I can already tell it’s going to be a busy spring…
Clancy asked me if I’d do a Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab post along the lines of this one from New Kid on the Hallway. BPAL, for those of you who’ve never heard of it, make some of the strangest and most fabulous perfume oils out there, and they have the best names for them, too (many of them incredibly literary: you’ve got to love perfumes called "Parlement of Foules" or "Ode on Melancholy" or "Ozymandias," or the series named after Shakespearean characters). It’s entirely possible to get addicted to trying new ones and trading samples with fellow addicts.
So, in the spirit of end-of-term frivolity, here’s a very partial list of my own favorites and not-favorites. The links go to the reviews of each scent posted in the BPAL forums.
The favorites:
Anne Bonny: Sandalwood, patchouli, and incense. Very piratical.
Catherine: I love orange blossom, and while I would never have thought to pair it with rosemary, it absolutely works.
Les Infortunes de la Vertu: Another orange blossom one, very elegant and haute-couture.
Loup-Garou: Juniper, eucalyptus, and galangal. A new favorite.
Luperci: Forest floor meets polished wood with beeswax. This may be my all-time favorite.
Morocco: Spicy and light and perfect in every way.
The Pool of Tears: Flowers and salt water.
Saint-Germain: Lavender, oakmoss, amber, and carnation. Like a traditional cologne but better.
White Rabbit: Like a cup of tea with milk and honey. The most soothing scent ever.
The not-favorites:
Incantation: Bitter and smoky, like scorched earth.
Nosferatu: Dirt and red wine. I don’t think I want to smell like a vampire.
Sacred Whore of Babylon: I think it was the gardenia, but something in it went disastrously wrong on me.
Twenty-One: Very clever, but rather too realistically like a mixed drink.
Fellow BPAL fans, care to weigh in?
… are any of you out there using Twitter? I’m not sure I’d want to use it (I’m too lazy to constantly post what I’m up to, and I don’t know if any of my friends would be into it), but I’m also kind of intrigued by Liz Lawley’s post about it. Show of hands?
This week’s assignment for one of my classes was a "pretend cataloging" kind of assignment: take three books we’d read, and assign them Library of Congress subject headings. I discovered that I gravitate to hard-to-classify books (James Elkins’ Pictures and Tears was the trickiest one; I still don’t get why "Crying," an honest-to-God LC subject heading, isn’t used for it), and that I’m actually looking forward to taking Cataloging when I get a chance. Next quarter it looks like I’m taking History of the Book (yay!) and Action Research and Statistics (not nearly as exciting, but hey, required). Expect a lot of profoundly geeky book-history-related posts in the coming months.
In my spare time, I noticed that LibraryThing added a new, enjoyably time-sinking feature: links to author-related sites on author pages. I’ve been having fun annotating the author pages for various poets; the Electronic Poetry Center, Modern American Poetry, and Poets.org have all come in handy.
In other news, Big End-of-Term Project #1 is pretty much finished, House is on tonight, I’m blogging from home on a now-functional wifi connection, and life, for the time being at least, is good.
Internet connection: STILL down. We’re now into Day 6.
Calls to tech support so far: Three, plus an online chat session. Earthlink, if you’re listening, I’m not feeling much like a valued customer. Hint: if you want someone to continue using your service, it’s not a good idea to keep her on hold until her cell phone battery dies.
Reason why I’m smiling, nevertheless: Big End-of-Term Project #1 is very close to finished. Wahoo! I worked on it all day yesterday, and today I’m celebrating by not working on it. And possibly going to see a movie later, preferably something escapist and fluffy.
Sorry to be so boring, but the circumstances do rather conspire against brilliant thoughts. Hopefully the circumstances won’t last too much longer.
Update, at long last: It’s working again. I’m still not sure why, but it is. But, as soon as I knock the last of Big End-of-Term Project #1 out of the way tomorrow, expect bloggage.
No time for substantial posting means … it’s time for Bullets of Random Crap!
