Sweet Diva

Moving to New Location!

2009-02-28T19:54:00.003-05:00

Hi Everyone! All book-related content and posts have been moved to my new blog, The Evening Reader. If you have linked to this blog or saved it in a feed, please update the location to the following:

eveningreader.wordpress.com

I'll be posting regularly there starting Sunday, March 1.

Sweet Diva will remain online as a perfume blog. All other links and info will be moved to the new blog over the following week.

Thanks for reading!

Reader’s Journal: Isabella Moon

2009-02-27T16:10:00.002-05:00

Being somewhat new to the thriller genre, I want to say first that I realize I might not be this author’s ideal reader. Authors, of course, don’t really get to choose who their readers are, unless they publish and distribute their books themselves. Even though I was hopeful--I really wanted to like this book--I find myself disappointed. I found Isabella Moon through Laura Benedict’s blog, and she seems so nice, like someone you’d want to have in your circle of friends. All the time I was reading this and thinking about composing my thoughts, I wondered: if one of my friends wrote a book (actually, some of my friends are writing books) that I read and didn’t exactly like, would I tell him or her the truth? Well, yes.

Isabella Moon tells the story of a woman visited by the apparition of a young girl who has been missing for two years. Isabella Moon appears in Kate Russell’s dreams to tell her where she’s buried, information Kate takes to the town’s sheriff, an incident which kicks off a series of murders that reveal secrets hidden beneath the town’s quaint, friendly veneer. We meet a lot of characters and witness a lot of twists and turns.

I suppose that’s my main problem with the book: it never focused on any one thing long enough for me to feel invested. It seems at the beginning like this will be Kate’s story, that she has some connection with the girl, either real or psychic. Most of the first half of the book does focus on her, unfortunately in flashback. I say unfortunately because these flashbacks, which tell the backstory of Kate’s relationship with her abusive husband Miles, detract from the present story. They’re too long, and instead of making us understand her better, they serve to make her seem like a stock character, and sort of an aimless, empty-headed one at that. We never get a real sense of what keeps her with Miles--the money? Her desire for stability? She doesn’t come across as insecure so much as apathetic, which makes her come across as flat. Of course, the abuse is terrible, but beyond not wanting to see her suffer, she’s hard to care about.

Another thing that bothers me about the flashbacks--they’re in italics. To authors and editors everywhere: please learn to write (or edit) solid transitions between the past and present, and assume your readers are intelligent enough to follow along with you. Plenty of writers have done this quite successfully. Also, if you must use italics to show us when you’re going into the past or into the head of one character, don’t suddenly start using the same technique for other characters. About two-thirds of the way through the book, Benedict gives Miles a flashback chapter, and then she goes on and gives other characters flashback chapters. I was left wondering, why the transition from Kate?

And speaking of that, the whole book transitions from Kate, but it’s unclear why, except for the fact that Benedict has placed all these other characters in the story, and she has to somehow wrap up everything that’s happening with them. Even though it does come back to Kate in the final chapter, we never get a sense of why Isabella Moon chose her to communicate with in the first place. In fact, Isabella Moon seems to be nothing more than a plot device (and a title). She appears only to a few characters, but why? And another character who dies also appears several times, but that’s never explored either. I’m not sure if Benedict had ideas about making this a paranormal thriller and then she got caught up elsewhere, or what.

The book also focuses on the relationship between Kate’s best friend Francie and her secret lover, Paxton Birkenshaw. Francie is black, from a decent family, and Paxton is white, from one of the town’s best families. Francie and Paxton themselves are dull characters (usual small Southern town racial tension, and they both like coke--not the drink), but their mothers are both interesting characters, and I wanted more of them and less of their children. Delving more into the town’s past--and less into Kate’s--would have made for a more interesting book. And one nitpicky thing: at one point, Kate, who’s from South Carolina, seems puzzled that the little Kentucky hamlet in which she lives has an area still called “Darktown” by some of the town elders. Nobody who lives or grew up in the South would bat an eye at that or need to have it explained. The vestiges of racism still exist all over the South. (I live in Georgia, by the way.) To say she looked offended, yes--but puzzled? Hardly.

I’m finding it hard to write a focused review about such an unfocused book, especially without either giving something away or having to go into detail about the various plotlines, which would make this post way too long.

The writing itself is okay. Looking for passages to quote, I tended to notice things that bothered my internal English teacher: lots of “wryly” and “idly,” lots of unnecessary intricate description, wordiness. The one sentence that bothered me more than any other in the book (seriously, I kept thinking about it): “His skin wore a healthy-looking tan and there were faint, whitish lines at this temples where his sunglasses had been.” Skin does not “wear” a tan. Skin is tanned. It’s a process that occurs that changes the skin--not something that one puts on and takes off. Grr. I know I sound like a picky bitch, but I hate when writing detracts from the story, when I feel like I want to get out a pencil and start marking things up. (I have a friend whose mother actually does this, by the way.) I know many people don't notice this sort of thing. I've been in a book club for five years, and not once have we discussed the language in a story. (I tried, and I gave up.)

