly enough money for the endeavor. We were very young, had no dependents, were able to pack all of our belongings up into 3 trunks, and were not putting careers on hold as we didn’t yet have careers to speak of. This might have been kind of risky, but in retrospect it was one of the best decisions we have ever made. You might think that taking off with a new spouse to a strange place away from all your friends and family support sounds like a terrible idea. For us, spending a full year away from the obligations and habits tied up with our friends and families gave us the opportunity to figure ourselves out in a really genuine way. In a situation where we didn’t have other people to rely on and didn’t even have the vocabulary to complete simple tasks like paying the electric bill independently, we figured it all out together and without any audience to speak of.

I’m really thankful for the insightful and respectful guidance GC and I got from our priest as we were preparing for marriage. It was valuable and important, and it was fun. I’m even more thankful for that year in Brazil. Spare me the NYT’s lists of questions.

 

The Inevitable List: Resolutions 2007

- Maintain this blog. It’s not procrastinating. It’s not time I absolutely need to be spending on my dissertation. It’s writing. It’s practice. And it’s fun for me (hopefully for you too!)
- Read for fun. I read a lot, and I love my research. But last year I read exactly four books that were totally unrelated to my work: Julia Child’s Autobiography (fantastic), Anne Lamott’s Plan B, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, and Gabriel García Márquez’s Memories of My Melancholy Whores – read this one while I was in labor, which was actually not as strange as it sounds. I’m shooting for more than four in 2007.
- Call my grandmother regularly. That is to say, call her before she calls me. I know she really likes that. She’s turning 90 this year and deserves it.
- Keep my sense of humor. When I was little and I came to my parents with some sort of disappointing news, my dad, who always had pretty high expectations, would say, “Well, they’re not going to line you up against the wall and shoot you.” Seriously. He would say that. I’ve had a lot of serious things on my plate this past year (a new baby and a job search among other things), but I regret to say, I’ve probably taken all of it a tad too seriously. Next year will inevitably entail a whole slew of new and very serious things. I’ll show up late a few times, and I’ll get puked on a few times as well. But I’ll pull through on most things – on time and without looking like a total disaster, and it will all be okay. Under almost no circumstances will anybody line me up against the wall and shoot me.

 

White Teeth

When you read a book six years after everyone else read it, your review is one of like 400 on Amazon.com, and there’s nobody to talk to about it because it seems like everyone else had that conversation already and is on to other things. Still I feel compelled to write something about the novel I just finished – one of the only novels I read this past year. No book is perfect – this one included – but that’s not the point. It’s easy to pick apart a writer’s choices and take him or her to task for the ones that didn’t quite suit your tastes; much harder to actually produce something valuable.

I’m always amazed by people like Smith who have something of a prophetic voice – people who have their finger on the pulse of the biggest, most complicated, trans-national issues at hand and can translate all that’s about to erupt on a larger social scale into compassionate, characters you want to know more about. And to do that without being heavy handed? I was just about to feel accomplished and a little bit young and fabulous for being on track to finish my degree this year, but Smith finished White Teeth when she was 24. Sheesh. I gotta get back to work.

 

A Great Equalizer?

I recently caught this interview with the writers of The Office (probably my favorite show on television right now) on Fresh Air and thoroughly enjoyed it.

There’s something funny about Fresh Air. I listen to it occasionally – whenever I’m in the car at the right time, though I did listen to it almost every day during that brief period of time I had a desk job with a regular schedule. The thing is, relative to how often I listen to Fresh Air, I talk about it a whole lot. Get together with friends for lunch – did you hear Willie Nelson on Terry Gross? Greg Kinnear on Fast Food Nation? Mike Judge? We especially like talking about guests who have ties to Austin, but not exclusively. At a housewarming party with lots of people I didn’t know, I was part of a really lovely conversation about Terry’s interview with Zadie Smith. It was an old interview, rebroadcasted just as the paperback version of On Beauty was being released; hearing it prompted to pick up a copy of her first novel. Another person at the party had done the exact same thing after catching the program.

Maybe this just says something about the social circles I run in: academics, film people (I married into that world), architects, a few musicians — highly educated, creative types, who don’t have a whole lot of money. But I think it actually goes beyond that. A recent ASR article on cultural tastes and social networks speaks to this. The author argues that cultural consupmtion is primarily a social endeavor insofar as that our cultural tastes help us create and sustain different types of relationships. “High-brow” and “popular” culture lend themselves to different types of social captial – evidenced by more strong and weak network ties, respectively. Individuals who consume both types of culture (and lots of it) have some pretty serious advantages compared to those who consume only one or the other.

So back to Fresh Air. There’s something ironic about learning more about The Office (network television, generally considered pretty low-brow) on NPR (media for “sophisticated” people who “don’t watch TV”). I consume both popular and high-brow culture, and on occasion – like when listening to Terry’s interview with Matt Groening – I do it simultaneously. Better yet, when I talk about Fresh Air interviews with friends and strangers in this blog, in conversation, or by emailing a link to a particular program to someone I suspect would enjoy it, it’s a two-fer. I’m sharing that I listen to NPR and that I watch network television – complementary cultural resources – and in doing so, I’m reproducing my relatively advantageous social position. Sheesh.

If all this is true, could we conclude that Fresh Air has the potential to be a profoundly equalizing social force? Omar? Terry? Anybody?