Scent and Subversion

 
Scent and Subversion

Decoding a Century of Provocative Perfume

by Barbara Herman

Lyons Press

2013

 

 

Thank goodness for library renewals, because while Scent and Subversion isn't a particularly long book, the only way to read it is slowly, and I took about 3 months. Herman opens with an essay about her particular preference in perfume and concludes with profiles of two unconventional perfumers and two scent artists, plus a glossary of terms, but the heart of Scent and Subversion is a collection of about 300 reviews of perfumes, from the 1880s to 1990s.

 
The perfumes that Herman loves and writes about are a kind that aren't really made anymore, both because styles have changed, and because many of the key ingredients are no longer legal (due to concerns about either allergens, endangered status, or the treatment of animals.) Many of these perfumes mix floral, herbal, and animal scents, often with the more-or-less explicit intention of allowing the wearer to communicate sexual desire that she might not feel able to speak aloud. Coco Chanel famously said a woman wearing No 5 should 'smell like a woman, and not a rose,' which is a sentiment shared by many of the other perfumers Herman reviews.

 
One tidbit I learned, the 'indolic' scent is present in low concentrations in jasmine flowers and in high concentrations in feces. I'd thought my aversion to jasmine scented hand soap was idiosyncratic, but apparently some part of my brain recognized that the same smell had another possible source.

 
Based on my taste in scented candles, I think I would enjoy the now-extinct 'chypre' and 'fougere' perfume styles. Chypre is named for the island of Cyprus, and combines citrus top notes, floral heart notes, and base notes of moss. Fougere is named for ferns, and it's a style that is intended to smell like a perfumer's fantasy of a deep forest.

 
I'm kind of sold on the idea of liking 'difficult' vintage perfumes, but who knows if I would actually enjoy smelling them, even if I like the idea of them on paper. Also, it's the nature of perfume that you're never the only one smelling it, and I don't know where I could go where I'd want to be wearing prominent animalistic, bodily notes ... so I probably won't be hunting for vintage scents anytime soon.

Discarded Science

 
Discarded Science
Ideas that Seemed Good at the Time...
by John Grant
Facts, Figures & Fun
2006

 

 

This is a bit of a cheat, since I checked this one out last year, finished most of it, ran out of time and returned it, and recently got it back out.

 

Discarded Science gives a brief overview of a lot of different hypotheses and beliefs that we no longer accept as true. 

 
Or at least, that scientists working within their field of expertise no longer regard as true. One surprise from reading this was just how many scientists are responsible for these ideas - usually either theorizing outside their field or unwilling to reject their pet theory even after experimental evidence has shown that it's false.

 
The second surprise is that what we might call 'woo' has a long history that parallels science, a history of ideas that are kept around because people want to believe them, even though the evidence shows they're not true, and even though, when applied to medicine, they're often dangerous or fatal.

 
Which kind of leads into my third surprise, which is just how boring this turned out to be. I was hoping for ideas that were fascinatingly wacky, and instead it's mostly just Biblical inerrancy, reincarnation, gold, vibes, and life force energy over and over again.

 
Grant compounds this problem by giving interesting wrong ideas like phlogiston and luminiferous ether pretty short shrift, while going on and on about Creationism and Intelligent Design. The book is organized by broad subject, but has no real throughline within chapters, and sometimes Grant just fires off trivia a sentence at a time. He also has a bad habit of repeatedly referencing an influential idea but not describing it in detail until after all the things it inspired.

 
My one cool discovery was the so-called 'Axial Theory,' which claims that the Earth used to have water-ice rings like Saturn, but in a great disaster, they fell down and melted, causing the Biblical flood. There are countless versions of 'the Bible is literally true, the Earth is 6000ish years old, and the flood really happened' in the book - this was the one that was genuinely fascinating in its strangeness.

Monster, She Wrote

 
 

Monster, She Wrote

The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction

by Lisa Kroger and Melanie Anderson

Quirk Books

2019

 

 

Monster She Wrote is a history of the most famous and influential women to write Gothic fiction, whether their works would be classified as horror, scifi, fantasy, or just 'literature.' Each author gets 3-5 pages of a vignette biography and discussion of her major works.

 
Most of the book is divided into chronological sections, covering the authors who originated 'the Gothic' like Mary Shelley and Anne Radcliffe, pulp authors from the early 20th Century, the writers of lurid paperbacks from the 80s and 90s, and a few sections in between. The last chapter is organized thematically, and it's overstuffed with names and recommendations.

 
I thought the earlier sections were stronger, but I appreciate Kroger and Anderson's willingness to try to wrestle the plethora of more recent works into a kind of canon to accompany the more-established earlier ones. They certainly offer a lot of help if you want to craft your own Gothic reading list.