hortus conclusus

In Salman Rushdie’s Moor’s Last Sigh , a spice heiress and a manager succumb to their passion for one another and make love on sacks of pepper. This scene won Rushdie the award for bad sex writing . I guess the line that seems to especially offend people’s sensitivities is the admittedly very stupid-sounding: “For ever they sweated pepper n’ spice sweat.” Ok, fair enough, that sounds pretty mojo-killing. But I remember the first time I read this novel (when it came out. I admit to being a Rushdie fan), and I remember that I thought this scene was pretty hot. not the terrible n’,  but the scene in general. Reader, what do you think: link to this page of the The Moor’s Last Sigh I found myself thinking of it again, dear readers, when I spritzed on The Different Company’s Rose Poivrée —after the inevitable sneeze, I thought, what a sexy scent, with its pepper, civet, rose, cumin, and coriander, and then all these images of sexy Indian heiresses and their strappi

I make all sorts of different chais-it is said that nearly every part of India serves a different sort of chai (the name just means tea—c.f. Japanese ‘cha’) and so do I. Some kinds I make are cinnamon-heavy. Others are garam masala based. others utilize fresh ginger. Still others are a blend of all the spices I can get my hands on. But one of my favorites, the one I recommend your making for your pepper adventure , is my pepper-cardamom-nutmeg chai. This is very piquant, and quite lovely, if I do say so myself. Give it a try, and tell me what you think. Pepper Cardamom Chai bring 4 c. water, one ground nutmeg, a teaspoon of ground cardamom, and a teaspoon of pepper to a boil in a large pot. Allow to simmer for 10 minutes, then add tea of choice (I usePG Tips), three tbsp, sugar or to taste, and 3 c. milk. When chai is almost at a boil, strain or serve with mate straws. Enjoy!  

We live in an age of superspecialization; it’s been said many times and I’m gonna say it again.  My favorite example of this phenomenon is Pandora , the online radio station, which allows one to suggest one’s favorite song, then produces the songs and albums its special generator thinks you might like. If you don’t like the suggestions, give it a thumbs down—it’ll recalibrate and try to find the exact right thing for your tastes and expectations. So far so good, right? You get exactly what you want for your mood, and discover new artists in the process, right? The problem, in my eyes, lies in the fact that a person could listen to nothing but artists who all have something in common with David Bowie , for example, and never come into contact with any other genres or music al ideas, for the rest of her life. New music is always coming out, and she can just specialize in that niche. The same trend holds true for perfume. New fragrances are always being launched, in every cat

Ok, it’s the second day of my monthly lunar insomnia, so here’s my second musing on the link between the moon and perfume. I was thinking about D&G’s recent attempt to offer a niche line with their generally disappointing tarot-inspired fragrances (what is with the naked models as tarot cards anyway?) and their interpretation of the moon tarot card with a rather insipid fruity floral/woody scent, La Lune . Of all things, this is just the wrong fragrance for this mysterious card. Not to get all new-agey on you (I’m not usually) but I have spent some time with the Tarot in my life—I am a medievalist, after all, and the allegory of the Tarot appeals to my sensibilities—and the moon is one of the most powerful and ambiguous cards in the deck. In the Tarot, the moon—the most powerful sign of mutability next to the Wheel of Fortune—has both positive and negative meanings. As you can imagine, it is associated with women, with their monthly cycles, and with their fertility. It

It is a full moon today, and I feel myself becoming owly. Question: is there such a thing as a lunar note in perfume. Lately I've seen a lot of frags list solar accord in their notes, which is supposed to smell like the sun on skin, but is there one that captures the clammy, mystical fragrance of the full moon? Arguably, the whole genre of white flowers combined with exotic woods is intended to evoke the feeling of a luminous night of love on the full moon, but these are all very Southerly visions of what a walk in a garden in the moonlight in India or the deep South or Persia might smell like, with night-blooming jasmine, moonflower, lotus, gardenia, camellia, rose, etc. Is there an equivalent 'lunar' scent for, say, an English garden, or more perversely, a winter solstice night in the far North? My dad, who used to be a choral director in a high school, says that he would always notice the kids acting strangely at certain times of the month. There would be more fi

