I would like to write about fragrances [an entry about mostly Japanese incense | an entry about home written from the road | a final indulgence before returning to serious subjects]
I would like to write about fragrances [an entry about mostly Japanese incense | an entry about home written from the road | a final indulgence before returning to serious subjects]
dylanleviking.substack.com
A WARNING / _ I have not lived up to my promise. In fact, I would like to write more about fragrances. This is partly because I appreciate that style of overwrought sensory writing that some do well. I can’t pull it off, I realize. Pursuing other methods, I wrote about the pleasure of walking through an afternoon fair, reeking of vetiver and Lark cigarettes. I haunted junk stores to find antique bottles, then tried to write about Mitsouko and what we can’t recover from the ruins of our civilization. I tried to understand Soviet chypres and Abdulaziz al-Omari's advice to the hijackers to cloak themselves in Paco Rabanne. I wrote about the joy of discovery in spending an hour in a niche perfume shop on the third floor of a lesser Lumine, where I tried to decide between smelling of sawdust and lacquer, salt and roses, or fig and coriander. I tried to figure out fantasy Northern European allusions in Chinese-language perfume reviews. I wrote about the young women that work at department store perfume counters. I started earnestly on a report on the Korean perfume industry as a way to understand the brief craze for apple-scented body spray, mimicking security analysis, inserting satellite images of the Pyongyang Essential Oil Factory and the Institute of Perfume and Cosmetic Engineering. I wrote about collecting a vial of every Tom Ford version of cherry, so that I could spray one on each arm and my collar while I read a Kawakami Mieko microstory in
I would like to write about fragrances [an entry about mostly Japanese incense | an entry about home written from the road | a final indulgence before returning to serious subjects]
I would like to write about fragrances [an…
I would like to write about fragrances [an entry about mostly Japanese incense | an entry about home written from the road | a final indulgence before returning to serious subjects]
A WARNING / _ I have not lived up to my promise. In fact, I would like to write more about fragrances. This is partly because I appreciate that style of overwrought sensory writing that some do well. I can’t pull it off, I realize. Pursuing other methods, I wrote about the pleasure of walking through an afternoon fair, reeking of vetiver and Lark cigarettes. I haunted junk stores to find antique bottles, then tried to write about Mitsouko and what we can’t recover from the ruins of our civilization. I tried to understand Soviet chypres and Abdulaziz al-Omari's advice to the hijackers to cloak themselves in Paco Rabanne. I wrote about the joy of discovery in spending an hour in a niche perfume shop on the third floor of a lesser Lumine, where I tried to decide between smelling of sawdust and lacquer, salt and roses, or fig and coriander. I tried to figure out fantasy Northern European allusions in Chinese-language perfume reviews. I wrote about the young women that work at department store perfume counters. I started earnestly on a report on the Korean perfume industry as a way to understand the brief craze for apple-scented body spray, mimicking security analysis, inserting satellite images of the Pyongyang Essential Oil Factory and the Institute of Perfume and Cosmetic Engineering. I wrote about collecting a vial of every Tom Ford version of cherry, so that I could spray one on each arm and my collar while I read a Kawakami Mieko microstory in