Genius!

 

This guy in Brooklyn has jumped onto the non-fungible token craze by selling digital recordings of his own farts.

This is brilliant on so many levels.

While giving Alex Ramírez-Mallis all due credit as a (f)art world innovator, I do have some reservations. Having listened to a few of his audibles, he seems to be—if not a true squeaker—a short-burst specialist. The type Dr. Raymond Stantz might classify as “a focused, non-terminal, repeating phantasm or a class-five full-roaming vapor. A real nasty one, too.”

You can spend your crypto-currency on ARM’s staccato output, or you could wait for someone in the basso profundo category with a more sostenuto style of delivery. It’s all a matter of taste.

The Undead: A Disinterred Collection of Smelly Ghost Posts

The leaves are falling, the temperature is dropping, and the days grow shorter. Piles of bagged candy bars clog the supermarket aisles. Halloween in nearly upon us.

Some years ago I dug up as many ghostly or paranormal smell stories as I could find. There was an underwhelming Victorian novel by Wilkie Collins, and a sad, graceful tale in the form of a poem by the American writer Bret Harte. (Of special interest to South Park fans, the latter post includes some background on the Comte de Rochambeau.)

The Uninvited, a novel set in 1930s England, featured supernatural disturbances, including the scent of Parfum Mimosa. The book was later made into a movie starring Ray Milland in which the song Stella by Starlight—now a jazz standard—made its first appearance.

Finally, I took a look at the spirit smells reported by the Irish poet W.B. Yeats during a preoccupation with the occult.

Some links to check out late at night over a glass of port while the wind rattles the windows.

How Nick Zollicker Came to Be

I join Luke Clancy on his Culture File podcast to talk about Nick Zollicker, the protagonist of my new “smell stories.”

A Vertical Chord: Nabokov's Multisensory Evocation of Scent

Vladimir Nabokov is one of those writers I return to again and again. I love his taste, his elegance, and his wry humor. His style, especially in his early stories, uses sights, sounds, and yes, even smells, to give a spontaneous immediacy to scenes from the past that are full of soft sadness, even nostalgia. One could make the case that he is a synesthetic writer; there is no doubt that he is one of the best olfactory writers of all time.

The story Sounds, written in Russian in 1923, was translated into English and published in The New Yorker in 1995 by his son, Dimitri Nabokov, who noted that “the story is, among other things, a transmuted evocation of a youthful love affair” that his father had with a married cousin.

This is one of many olfactory passages in the story. It is a perfect literary example of how to set up and deliver an olfactory image.

I was watching your back, the silk checks of your blouse. From somewhere downstairs, probably the courtyard, came a resonant peasant-woman voice, “Gerosim! Hey, Gerosim!” And suddenly it was supremely clear to me that, for centuries, the world had been blooming, withering, spinning, changing solely in order that now, at this instant, it might combine and fuse into a vertical chord the voice that had resounded downstairs, the motion of your silken shoulder blades, and the scent of pine boards.

Sounds
in The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

F. Scott Fitzgerald: An Olfactory Archaeology

A wonderful literary use of smell to illuminate the thick layers of human detritus that accumulate with time in a New York apartment building. Climbing up the scented stairway is like descending through the layers of an archaeological dig.

Then he would trudge homeward, enter the dark hallway, and climb three rickety flights of stairs covered by an ancient carpet of long obliterated design. The hall had an ancient smell—of the vegetables of 1880, of the furniture polish in vogue when “Adam-and-Eve” Bryan ran against William McKinley, of portières an ounce heavier with dust, from worn-out shoes, and lint from dresses turned long since into patch-work quilts. This smell would pursue him up the stairs, revivified and made poignant at each landing by the aura of contemporary cooking, then, as he began the next flight, diminishing into the odor of the dead routine of dead generations.

Eventually would occur the door of his room, which slipped open with indecent willingness and closed with almost a sniff upon his “Hello, dear! Got a treat for you to-night.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Oh Russet Witch!”
From Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)

The Stench of the Abyss

Dante
Inferno, Canto XI

[Circle Six: The Heretics]

In su l’estremità d’un’alta ripa
che facevan gran pietre rotte in cerchio,
venimmo sopra più crudele stipa;
e quivi, per l’orribile soperchio
del puzzo che ’l profondo abisso gitta,
ci raccostammo, in dietro, ad un coperchio

d’un grand’ avello, ov’io vidi una scritta
che dicea: ‘Anastasio papa guardo,
lo qual trasse Fotin de la via dritta’.