Honestly, I don’t mean to pick on Laura Benedict too much. After all, this is her first novel, and as I said in my post about Goldengrove, writing is difficult, and I think writing a mystery is doubly so. The author must keep the reader guessing--and Benedict did this pretty successfully--and that’s not easy. This book had great potential, and I still would like to read her latest book, Calling Mr. Lonely Hearts (although if she reads this, she may write and ask me not to, or at least to keep my mouth shut). I feel here like she must have had a book with so much going on, she and her editor ended up doing the best they could. Then again, as I said at the beginning, I’m not the target audience, not a person who usually reads thrillers, so the fault could be mine. I may be too blind to the conventions, or simply not understand what the audience wants.

*image from powells.com

9 for '09 Challenge: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

2009-02-25T09:37:00.003-05:00

My first pick for the 9 for ‘09 challenge was in the category Long, which had to be a book longer than the books one usually reads, and for that I chose Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke. I remember very well reading the review of this in the New York Times and thinking it sounded intriguing--although not for me. My mother-in-law was an avid reader of the Harry Potter series, so when I saw the headline “Hogwarts for Grown-Ups,” I scribbled down the title and resolved to give this to her as a Christmas present, which I did. And I never heard a word about it until she handed it back to me two years later, in a shopping bag full of books she thought I might want to read. Well.

Now, I myself have no basis for comparison, because--brace yourself--I’ve not read any of the Harry Potter books. Yes. It’s true. About eleven people in the Western world have not read the Harry Potter books, and I am one of them. I resisted them at first because they were too popular (Have I talked about that yet--about how I’ll avoid something just because it’s popular?), and now I resist them because my TBR list is already too long and the commitment seems too daunting. And because they’re still popular, and I am stubborn. I’ve seen the movies, but movies aren’t books, so I’m not going to spend any time comparing the two.

Where was I? Oh, the book!

Giving a summary of this tome seems next to impossible, but I’ll try:

The first part of the book is dedicated to the introduction of Mr. Norrell. Some members of a Yorkshire society of theoretical magicians learn of a great library of rare magical books, all kept by Mr. Norrell. The theoretical magicians would like access to the library, but Mr. Norrell is reluctant. He makes a bet with them: if he can perform an act of practical magic--practical magic had disappeared from England hundreds of years before--then they will retire from their studies and cease to call themselves magicians. Mr. Norrell is successful, and all of the magicians save one are forced to retire. Upon Mr. Norrell's success, he determines he should go to London, and we learn that Mr. Norrell hopes to use magic to curry favor with the government, and also to help them end the war against France.

Upon arriving in London, although Mr. Norrell is welcomed by society (although they find him rather dull and are disappointed that he refuses to perform any tricks), he finds that the government wants no part of what he has to offer--until, that is, he is able to resurrect the fiancee of a powerful man, Sir Walter Pole. The problem: upon resurrecting the future Lady Pole, he calls forth an evil faerie, the man with the thistle down hair, and is forced to make a bargain with him for Lady Pole’s life. Mr. Norrell offers the faerie half of the next seventy-five years of Lady Pole’s life (assuming that Sir Pole will have passed by then, as he’s quite a bit older than Lady Pole). The faerie agrees, but what Mr. Norrell does not know is that the faerie places her under an enchantment to take her nights (as his half), leaving her like the walking dead during the day.

In the meantime, Mr. Norrell has great success helping the British defeat the French, and all of England celebrates him as a hero. Mr. Norrell, however, finds himself with a real conundrum on his hands, because with every successful magic act he performs, the more curious people become about magic itself, including the practice of magic. Nothing frightens Mr. Norrell more than the idea of other people besides himself--with one exception--practicing magic, because he believes people are incapable of controlling the outcome.

The exception, of course, is Jonathan Strange, who, on his way to propose marriage to his beloved, is stopped along his journey by a man named Vinculus (a shadowy street magician cast out of London by Mr. Norrell) who prophesies that Strange will be one of two great magicians in England:

“Two magicians shall appear in England,” he said.
“The first shall fear me; the second shall long to behold me;
The first shall be governed by thieves and murderers; the second shall conspire at his own destruction;
The first shall bury his heart in a dark wood beneath the snow, yet still feel its ache;
The second shall see his dearest possession in his enemy’s hand…”

Vinculus also gives Strange two spells, and that very evening Strange performs one of them, “One Spell to Discover what My Enemy is doing Presently,” which conjures for him an image of Mr. Norrell:

Well, Henry, you can cease frowning at me. If I am a magician, I am a very indifferent one. Other adepts summon up fairy-spirits and long-dead kings. I appear to have conjured the spirit of a banker.

The second part of the book deals with Strange and his wife, Arabella, moving to London so that Strange can study with Mr. Norrell. Strange’s comment about having conjured a banker sets up the difference between these two, because Strange is more charismatic, more curious and eager to perform spells than simply to study them, as Mr. Norrell does. But this section also sets up the relationship, because Mr. Norrell is eager to have someone with whom he can discuss and share magic. Even without all the fundamental texts--Mr. Norrell keeps the choicest selections of his library at his Yorkshire estate, and never lets Strange see it voluntarily--Strange proves to be a better, more adventurous magician, as we learn as he travels with the British army as they work to defeat Napoleon. He becomes more and more independent of Mr. Norrell, and eventually, he decides to part, for they disagree over one fundamental aspect of English magic and its practice, and that is the summoning of the last King of the North (the "human" King of England ruled the South, or the area around London), a Faerie king named John Uskglass, who was said to have control of all the realms of the world, of Faerie, and even of Hell. Strange believes that they can uncover the spells and the origins of magic by this summons, and Mr. Norrell believes it to be too dangerous, which is the crux of the entire book.

