121309

I discovered this week where the name Mark Twain comes from: Samuel Clemens was a riverboat captain for years before he became a writer (and when he did it was almost by accident); "Mark twain!" used to be called out on riverboats to notify the skipper that the boat was in two fathoms (12 feet) of water.

_____

"I felt a loud, unending scream piercing nature."

--Edvard Munch

I read this quote and something struck me: this is exactly what it feels like living with MS. I always felt an affinity for his painting The Scream.

*Lord's-Jester*

When I first started in natural perfume, about five years ago, recipes for me were quite strict, i.e. I had to use 60 drops aromatics in 15ml alcohol, had to have a top section, had to follow standard protocols. Now that I make perfume by weight (I still make samples volumetrically), everything has changed. I'm only worried about the total weight of aromatics; from there I can make any concentration, EdP, EdT, EdC, etc. I also am not so worried anymore about proportions of top to middle to base. Now when I draw up a recipe, I'm familiar with the odor intensities of different aromatics; I let that guide me in terms of proportions. I compose each section, look at odor intensities, and determine which part gets how much.

Recently, I was talking to Michelyn about a perfume with no top section, just base and heart. I have long thought of doing this, because often, when it comes to top notes, there's nothing I really want on top; still, I've felt compelled always to create a top chord. However, recently Michelyn tried my immortelle perfume, Chronos, and her reaction was, "It's fantastic, but I can do without the top." Just the base and heart of that perfume are perfect; I added a top section only because I felt compelled to. No more. I've always been inclined toward base and heart anyway, and in truth, every note is in fact complete. Base notes contain base notes within them, as well as heart notes, as well as top notes. (Certain recipes of course do need a top.)

For example, with my osmanthus perfume, Phoebe (the latest version of which I've found to be delightfully powdery), the first thing I smell is osmanthus; I'm sensing the top notes of osmanthus which is, nevertheless, considered a base note. As to other perfumes, recently we remade Heracles, one of my boronia perfumes; it was a failure, too much black-currant bud and not enough boronia (17 notes all together). Another iteration is in order. Still waiting for the remake of Cuir du Farceur to mature. I am very hopeful about that one. On the NP email list this week, somebody asked what to do with failed perfumes. Anya McCoy responded that she does as the big perfume houses have always done: she makes "mille fleur," which means literally "1000 flowers." I've started a batch which I call 10,000 Flowers (in China they say 10,000 when they mean a whole lot; we'd say "a million").

My article for Fragrantica, found at The Original Art of Seduction, was a big success. Anya McCoy, president of the Natural Perfumers Guild, raved about what I had written. Many other perfumers, natural and otherwise, were also impressed. Best of all for me, Mandy Aftel, the premier natural perfumer in the world, whose course I took and passed with flying colors, commented on the article; she too fairly raved, and said she was happy I'd be covering naturals for Fragrantica. The fact that _everyone_ was impressed I think bodes well for a natural-perfume presence in the main. I will see to it that no one forgets the way it used to be: natural perfume was part of the original arts of seduction.

*Facts*

Random factoids about our world:

1. Bee keepers can smell their own hive out of a sea of other hives. There are quite a few collective bee farms these days; many of them allow their bees to forage only on certified organic plants, in order to produce certified-organic bee products (pollen, honey, wax, etc.). And on these collective bee farms, no signs or labels are needed--a bee keeper can smell his hive from a mile away, and can pick it out instantly from 1000 other hives.

2. There is an awful lot of misinformation out there on engineering topics. One thing I want to be clear about: _do_ heat up your car. An auto produces some 70% of its emissions in the minutes after a cold start. This means every time you get in your car, you should heat it up quickly and keep it hot. The reason cold engines are dirty? _Incomplete combustion_. If you drive a car when it's cold, most of the fuel coursing through the engine comes out of the tailpipe _unburned_. The vast majority of automobile greenhouse-gas emissions come from cars working at sub-optimal operating temperatures. Get it hot and keep it hot.

3. Digital TV means all shows and games are online instantly. It's never been easier to keep tabs on your favorite shows and teams.

*Asia*

When I was living in Taiwan (in a small beach town called Hualien, where I lived for a year), my older brother Christopher did three months in Jakarta as a doctor. We agreed to meet in Singapore, then take a boat into the middle of Sumatra, where our great grandfather lived and worked for 40 years. Having lived in Nepal, I was fully prepared for the transition from developed east Asia to 3rd-world south Asia. Singapore itself is most definitely 1st world. We spent a night there and left by boat the next morning. I knew full well what to expect from the boat; my brother was unsuspecting. We arrived and he was stunned: what we faced was a large ferry with an enormous, empty central space for passengers. Folks were expected to camp out on the floor, make fires, make noodles, etc.

