Blame it on the Whales

It’s not often that our Google Alert for “higher than normal volumes of mullet breeding” returns a news item, but when it does it’s a doozy. Today’s story is from Cape Town, South Africa or more specifically Cape Town’s V&A Waterfront, billed as “a place where crowds gather to eat, drink, shop, socialize, and admire breathtaking views of Table Mountain.” Apparently a new breathtaking feature is the stench of rotting fish. These have accumulated in the harbor due to HTNVOMB along with a pair of humpback whales who chased a school of mackerel to an oxygen-starved demise in the shallow waters.

The Shape of Stinks to Come: The Green Revolution Devours Boulder County’s Open Space

 

I’ve written here several times about composting, the high-minded effort to turn waste into re-usable mulch. When it comes to setting up large-scale composting operations, these efforts tend to follow a familiar sad sequence. The initial proposal assures the public that the facility will be run according to the latest best practices and result in minimal odor, if any. Once the operation gets underway, nearby residents start to notice objectionable smells. The facility may deny being the source; there may be a back-and-forth as the town tries to document the stink and locate its origin. The facility may own up to being the source, and offer assurances that the smell is a mere hiccup that will disappear once the operation is fully optimized. When the smell and local objections continue, the town hires consultants who recommend installing some sort of odor remediation system. The result: the entire project comes in heavily over budget and leaves a lot of ill will in its wake. 

A common feature of these episodes is a failure to take potential odor issues seriously from the very start of the project. Why does this happen? I think it’s because proponents of large-scale composting don’t anticipate issues of scale. 

Home composting enthusiasts maintain little heaps of banana peels, apple cores, and lawn clippings in their backyards. These produce a small amount of innocuous odor. So what’s the problem in just adding everyone’s little heap to a town compost pile? 

The problem is that the amount of biomass in a commercial or municipal composting facility is exponentially larger than a backyard heap, and that the resulting odor production will also be exponentially larger. Massive odor generation is a certainty—it’s an operational issue that ought to be dealt with in detail at the preliminary engineering stage. It is not enough for planners and proponents to blithely claim that proper “turning over” and aeration of the pile will minimize odor. 

Now comes a story out of Longmont, Colorado, roughly 35 miles south of FirstNerve headquarters. Three residents have filed a lawsuit against a proposed composting facility—one that hasn’t even been built. Among other things, the lawsuit anticipates loss of property values should the facility-to-be emit “noxious odors.” Is this simply a case of NIMBYism or is there something more to it? 

What is at issue is a proposal by Boulder County to build the facility on ~40 acres of land that was purchased, with voter approval, as preserved open space with a perpetual conservation easement. By law, the county’s open space “can be used solely for passive recreation, agriculture or environmental preservation purposes.” But that’s no problem for the three county commissioners. By using an obscure real estate doctrine and a recent land purchase they claim to have extinguished the conservation easement, giving themselves the ability to build a compost facility on the land. The commissioners pushed their plan through with a minimum of public notice. 

The 235-page plan is a classic instance of blithe disregard for potential odor issues. It mentions odor only four times:

(1) In the architect’s narrative under “Buildings”, it states that waste will be delivered to a 17,590 square foot “tipping building”: “This building is a fully enclosed, fully contained component of the operation that will minimize odors, provide visual screening, and prevent any leaching of feedstock liquids into the surrounding soil.” 

(2) In the “Operations” section under “Odor control”: “The CASP [“covered aerated static pile”] bunkers have been shown to reduce odors by 90-95% over conventional open pile windrow systems.” 

(3) In the “Proposed Conditions” section under “landscaping: “Newly landscaped areas are strategically located for visual screening and to reduce sound and odor impacts of the facility.” 

(4) And on page 12: “The existing site border of trees creates a natural setback from the road and would provide visual and odor screening.” 

The idea that a line of trees and other landscaping features will reduce and screen odors is laughable. The tipping building may indeed contain odors—as long as the doors are never opened. And once the dumped waste is moved out of the building for composting, the odor issue pops right back up. Finally, even assuming that the claim about CASP bunkers is correct, that residual 5 to 10% of odors may still reach obnoxious levels, especially since the county intends to process “125 million pounds of animal manure, sewage sludge and food waste per year.” 

Yes, that’s right: this is not just a food waste compost pile. It includes massive amounts of animal manure and sewage sludge (i.e., human manure). 