The third part of the book is called “John Uskglass,” and it deals primarily with Strange working to call forth John Uskglass as a means to release Arabella from the same faerie enchantment that grips Lady Pole. I’m oversimplifying this part because it contains all the answers, and only as events unfold does it become clear who is performing what magic and why. Of course I cannot give away the ending, but nothing is revealed until the very last few pages, and Clarke does a terrific job of keeping up the pace, of keeping the reader guessing. Many other characters play a part--a large part, even, but they are too numerous to list here, their stories too involved to tell. Clarke also provides generous footnotes to educate us about the “history” of English magic, and these are both necessary and as interesting as the story they support.

This is a terrifically enjoyable book, and I had a great time reading it. The language is wonderful, and the detail is stunning. Some reviewers seemed to think all the detail detracted from the action (Janet Maslin described it as “[both] action packed and unhurried”), and here I have to disagree. I think the “get to the action already” attitude is a modern one. While I assume that Ms. Maslin would make allowances for “old” books, her annoyance stems mainly from the fact that this is a modern author, but she’s not doing a modern author’s “thing.” In other words, she hasn’t written something literary that could be easily adapted into a screenplay, without having to cut too much of the story. I think it would be next to impossible to make this into a film (although apparently they are trying, and perhaps I‘ll stand corrected), but I also think it would be completely unnecessary to do so: something about the way Clarke tells the story makes it completely visible to the mind’s eye. Her descriptions of places and people are so straightforward that they both reveal the scene and allow the mind to dress it up a bit, as it likes.

Also (and here’s where I geek out completely), I loved the tension between Norrell and Strange, because it reminded me of Plato and Aristotle. Plato believed that writing should not be taught, that people could only do more harm than good for themselves by practicing it, that it could lead them morally astray. Aristotle believed writing was a tool, that poetics (drama) and rhetoric were necessary for man to understand and live life. I’ve no idea if Clarke intended this parallel, but it stuck with me throughout the book.

Finally, even though the book deals with magic and some sections are rather dark, only one part really scared the pants off me. It was the very last sentence on the next to the last page: “This is her first novel.” Terrifying. I can’t wait to see what she does with the next one!

Read an interview with Susanna Clarke here.

*book image from powells.com

Ten Random Tunes 02.24.09

2009-02-24T11:22:00.009-05:00

Still working out player issues. If anyone has suggestions, please leave a comment or contact me at the email address listed in the sidebar.

“Purple Haze,” Jimi Hendrix. Experience Hendrix - The Best of Jimi Hendrix. This is a track I actually own already (on Are You Experienced?), but I bought it as part of a playlist created by Patti Smith. Other people’s playlists are fascinating to me because I like, well, to hear through other people’s ears, to hear how they connect the songs, and what the elements are. It gives me an aural “vision” of the person’s world and outlook.

“Not Even Jail,” Interpol. Antics. My favorite song on this album. I love this album. I don’t care about any of the criticism I’ve heard about how they’re trying to be Joy Division or blah blah. I like Joy Division, too, but I can only take so much, whereas I can listen to this over and over again.

“Farewell to Earnest” (From Merchant Ivory’s Film “The Householder"), Jyotirindra Moitra & Ustad Ali Akbar Khan. The Darjeeling Limited Soundtrack. Has anyone ever seen The Householder? They have it at Netflix. It was released in 1963, apparently. I feel dumb, because to me, Merchant Ivory films entered my consciousness with Passage to India. I had no idea.

“Where Do You Go to (My Lovely),” Peter Sarsdedt. The Darjeeling Limited Soundtrack. This is one of my very favorite movies, and one of the ways I knew was this song, which plays during "The Hotel Chevalier," the “prequel” to The Darjeeling Limited. I love the literary feel of this movie, the three brothers, and all the colors of India.

“Vampira,” Misfits. Walk among Us. “Come a little bit closer…” This album gives me so much energy, I like to listen to it when I run on the treadmill. I hate running, but this makes it go by faster.

“Walk You Home,” Super Furry Animals. Love Kraft. I have no idea where I got this song. Probably off another playlist years ago. It’s kinda lounge-y, kind of modern 70s fern bar music, at brunch with a bloody mary, after Saturday night at the disco. Where’s my eggs benedict?

“Close to Me,” The Cure. Standing on A Beach: The Singles. Speaking of soundtracks and such, I’ve always thought this song would be perfect for a movie ending. Maybe not as perfect as the next song, but I’d have to see the movie first.

“Just Like Honey,” Jesus & Mary Chain. Lost in Translation Soundtrack. Tokyo is in my top three places I want to see. Sofia Coppola must have done wonders for tourism, because the movie is so beautiful. I actually just like to look at the city’s night sky on the DVD menu. This song sets the perfect tone, the melancholy feeling of leaving some extraordinary place to go back to ordinary life.

“Freaky Styley,” The Red Hot Chili Peppers. Freaky Styley. This reminds me of college, of crushes on guys on skateboards, of going to see this band at Club Clearview (In Dallas. In March, 1989. Wow.) and having the crowd dancing and moving so much, the stage was bouncing. I also remember thinking back then that I got more information about what was inside men’s heads from listening to this band than from any article in a woman’s magazine. After all, the refrain is “I f#%k ‘em just to see the look on their face…”

“Where Did Our Love Go,” The Supremes. The Ultimate Collection: Diana Ross & The Supremes. Oh, Miss Ross. Could this be a more perfect juxtaposition to the last song? Baby, where did our love go? Well. Oh, folks, I’m not that cynical. I have the greatest husband in the world. But you could do a mash-up of these two songs and have a Sex And The City episode…of course, it might be Samantha singing “Freaky Styley,” and not one of the guys. Ha!

