“a combination of science classroom, hunting lodge, and Art Nouveau battleship” — Neko Case, on her interior design aesthetic. (via Neko Case Vermont Farmhouse - Neko Case House Tour - Country Living)
A few days late, but! As promised, the Bon Iver bus!
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#cave
Whatever he’s receiving from the aether is probably true/real/relevant.
(Source: elizabethmypoison)
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You don’t have to dabble for very long to begin to realize that the world of smell has no reliable maps, no single language, no comprehensible metaphorical structure within which we might comprehend it and navigate our way around it. It seems to compare poorly, for example, with the world of sight. If we want to think about color, we can use words like hue and brightess and saturation. We can visualize a particular sightly milky green, imagine where it falls on a spectrum chart, look at its neighbours and complemetaries, and the finally say that it is, say, “eau de nil” or “pale turquoise” or “jade.” These are relatively precise numerically, in angstroms, for example, or (if you want to paint your house in it) as “British Standard paintshade number something-or-other.” Similarly with shape: We use measurement and geometry and, of course, drawings, to communicate that type of information.
But the best we seem to be able to do with smells is to evoke comparisons. We can say that karanal is “like striking a flint,” that the aldehyde C14 is “like latex.” As far as I know there is not even the beginning of a usable system of realting these to one another. Where does karanal stand in relation to tuberose? Or sandalwood to sage? Don’t ask me.
Like others who’ve played with perfumes, I found this somewhat unsatisfactory. I wanted a system, a map. I briefly thought I might be able to make one myself, but this plan foundered as I jotted down the resemblance between strawberries and egg yolk, between breweries and certain types of horsehair bedding. I just knew I didn’t have enough stamina to collect, let alone collate, all those sensations. I’d also noticed to my confusion that the substances “coriander” and “vetiver” were never quite the same twice. The vetiver I bought in the Walworth Road in London was distinctly different from what I got from the labs of Quest International in Paris, and the French coriander I found in 1988 was different from the French coriander I bought a year later. Even the names, it turned out, didn’t describe anything stable. So, still lost, I abandoned the classification project (what a relief!) and decided to continue pleasurably stumbling around in the gloaming, rubbing bits of thei and that on anyone kind enough to loan me a patch of their skin, then sniffing to test the effects (it turned out to be a great way of getting to know people…). It took me a long time to begin to realize that this was the way things were likely to continue. Just like with everything else, there was probably never going to be a time when I “knew what I was doing,” when I had in mind some final, logical picture of the whole world of smell. The Linnaeus of smell was not to be, or not to be me.
It’s strange how you arrive at ideas, how thoughts consolidate themselves out of the most disparate and unlikely beginnings, and how often those beginnings are realizations from experience that something isn’t possible (or alternately is possible but not interesting).
” —Details Magazine: Scents and Sensibility, Brian Eno, July 1992
Read the whole thing. It was impossible to carve out a quote. Just … goreadthewholething.
(via Dazed Digital | EXCLUSIVE: Jeremy Scott Womenswear A/W12)
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More than one critic has suggested that this name, shared with the century’s most famous movie star, accounts in part for the obscurity suffered by such a consistently delightful writer. If true, it’s the kind of sad irony that would have been appreciated by Taylor, who over the course of 12 novels and dozens of short stories written between 1943 and her death in 1975 returned repeatedly to the subject of women forced to be wives and mothers first and only then, if at all, writers, artists or simply human beings.
— from The New York Times review of the recently released Elizabeth Taylor novels, Angel and A Game of Hide and Seek
The NYRB Classics release of these two titles is a great chance for you to get to know the “other” Elizabeth Taylor, y’all.