The base structure of both the city and the poem is the labyrinth. In the city, it’s the physical plan. As in any maze, you can only see to the next corner, never around it. Nineteenth-century Paris is routinely described, in Balzac, Poe, Baudelaire, and elsewhere, as a labyrinth, and as such, something that needs to be unraveled, something coiled up, convoluted, ready to spring. Meaning is often similarly coiled within a poem—not laid out directly; one must follow intricate turns of thought, and unravel. …
The city occurs in chunks just large enough to hold in the mind, just as a prose poem is usually a single gesture, whether image, thought, or impression. …
The city is always something going on ahead, something that just turned the corner, that just slipped out of view. The city is posited as something unseizeable, something whose body is necessarily amorphous, and that just might be concretized by the mapping the poet does in his walking.
Note to self:
You’ve previously had occasion to discover that a carton of Trader Joe’s chicken broth and a carton of Trader Joe’s soy milk are exactly the same size and shape and, while not the same color, can still cause confusion if you store them side by side in the refrigerator.
The ruined cup of coffee was instructive enough. Was it really necessary to repeat the experiment tonight and wind up with a whiter-than-intended pasta sauce? Just, please, for Pete’s sake, remember to double-check the container before you try baking.
[Actually, the pasta — penne with a sort of improvised kale-and-garlic-in-broth sauce — turned out fine. I caught the mistake before I’d poured in too much soy milk, and the end result was probably improved by it. Of the coffee incident, though, the less said the better.]
I have a pile of assignments and readings to finish over the next few weeks, and I’m thoroughly and profoundly tired of February. I vote for abolishing this entire month, even if it means ripping a hole in the space-time continuum. Down with February now! Let’s just skip right over it next year!
There. I feel better now. How about the rest of you?
I was listening to This American Life this weekend, and the first story was about a guy who went to extraordinary lengths to get onto Jeopardy!. So I’m half-listening, and the guy starts talking about how he memorized facts, like the titles of E. M. Forster’s novels: to remember A Room with a View, he imagined someone’s living room and its view, and then to remember Howards End, he thought of a friend named Howard and then visualized Howard’s buttocks, at enormous size, visible through the windows of the room. Then he added Where Angels Fear to Tread by reasoning that of course the angels would want to avoid Howard’s, er, end. (At which point Ira Glass notes: "Let’s not even talk about how he worked in A Passage to India.")
And I do a little dance of nerdy joy, because
memorization-by-imagery is one of the things I wrote my dissertation about.* When I was working on the Magnum Opus, people always asked me "but why would anyone create such an elaborate system to memorize things? It doesn’t seem like it would work!" I wondered the same thing myself. But this guy sounds like he’s just figured out on his own that the method works — without reading anything about the classical practice of constructing memory places, or the way various ancient and medieval authors suggested picturing places and people you know, or really absurd imagery, to make the content
stick in your memory better.
So: they were right, after all! Maybe I’ll send Ira Glass an e-mail about it.
You
can listen to the whole thing here (it’s the one called "Quiz Show"). The other stories —
especially the one about the MIT Mystery Hunt (which I really want to
do someday) — are all well worth listening to.
* If you’re curious, Frances Yates wrote a classic introduction to the subject
(The Art of Memory, University of Chicago Press, 1966); Mary Carruthers’ The
Book of Memory (Cambridge UP, 1990) is another, more recent take on it.
I’m short of post ideas today. So, an old favorite:
Brown Penny
I whispered, "I am too young,"
And then, "I am old enough";
Wherefore I threw a penny
To find out if I might love.
"Go and love, go and love, young man,
If the lady be young and fair."
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
I am looped in the loops of her hair.And the penny sang up in my face,
"There is nobody wise enough
To find out all that is in it,
For he would be thinking of love
That is looped in the loops of her hair,
Till the loops of time had run."
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
One cannot begin it too soon.
(There’s also an earlier version whose second stanza begins "O love is the crooked thing, / There is nobody wise enough…", and, though I rather regret the loss of that line about love being the crooked thing — because really, it is, isn’t it? — I love the gain of "Till the loops of time had run.")