*images from amazon.com

Catching Up

2009-02-23T10:52:00.002-05:00

Today I am working on my post about Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which I completed for the 9 for '09 challenge. I'll probably also spend some time looking at a terrific new (to me) blog about books and music that I found this morning: Largehearted Boy. It has a feature called Book Notes, where authors discuss music they associate with their books, as well as a section called Note Books, where musicians discuss books. How cool is that? A large chunk of my day just disappeared, I can already tell.

I'm also dedicating some time this week to read about and research the wonderful world of freelancing. I've got a couple of books, The Four Hour Work Week and My So-Called Freelance Life, that I hope to talk about next week.

In reading, I've moved onto Isabella Moon, and after that I'll be picking up Falling Leaves for the World Citizen challenge.

Happy Monday!

Sunday Salon: Favorite Books, vol. 1

2009-02-22T12:00:00.007-05:00

When I dislike a book, even if I have plenty of reason to do so, I still feel bad about it. Last night I kept thinking about Goldengrove and whether I had been too harsh, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I was having the same feeling I get when I watch a film with a favorite actor or actress and I realize that person is just phoning it in. Had Goldengrove been a first novel, I probably would have kept reading. Mind you, I would have continued to curse the editor, the agent, and everyone with whom the writer had shared the manuscript, but I would have understood the precariousness of the situation. With a seasoned writer like Francine Prose, I would think someone would tell her the book wasn’t up to snuff.

I’m not here to dwell on that, though. Instead I want to talk about my favorite books--or one of them, at least. Favorite books aren’t necessarily the best books, the classics, the books that make “must read” lists, or even best sellers. They’re books that speak to our own experience, that seem to be a response, maybe, to the voices in our own heads. They are like glasses we don that make our view of the world clearer, sharper. They tell us their secrets, and they hold ours.

One of my favorite books happens to be a first novel: The Secret History, by Donna Tartt. I remember, very distinctly, reading an interview with Tartt in Vanity Fair, just before the book was released. I was in my first semester of graduate school, and the notions I held regarding higher learning and teaching were as romantic as the notions Richard Papen, the book’s main character, has about Hampden College:

Hampden College, Hampden, Vermont. Even the name had an austere Anglican cadence, to my ear at least, which yearned hopelessly for England and was dead to the sweet dark rhythms of little mission towns. For a long time I looked at a picture of the building they called Commons. It was suffused with weak, academic light--different from Plano, different from anything I had ever known--a light that made me think of long hours in dusty libraries, and old books, and silence.

Never mind that I went to a state university only thirty miles from home, that its library was an ugly brick rectangle situated in the middle of campus. I shared offices with the other teaching fellows in the musty basement of one of the oldest buildings on campus, from a time when the school had been a state teachers college. It housed an auditorium with a large pipe organ, and when music students would come in to practice, I would feel as though I were in New England instead of Texas.

In The Secret History, Richard Papen looks back to tell the story of his time at Hampden, where he is drawn to an elite, exclusive group of students who study Greek. As they slowly warm to him and accept him into their ranks, he discovers they have a secret. This is a mystery of sorts, less about the murder that takes place on the first page than about love and longing, and wanting to belong. The first part of the book deals with Richard’s journey to Hampden, his involvement with the Greek students, and the acts that lead them to the murder. The second part of the book deals with the eventual unraveling of this tight-knit circle, as they struggle to conceal what they‘ve done.

Even as the horror of what they’ve done dawns on Richard, he remains so enthralled that even as he looks back to tell the story, his view of his friends remains gilded:

[I] have trouble reconciling my life to those of my friends, or at least to their lives as I perceive them to be. Charles and Camilla are orphans (how I longed for this harsh fate!) reared by grandmothers and great aunts in a house in Virginia: a childhood I like to think about, with horses and rivers and sweet-gum trees. And Francis. His mother, when she had him, was only seventeen…and, as Francis is fond of saying, the grandparents brought them up like brother and sister, him and his mother, brought them up in such magnanimous style that even the gossips were impressed--English nannies and private schools, summers in Switzerland, winters in France. Consider even bluff old bunny, if you would. Not a child of reefer coats and dancing lessons, any more than mine was. But an American childhood…an upbringing vitally present in bunny in every respect, from the way he shook your hand to the way he told a joke.

I do not now nor did I ever have anything in common with any of them, nothing except the knowledge of Greek and the year of my life I spent in their company.

Plot-wise, if Tartt were not so strictly in control of Richard’s character--his longing, his ambivalence--the events would seem implausible, but the characters are so well-drawn, and Richard’s vision is so clear that what happens seems not only possible but necessary. Almost everyone longs for exclusivity of some sort, to belong at the core of something, to be a part of a group that makes them more than the tiny individual soul suffering alone. This is the reason churches and political parties exist, why nationalism and patriotism are popular, why high school students become athletes and cheerleaders, why we spend our lives searching so hard for others with whom we identify.