«Lo nostro scender conviene esser tardo,
sì che s’ausi un poco in prima il senso
al tristo fiato; e poi no i fia riguardo».

We came to the edge of an enormous sink
rimmed by a circle of great broken boulders.
Here we found ghastlier gangs. And here the stink

thrown up by the abyss so overpowered us
that we drew back, cowering behind the wall
of one of the great tombs; and standing thus,

I saw an inscription in the stone, and read:
“I guard Anastasius, once Pope,
he whom Photinus led from the straight road.”

“Before we travel on to that blind pit
we must delay until our sense grows used
to its foul breath, and then we will not mind it,”

my Master said.

[Translation by John Ciardi]


A fine example of olfactory literature: the stench of the pit is simultaneously literal and figurative. Virgil’s advice to Dante to pause while their noses adapt draws on a keenly observed bit of odor perception; it also provides a dramatic interlude for him to explain the next levels of the damned. The presence in Hell of Pope Anastasius is nice reminder that popes too can be led astray.

The Upside of BO

Top five things I miss about Laura. [ . . . ]

Three: I miss her smell, and the way she tastes. It’s a mystery of human chemistry and I don’t understand it, some people, as far as their senses are concerned, just feel like home.

Rob (John Cusak) in High Fidelity

Vladimir Nabokov: The Literary Scent of Nostalgia

I’ve been dipping into the marvelous stories of Vladimir Nabokov (1899 – 1977). Many of them are about Russians, like himself, who were driven from their country in the revolution of 1917 and spent the next decades circulating around Europe, trying to make sense of what had become of them and their past. Nostalgia was forced upon Nabokov at an unnaturally young age—his family lost its estates, its wealth, its history and its place in the world. As an author he would return continuously to the themes of memory, longing, and fractured time.

Nabokov is a also multisensory writer: he describes sounds, textures, colors, and shapes as if they were animated by their own intentions and emotions. His stories are shot through with smells—very specific ones tied to a particular time and place. The overall effect is almost one of synesthesia. Here is an example from the story "Mademoiselle O", Nabokov’s recollections of a French-Swiss governess his family hired to look after him and his siblings in the years just before the revolution.

Presently, lessons are over and Mademoiselle is reading to us on the veranda where the mats and plaited chairs develop a spicy, biscuity smell in the heat. On the white windowsills, on the long window seats covered with faded calico, the sun breaks into geometrical gems after passing through rhomboids and squares of stained glass. This is the time when Mademoiselle is at her very best.

Nabokov’s often writes long sentences that are an inventory of objects and smells. But these are not mere lists. Watch as he seamlessly weaves scents into a psychological portrait of Mademoiselle O:

Mademoiselles’ room, both in the country and in town, was a weird place to me—a kind of hothouse sheltering a thick-leaved plant imbued with a heavy, queerly acrid odor. Although next to ours, when we were small, it did not seem to belong to our pleasant, well-aired home. In that sickening mist, reeking, among other effluvia, of the brown smell of oxidized apple peel, the lamp burned low, and strange objects glimmered upon the writing desk: a lacquered box with licorice stick, black segments of which she would hack off with her penknife and put to melt under her tongue; a picture postcard of a lake and a castle with mother-of-pearl spangles for windows; a bumpy ball of tightly rolled bits of silver paper that came from all those chocolates she used to consume at night; photographs of the nephew who had died, of his mother who had signed her picture Mater Dolorosa, and of a certain Monsieur de Marante who had been forced by his family to marry a rich widow.

Mademoiselle O
in The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

The Shape of Smells to Come

There is a certain charm to the stiffly drawn illustrations found in United States patent documents. The clear, static, highly conventionalized style evokes comic books and instruction manuals. Yet, in contrast to the ponderous, formal, lawyerly text of the patent, the hand of the artist can give the images a certain style of their own.

Here is Figure 1 from U.S. Patent 3,902,851, “Method of detecting odors and apparatus therefore,” by Andrew Dravnieks. It was granted on September 2, 1975. The illustrator did not sign his work, but I think it qualifies as a type of olfactory art.