We were given food, as my bother had been told we would be; it was typical for south Asia: twice per day we were given plates of white rice with a single, whole dried fish and chili paste. Of course we supplemented this with "super mee;" folks who'd taken the boat before came prepared with ramen noodles to which they added eggs, onions, etc., and which they sold for a whopping couple of pennies. I must admit that another thing I'd learned well in Nepal was how to eat with my hand; my brother, on the other hand, had spent all his time with rich doctors (wealthy by Indonesian standards). I remember the first night on the boat, we were served our rice and dried fish; without utensils my brother was helpless.

Folks around us started complaining about the foreigner next to them who didn't know how to eat (I experienced the same thing my first night in Taiwan: I was unable to use chopsticks to eat my noodle soup, and someone asked the owner of the noodle stand to give me a fork). I had to give Chris a quick lesson on eating with his hand. He was approaching it the way all westerners do at first: he grabbed a handful and attempted to bring it to his mouth; with each handful he dropped food all over himself. The trick, you see, is to hold your face near the plate; you bring your mouth to the food, not the food to your mouth (the same rule applies to using chopsticks) and for a westerner that's quite counterintuitive.

The really shitty thing was that the riverboat captain decided he would earn extra money by allowing extra boats to tie on to the back of ours. This meant that we took twice as long to get where we were going; and to top it off, one of the two engines broke after a day and a half (too much extra weight). It was a fun trip, feeling very much like the trip up river in Apocalypse Now. Once we arrived in the middle of Sumatra, we had a fantastic time. One of my brother's Indonesian doctor friends had a home in Bukitingi; we stayed there, and the house came with a maid, a cook, a groundskeeper, etc. We lived like kings for a few days. We even made it to the village where our great grandfather had lived, and found an elder who remembered him.

After we were done, I took a flight from Sumatra to Singapore, where I stayed for a few days before returning to Taiwan. Singapore, unlike Taiwan and Hong Kong, has a majority of folks who speak English; in places where folks speaking different languages live together, English invariably becomes the common tongue (in Singapore, there are speakers of Malay, Indonesian, Hindi, Urdu, Arabic, Mandarin, Cantonese, etc.). So Singapore has a lot of English-language book stores. I had been isolated in Hualien for some nine months, and I had wads of cash from teaching, so I stocked up on every book I could think of that I wanted. At 18, I had never gone to college, so I tried to make up for it by getting myself innumerable nonfiction books, books on Chinese history, ESL, tying knots, doing magic tricks, and anything else I could think of that interested me. I still have one or two of those books.

*Quotations*

Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained.

--Marie Curie

["Ask what makes you come alive and go do it."]

I never quite know when I'm not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, 'Dammit, Thurber, stop writing.' She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph. Or my daughter will look up from the dinner table and ask, 'Is he sick?' 'No,' my wife says, 'he's writing something.'

--James Thurber

[The line between life and art is one I explicitly ignore.]

In my soul rages a battle, without victor, between faith without proof and reason without charm.

--Sully Prudhomme

[I could never have said it better.]

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

--Emily Dickinson

[Top of the head, to be sure.]

Literature can carry the consciousness of human times and social life better than anything else. Look at the movies of the 1920s, watch the Murrow broadcasts--you can't recognize any of the people. Now, read Fitzgerald--that's it. That is the truth of the times. Somebody has to be committed to the idea of truth.

--Thomas McGuane

[I'll be sitting quietly speaking Truth until the day I die.]

With modernism came this new notion that poetry is something that is not as direct or accessible, and poetry became something that needed to be deciphered, a kind of riddle. And, of course, a lot of people are put off by this. A lot of people read poetry, and they don't understand it and it makes them feel resentful. They also tend to think if they don't understand it that means it's good poetry because you're not supposed to understand poetry. You can have poems that are clear enough, accessible enough, that people can understand. The best of these are not going to be any less original than those poems that are obscure.

--Thomas Lux

[Even today there are many who espouse the obscurity principle. It does no one a spot of good. Clear and accessible is the only way.]

Life is never easy for those who dream.

--Robert James Waller

[The bigger your dreams the tougher your life.]

Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men.

--JFK

[Adversity breeds strength.]

Kind words are short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.

--Mother Teresa

[It is often much easier to be kind than to be otherwise.]

It is easy enough to be friendly to one's friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.

--Gandhi

[My greatest days in the last 10 years have been days I made friends with the MS, not enemies, for enemies would entail vilifying myself.]

Peace love and ATOM jazz