Luca Turin changed my life

You don't know who Luca Turin is? Some people think he's a hack and others a genius. I am on the side of genius. Whether or not his biology is worthy, the man has a nose and a sense of metaphor that changed my life. Let me explain.

One Friday evening bookshop expedition, I found a tiny hardcover in among the bold spines of other popular science titles. The cover is a smokey black and the title is written in a modern serif font, with large spaces between the letters lending it an edge of elegance: The Emperor of Scent.

The subtitle reads: "A story of perfume, obsession and the last mystery of the senses." Sprouting from this is a white dew-covered flower and two buds. The smokey grey is the dark background of the image, bleeding out.

The book is a memoir written by Chandler Burr, a journalist for the New York Times who wrote their perfume reviews - don't raise your eyebrows; you are still to discover the hidden world that is your sense of smell. It describes biophysicist Turin's increasing interest in our organ of smell and the perfume industry.

Like the war between Chomsky and Skinner, Turin pits the molecule vibration theory against the perfume industry's shape theory. The memoir is obviously weighted in support of Turin and casts him as the persecuted cowboy fighting the ills of urbanisation, and disregards contradictory evidence. This aside, Burr explains the theories clearly without patronising the reader, so even I felt like a competent biologist.

What enamoured me, though, were the descriptions of everyday scents, which break the smells into their components and build them back up again. Then there are the more unusual scents, which I doubt I have ever smelt, but can imagine. His metaphors are precise and you can't imagine any other plausible exposition of their merits and failures. The man is an olfactory genius.

The book obviously has implications for your reading of Perfume by Patrick Suskind, and vice versa. But it also has implications for your interactions with the world around you, using a sense that you probably never thought much of, sight and sound remaining the Zeuses of your sensory world, but in Turin's world our Hermes rules.

With the success of The Emperor of Scent, which somehow had gone out of print the last time I tried to get a copy, Turin has co-authored a guide to commercial perfumes, called simply Perfumes. The cover is beautiful, but what you don't see are the embossed, foiled and spot-varnished details.

Now I can get a fix of Turin every day, in his often scathing reviews of various perfumes (even those he ranks a five). Take for example, one of my favourites: Angel by Thierry Mugler. Calling the perfume "a high-energy state of contradiction" and "a joke", he breaks it down into:

a handsome, resinous woody patchouli straight out of the pipes-and-leather-slippers realm of men's fragrance, in a head-on collision with a bold blackcurrant and a screechy white floral.

This isn't the ambiguous realm of wine tastings, folks - find yourself a perfume stockist and try Angel. Then try another perfume and see if you can smell its components and how they work together. It's a miracle; I was blind but now I see. Whereas the epics among wine vintages suffer when set to a blind tasting, perfumes do not. You can distinguish a good perfume from a bad one almost instantly. Cheap perfumes are always bad, but so are most of the expensive ones.

If Angel is a joke, it is that of Truman Capote, while most perfumes are the slapstick comedies of Jim Carey or the gush of Maid in Manhattan.

This post came about from a recent foray into the perfume aisle. Oh dear heaven above, many of the perfumes have nice elements but ruin them by the dosing of one that drowns the rest. Not only against my skin, but against the objective whiteness of those paper strips. I felt like a walking headache.

With Turin's help, you understand how a perfume should engage with your own natural scent. How this engagement changes over the course of the day. How you shouldn't be able to smell a perfume that complements you, except for whiffs as you turn or gesture.

And the wonderful thing about this is, I think, something that is misunderstood about Turin. His is not the definitive off-with-her-head sentence on a perfume. Scent is about you. How it assists in creating your own identity, just as clothing does. (You can deny this, but then deny that you routinely categorise people based on superficial signals because you are able to process the immense amount of stimuli you are subjected to every day. I suspect that if this were true, you'd never leave your bedroom.)

I don't mind being a "perverse" joke, provided the meaning of it is my own.

Drag races in my mind

Thoughts are screaming through my mind, like racing cars on a bridge, weaving and jostling and breaking the rules without appearing to break the rules, and every so often one spins from the edge (because there are no barriers made of tyres - this is not mere sport) and disappears. Except, no wait, it doesn't disappear because my mind appears to be infinite, so it just spins around, bumping into other bridges and scraping pieces of cement and steel from the supports.