Literary Smellscapes: Joan Didion on Leaving New York

When Joan Didion, a native Californian, recounts her change of scene to the East Coast and back, it is scent that drives her back and forth in time, as through a wormhole. It begins with a foreshadowing, the mirage of new smellscape that locates her far from her roots:

“I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later—because I did not belong there, did not come from there—but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.”

Later, scents pull her back into specific times and places:

“Now when New York comes back to me it comes in hallucinatory flashes, so clinically detailed that I sometimes wish that memory would effect the distortion with which it is commonly credited. For a lot of the time I was in New York I used a perfume called Fleurs de Rocaille, and then L’Air du Temps, and now the slightest trace of either can short-circuit my connections for the rest of the day. Nor can I smell Henri Bendel jasmine soap without falling back into the past, or the particular mixture of spices used for boiling crabs. There were barrels of crab boil in a Czech place in the Eighties where I once shopped. Smells, of course, are notorious memory stimuli, but there are other things which affect me the same way. Blue-and-white striped sheets. Vermouth cassis. Some faded nightgowns which were new in 1959 or 1960, and some chiffon scarves I bought about the same time.”

In the end, the notes of a familiar smellscape tell her that she is home once again:

“The last time I was in New York was in a cold January, and everyone was ill and tired. Many of the people I used to know there had moved to Dallas or had gone on Antabuse or had bought a farm in New Hampshire. We stayed ten days, and then we took an afternoon flight back to Los Angeles, and on the way home from the airport that night I could see the moon on the Pacific and smell jasmine all around and we both knew that there was no longer any point in keeping the apartment we still kept in New York. There were years when I called Los Angeles “the Coast,” but they seem a long time ago.”

Joan Didion
Goodbye to All That (1967)
(Slouching Towards Bethlehem)

Scent of Mystery Comes to Video

The New York Post’s Lou Lumenick has the story: “Elizabeth Taylor’s forgotten Smell-O-Vision adventure arrives on video.” He’s talking about Scent of Mystery, the first (and only) film to use the revolutionary Smell-O-Vision process promoted by Mike Todd, Jr. and his father. Elizabeth Taylor (then married to Todd, Sr.) was an investor in the technology and makes a cameo appearance in the movie. (Your Hollywood trivia of the day: Mike Todd, Sr. coined the word cameo.)

I researched the story of Smell-O-Vision—and its rival, AromaRama—for my book. Along the way I interviewed inventor Hans Laube’s wife and daughter, and saw a prototype of his scent-generating device, along with all the promotional material for the film’s premiere. It’s a great story in the history of technology.

Until now, Scent of Mystery was only available in a badly butchered VHS of a television mashup version. I’m looking forward to seeing the newly restored re-release. Sure, it was slightly corny even for 1960, and unspools at the leisurely pace of that time. But I look forward to viewing it end-to-end while imagining all the odors (there are lots of them).

Schlubs of New York

There are rare nights when Manhattan has a manic, magical charm. Then there are nights like tonight, when Tenth Avenue reeks of discarded ice outside the fish market and the air is shattered by car horns as drivers blast their way into the Lincoln Tunnel. (To be fair, these aren’t New Yorkers—they’re assholes from New Jersey in a big fucking rush to get back to their blighted home turf.)

On such a routine, uncharming evening people in New York look like hell—vacant, tired, badly dressed; a parade of the lame and the halt, the obese and the homeless. Chelsea becomes a badly lit Fellini set.

Hordes of people pour across town, flooding the sidewalks. I fight my way down Tenth through the selfie-taking mob, past a couple of bloody zombies. I start thinking about airport temperature screening for Ebola and what a joke that is. It’s not until I pass another ghoul that the signal rises above the noise and I realize these are not the usual schlubs of Manhattan. These are out of town schlubs dressed up as zombies (and anime princesses and super heroes). I am surrounded by morons exiting Comicon at the Javits Center.

At 28th Street I reach my goal: an opening at the Fred Torres Gallery, billed as an “experiential showcase” that “blends diverse visual and olfactory mediums to explore a full spectrum of the moments and states that cannot fully be defined.” Thus the show’s title, “Liminality: betwixt and between.”

