It is said that the average human nose can pick up some 4,000 different smells. Many become triggers for memories—freshly baked bread, an ex-girlfriend's hair in the warm sun, old socks left for three days in wet boots.
But smells do more than confer pleasure or tell us that meat has turned rancid. In the creepily disturbing and occasionally repulsive novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, first published almost twenty years ago, Patrick Süskind explores the idea that our ability to smell—and the ability of others to smell us—is essential to our humanity.
In fact, if one takes the message of this book to heart, the absence of scent and an aberrant and exaggerated sense of smell can lead to social isolation so extreme that it can drive a scentless victim to amorality and murder.
The most gifted human nose recognizes about 10,000 scents. Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, the main character in Perfume, has just such a nose. Grenouille can recall every odor he has ever encountered; he smells a worm in an apple, money hidden behind brick, and people blocks away.
Perfume is so full of smells that they seem to rise from the pages of the book.
Süskind seduces the reader's olfactory imagination with sensuous descriptions of jasmine, attar of roses, the Florentine flasks, and copper kettles used to reduce flowers and herbs to their essential oils. The level of detail is remarkable, both for the book's fairly slim size and the apparent lack of repetition.
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| The art of perfume making. |
Set up as a fictional biography, the novel opens in eighteenth-century Paris, where "the streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells stank of moldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat; the unaired parlors stank of stale dust, the bedrooms of greasy sheets, damp featherbeds, and the pungently sweet aroma of chamber pots."
Into this world, Grenouille is born. His mother abandons him, leaving him under a table at a Paris fish market, and he grows up in an orphanage.
As a baby, Grenouille doesn't smell the way babies should (“like caramel”). Although he has an exceptional nose, he himself gives off no bodily odor whatsoever. Still, everyone he meets finds him in some way repellent. “The young Grenouille … gave the world nothing but his dung—no smile, no cry, no glimmer in the eye, not even his own scent.”
He learns different smells around him as most children learn the alphabet, or grasp numbers, and he spends his days identifying and ordering the scents in his world. His obsession with smell is absolute. He doesn't care for people and cares very little about himself.
At the age of 15, Grenouille becomes an apprentice to a Parisian master perfumer and learns the art of dissecting and isolating scents.
One day, Grenouille's nose is assailed by the most wondrous and magical perfume—the scent of a girl on the brink of puberty. When he resolves to bottle the maiden's scent, the obsession becomes deadly. Without leaving a trace or a scent, Grenouille escapes the murder scene.
After that first crime, Grenouille understood his destiny: He, Jean-Baptiste, the fishmonger's bastard, was to be “the greatest perfumer of all time.” The goal and purpose of his life became nothing less than to “revolutionize the odoriferous world.”
For the most part, Süskind holds the reader in suspense through this gripping page-turner.
When Grenouille is beset by demonic dreams, his ambition takes a grandiose and sinister bent as he develops a plan to rule mankind:
“People could close their eyes to greatness, to horrors, to beauty, and their ears to melodies or deceiving words. But they could not escape scent. For scent was a brother of breath. … He who ruled scent ruled the hearts of men.”
Grenouille's immediate quest is the ultimate and perfect scent—the scent of love—that will give him irresistible power over others. With creepy dispassion, Grenouille kills 25 young virgins and wraps their bodies in specially oiled cloths that capture their odors. The result is “an aura more radiant and more effective than any human being had ever possessed before him.”
His triumph is brief. Grenouille realizes that “what he had always longed for—that other people should love him—became at the moment of its achievement unbearable.”
Much of the novel stays vaguely within the realm of plausibility, but Grenouille's final scene takes a turn for the macabre. The story ends in something of a mess: a hellish orgy of cannibalistic desire.
The book was first published in German in 1985. When critics and readers caught scent of Perfume, it became an international bestseller and has since been translated into 37 different languages, including the English translation by John E. Woods, which was Süskind's first book to appear in English .
Dennis Severs was born in 1944 and from Southern California. His passion for what he called 'English light' drew him to London, and he made his home in the dilapidated property in 1979. His way of making a home was a unique and highly personal endeavour. He wrote, I worked inside out to create what turned out to be a collection of atmospheres: moods that harbour the light and the spirit of various ages. Each of the ten rooms in the house evokes its own period of history, brought alive through sight, smell, and a deliberate sense of precariousness, that work within 'the space between'.
Severs called his medium 'still life drama', that allowed his visitors (or at lease those receptive to his medium) to imagine themselves in another time and place. Woven through the house is the story of the fictive Jarvis family (a name anglicised from Gervais), Huguenot silk weavers who lived at the house from to 1725 to 1919. Each room evokes incidental moments in the lives of these imaginary inhabitants. Writer Peter Ackroyd wrote that The journey through the house becomes a journey through time; with its small rooms and hidden corridors, its whispered asides and sudden revelations, it resembles a pilgrimage through life itself . In a similar vein, Jeanette Winterson observed that Fashions come and go, but there are permanencies, vulnerable but not forgotten, that Dennis sought to communicate , in her article for the Times newspaper.
Severs bequeathed the house to the Spitalfields Trust shortly before his death in 1999. 18 Folgate Street is now open to the public.
The motto of the house is Aut Visum Aut Non!: 'You Either See it or you don't'.
Street artPoliceman writing a ticket for the cute car!
It's either an explanation for why Lance, Jake, and Matthew are spending so much time together — or the perfect Hollywood cover-up of our wildest fantasies. From today's Gatecrasher column:
Cycling legend Lance Armstrong has privately confirmed speculation that Jake Gyllenhaal will portray him in a biopic.He told sources at ESPN that Matthew McConaughey had been up to play the part, but lost out to Gyllenhaal.
"He said that's why he has been spending so much time with them both this summer," said the source.
This confirms last month's news that first announced Jake and Lance were getting together for the project. What else does it confirm? A gay box office draw.
Blue Mood
Upon entering the theatre, it is immediately evident that this is a one-of-a-kind experience. The ushers hand out white streamers to the audience, with no explanation as to what they should be used for. Many took the opportunity to add the streamer as an accessory to their theatre-going attire, however. Adding to the eccentricity, signs with red digital lettering scroll for narration and encourage the audience to participate in talking (singing is discouraged) happy birthday to someone and saying hello to some random person to make them feel better.
The show eventually opens with the three (alien?) blue men standing behind what appear to be buckets. The middle begins to play them as drums while the other two pour neon paint on the lids, forcing the paint to splash all over the place with every beat, explaining why the front rows of seats are the poncho section.
The men's antics provide a spectacle of events throughout the 100-minute show, from one catching an outrageous amount of marshmallows in his mouth to a tutorial on rock concert etiquette to an attempt at romancing a girl from the crowd by sharing Twinkies with her in what resembles a candlelit dinner. There is a house band placed strategically in cubes above the blue men, with rock music flowing from men who appear to be skeletons by the effect of black light and neon suits and face paint.
With lack of a better way to describe the surreal show, Blue Man Group is pure entertainment at its core. There doesn't seem to be much purpose or message behind the array of bright colours or inventive instruments, but to be honest, who cares? It's an interesting, and at times hilarious, show for the whole family and should be a must-see event if you can afford the tickets.
Just make sure you're not late, because the men will stop what they are doing while a speaker serenades 'You're Late' as a cameraman focuses on you, placing you on a big screen for the entire audience to see. And be prepared to unrol meters of toilet paper that will end up covering the audience enterily.
Bees. Swarming buzzing bees.
Tickling temperamental bees. Bees with
pointy painful stingers.
The boy poured honey down his back
and shook his buttocks left to right.
The naked crazy boy. He passed by the beehives,
jogging not running. Taking
his sweet innocent time, through the grass,
toward the white perfumy clover
field. The bees rose in a fuzzy brown boil,
filtered out their hive, cleaved
the air like an arrow aiming for honey-dripping
bare-bummed Johnny. Little
Johnny boy smiled broad and white, his feet
advancing toward the clover, tossing
his hips from side to side,
breathless voice issuing forth, "Beeeeez.
Zzzzzzzhahahahahaaaaaaaa."
Little Johnny boy slipped a finger
between his perspiring crack, taking
away honey as if from the stale edges of a white bread sandwich.
Johnny loved
the bees, almost as much as the sticky sweet clinging
of honey that formed and
hung like stalactites from his perineum, dripped
dripping drops.
The bees closed in. Thousands of bees,
their murmuring buzzing chorus
titillating little Johnny boy, stingers angry
and shining in the sun, quivering
mad. Johnny jogged toward the clover field,
licking his finger of the sweet
sweaty honey. Honeybuns, Johnny thought,
and laughed until he fell rolling over
the start of clover. Honeybuns, thought Johnny,
and he laughed, giggled, a
smile playing over his bare freckled puss.
"Beeeeeeez!" Johnny exclaimed, as a
fuzzy buzzing cloud converged on
little Johnny's honey sticky ass.
The sun rolled in golden fury,
and hours later, when it had turned a dark
red, and sunset swollen, little Johnny boy
lay stiff and puffy, pink and happy,
dead stinking sweet.