The city of Boulder gives Berkeley, California a run for its money when it comes to progressive politics. Boulder County has a “Zero Waste Action Plan” that aims for a goal of zero waste by 2025. The three county commissioners (all Democrats) seem hell-bent on getting there, even if it means overriding the declared intent of county residents. Will three residents be able to stop the onrushing tide of sludge? Stay tuned. You can track their battle here.

UPDATE March 22, 2021

The Boulder County commissioners caved and will no longer consider placing a composting facility on the open space in question. The county has filed motions to dismiss lawsuits by neighboring property owners. Story here.

Turgenev: The Scent Trails in “Smoke”

Turgenev, by Ilya Repin (1874)

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev did not make much use of olfactory imagery in his novels, at least judging by Fathers and Sons (1862) and Smoke (1867). For the most part, he set his scenes with spare yet effective visual references.

Yet there are a couple of notable exceptions in Smoke, which is the story of a man torn between his feelings for two very different women. One of them occurs when the protagonist Litvinov comes across a picnic party of young Russian officers and their ladies.

All these warriors were immaculately groomed, shaved and perfumed all over with a scent redolent of the nobility and the Guards, a mixture of the finest tobacco smoke and the most amazing patchouli.

There’s a rather hyper-particular smellscape from mid-nineteenth century Russia! And this one is even more so:

Irina [a femme fatale] was sitting on the sofa between Prince Koko and Madame Kh., once a famed beauty and pan-Russian bluestocking, who had long since mutated into a rotting toadstool, smelling of Lenten oil and stale poison.

In those days, the Eastern Orthodox Church proscribed olive oil during Lenten fasts; oil from other sources was allowed. The image of “stale poison”, on the other hand, is a product of Turgenev’s inventive genius.

There are a couple of other olfactory vignettes involving the intoxicating scent of a woman’s hair and neck. They serve their purpose well, but are less unique. A final instance involves an anonymously delivered bouquet of flowers, which figures later in the story.

A strong scent, very pleasant and familiar, caught his attention. He looked round and saw a large bouquet of fresh heliotropes in a glass of water on the window sill. In some surprise he bent down to the flowers, touched, them, sniffed them . . . It seems that something came back to him, something very distant, but what it was exactly he could not think.

Sacrebleu! Yet another example of “Proustian smell memory” that predates Proust by more than half a century. (In this case, it is Proustian in the actual sense of Marcel, namely an odor summoning up a vague, ungraspable feeling where an actual memory ought to be).

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev
Smoke (1867)

Avery and the Cannabis Factory

I recently had the opportunity to tour a licensed, commercial cannabis grow operation in Denver. It was a mind-blowing experience, but not for the obvious reason—I haven’t tried marijuana since an unfortunate episode in graduate school. [A story, like that of the giant rat of Sumatra, for which the world is not yet prepared.—Ed.]

The operation is located in a nondescript, unlabeled building in the semi-industrial outskirts south of town. One step inside and there is no doubt where you are—the scent of cannabis bud hits you full in the face. That’s because the drying room is next to the entrance. Newly harvested and trimmed buds are spread on wire mesh frames, which are slotted into wall racks. The drying room is kept dark and air conditioned, while fans circulate the chilly air. This struck me as a counterintuitive way to dry the product, but Gary, the slim, thirty-something Willy Wonka who runs the site, tells me the aim is to suppress mold growth.*

As I sign in and get my visitor’s badge, I notice the wall of the entryway—it’s covered with a dozen or more framed certificates from the army of agencies that regulate every aspect of commercial cannabis in the state of Colorado: health, revenue, environmental, etc.

A couple of doors down is a small break room. With a refrigerator and cute sign reminding people to clean up after themselves, it could be the lunch area of a muffler shop or book store—except for the three HD screens on one wall. Each screen displays multiple views from security cameras mounted everywhere in the building, inside and out. Security is a major concern and private patrols visit the facility throughout the night.

The actual process of cultivation begins with small, two- or three-branch cuttings from mature plants. Like straws in soda cup lid, they are stuck into fittings atop a plastic tub. Inside the tub an “aquaponics” system periodically sprays the bottom of the clippings; the water contains carefully calibrated amounts of nutrients to encourage root growth. Once the sproutlings have developed enough of a root system, they are transferred to quart-size plastic bags of potting soil. Then they are given a unique, bar-coded, plastic ID tag purchased from a state-authorized provider. Individual plants are tracked this way until harvest—part of the minute oversight of inventory required by Colorado authorities.

