American Literary Smellscapes: Sheehan’s Pool Room

I’m beginning to think that H.P. Lovecraft was quite the olfactory-minded artist. He certainly was smell-aware, based on the first six stories in The Complete Works, which I’m reading front to back to work up a frisson of creepiness for Halloween.

Lovecraft’s story Old Bugs was written in 1919—at the dawn of Prohibition—but set in the future of 1950. Its combination of moodiness, detail, and a Big Reveal reads like an episode of The Twilight Zone. Here’s how it starts:

Sheehan’s Pool Room, which adorns one of the lesser alleys in the heart of Chicago’s stockyard district, is not a nice place. Its air, freighted with a thousand odours such as Coleridge may have found in Cologne, too seldom knows the purifying rays of the sun; but fights for space with the acrid fumes of unnumbered cheap cigars and cigarettes which dangle from the coarse lips of unnumbered human animals that haunt the place day and night. But the popularity of Sheehan’s remains unimpaired; and for this there is a reason—a reason obvious to anyone who will take the trouble to analyse the mixed stenches prevailing there. Over and above the fumes and sickening closeness rises an aroma once familiar throughout the land, but now happily banished to the back streets of life by the edict of a benevolent government—the aroma of strong, wicked whiskey—a precious kind of forbidden fruit indeed in this year of grace 1950.

H.P. Lovecraft
Old Bugs (1919)

Gwyneth Paltrow and the Scent of Fame

Gwyneth Paltrow’s movie career stalled for a while following her 1999 Oscar for Shakespeare in Love. Now she’s back in the money with a role in the Iron Man franchise. But all may not be well. Based on our careful monitoring of the smellebrity scene we predict major life changes in her future. Doubtful? Think back to when Britney and K-Fed made headlines with their noxious B.O.

Paltrow’s recent Vanity Fair kerfuffle has revived attention to some unkind olfactory observations about her personal hygiene habits. By some accounts she was a bit ripe in the armpits at this spring’s Met Gala, allegedly because she rejects AP/deo products that contain aluminum. One view is that the sniffy comments are payback for her undiplomatic remarks about the event. Whatevs. Here at FN we’re just happy to report on a good, old-fashioned case of smellebrity B.O.-mongering.

Exit question:
If Bruce Jenner really is entertaining the idea of becoming a woman, as our reading in the supermarket check-out lane suggests, then shouldn’t there be some olfactory evidence? Perhaps a change in his cologne purchases? Inquiring nostrils want to know.

Haunted Literary Smellscapes of America

I shall never forget the afternoon when first I stumbled upon the half-hidden house of death. It was in mid-summer, when the alchemy of Nature transmutes the sylvan landscape to one vivid and almost homogeneous mass of green; when the senses are well-nigh intoxicated with the surging seas of moist verdure and the subtly indefinable odours of the soil and vegetation. In such surroundings the mind loses its perspective; time and space become trivial and unreal, and echoes of a forgotten prehistoric past beat insistently upon the enthralled consciousness.

H.P. Lovecraft
The Tomb (1917)

Armpit Love

It’s been a while since our first tentative sniff at the case of famously stinky teen heartthrob Robert Pattinson. Now he’s back in the news with remarks to the Portuguese magazine Activa, translated here, regarding the olfactory nature of his attraction to women:

“It doesn’t necessarily have to be perfume. I like the smell of people. It is really strange and I’m sure it has to do with pheromones. We like people because subconsciously we like the way they smell. I always find this very interesting to observe.”

OK, that’s a pretty conventional view. But what struck us was this reference to an article in Vogue that we seem to have missed.

In 2012 [Pattinson’s girlfriend at the time] Kristen [Stewart] told Vogue magazine: “I’m so in love with my boyfriend [Robert Pattinson] I love the way he smells. And him me. 

“Like, he loves to lick under my armpits. I don’t get this obsession with washing the smell off. That smell of someone you love – don’t you think that’s the whole point?”

Pit sniffers of the world, unite!



When it comes to underarm odor, RB apparently works both sides of the street. Not that there is anything wrong with that. Unless you’re one of those prudes on a film crew who find him a little overripe. Or you’re some inhibited loser who doesn’t like having your unwashed armpits licked by a guy nominated for Best Actor in a Canadian Film by the Vancouver Film Critics Circle. Really, loosen up. Get a life.

Exit question: Is there a formal term for people who are pathologically attracted to armpit smell?

Bonus question: If not, what should we call them?

UPDATE October 18, 2013

FN Commenter Lindaloo offers “pitophilia.” Not bad: it is easily understood. Some googling around reveals “maschalagnia” as the appropriately arcane and unpronounceable designation for armpit fetish. But maschalagnia strikes me as one of those formalisms that shows up frequently in tedious academic tracts but is rarely used by clinicians or researchers. For example, it is mentioned in about eight volumes on Google Books (including such time-wasters as There’s a Word for It and Lecher’s Lexicon). Meanwhile on PubMed, the go-to source for working scientists, it doesn’t produce a single hit. QED

Smell and the Occult Sciences

To help you gear up for the ghoulish festivities of Halloween, FirstNerve presents a few aromatic tidbits from the Encyclopedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences of the World, published in 1903 by J.H. Yewdale and Sons Co., of Chicago and Milwaukee.

He who smells the flowers or wreaths at a funeral, will lose his sense of smell. 

It is unlucky to put perfume on your clothes the first time you wear them. 

Happily, a frivolous and irreverent spirit can be changed into that of a profound and meditative thinker by the habitual use of bergamot. 

White rose begets a love of sloth and indolence, and the famed patchouli will, sooner or later, cause the moral downfall of its devotee. [Heh. God damn hippies.—Ed.]