Those of you not on Facebook have not had a chance yet to watch my spoken-word videos; I have just uploaded a bunch to Youtube. These are 25 of my best pieces. Guaranteed to amaze and excite you, with me reciting my work (no books, no papers, just me on a high-wire). Check it out! Found here:
*Lord's-Jester*
This week we've been preparing materials for the custom-perfume process. This process is the ultimate manifestation of the art in that, judging from which smells alone a person likes, a perfumer makes leaps and bounds to create a complete, bespoke perfume. Some perfumers like to do oodles of questionnaires so that they might better "get to know" a given client. Anya McCoy convinced me, rightly, that, since I'm not a psychologist or counselor, the only thing that matters to me is what smells a person likes. (My clients will get a brief five-question questionnaire, with questions like, "What color, if any, comes to mind when you think of your would-be perfume?") Then comes a slew of individual essences to try (not a slew, 18 to start). The essences are anonymous to the client (only I have a record of what's what). Depending on the sense I get with each individual, I then will send out a second batch of essences, judging from what a person liked from the first round.
These "essences" are actually diluted forms of each essence; that's what we've been busy doing this past week, diluting aromatics to 10%. After a little give and take, we arrive at groups of likes and dislikes; I then move quickly to making attempts at perfumes, until we get one the person really likes. There are two things I'll probably do to streamline the process: 1) knowing that I'm a good perfumer (I'm confident I'll be able to customize for each person), I'll put a limit on the number of iterations we go through (between three and five), and 2) make two price levels, one for inexpensive and common materials (benzoin, clary sage, fir), one for rarified and uncommon materials (flouve, boronia, honeysuckle). Most base-note custom samples I've found will need to be filtered; heart and top notes not so much (being, as they are, often from distillations; absolutes from solvent extraction have waxes and other gunk to make alcohol solutions cloudy and/or cause there to be a lot of detritus).
So far, I've got three female test subjects and two male. That should get the ball rolling. Just as my Australian professional-perfumer friend says accommodating changes in odor profiles of given aromatics is where the true art of natural perfume lies, so too I think it encompasses being able to do custom perfume, to get an olfactory sense of a person, to have the imagination to envision what smells might work on a test subject or client. This does take up a fair amount of time, and the process will be priced accordingly. Once you pay for a custom perfume, the recipe is secret, only for your nose and those you love. And refills, separate from the cost of doing the whole custom process, will be the same price as my regular perfume. Additionally, a client may get the perfume in any strength or forms she or he desires, pure parfum to eau de cologne, liquid and solid. As far as I'm concerned, this whole deal is going to be sheer joy. I can't wait.
*Sustainable-Development*
In my upper division studies in college I investigated the meaning of Sustainable Development. The Brundtland Report, which brought the term Sustainable Development to the mainstream lexicon, was released in 1989, so I was doing my work not five or six years after the release of that document. To investigate fully, I had to do two main things: 1) I had to find a college that let students design their own majors, 2) I had to do minors in about six subjects, and (hardest of all) my 10-page essay about the larger issues behind my work _and_ every single class in my two years of upper-division studies had to be okayed by the three Ph.D.s who oversaw my "concentration." I'm very pleased to say that none of my three doctors could say anything negative about the efficacy of my work; honestly, I don't think any of them knew quite what to say. They couldn't argue with my reasoning, and I was a pioneer in this field.
I had a doctor of physics (my main mentor), one of resource assessment and analysis, and one of economics. The school I went to, Fairhaven College at Western Washington University, allowed me to take all my classes on the main campus while still designing my own concentration. The concentration was called Economics as if Thermodynamics Mattered: Development without Growth (and that's a play on the many 'Economics as if X Mattered' titles that abound). As part of this effort, I studied: physics, engineering, economic theory, moral philosophy, civic planning (and land-use law), and environmental science. Needless to say this struggle nearly killed me; I had to drop out for a year to gather my thoughts and stamina for the final push (28 credits in one quarter). I learned more from forcing myself to do the required work than I've ever learned in my life, and not just about Sustainable Development.
There was this overarching theme to my studies of acting on the needs of future generations, and I looked at the subject in every possible way, the engineering to get us there, the philosophical underpinnings which drive the very idea of considering the future at all, the economic theories behind development without growth (that our lives should become qualitatively better not quantitatively larger), etc. Also, in stretching myself thin, I was arguing in my way for The Unity of Knowledge. In effect, I ended up espousing the conviction that, in this knot of development theories, the physics could not be separated from the philosophy just as the environmental science could not be separated the urban and regional planning just as the economics could not be separated from the agroecology. I wrote a 75-page thesis paper; my main mentor, the physicist, told me it was on par with what would be expected of a doctoral thesis.
And I gave a presentation called The Unity of Knowledge, a presentation in which EO Wilson's book Consilience (which argues for this unity of knowledge) played a prominent part. As I remember it, I was truly all over the map, drawing graphs, showing off spoken word, reciting passages from books, etc. My point was simple: that all the sciences and art and language I've ever come across display the same patterns, and that in the meta-disciplinary art of combining them, conflating them, uniting them, we get closer to what really matters, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen's idea that the only real profit we take from life is the sheer enjoyment and experience of it. Everything else on this green earth turns to dust in the long-term. The idea of our only profits being the enjoyment of our lives is one very dear to me, and is an idea which I would see become the tether which ties us all together.
*Quotations*
So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery.
--Virginia Woolf
Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb.
--Churchill
Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.
--FDR
Serendipity is looking in a haystack for a needle and discovering a farmer's daughter.
--Julius Comroe
One aspect of serendipity to bear in mind is that you have to be looking for something in order to find something else.
--Lawrence Block
A novel is a long answer to the question, 'What is it about?' I think it should be possible to give a short answer--in other words, I believe a novel should have a thematic and narrative unity that can be described.
--David Lodge
["A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer."--Karl Kraus]
The lovesick, the betrayed, and the jealous all smell alike.
--Colette
[I'm fairly certain that's the way I smell.]
The hood-winked husband shows his anger, and the word jealous is flung in his face. Jealous husband equals betrayed husband. And there are women who look upon jealousy as synonymous with impotence, so that the betrayed husband can only shut his eyes, powerless in the face of such accusations.
--August Strindberg
[I have felt impotent ever since my ex-wife walked out.]
If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, then you will have betrayed yourself
--Rollo May
[Insist and insist do I, and where has it gotten me?]
I have been constantly betrayed and deceived all my life.
--Taylor Caldwell
[It's been forever that I've felt outside the realms of human understanding.]
*Music*
On the latest Decemberists record, The Hazards of Love, which I've been liking more and more (my true test of good music), there is a retro feel that reminds me of classic rock like Jethro Tull, while still sounding eminently hip and Now. There is a hard-rock flavor to the outing, especially with the likes of Becky Stark on vocals, sounding like a cross between Heart (of Barracuda fame) and maybe Aimee Mann. This record never fails to please, especially if you like some hard rock with your alt-pop.
Peace love and ATOM jazz
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