In their quart bags, the new plants resemble the immature tomato plants for sale at Safeway. Arranged in neat rows on white platforms, they begin to bask under a glaring array of artificial lights that keeps the room as warm as the greenhouse it is. The room air is humid but odorless.

After a week or two, the now established plants are transferred to three- or five-gallon bags and moved to a “vegetative room” where they get 18 hours of light daily from high output T5 fluorescent bulbs. They are watered via an automated drip tube system. The room air is kept moving by wall-mounted oscillating fans. Here, again, the room is relatively nonodorous.

Once they are mature, the plants are transferred to a “bloom room.” Individual stalks are woven through a loose rope grid that separates the tops and insures that each newly forming flower bud gets maximal exposure to light. Beside the usual automatic lighting and watering system (now delivering a nutrient mix optimized to encourage bud growth), the bloom room is supplied with extra carbon dioxide. It is delivered (during “daytime” only) via an automated system that monitors the ambient concentration and keeps it at a specific parts per million level. On the bloom room door is posted a sign: “You are entering a possibly oxygen deficient atmosphere.” Should the CO₂ level exceed the safety threshold, a warning light flashes and an alarm sounds. It’s an expensive system, but it’s required by the state. “Seems reasonable,” I say to Gary, who shrugs his shoulders. He operates under an OSHA rule that specifies one permissible level for CO₂ and under a Colorado marijuana-specific rule that specifies a different, lower level.

In the bloom room, I notice for the first time a distinct background odor—it smells like ripe, even overripe, cantaloupe melon. Nothing at all like the funky herbal smell of dry bud. Yet in order to minimize the risk of complaints from neighbors, Gary has installed large, cylindrical carbon filter units in each bloom room. Harvest day, he says, produces the greatest amount of smell, presumably from the volatile and odorous terpenes that are released as the plants are cut.

The previous tenant of this building was a light-industrial operation. When the marijuana company took over the building it completely renovated the interior. The array of active technologies—lights, fans, watering systems, CO₂ delivery, air filtration, HVAC—requires an enormous amount of power. Multiple electrical conduits and air conditioning ducts course along the ceiling and curve down to individual grow rooms—it’s like being inside a gigantic pipe organ. Gary is on personal terms with his Carrier air conditioner rep who makes weekly visits to keep the system tuned up.

Gary keeps 70 different cannabis strains in rotation. From a manufacturing and logistics point of view this is an insane number. But the dispensaries he supplies—and their retail customers—demand it. If he delivers only 10 varieties they complain. What drives this demand? Besides sheer THC potency there are real and/or perceived psychotropic differences between sativa and indica strains, as well as differences in bud aroma and smoke flavor. And thus separate calls for OG Kush, Girl Scout Cookies, Strawberry Cough, Alaskan Thunder Fuck, and all the rest.

Having lived for a year now in Colorado, I’m beginning to see the connection with another artisanal, sensory- and botanical-based industry: beer. There are a ton of microbreweries in the state, and each one produces a range from stouts to IPAs. A microbrewery that produced only two or three beers would soon fail. People revel in sensory choice. And if they are accustomed to getting it in one area, they expect it in others.

This leads me to propose Gilbert’s First Conjecture of Sensory Marketing:

For a given zip code, the number of microbrews on tap is positively correlated with the number of cannabis strains available in dispensaries.

Besides the usual burdens of running a business—hiring, scheduling, payroll, accounting—Gary has the responsibilities of a vintner. He decides when the plants are ready to harvest: too soon and they lack potency, too late and they become stale with oxidized THC. He has to plan the rotations of each strain, and stagger their growing cycles so he can harvest one of his eight bloom rooms each week. Then there is the matter of drying and curing. Gary does this the old school way, in two steps. From the racks in the drying room the buds go into large glass jars, equipped with humidity sensors, where they stay for another week or so, until they reach their optimum in terms of aroma and smokability. I suspect cigar makers and aficionados would agree. I sniff from several jars to get an idea of the range of strain-specific aromas. Some are not very smelly; in others I detect mint, a conifer note, and the vegetal scent of cooked artichoke. Elsewhere I’ve smelled buds that reeked of orange peel. There’s a lot of opportunity here for systematic olfactory evaluation.