The book definitely has its flaws, the main one being that the second part seems to slow to a crawl about halfway through, as the characters begin to break down, and there’s a jarring character development and event at the end that seems to package things up in a way that seems to go against the book’s sensibility. Still, as a whole, it works. Like Richard, I spent so much time as a child and a teenager wishing for a life far different from the one I had, and books always carried me away, let me be somewhere else for a while. Like Richard, I only wanted to be somewhere beautiful and to belong. I’m not sure anymore if I love this book because it reminds me of who I was at a particular time, of if I love it for itself. I suppose it doesn’t matter.

You can read the Vanity Fair interview (from September 1992) with Donna Tartt here.

More passages:

I honestly can't remember much else about those years except a certain mood that penetrated most of them, a melancholy feeling I associate with watching "The Wonderful World of Disney" on Sunday nights. Sunday was a sad day--early to bed, school the next morning, I was constantly worried my homework was wrong--but as I watched the fireworks go off in the night sky, over the floodlit castles of Disneyland, I was consumed by a more general sense of dread, of imprisonment within the dreary round of school and home: circumstances which, to me at least, presented sound empirical argument for gloom.

It was a beautiful room, not an office at all, and much bigger than it looked from outside--airy and white, with a high ceiling and a breeze fluttering in the starched curtains. In the corner, near a low bookshelf, was a big round table littered with teapots and Greek books, and there were flowers everywhere, roses and carnations and anemones, on his desk, on the tables, on the windowsills. The roses were especially fragrant; their smell hung rich and heavy in the air, mingled with the smell of bergamot, and black China tea, and a faint inky scent of camphor...Everywhere I looked was something beautiful--Oriental rugs, porcelains, tiny paintings like jewels--a dazzle of fractured color that struck me as if I had stepped into one of those little Byzantine churches that are so plain on the outside; inside, the most paradisal painted eggshell of gilt and tesserae.

I was charmed by his conversation, and despite its illusion of being rather modern and digressive (to me, the hallmark of the modern mind is that it loves to wander from the subject) I now see that he was leading me by circumlocution to the same points again and again. For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind in narrow, unhesitating, relentless. It is not a qulaity of intelligence one encounters frequently these days. But though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.

We had so many happy days in the country that fall that from this vantage they merge into a sweet and indistinct blur. Around Halloween the last, stubborn wildflowers died away and the wind became sharp and gusty, blowing showers of yellow leaves on the gray, wrinkled surface of the lake. On those chill afternoons when the sky was like lead and the clouds were racing, we stayed in the library, banking huge fires to keep warm. Bare willows clicked on the windowpanes like skeleton fingers.

*image from amazon.com

Reader's Journal: Goldengrove

2009-02-21T17:58:00.004-05:00

I very rarely abandon a book. Sometimes I will set a book down because I am distracted or not in the mood for it, but usually I have every intention of picking it up again. Abandoning a book, for me, is a deliberate and aggressive act. I do it because I feel like the author is wasting my time.

Goldengrove is the story of thirteen-year-old Nico, who loses her sister (she dies of a heart-attack in the first chapter) and then over the following summer becomes involved with her sister's boyfriend. Blah blah blah what it means to be a grown-up. Blah blah blah art and life. Blah blah blah things aren't what they seem...heartache shall ensue, as shall wisdom.

I abandoned Goldengrove at the end of the second chapter. I'm trying to keep in mind the rule set forth by Updike: "Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt." Question: can I blame him (or her) for not achieving what he (or she) did attempt? Let's assume I can, because that will make things easier. The number one problem I have with this novel is the fact that Francine Prose has created a first-person narrator, a thirteen-year-old girl, and her voice is completely inauthentic. Apart from the fact that Prose has created the cliche "wiser-than-her-years" budding teenager, she's also given her a prop vocabulary. She's sure to throw in references to the Internet, to BlackBerries, to global warming, to yoga, to Goth. For real? It sounds like someone, you know, trying to be "hip to the kids." Just listen, as Nico stands outside the cemetary after her sister's burial:

Who'd drunk that Diet Coke? A mourner? A cemetary worker? Cheating couples? Goth nerds who haunted the graveyard for fun?

Yes, yes, Diet Coke: choice drink of cheating couples and "Goth nerds" everywhere. Even a young teenager knows that cheating couples would probably have been more likely to abandon a wine bottle than a Diet Coke can.

Goth nerds? I have a vision of Prose hiring a teenager to guide her through a mall and asking questions like, "And those kids, with the black clothes and black nail polish and the math textbooks and the tape on their glasses? What do you call them?" And on that note, how about a Red Bull can, or Mountain Dew? Oh, I know, I seem off the point here, because Nico's just wondering who it was who left the can (because she's trying to distract herself from the pain), but it just sounds so stilted and silly, I can't get past it.

After the funeral, Nico explains: "My parents worked it out so I could skip final exams and get the As I would have gotten anyway." Well. It's a good thing Nico doesn't seem one-dimensional, like one of those precocious stereotypes you see in movies. I'm sorry, but someone struggling to pass science or history is just more interesting. Making her a straight-A student just seems to be setting up one of those "summer I bloomed emotionally" stories, where the heart catches up with the head. I don't mind those stories, but only if the character has depth. I started thinking that maybe Prose--who apparently also writes YA--needed to read more Judy Blume, so she could get a sense of an authentic teen voice.