There you have it, folks, another crisis. Long overdue, really, like the shifting of the poles. What the doomsayers don't tell you is that we will survive the changes in magnetic fields, because we are resourceful (and annoying) creatures, although this is based on the evidence of blockbuster movies, where we annihilate the aliens - and I suspect that half the time we don't even know how we did it.

(Afraid of water? Really? Build a suit of armour. A wetsuit. Coat yourselves in Vaseline. I suspect that really these aliens figured out how dumb and superstitious we are and figured it was something in the air. And since they hadn't thought to build a suit of armour etc, and probably had no way to test the air to come to a definitive conclusion, they therefore could not afford to lose what brain cells they have left.)

My point is this won't destroy me - but don't tell me it will make me stronger.

To interrupt, and really to prove my point - Interception. Brilliant movie that set my little dinkie cars off on my Lego bridge (circular pun). But the scene where the merry band of blackmailers run from a pursuing band of snowsuit-clad symbols of the subconscious - don't make me laugh. I have had a few encounters with my subconscious and, trust me, its minions certainly don't run around in furry white suits on a snowy holiday.

There are no metaphors for the pain and suffering this force that we live with every day can and routinely does enforce. In fact, chances are you would be the tool of your own torture, so that it wouldn't have to waste time on more dumb creatures - guarding the one it has is probably punishment enough.

My furry pursuers and I have reached a truce, an equitable one. The alternative is pain and suffering in the form of an eternal crisis. This way I only have intermittent ones. Hurrah. But no, these crises are now a bonding experience. Hurrah.

I know where this crisis has come from. I don't like to stand still. My past might catch up. I am in charge of a humongous project, in a job I enjoy, in a company I like, with colleagues I respect. That sounds like a stimulating challenge, right, that doesn't leave much time for boredom. My past is 1 400 km away and for the time being staying put. But I am bored. Which does not imply I want to leave my job. On the contrary.

I am difficult to manage. I am high maintenance. (Don't patronise me by pretending to be surprised.) But I have an insatiable appetite for learning. (This is the basis on which my subconscious and I have bonded so that we are no longer separate entities.) I need to be pushed, incessantly. I need someone to stand there with a stick and an ice pack, and I can't do it on my own because then the stick turns into a cat o' nine tails and the ice pack into the bloodied rags of a damp face cloth.

The usual solutions have made an appearance on the bridge and have one by one been mown down except the last: travelling, Master's, novel. But even this one doesn't quite soothe the bruising. For the time being, I am battling the urge to run by doing the things I had forgotten I liked: making things, drawing, gardening, mothering every living thing in sight (including geckos).

And writing. Hello regular blog postings and appearances on various social media.

Maybe it's ok for there to be drag races on the bridges that connect one roiling island of my mind to another. Something like the progressive levels of the Nordic spiritual plane. I like that metaphor. I might pin it up somewhere. So maybe the furry snow riders aren't pursuing. Maybe they are shepherding.

Armageddon in retrospect

Your moods are in flux during a day (right?). Different moods require different books (right?). Also, different situations require different types of book.

For instance, you are reading over breakfast and need some way to hold the book open without using your hands. You need a thinnish paperback that slides under your bowl with bending the spine. You are sitting outside. You need something sturdy that you can plonk on your lap or on the ground without the pages constantly flipping over. You need a thick hardcover.

(Right?)

I appease this fickleness by reading different books of different formats at one time. A fiction, a non-fiction, a science fiction. Sometimes I read multiple books from each type, provided they are easy to distinguish. In addition to reading Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth, I am also reading Armageddon in retrospect by Kurt Vonnegut.

(I confess, I have only now learnt to spell the word Armageddon. Don't judge me; at least I'm honest.)

This is a collection of short stories. I generally don't enjoy short stories, but the Byliner single series on Kindle has converted me. (Margaret Atwood has left me biting my knuckles bloody for her next installment - and I swear, she knows it! - and Nicole Krauss has intrigued me.)

I expected something different. Something more brutal, set in the middle of the action, throwing grenades at the reader - tsa tsa tsa. What I am getting is a Sunday drive that ends when the path becomes overgrown from disuse and a smoke bomb is set off overhead. Tssssssssaaaaaa. (Imagine I am out of the car by this time, else the metaphor doesn't work. Hang on, perhaps I should be taking a Sunday walk, but then where would it end...?)