With demand far outstripping supply, commercial cannabis growers are under enormous pressure to deliver mass quantities. To speed things up, some growers claim to use techniques that telescope drying and curing into a single step. Not Gary. However, he does make some concessions to efficiency. Instead of having employees trim buds by hand, he puts the buds into a tumbler-like device, an automated Edward Scissorhands. The broken leaf residue or “trim” doesn’t go to waste. (It can’t—the state requires that he account for every gram of it.) Gary’s operation, like others, sells the trim to extractors who transform it into oil, shatter, and the multitude of derivative products that are sold directly to consumers or that go into products such as edibles.

I have toured essential oil extraction operations in Grasse, fragrance compounding factories in New Jersey, a Budweiser brewery in Colorado, and numerous wineries and champagne makers in California. They all manage to bring industrial scale to what is, at its core, a process of subjective, sensory-based, aesthetic design. The Denver grow house, with its blend of technology, agronomy, and logistics, tells me that cannabis is on the road to similar scale.

*If Gary is the Willy Wonka, the Oompa-Loompas of the factory bear an uncanny resemblance (minus tattoos and piercings) to certain of my Berkeley Coop housemates of the 1970s.

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.

On the Radio

Welcome, CBC Radio listeners! Check out the topic tags and have a look around.

The Current host Piya Chattopadhyay and producer Acey Rowe put together a fine episode of their By Design series that turned attention to smell. It's called “Mapping urban smellscapes: Designing cities through scent”, and you can listen to it here.

Kate McLean and Daniele Quercia discuss their mapping of urban smellscapes, and Halifax Chief Planner Bob Bjerke talks about zoning stinky land use. Smell enthusiasts and lovers of liberty would do well to heed his warning about regulating urban smells: “Be careful what you wish for.” His town is notorious for its attempts to outlaw perfume.

Some other thoughts from listening to the broadcast:

Crowd-sourced smell maps with geo-tagged contributions are cool. But what about time-date tagging? How do the mappers distinguish static odors from transient, episodic ones? Is the smelly soul of a city in the occasional bursts or the steady background? Is San Francisco more typical at low tide or high?

Smell regulation is an open invitation to political abuse. Who could object to the smell of a bakery? Answer: activists who object to it using GMO wheat, that’s who.

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

Henry Adams and The Non-Blonde

Gaia Fishler blogs indefatigably about fragrance and cosmetics as The Non-Blonde. Yesterday, in a change of pace, she wrote about her earliest scent memories. The smells themselves are not remarkable: her mother’s brand of soap; a Moroccan neighbor’s cooking; a summer weekend at the beach. But the web of associations she spins around them gives them unique vividness, detail and emotional tone. She describes them in a way that lets the rest of us imagine them, even when Gaia the pre-schooler relates her idiosyncratic impression of the inside of a washing machine as “white and ominous”.

Note that Fishler’s olfactory memories as not Proustian. They are not spontaneously evoked by a scent in the air (or the tedious madeleine dipped in tea). Rather, they are the product of deliberate recall. Also, they do not require a prolonged inner struggle to place them in time and space. Instead, Fishler tells us about them in an easy, compelling way that, to my mind, qualifies as olfactory memoir.

In What the Nose Knows, I contrasted Proust’s over-praised madeleine passage with a more open and democratic type of olfactory memoir:

Henry Adams gave us a small sample of a true olfactory memoir—it puts you behind another person’s nose in another time and place. In his honor, I call it Adamsonian memory. To my way of thinking, Adamsonian memory beats Proustian memory because it deals with smells that are deliberately sniffed and voluntarily recalled. These are not the buried landmines of Proustian memory; Henry Adams describes a smellscape that was familiar to his entire generation, and his memory of it is open to the public. Proustian memory inhabits a private, interior place, and is open by invitation only. For Proust, smell was a tool, a reflex hammer he used to probe his own mind. For the young Henry Adams, smell was the whole world; for the old Henry Adams, it was an open gateway to the past.

Gaia Fishler has given us a lovely Adamsonian glimpse into her early life. Brava!

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)

The Return of an Olfactory Memory

Raymond Leon Iddings died November 14, 2014 at the age of 93. He grew up on a small farm in Putnam County, Indiana, and, like so many Americans of his generation, joined the army and fought in World War II.

