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.

 

Really surprising

Reading Jerry Jacobs’s interview with David Brooks in Contexts Magazine: The New York Times does not subscribe to JSTOR. I think they should splurge.  There are, of course, some other very interesting things in the interview, but I can’t really focus on anything but the fact that writers for (arguably) the world’s most important daily newspaper don’t have this resource at their fingertips. Stunning.

 

Seven new sins

As reported by the NYT and a slightly different version from NPR. Created by Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti to attune the Catholic leadership to some of the real evils in our world and reinvigorate the practice of confession (a topic I’ve been meaning to write about for months). I’ve long thought the 10 Commandments might need some updating, and I’d have written a slightly different list, but I’m very much on board with the overall sentiment. If only the announcement had come out during a slower news week and gotten more coverage….

1. Genetic modification

2. Experimenting on humans

3. Drug abuse

4. Polluting the environment

5. Causing social injustice

6. Excessive wealth

7. Creating poverty

 

Secular sabbath

It’s nice to know that I’m not the only one having a hard time managing work and email and down-time. Mark Bittman’s* idea of a secular sabbath is an intriguing one. My first reaction was that I need one “unplugged” day each week and that Saturdays might be preferable to Sundays - so I can do that whole “prep for the week” thing on Sundays. But the quote from David Levy stood out in my mind, ““Who would say you don’t need time to think, to reflect, to be successful and productive?” Then I started thinking that unplugging doesn’t necessarily need to happen during the weekends. A radical idea: what about taking an unplugged WORKING day? Say Tuesdays? So I’d devote an entire day each week to the kind of work (reading, writing with a pen, brainstorming new ideas…) that tends to get squeezed out when I have my email open all day long. A day for my own work. On the clock. I’m thinking seriously about it.

*Is MB taking over the NYT or what?

 

On waste

I’ve been enjoying Mark Bittman’s blog these past two weeks. Today he linked to Chris Jordan’s stunning and shocking work on consumption in the US. Please take a look.

The photo above, Building Blocks, consists of 9 million alphabet blocks. 9 million to depict the number of American children without health insurance in 2007. The piece is 16 feet tall x 32 feet wide — eighteen square panels, each sized 62×62. Astounding. Has anybody seen his work in person? I’m sure the full-scale pieces are much more dramatic.

 

Kristof: The Dynastic Question

Kristof tackles the question I’ve been asking over and over again over the course of the past several months the NYT today: “Does it diminish American democracy if we keep the presidency in the same two families that have held it since 1989?”

Here’s another one: Should pundits be referring to Hillary Clinton as Mrs. Clinton or as Senator Clinton? What are the rules? Would we find patterns in title usage by writer’s level of support for HC if we looked at coverage systematically? Is it just a question of style? I suspect not.

 

Kenya

Why is the world waiting to “do something?”
Ben Curtis/Associated Press

UPDATE 1/30 (from the NYT)
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
Published: January 31, 2008
NAIROBI, Kenya — The top American diplomat for Africa said on Wednesday that some of the violence that has swept across Kenya in the past month has been ethnic cleansing intended to drive people from their homes, but that it should not be considered genocide.

 

Spare me polyester

This article appeared in the NYT’s Thursday Styles section shortly after I wrote about cobblers, which was actually a post lamenting the fact that clothing and shoes have become disposable goods and wondering aloud about how to behave given this reality. The article asks whether supposedly environmentally-conscious customers will be willing to change their consumptions habits to buy less-fashionable but “sustainable” garments - and less of them at higher prices.

It’s easy to brush off the fashion-related moral dilemma as an indulgent, irrelevant, and relatively superfluous one, but that’s not exactly fair. From the trendy fashionista to the “I only shop at resale shops” hipster to the person who honestly doesn’t bother to make sure their socks match (as an academic, I interact with more of a few of these types on a pretty regular basis), we all participate in the “fashion industry” - whatever that is. We all wear clothes and wash clothes and acquire clothes and clean out our closets, and we all use this as a way to cultivate and express identity - even if that identity is something along the lines of: “I don’t care what I look like because I’m too smart to bother with such trivial matters.”

The problem is actually a complex and relevant one that’s not superfluous at all. Cheap garments allow people - especially young people - to change their style easily and often. This is convenient for individuals who are struggling to find their identity and express it through their style of dress. In fact, I suspect that it’s become a truly important developmental step for American adolescents and for teens in many other parts of the world as well. The principle of buying pieces you know you can live with for a long, long time is at odds with the fast-paced changes the fashion industry is pushing and the mass-market model of clothing production that has taken over. And it’s tough to do with a changing sense of who one is, who one wants to be, and the persona one wants to project through their fashion choices.

There is no question about whether or not to make careful investments in basic pieces that build your wardrobe. But what is one supposed to do about the trends: the poncho, leggings, skinny jeans, wide belts, and pointy-toed shoes? A few options come to mind. Just a few ideas, really.
- Reintroduce the school uniform to reduce trend-based consumption among children and adolescents
- Categorically avoid anything that screams “trend of the season”
- Purchase only when relatively certain you can wear the piece out before it goes out of style
- Establish a limit; allow yourself 1 such purchase per season or per year
- Force yourself to wear the trend piece from 3 years ago as punishment for your fashion consumption sins; then blog about that experience

 

Breaking up with

In the coming weeks you will witness a sharp decline in the number of times I write about things I read in the NYT because I cancelled my subscription this afternoon. I have been getting home delivery of the Sunday paper for about five years, which has given me access to Times Select since that started up - whenever that was. The whole Times Select thing bothered me from the beginning, especially the irony of Kristof calling for poeple to DO SOMETHING ABOUT DARFUR, when “people” don’t have access to his articles - only Times Select members do. Idiocy.

My last bill from the NYT got lost in the shuffle of holiday mail and job interviews and being sick and general chaos. Last week I received a really snotty “you’re late with your payment” letter from them, which I did not appreciate - especially not after having always paid it on time over the course of five years. I also don’t really take advantage of the Times Select stuff. I read the Op-Eds regularly, but over the course of a month I NEVER use more than 3 of my 100 archived article privlege, so I’m not not getting my money’s worth on that one.

Today was the final straw. Air strikes in Somalia, Fierce Fighting in Baghdad - the NYT’s top stories were Mark McGwire not getting into the baseball hall of fame and silicone kitchen tools. Who fucking cares? I’m turning to BBC news and Christian Science Monitor, unless you have some better suggestions for me.

 

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.