I am only on the third story (I skipped the blah-blah of the son's introduction and a speech by the author - publishers need to start putting these things at the end, after we're finished reading - which took out about a third of the book - bastards), but the story "Guns before butter" has me dancing before the overgrowth, trying to figure out a way through short of scything the brush aside.

I won't describe the premise, because the moral will jump out at you if I do. But no! Two pages before the end, the moral is thrust aside by the flight of two pins but you don't know why at first, and really, I doubt you ever fully know, even though the writer convinces you that you do. You take a step further down the road (now you're taking a Sunday walk) and the brush begins to grow around you.

Those pins are rattling around in the corners of my apartment - not even in my skull, because my brain takes care of that - but out here in the real world. The short story will fall short of my excitement, I promise you, but that is because you are taking it on face value. Read it, think about it and listen to the pins drop (get it?).

At the risk of TMI, this is the book I read in the bath. It is light enough that I can hold it up without bruising the webby skin between thumb and index finger, and I can read one story in one, uh, sitting. Also, I need breaks from Sacred Hunger. I mean, it won the Booker, so what else did I expect from the novel?

On library cards

I think I have posted something similar before... or maybe I just meant to. I have visited The Library, religiously, every second or third Saturday since I was in Grade 2. As friends and readers may know, a 'little birdie' broke into our house one night and flew away with our TV. 'What will these children do without a TV?' my parents wondered.

'Read!' they shouted in unison. (No, not really. I don't how the conversation really went.)

The next morning we were surrounded by books in waist-high (my seven-year-old waist), horizontal bookshelves. This experience meant little to me at the time, mostly because what I knew about reading was Johnny and Mary going to town, spewing rhyming non sequiturs, depicted as children in 'sensible clothes' prancing around.

We were given barcoded cards, but the entry into the system was still done with cards placed inside the books when shelved and removed when they were taken out. (Yes, I am that ancient. I learnt to use a computer on MS Dos.)

The first book we took out on our first library cards was a picture book featuring crocodiles. Each page was filled with jungle scenes and crocodiles and tiny creatures to find - a mouse under a fern, a bird in a nest... We (my sister and I) took this book out every few weeks, until my mother insisted I was too old for it. I continued to take it out as a show of autonomy.

It all steamrolled from there. Soon I was reading my complement of books (three), plus two on my mother's card, in a week. I would finish at least one of these books that same Saturday. I would hide a book under my pillow and either hold it at an angle to catch the light from the passage or sit in the light that fell in through my open doorway with one ear cocked for the sounds of my parents going to sleep. I was never very good at pretending to be asleep when they checked in on me though.

In my defense (and that of my shortsightedness), I was never one of those children who fall asleep quickly. I could lie there for hours and hours and hours staring into the dark and imagining what the witch under my bed was planning to do to my toes and what I would do without toes, so why not make better use of my time - and imagination?

By Grade 8, I had the reading level of a Grade 12 - after which, I confess, my reading habit took a brief nosedive. I had read all the books in the children's and young adults' section, but wasn't quite ready for the adults' section (no below-the-belt humour intended). My world righted itself in Grade 10, though.

Predictably, I took English Literature as one of my undergraduate majors, and fell in love repeatedly. During my holidays from prescribed reading, I consumed everything I could find in the library by the author I was then enamoured with: Toni Morrison, Rebecca West, Henry James, EM Forster, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Zakes Mda... In my third year, I got a job as a bookseller, so now I could take five books from the library, three books on apro from the shop and buy books at two-thirds of the retail price.

If I sound as though I've read a ton of books, that's why. Note: trade publishers also give booksellers complimentary/advance copies twice a year.

By turns, I have worked as a book reviewer, publicist, editor and publisher, all of which, my friends, equals (yes) more free and discounted books. As you can imagine I have towers of the things, mostly in boxes at my mom's house, which amounts to a good few years-of-reading's worth. Still, I visit the library every second Saturday and/or Wednesday. I never take less than my full allocation and, no, I don't read them all, but I get to look at them for two weeks.