A small group of people mill about on the sidewalk in front of the gallery’s plate glass window. They’re watching perfumer Christopher Brosius on a step ladder hang some laundry on a metal frame. At least that’s what it looks like at first glance. On second glance (and first sniff) he’s hanging a silken sheet printed with a phrase and ever so lightly scented. The 15 knot breeze coming off the Hudson makes it hard to build much olfactory ambience. A silver-haired gentleman is observing the scene while a Asian woman gesticulates and lectures him energetically in German.

CB himself, of course, is wearing boots and a black kilt. His parti-colored hair is braided to his scalp in tight cornrows. He peers myopically through wire-framed aviator frames set with thick lenses. It’s quite a look. [You should talk, Mr. Minus Six Diopters.—Ed.] [Yeah, but I gave up aviators frames in the Eighties—right after kilts.]

Inside the miniscule gallery I gratefully accept a glass of champagne from an attractive young woman with ample and generously displayed cleavage. Reluctantly, I turn away to the art. There are three visual artists, each with his own wall. One is a collection of dark B&W photos of random people in random scenes; the images are untitled and uninterpretable, but all are definitely bleak. On the next wall hang three quasi-representational paintings that are quasi-engaging. On the third wall is a series of color photographs. Some were taken in a semi-finished attic with a female subject who looks lost and ill at ease. Others feature bare male asses. This is the artist examining “the tension between sexuality and intimacy.” Or something.

In the center of the room, on a pedestal draped in white fabric, stands a clear glass Florence flask. No one is paying it any attention. I lean in and sniff—I get notes of dry wood and fresh green leaves. This is CB’s contribution to the show.

The show was organized by an outfit that bills itself as “a full-service curation and experience-design agency specializing in immersive events production.”

Really? I got fully immersed in the champagne and that was about it. I guess if you want to “cultivate an inclusive influencer network augmenting cultural cachet,” then this is the agency for you.

Or you could set up an odorized booth at Comicon.

Literary Smellscapes: Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon

This is the opening paragraph of Michael Chabon’s 2012 novel Telegraph Avenue.

A white boy rode flatfoot on a skateboard, towed along, hand to shoulder, by a black boy pedaling a brakeless fixed-gear bike. Dark August morning, deep in the Flatlands. Hiss of tires. Granular unraveling of skateboard wheels against asphalt. Summertime Berkeley giving off her old-lady smell, nine different styles of jasmine and a squirt of he-cat.

An old friend from California recommended the book to me the other day; he thought I’d appreciate its depiction of local color. And indeed, I’m inclined to like novels that set the scene with an olfactory grace note. And yes, the nine styles of jasmine is Berkeley in a bottle.

But there’s also something about Chabon’s style—a slow, steady accretion of descriptive detail that doesn’t really build a mood or lead to action—that feels laborious. I struggled to get through the next ten pages. His layering-on of references to specific places, names, and brands reminds me of a painter who slathers thick layers of paint onto a canvas and moves it around with a trowel. I gave up somewhere around page fifteen.

De gustibus. You might love it.

P.S. In creating the Amazon link I found that Michiko Kakutani calls Chabon a “magical prose stylist.” Well, that seals it. Michiko Kakutani is my personal counter-indicator; her assessments, back when I bothered to read them, were in perfect negative correlation to my own.

Bertie Wooster on the Aroma of the Great Hall

The Grammar School at Market Snodsbury had, I understood, been built somewhere in the year 1416, and, as with so many of these ancient foundations, there still seemed to brood over its Great Hall, where the afternoon's festivities were to take place, not a little of the fug of the centuries. It was the hottest day of the summer, and though somebody had opened a tentative window or two, the atmosphere remained distinctive and individual.

In this hall the youth of Market Snodsbury had been eating its daily lunch for a matter of five hundred years, and the flavour lingered. The air was sort of heavy and languorous, if you know what I mean, with the scent of Young England and boiled beef and carrots.

Aunt Dahlia, who was sitting with a bevy of the local nibs in the second row, sighted me as I entered and waved to me to join her, but I was too smart for that. I wedged myself in among the standees at the back, leaning up against a chap who, from the aroma, might have been a corn chandler or something on that order. The essence of strategy on these occasions is to be as near the door as possible.