Oh, and the sister. The dead sister, the torch-singing seventeen year old, the great beauty with the flawed heart (literally--she dies of a heart attack), beloved of Aaron, master painter of the senior class:

Margaret was the singer, Aaron the artist. They were the glamour couple, their radiance outshone the feeble gleam of the football captain and his slutty cheerleader girlfriend.

Oh yes, teen painters are revered in high schools all across America. We care little for sports. Still, way to play to stereotypes, even by way of comparison. And mind you, Margaret is no Britney Spears. Oh no. She makes grown men cry by singing the classics, like "My Funny Valentine." And still, the kids love her too! Revere her! Not an eye rolling in the house. I find it kinda implausible, in case you can't tell.

Let me not forget to point out the terrific use of cliched metaphors: "One thing happened, then everything else, like a domino falling and setting off a collapse," or "I nodded like a bobble-head doll." Bobble-head doll! The kids love those!

But the part that made me finally just close the book and give up entirely was this:

One thing I would never tell them was that Margaret's last words were 'Smoke this.' That was her special present for me, the hair shirt she'd left me to wear until time and age and forgetfulness laundered it into something softer.

Yes. Done in by the image of the laundered hair shirt. Until Downey breaks it down, she carries the burden that she mentioned to her fabulous sister with the heart problem that she shouldn't smoke. Don't get me wrong. Writing is difficult. But if Prose dragged this into an undergraduate writing workshop, she would probably be called out. One wonders why or how the bar lowers just because someone's a recognized name, a published writer. She should fire her editor.

If you want to read a good coming-of-age story about two sisters, I'd suggest The Invisible Circus, by Jennifer Egan.

*image from amazon.com

Miller Harris Fleur Oriental

2009-02-20T18:10:00.003-05:00

Today, for the first time in well over a week, I put on makeup and fixed my hair. Not to say I’ve been a complete slob, in my unemployed state: I shower daily, I wash and brush all the necessary parts and pieces. And it just so happens I love makeup. Even though I don’t pile it on, I love even the slightest transformative power it has: a shimmer here, a gloss there, a bit of color to liven things up. If I don’t wear it, it’s either because I’m too lazy to take it off, or because I want to be invisible. Lately, I don’t wear makeup due to the latter, for I don’t feel unemployed so much as untethered. Every morning I wake up and think not, “What am I going to do?” but “What am I going to be?”

I realize that’s a bit deep for a perfume post, and all that is just to say, today I felt like being seen. I’m not any closer to having an answer, but I can feel the little gears whirring away in the back of my brain, running through the possibilities, calculating and tallying all the options, and it gives me hope. So today, makeup. Makeup and perfume.

The notes in Miller Harris Fleur Oriental are carnation, Turkish rose, Indian jasmine, amber, vanilla, sweet musk, heliotrope, orange flower. This is a soft, powdery oriental, perfect for a cold February day. The carnation lends it a bit of spice, but I find that the heliotrope and vanilla tend to dominate. Upon applying this, I was reminded immediately of Guerlain’s Shalimar, although I think Fleur Oriental is a bit more timid, less sensuous without the Guerlainade underneath. It has a faint whiff of a lady’s handkerchief, the smell of something distant, like spring. Maybe timid is a bad word, because to me Fleur Oriental has the quality of one of my favorite Miller Harris perfumes, L’Air de Rien. I think maybe melancholy is a better word. Melancholy and lovely. Like these days.

You can find Miller Harris perfumes at Luckyscent.

*image from luckyscent.com

Reader's Journal: Delicate Edible Birds

2009-02-19T16:55:00.006-05:00

Several years ago, bookstore shelves suddenly seemed crammed full of story collections about twenty- and thirty-something mini-skirted women who were unable to love, unable to hold down a job, unable to commit, unable to lose weight, unable to find a boyfriend. After tearing through four or five of these collections--all interchangeable, really--I found myself unable to read anymore. The characters in these books were little more than overwrought, angst-ridden, boozy versions of the girls on Friends, and at some point I wondered if book publishers were starting to suffer from the same disease as record labels, the disease where they find one band or album that’s a hit, and then try to recreate it, over and over again. This formula works well for creating popular books that sell, but probably does not work so well for supporting art.

What a shame, then, for Lauren Groff, because Delicate Edible Birds is art. The nine stories in this collection all focus on women at different stages in their lives, at different points in history, even in different countries. These stories read like tiny novels, self-contained worlds, even as ideas bounce and echo between them, so that the collection as a whole reads as a sort of palimpsest, a complicated history of women’s experiences that transcends both the personal (or domestic) and the political and enters a sort of nether region: these stories read more like allegories or fairy tales--an element Groff relies upon heavily--than traditional short stories. Groff reminds me of another favorite writer of mine, Margaret Atwood. As in Atwood’s work, there always seem to be darker forces at play, bits of magic shaping fortune.

If I did not have to return this book to the library, I would keep it and read it again, probably more than once, because I can find no way to come at it head on. This collection is like some complicated piece of furniture from the Eighteenth century: it looks like a table, but flip that lever and up pops a set of shelves, some drawers. Open the drawers or pull another lever and find more drawers, little slots, secret removable boxes. It’s both wondrous and infuriating, because I feel as though I’ve taken it all apart, but I have no way to put it back together again so I can show it to you.

So I’ll talk a bit about the stories. Although I enjoyed almost every story in the book and would like to talk about all of them, I’ve picked a few: “Lucky Chow Fun,” “Majorette,” “Sir Fleeting,” and “Blythe.”