This week's view

This post was supposed to about the Cape Town Central Library, which has become My Library because of the range of books, the architecture and mass of books. This library is where I go when I need some reassurance. It's my rabbit hole. There are bookshelves around you, above you and in little rooms to the side... I can breathe there.

Sadly, I do not have the guts to delete this entire post and begin again. So perhaps those of you in the city should just take a gander instead.

PS. The library card is free, and you can take out seven books (I squealed out loud when the librarian told me) for two weeks and renew them twice - and then take them out as new books again! And the card works in any of the municipal libraries, so you just check online which library has the book you're looking for and pick it up. Really, why are you still in front of your computer?

What do Russia and dystopia have in common?

When I typed in the heading, the spelling feature in Chrome highlighted 'dystopia' and gave me only one option: 'topiary'. It's a bit of a leap from anti-paradise to a garden feature via Russia, but I'm sure that there's an answer out there. This is not what the first and last have in common, however, so perhaps we can ponder this in another post.

Multiple answers come to mind. The most obvious one is that this is the literature I am most drawn to at the moment. (One might be tempted to diagnose my state of mind here, but you're reading the post of an amateur anarchist, so really what did you expect?)

Ah, The People's Act of Love. Some of you may know how that book both terrifies me and is high on my favourites list. You may also know that the book haunts me in a tangible way, in that I am always aware of its presence, that just looking at it (as I am right now) is enough to plunge me into crisis and hold my head under water, and that I am not the only person to feel this way (click on link, now please).

PS. When trying to find an appropriate link, the first Google option was 'I love catching people in the act'. No words. Just resignation.

No one knows this personal snippet, except that now you do: when I was a child (climbing trees and reading, copiously) I believed I was Russian. Not consciously, of course. I only realised in adolescence that a) I believed this and b) it wasn't true. When I looked in the mirror I saw a snow-pale, black-haired child. (I am pale, but more the tint of hail clouds and my hair is a dull brown; not that I have a self-esteem issue but this is true.) I'm not suggesting anything esoteric here, only that I identified with something I had watched or read about.

So, it seems, anarchy isn't just an intellectual revolt.

It goes without saying that browsing secondhand bookshops is my favourite way to kill time. I confess, even on a Friday night, when my peers are donning heels and matching underwear. In need of indulgence, I was browsing (on a Wednesday not a Friday evening), finding nothing of interest until I browsed the 'Book club reads' on my way out of the shop (no stone left unturned). Four pairs of men (their hands tied behind their backs I see now) set against a background of snow. I knew I would buy it even before I picked it up.

The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-56 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. (This does not classify as a book club read, but I'm glad it was in my path, appropriately as I was leaving disappointed.)

There it was, as if it knew I was about to reread The People's Act of Love. That is crazy, yes, and anthropomorphic. But this book is enough to make me wax lyrical for hours, except that my words are usually inarticulate in this instance: "I can't explain it; the book destroyed me. Des-troy-ed." *shaking head* And again, on repeat.

This post is already too long, so I'm going to skip over to dystopia.

The list of great such novels is long, so look out for this post. War is dypstopia. It is pre-apocalypse. The thought of people dying and suffering, for decades after too, and often for no reason... How are we not as horrified by even one such event as we should be about children sleeping on the street? It is beyond my comprehension, as it is that I can sit here typing while people suffer. While children suffer. People, we are living in a dystopia. And there is nothing you or I can do. This is the nature of my nihilism.

Reading dystopian fiction relieves some of this pressure (while reminding me that I am a hypocrite) and often pushes me towards the ideals of socialism. Perhaps I should amend my heading: What do the revolutions and gulags in Russia and dystopia have in common? That answer is obvious. And here my shoulders hunch and I lean over my keyboard, gutted.

Intellectually, I can justify my current literary obsessions. Emotionally, the anger and helplessness at the bigness of life and death and pain (because no happiness or beauty can amortise pain) overwhelms me and this is the only demonstration of my refusal to accept this that I can muster.

My next read is We by Yevgeny Zamayatin, a translation of a Russian dystopian novel that, according to reports, precedes (chronologically and in content) all other such novels. Look out for future posts. I will try to contain my emotional nihilism, although really this is the nature of my blog and I shouldn't be afraid of potentially squeamish readers, because virtual sharing is about the construction of my virtual identity not yours - sorry folks.