P. G. Wodehouse
Right Ho, Jeeves (1922)

A License to Smell

Ian Fleming was a very smell-aware writer. His James Bond novels are shot through with olfactory observations. Here’s a passage in From Russia with Love:

Bond’s thoughts were interrupted by the stewardess. ‘Fasten your seat-belts, please.’ As she spoke the plane dropped sickeningly and soared up again with an ugly note of strain in the scream of the jets. The sky outside was suddenly black. Rain hammered on the windows. There came a blinding flash of blue and white light and a crash as if an anti-aircraft shell had hit them, and the plane heaved and bucketed in the belly of the electric storm that had ambushed them out of the mouth of the Adriatic.

Bond smelt the smell of danger. It is a real smell, something like the mixture of sweat and electricity you get in an amusement park arcade. Again the lightning flung its hand across the windows. Crash! It felt as if they were the centre of the thunder clap. Suddenly the plane seemed incredibly small and frail.

Fleming is especially keen on body odor. Here he uses it to tee up a wisecrack from Bond:

Bond washed and shaved under the amused eyes of Tatiana. She approved of the fact that he put no oil on his hair. ‘It is a dirty habit,’ she said. ‘I was told that many Europeans have it. We would not think of doing it in Russia. It dirties the pillows. But it is odd that you the West do not use perfume. All our men do.’

‘We wash,’ said Bond dryly.

And Fleming gives Bond some of his olfactory awareness. In the novel’s final scene, Bond enters a room at the Ritz Hotel in Paris expecting to find Colonel Rosa Klebb of the KGB. He is puzzled to find an old lady sitting and knitting. But something about her doesn’t add up.

Bond stared rudely into the woman’s face, examining it. It was an ugly face, toadlike, under the powder and under the tight cottage-loaf of white hair. The eyes were so light brown as to be almost yellow. The pale lips were wet and blubbery below the fringe of nicotine-stained moustache. Nicotine? Where were her cigarettes? The was no ashtray – no smell of smoke in the room.

Bond’s hand tightened again on his gun.

A Late Sixties Version of The Feelies

Morton Heilig is considered by some to be one of the technological pioneers of virtual reality. Jon Turi wrote yesterday about Heilig’s 1962 3-D Sensorama simulator in Engadget’s Time Machine column. Turi mentions Heilig’s concept of a cinema-sized, multisensory Experience Theater that included a smell component. Given my fascination with the previous technologies of Smell-O-Vision and AromaRama, documented in What the Nose Knows, I took a look at Heilig’s U.S. Patent 3,469,837, issued on September 30, 1969. Heilig begins his description of the smell component with this observation:

Aroma systems without 3-D have been attempted in the past but they have always failed because of the psychological paradox of smelling a flat two-dimensional image. Odor implies a physical reality—a palpable presence—thus, the object providing the aroma should preferentially be three-dimensional, if a satisfactory natural impression is to be made on the spectator.

This is a questionable assertion, to say the least. I have never heard of the “psychological paradox” of the smelly flat image, and in all my research on the topic I have never seen it cited as a reason for the failure of Smell-O-Vision or AromaRama. I also disagree that smell always implies a palpable presence. Garlic on someone’s breath does not imply that garlic is still present and available for you to eat. The remembrance of someone long dead triggered by the smell of an old shirt does not imply his physical presence. And so on.

In the patent, Heilig describes two ways of delivering smell to a person seated in the Experience Theater. The first involved tubes that deliver a scented air stream to the person’s face. This is an invidualized version of Smell-O-Vision which delivered scents through tubes on the back of theater seats. Heilig’s concept also includes a suction/exhaust feature that carries the scent away from the viewer and out of the theater. Here’s what he says about this feature:

One of the serious problems with other attempts to add aromas to films has been the contamination of the theater air with one odor and the inability to clear the air of this aroma before the next one arrived.

Here Heilig overgeneralizes. Scent built-up was a problem for the shoddily designed AromaRama; it was not an issue for the more finely-tuned Smell-O-Vision system. People tend to exaggerate the residual odor problem because they overestimate how much scent is required to provide create a successful impression—it doesn’t really take a lot.

Heilig’s second idea for scent delivery is a cartridge that fits into the theater seat. It contains a dozen chambers with scent-saturated pellets; a solenoid system triggered moves the correct scent into a position where it intercepts the air stream to the view. Yes, it would have been kludgy; and imagine the clickety-clacking as a hundred solenoids simultaneously move their aroma cartridges into position

Still in all, I have to admit that Heilig wasn’t afraid to think big.