This week I spent five days in the city, and have been away from the blogosphere, but now I’m back to share all my news! The question is, what is the most exciting thing that happened to me fragrancewise? With my busy fragrance schedule (see my Birthday Pilgrimage) it’s hard to say, and I will surely be mulling over all my experiences online over the course of this week, but I think I must first come out with the most exciting news of all: I fell in love. And bought the bottle (thank God Bergdorf-Goodman was having a $25 off sale)  The lucky fragrance? Robert Piguet’s Fracas. I had never really understood what all the fuss over tuberose was about until I wore this. Yes, I’ve sniffed it before, and other insanely bold tuberoses like Tuberose Criminelle and Carnal Flower, but wearing 4 spritzes (overkill, I know!) of Fracas around Greenwich Village on this past Thursday night made me understand. On me, Fracas smells like tuberose, yeast, and butter—and warm, unwashed sheets. And t

I never realized how closely related carnations and cloves were until cdg connected the dots. While a superrealistic carnation scent, the clove supports and brings it out and the two notes dance together in a dipping and weaving mating dance; sometimes I smell clove, sometimes carnation, sometimes just enhanced carnation.  I also get an oxidized tea note. SO I wouldn't consider this a soliflore, although some may be inclined to, since the clove, tea, pepper, and rose notes only serve to round out and enhance the carnation scent, which is certainly the star of the show here. But to me, since the clove plays such an important role in the understanding and development of this scent, this becomes an elegant study in the ways the smell of chloroforms er, chlorophyll, and spice work together—how they are all part of a great continuum. I am getting dimly remembered shades from my childhood of high school dances on the reservation, that my dad would chaperone when he was a teacher th

I love scotch, because I love its complexity, its fragrance, and the way it looks in the glass. At a scotch tasting last night, I was struck by how much the protocols of Scotch tasting parallel those of fragrance. When we taste Scotch, we give greater emphasis to how it smells than to how it tastes; the more complex the scotch, the more difficult to understand and describe the scent, the more we value it. And unlike other beverages,  professional scotch noses never actually drink it; they evaluate the quality of the scotch based on smell alone. When we smell a  Scotch, we look for the scents of earth, peat, smoke, fruit, wood, dirt, brine, sulphur, grain, and spice among others, and physiological reactions like ‘nose burn’ the feeling of light pain from the rising alcohol of a Scotch. We also look for ways to describe the ideas we get about the kind of space the scent occupies—is it round, angular, smooth? Smelling Scotch can help hone our noses for fragrance, and vice versa, since

  Down with them! Down! I really dislike the Vera Wang Princess ads. The girls portrayed in them remind me of the kind of overprivileged young women who populate the undergraduate population of my university. I always groan when I see this kind of girl in my classes on the first days of the semester; you can spot them from a mile away—always attached to their blackberrys, hoisting a huge be-logoed Prada bag on their anorexic shoulders, wearing a hideous and rather skanky outfit that you can tell is designer right away. This is the kind of girl who shows up in my office crying if she gets less than an A on the paper she plagiarized from the internet, who gets drunk and pukes at frat parties, who never worries about the future because she knows she can always work for Daddy’s firm. She never studies anything because it interests her;  she only studies subjects she needs to know to make lots of money. And worst of all, she speaks in a simpering baby whine that makes my ears curl.

I find it very interesting that Mary Magdalene is the patron saint of perfume. Her legend is so multifaceted, so sensory, and so deeply complex that I have to concede that she makes a perfect object of contemplation for the perfumer (and the lover of perfume, of course!). Her status (erroneously attributed to her in the sixth century by the ubiquitous Legenda Aurea   or The Golden Legend i n English) as a reformed prostitute landed her squarely in the world of the sensual, and her ritualistic, emotive actions subsequent to her conversion only enhanced this reputation. For example, Mary Magdalene was believed to have washed Jesus’ feet with her penitent tears and a whole box of spikenard; perfuming them, if you will, with the liquid of new-found holiness. The passage is so super-sensual I’ll include it here: Then took Mary a pound of ointment of spikenard, very costly, and anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped his feet with her hair; and the house was filled with the odour of the oin