Here’s a passage from his obituary:

His combat experienced forever identified Raymond Iddings as a professional soldier, and left scarred stories that he never told. Daughter Cheryl was recently told a final story while helping him eat some chicken soup. A few weeks after crossing the Rhine, on April 4, 1945 the United States Army liberated the first concentration camp prisoners from Ohrdruf, Germany. The conditions were so appalling that words fail description; the smell of feces and rotting corpses overpowered the senses. General Eisenhower, Patton and Bradley were all sickened during their tour and Eisenhower actually vomited. In his memoirs, Raymond wrote of the “foul odor that blanketed the area,” but said he never entered the camp. While Cheryl recently helped father eat some soup he began to cry and apologized to her for never telling this story before: He then shared with her a memory from that camp . . . a day that he held a spoon of chicken broth for a severely starved prisoner at this camp; the starved man was too weak, the man took a deep breath and died. Raymond told Cheryl that for all these years he repressed this story as his most painful memory — a war memory he was never able to talk about.

Trauma and repression, war and compassion, the great events of history—all brought to the surface by the aroma of chicken soup fed to an elderly man by his loving daughter.

With Raymond Iddings goes a small but infinitely valuable piece of the American experience. We salute him.

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.

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.

North American Smellscapes: Blame Canada

How do you know it’s springtime in the resort town of Whistler, B.C.? When you smell the skunk cabbage, eh?

American Smellscapes: A Devilish Scent

Image by W.L. Wagner @ USDA-NRCS PLANTS Database

I’ve never met Gail M. Williams but we have something in common: we pull over and investigate roadside plants that catch our eye. Sometimes we get an olfactory surprise.

Williams, writing in the Plainview Daily Herald, recounts some episodes of vehicle-based botany in southwest Texas. The one that stands out for me is Nyctaginia capitata (shown above). It’s commonly known as Scarlet Muskflower (see where this is going?) or Devil’s Bouquet (we’ve arrived!). Her guidebook says the flowers have a “strong and rather offensive odor” and she confirms that.

N. capitata is found mostly in southern New Mexico and Texas, although it apparently has been introduced near Dallas. I’ll be in Dallas later this month but doubt I’ll get a whiff—Devil’s bouquet doesn’t flower until late spring.

Literary Smellscapes: The Moscow Women's Barracks of the State Security Departments

Outside the anonymous, cream painted door, Tatiana already smelled the inside of the room. When the voice told her curtly to come in, and she opened the door, it was the smell that filled her mind while she stood and stared into the eyes of the woman who sat behind the round table under the centre light.

It was the smell of the Metro on a hot evening – cheap scent concealing animal odours. People in Russia soak themselves in scent, whether they have had a bath or not, but mostly when they have not, and healthy, clean girls like Tatiana always walk home from the office, unless the rain or the snow is too bad, so as to avoid the stench in the trains and the Metro.

Now Tatiana was in a bath of the smell. Her nostrils twitched with disgust.

It was her disgust and her contempt for a person who could live in the middle of such a smell that helped her to look down into the yellowish eyes that stared at her through the square glass panes. Nothing could be read in them. They were receiving eyes, not giving eyes. They slowly moved all over her, like camera lenses, taking her in.

Colonel Klebb spoke: ‘You are a fine-looking girl, Comrade Corporal. Walk across the room and back.’

Ian Fleming
From Russia with Love (1957)

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)

Charles Darwin: A Tropical Smellscape

Today is the 205th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. He was a keen observer of nature and his descriptions often reveal an awareness of smell. During the voyage of HMS Beagle, Darwin visited Callao, Peru on July 19, 1835.

Callao is a filthy, ill-built, small seaport. The inhabitants, both here and at Lima, present every imaginable shade of mixture, between European, Negro, and Indian blood. They appear a depraved, drunken set of people. The atmosphere is loaded with foul smells, and that peculiar one, which may be perceived in almost every town within the tropics, was here very strong. The fortress, which withstood Lord Cochrane’s long siege, has an imposing appearance. But the President, during our stay, sold the brass guns, and proceeded to dismantle parts of it. The reason assigned was, that he had not an officer to whom he could trust so important a charge. He himself had good reason for thinking so, as he had obtained the presidentship by rebelling while in charge of this same fortress. After we left South America, he paid the penalty in the usual manner, by being conquered, taken prisoner, and shot.

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: