Posted by Angela
on
26 January 2009
The building was pink stucco, big and new and ugly. It had a side entrance with “Romp Room” lettered above it in red neon…[I heard] The high titter of drunk and flattered women, the animal sounds of drunk and eager men. Babel with a wild jazz obbligato.
A big henna redhead in a shotsilk blouse was making drinks at a service bar near the door. Her torso jiggled in the blouse like a giant soft-boiled egg with the shell removed.*
The scent wafting off this dame was unmistakable: Coty Emeraude, in the bottle with the plastic lid. I bet she was saving up for Shalimar. Not that she should bother — the stink of cigarette smoke and bleach water bar rags would follow her wherever she went.
But who was this gorgeous dame down the bar? She was years away from drugstore perfume. At first glance, I'd peg her for Frédéric Malle Carnal Flower.
I stole a look at the woman, to confirm my first impression. Her atmosphere was like pure oxygen; if you breathed it deep it could make you dizzy and gay, or poison you. Her eyes were melancholy under heavy lashes, her cheeks faintly hollowed as if she had been feeding on her own beauty…Her hands fumbled with the diamond clasp of a gold lamé bag, and groped inside. “God damn and blast it,” she said.*
Hmm. Beautiful — ethereal even — but with a potty mouth…
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Posted by Robin
on
7 August 2008
We already did a poll on Jane Austen (and another on Harry Potter), now it's time for another of my favorite authors: Lucy Maud Montgomery. I read the whole of her Anne of Green Gables series several times over as a child, and then I read them several times over again as an adult.
The first novel in the series, Anne of Green Gables, appeared 100 years ago, in 1908. According to Wikipedia, Montgomery “used a photograph of Evelyn Nesbit, clipped from an American magazine and pasted on the wall above her writing desk, as the model for Anne Shirley, the book's main character”, but the editions I had as a child, printed by Grosset & Dunlap in the 1970s…
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Posted by Robin
on
16 May 2008
That's right: two lazy polls in a row! That might be a Now Smell This first, but I've been inexplicably exhausted all this week, and can't bring myself to finish another perfume review. This poll is for any of my fellow Janeites out there, and the rest of you will find it dull as nails so please come back tomorrow when Jessica will review the new Clean Well Hand Washes scented by Mandy Aftel of Aftelier.
So…I'm sure I'm not the only one who watched much of the recent Masterpiece Austen-fest on PBS. I enjoyed it immensely…
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“A scent always dissipates, leaving in its wake no more than a faint echo, a lingering trace. Perfume is a 'here' en route to a 'there', a today floating away in the direction of a yesterday, a possession paradoxically coinciding with an immanent loss” (Richard Stamelman, p.19).
The notion of perfume as the 'essence of absence' has always been a great source of inspiration to poets and novelists. Few, however, have taken it as literally as Italo Calvino in his tale The Name, the Nose. This short story was published posthumously in 1986, together with A King Listens and Under the Jaguar Sun, and consists of three interwoven plots in which sensuality, desire, and the sense of smell play a central role…
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“If desire causes suffering, it may be because we do not desire wisely, or that we are inexpert at obtaining what we desire. Instead of hiding our heads in a prayer cloth and building walls against temptation, why not get better at fulfilling desire? Salvation is for the feeble, that’s what I think. I don’t want salvation, I want life, all of life, the miserable as well as the superb.”
These words by Alobar, one of the protagonists of Jitterbug Perfume (1984), secretly reveal what this epic novel is all about. Four intricately interwoven stories, themed around the pursuit of immortality and individualism, take us from ancient Bohemia (1000 A.D.) and the slopes of the Himalaya to modern-day Seattle, New Orleans, and Paris. The narrative shifts back and forth between past and present, featuring an ex-king (Alobar) and the love of his life (Kudra), the foul-smelling God of the woods (Pan), a waitress with a college degree and a little secret (Priscilla), a small-time perfumery in New Orleans (Madame Devalier and her assistant V’lu), and an eccentric big-shot perfumer in Paris…
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