For my birthday yesterday I received a surprise present from my father; a bottle of one of those scents from my childhood that gets the wheels of my bittersweet memory turning. I don’t know what made my father decide to part with this bottle; it was a gift of a vintage bottle of Geo F. Trumper’s Wild Fern from one of the greatest bon vivants in my family of bon vivants, who sadly died of pancreatic cancer some years ago. I loved him, and miss him often, so anything that reminds me of him makes me somewhat sad—I feel like we lost him too soon. That said, I am very happy to have this bottle in my collection. It is precious to me. I remember the smell of this bottle, the gorgeousness of the green marbled tin, my surreptitious sniffs at the lid—this is probably the very bottle that made me fall in love with Fougeres—and perhaps with fragrance in general! It has a bitter citrus opening, deep anisic note, a definite greenness and a note of what might be bitter almond which quickl

A well thought-out perfume could be the best Mothers Day gift choice ever if you follow a few simple guidelines. Your mom will be flattered and happy that you took the time to seek out a custom scent you know she will love,  and it is one of those gifts that keep gibing; every time your mom spritzes on that fragrance she is sure to think of you lovingly. Before you go shopping, take a few minutes to think about the following items, and you are sure to choose a perfume that pleases mom! determine whether your mom is a romantic or a classic or a minimalist, a sensualist or a prude, and I mean that in the nicest way possible. For example,  a sensualist may be more drawn to musky fragrances, but if your mom was too shy to give you the ‘birds and bees talk’ and never divulged her secret hopes and desires in your memory, you might consider sticking with florals has she ever mentioned a smell she particularly loves? You can search Basenotes datab

Today is my birthday, April 18th, and I have always found it significant that it also happens to be the day that the pilgrims in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales set out on their pilgrimage, “the holy Blissful martir for to seke/ that hem hath holpen whan that they were seke.” As a medievalist, I love it that I share my special day (well, at least the day of my birth) with one of the greatest compositions in the English language, as well as the fact that the tales open with an invocation of springtime and rebirth, an idea that I am always in love with this time of year: "Whan that Aprille with his shoores soote/ the dorughte of March hath perced to the roote/ and bathed every veyne in swich licour, / of which vertu engendred is the flour...and smalle foweles maken melodye / that slepen all the nyght with open eye/ So priketh hem Nature in hir corages, / Than longen foolk to goon on pilgrimages /And palmeres for to seken straunge strandes / to ferne halwes, kouthe in sondry londes.&

NO perfume can capture the absolute delight of strawberries and cream, and that is a great pity. Today I enjoyed my first bowl of fresh cut strawberries floating in whole milk and sugar, and I have to say that few things delight me more. I love the tangy, acidic muskiness of the strawberries in contrast with the smooth creaminess of the milk, and the way the fruity juice from the strawberries slowly turns the milk pink and imparts the most beautiful flavor.  I was racking my brain for a scent that emulates the unique joy of this culinary combination, but all I could think of were failed attempts ( Miss Dior Cherie , Victoria’s Secret Strawberries and Champagne ). I have not tried Fragonard’s Juste un Baiser , which supposedly has notes of strawberry and vanilla, but I would be surprised if it were successful. I remember trying a Voluspa fragrance a long time ago th at seemed like a very tart, floral, wild strawberry, but alas, I have forgotten its name…. Another I must try is Neil

AFTER some deliberation, I have changed the name of this blog from “Life As Art” to “hortus conclusus,” which I feel better represents the nature of this site. “Life as art” seemed a little too general, although I like the idea behind it, that aesthetics should be an integral part of one’s life.  I chose hortus conclusus as the new title because it draws upon multiple layers of history art and symbolism. Hortus conclusus is Latin for ‘enclosed garden,’ and was first writ ten down in the Vulgate translation of the Bible, in that great erotic—and fragrant—poem, the Song of Songs : “ Hortus conclusus soror mea, sponsa, hortus conclusus, fons signatus”: An enclosed garden is my sister, my wife, a sealed fountain. In the Middle Ages, my area of research, the hortus conclusus was a popular kind of garden cultivated by many, as well as a powerful symbol of the erotic potential of a virginal woman. I like to think of perfume as a kind of ‘encl osed garden,’ the glass bottle a wall surrounding