In “Lucky Chow Fun,” a young woman, Lollie, looks back to tell the story of a sex scandal that gripped the small town where she grew up; “The year,” as she puts it, “we natives stopped looking one another in the eye.” Like a lot of teenagers, Lollie believes herself to be wise beyond her years: “I imagined myself a beautiful Cassandra, wandering vast and lonely halls, spilling prophecies that everyone laughed at, only to watch them to come tragically true in the end.” In truth, Lollie is always looking in the wrong direction, imagining danger when there is none, and missing the most obvious signs. For example, her younger sister, Pot, owns an ever-expanding collection of taxidermied birds, but Lollie never stops to wonder how Pot--a fourth grader with no friends to speak of--is adding items to her collection with such regularity, even as she worries that Pot will be abducted or raped by someone in the woods. And at the Lucky Chow Fun, the Chinese restaurant at the core of the scandal, she thinks only of the greasy food and whether one of the boys on the diving team will ask her to the winter dance, missing altogether the signs of what’s really happening.

After the town scandal breaks, Lollie tells her mother, “ ’…I don’t think people are made to take truths straight-on, Mom. It’s too hard. You need something to soften them. A metaphor or a story or something.” Lollie is the person who needs the fairy tales, the folklore, and the myths. She cannot face the truth of her father leaving, of what happened to her town, even as she looks back as an adult to tell the story.

“Majorette,” my favorite story in the collection, outlines the life of a woman from birth into middle age. Such a simple thing, it seems, a life where nothing spectacular happens: siblings arrive; parents drink and fight; girl discovers a dream, dates, stops dating, studies, twirls, goes to college, meets a boy--meets the boy--marries, has children of her own. Everything about this girl--she has no name--is in the details, the moments Groff chooses to frame, from the banal to the resplendent:

“On Saturdays the girl pushed the littlest three in the swings at the park when her mother was in the church basement, waiting for a boxful of dented cans and dandruffy cake mixes. At home, there were endless projects, her mother bent over the sewing machine crafting trousers out of curtains, remaking some little Anabaptist’s dress into something the girl wouldn’t hate, perhaps even a skirt the other girls would finger with envy, wondering what boutique it was from.”

“She took that hollow ringing in her and twirled it away, twirled in the basement in the foulest weather, when her hands stuck to the metal in the cold and she could not practice on the lawn. In her bed at night, her fingers flicked imaginary batons in the air. She sent batons spinning up like whirligigs into the night sky, batons flipping around her body like ions to her atom, batons spinning about her like glittering wings. She twirled through her legs and over her body as if her batons were her very own limbs.”

“Sir Fleeting” tells the story of a woman’s involvement with a rich playboy throughout the course of her life. The woman--we never know her name, only the playboy’s moniker for her, la bergere, or the shepherdess--meets Ancel de Chair on her honeymoon with her first husband in Buenos Aires. She says of her husband: “I knew my husband, knew he had always congratulated himself for seeing the allure of a farm girl he thought other men would overlook.” But the truth is, throughout the story, even through her second and third husbands, after she has dropped weight and gained money, after several--if you will, fleeting--encounters with Ancel de Chair, after she finds herself in a high rise apartment with a respectable art collection, preparing for her granddaughter’s wedding, she still thinks of herself as the farm girl, and it is her final visit with Ancel de Chair that releases her from the spell, enables her to see herself as she really was, really is.

My least favorite story in the collection was “Blythe,” and I admit this is probably because the sort of dysfunction on display in this story holds no interest for me in life or on the page. In this story, Harriet, a lawyer-turned-housewife, attends a poetry workshop where she meets a fellow student, Blythe, and is swept up into a tumultuous friendship. Blythe resembles some sort of Anne Sexton feminist** nightmare: smoking, drinking, pill-popping, plagued by anorexia. She becomes a performance artist, in a very Cixousian “write the body write the blood” sort of way, and as she develops and performs her pieces, alienating her husband and her children, growing ever more uncontrollable, Harriet trails along behind her, picking up the pieces and putting them back together again, sublimating her own wishes to write for the sake of her friend, which she explains as "midwifery":

“I admired how Blythe used her body, the shock of her, there was too much Milton and Frost in me for my own stabs at such dramatics to be anything but undignified. While Blythe created new pieces at a fevered pitch throughout the summer and fall, I wrote of gardening and politics, of sense and memory, of things safely domestic. I saved the secret thrill of transgression for Blythe’s work, proud to help her birth her strange little creatures, because it was midwifery. I was the one to contact the galleries, to drive Blythe to the theaters, to call the press, to organize. I was the woman behind the camera for the videos of her performances, Blythe’s very first audience. All the while I scribbled poem after poem in the ragged notebooks I salvaged at the end of my daughters’ school year, and only dared show Blythe the best.”

She’s like a stage mother of the damned. Of course, I didn’t skip a page. The writing was too good, and the whole time I was reading these stories, I worried that I might miss something. I’m sure there are drawers I didn’t open, knobs I missed, buttons and levers overlooked. Read this yourself, and see if you can uncover all the secrets, scrape away the layers, find the magic.

*image from amazon.com
**I have nothing against Anne Sexton, by the way, or feminism

TBR List 02.19.09

2009-02-19T09:57:00.006-05:00

Time for more items from the TBR list, three fiction picks this week. Feel free to comment if you’ve read one of these and want to recommend it (or dissuade me). And, of course, feel free to add to your own list. I’m here to serve.