Literary Smellscapes: A Jack London Vignette

One of my favorite places in California is Jack London’s former ranch in Glen Ellen, up in Sonoma County. I love the setting—the serenity, the views, the scents—and can see why the place meant so much to him. Even the burned ruins of Wolf House are haunting and beautiful. Another house serves as a museum and is full of evocative stuff from his adventurous life. I’m finally reading The Road, a 1907 memoir of his hobo days in the 1890s. The prose is rough-and-ready but the stories are vivid. Here London gets his point across with some olfactory, even multisensory, imagery:

Often I think over my tramp days, and ever I marvel at the swift succession of pictures that flash up in my memory. It matters not where I begin to think; any day of all the days is a day apart, with a record of swift-moving pictures all its own. For instance, I remember a sunny summer morning in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and immediately comes to my mind the auspicious beginning of the day — a “set- down” with two maiden ladies, and not in their kitchen, but in their dining room, with them beside me at the table. We ate eggs, out of egg-cups! It was the first time I had ever seen egg-cups, or heard of egg-cups! I was a bit awkward at first, I’ll confess; but I was hungry and unabashed. I mastered the egg-cup, and I mastered the eggs in a way that made those two maiden ladies sit up.  

Why, they ate like a couple of canaries, dabbling with the one egg each they took, and nibbling at tiny wafers of toast. Life was low in their bodies; their blood ran thin; and they had slept warm all night. I had been out all night, consuming much fuel of my body to keep warm, beating my way down from a place called Emporium, in the northern part of the state. Wafers of toast! Out of sight! But each wafer was no more than a mouthful to me — nay, no more than a bite. It is tedious to have to reach for another piece of toast each bite when one is potential with many bites. ( . . . ) 

At any rate, it gave my tongue time to wag. Those two maiden ladies, with their pink-and-white complexions and gray curls, had never looked upon the bright face of adventure. As the “Tramp-Royal” would have it, they had worked all their lives “on one same shift.” Into the sweet scents and narrow confines of their uneventful existence I brought the large airs of the world, freighted with the lusty smells of sweat and strife, and with the tangs and odors of strange lands and soils. And right well I scratched their soft palms with the callous on my own palms — the half-inch horn that comes of pull-and-haul of rope and long and arduous hours of caressing shovel-handles. This I did, not merely in the braggadocio of youth, but to prove, by toil performed, the claim I had upon their charity.

Jack London
The Road (1907)

Literary Smellscapes: American Noir

My Sherlock Holmes post smoked out commenter Melissa, who’s been reading Ellery Queen novels from the 40s and 50s and finding perfume references galore. (Being a vintage fan she anoints herself with the scent in question before reading on.) I brought up how Dashiell Hammett invoked a “chrypre” scent to impugn the manhood of Joel Cairo—the character played by Peter Lorre opposite Bogart’s Sam Spade—in The Maltese Falcon. I already had my next move planned—a post about smoke and scent from The Big Sleep—but Melissa got the jump on me in the comments. Well, here it is anyway.

Raymond Chandler’s novel came out in 1939 and the movie followed in 1946, with Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe and Charles Waldron as General Sternwood (pictured above).

Sternwood: You may smoke too. I can still enjoy the smell of it. Nice state of affairs when a man has to indulge his vices by proxy. You’re looking, sir, at a very dull survival of a very gaudy life.

( . . . )

Sternwood: The orchids are an excuse for the heat. You like orchids?

Marlowe: Not particularly.

Sternwood: Nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men. Their perfume has the rotten sweetness of corruption.

Okay, the orchid bit is a little stagey, but ya’ gotta love a debauched, elderly invalid indulging his vices by proxy. Not to mention the final frame of the movie:

Sleuthing

“Certainly the incident was unusual. What were your next steps? You examined the room, I presume, to see if the intruder had left any traces—any cigar-end or dropped glove or hairpin or other trifle?”

“There was nothing of the sort.”

“No smell?”

“Well, we never thought of that.”

“Ah, a scent of tobacco would have been worth a great deal to us in such an investigation.”

Arthur Conan Doyle
The Adventure of the Naval Treaty
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

California Dreamin’

This is what I’d be doing this weekend . . . if I was in L.A.