Dear Everybody, by Michael Kimball. From the author’s site: “Jonathon Bender had something to say, but the world wouldn’t listen. That’s why he writes letters to everybody he has ever known—including his mother and father, his brother and other relatives, his childhood friends and neighbors, the Tooth Fairy, his classmates and teachers, his psychiatrists, his ex-girlfriends and his ex-wife, the state of Michigan, a television station, and a weather satellite. Taken together, these unsent letters tell the remarkable story of Jonathon’s life.”

The description makes me think of The Stone Diaries, which wasn’t an epistolary novel, but still dealt with a character (a wonderful unreliable narrator) in charge of shaping her own story. Do you ever wish you could see the old letters and notes you wrote to people? Do you wonder if you really were the same person then that you are now? The idea of character through correspondence or diaries always gets my attention. The only epistolary novel I’ve picked up recently--We Need to Talk about Kevin--I was unable to finish. I wished I could have written “Return to Sender” on the book and put it in the mail. That’s not fair to say without a complete discussion, I suppose, but it’s my gut reaction. Feel free to try and change my mind. I like to give books a second chance most of the time.

You can watch the trailer for Dear Everybody here. Am I the only person who finds trailers for books a little bit strange? I’m an excerpt kind of person. I like to get a sense of the writing. I’m not going to “watch” the book, and I also don’t want any associations with other things, like voices or pictures, because it drives my impression. Seriously, am I weird? About this, I mean?

Servants of The Map, by Andrea Barrett. Synopsis: “Ranging across two centuries, and from the western Himalaya to an Adirondack village, these wonderfully imagined stories and novellas travel the territories of yearning and awakening, of loss and unexpected discovery. A mapper of the highest mountain peaks realizes his true obsession. A young woman afire with scientific curiosity must come to terms with a romantic fantasy. Brothers and sisters, torn apart at an early age, are beset by dreams of reunion.
Throughout, Barrett's most characteristic theme — the happenings in that borderland between science and desire — unfolds in the diverse lives of unforgettable human beings. Although each richly layered tale stands independently, readers of Ship Fever (National Book Award winner) and Barrett's extraordinary novel The Voyage of the Narwhal, will discover subtle links both among these new stories and to characters in the earlier works.”

Ever since I read Ship Fever, I’ve been meaning to pick up another Andrea Barrett book. This is another collection of stories, but I’d also like to read one of her novels. I love the way she blends science and history into the narrative. I’ll post about Ship Fever sometime, but just for the moment, I want to complain about the W.W. Norton site. If I were an author, I don’t think I’d be too happy, because A) it looks like the person in charge of the site gave this project to their seventh-grade kid who was trying to learn HTML; and B) it contains no excerpts or author interviews. I cannot think of a better way to promote a book--even if it wasn’t recently published--than excerpts. Get people hooked on prose! Books cannot survive by synopses alone!

Read a great interview with Andrea Barrett here.

The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald. Amazon.com review (the publisher’s synopsis is terrible): “[The Blue Flower] is the story of Friedrich von Hardenberg--Fritz, to his intimates--a young man of the late 18th century who is destined to become one of Germany's great romantic poets. In just over 200 pages, Fitzgerald creates a complete world of family, friends and lovers, but also an exhilarating evocation of the romantic era in all its political turmoil, intellectual voracity, and moral ambiguity. A profound exploration of genius, The Blue Flower is also a charming, wry, and witty look at domestic life. Fritz's family--his eccentric father and high-strung mother; his loving sister, Sidonie; and brothers Erasmus, Karl, and the preternaturally intelligent baby of the family, referred to always as the Bernhard--are limned in deft, sure strokes, and it is in his interactions with them that the ephemeral quality of genius becomes most tangible. Even his unlikely love affair with young Sophie von Kühn makes perfect sense as Penelope Fitzgerald imagines it.

The Blue Flower is a magical book--funny, sad, and deeply moving. In Fritz Fitzgerald has discovered a perfect character through whom to explore the meaning of love, poetry, life, and loss. In The Blue Flower readers will find a work of fine prose, fierce intelligence, and perceptive characterization.”

I’m pretty sure I found this book through an interview with another author, but for the life of me I cannot remember out who it was. Something the author said about it must have attracted me, because it doesn’t sound like the sort of thing I would pick up without a recommendation. I love the fact that Fitzgerald didn’t get started on her writing career until she was 59 years old. That gives me hope for all us late bloomers out there.

Read the archived New York Times review here.
Read a fun article on late bloomers here.

*images from amazon.com

Just Pay The Ten Cents

2009-02-18T18:15:00.004-05:00

Hello All. I know I promised a review of Delicate Edible Birds today, but due to some interruptions yesterday (welcome) and this morning (unwelcome), I did not finish the book until this afternoon, and I need more time to gather my thoughts. Library late fees be damned! After all, the book deserves it! Let that be hint. Have a lovely evening!

Ten Random Tunes 02.17.09

2009-02-17T08:19:00.013-05:00

I'm trying out some new MP3 players so you can hear the songs. This player may not work if you're using Google Chrome or IE. Try Firefox! I'll keep troubleshooting.

“Crossed Paths,” Arto Lindsay/Caludio Ragazzi. Next Stop Wonderland Soundtrack. First, this is a wonderful collection of Latin music. I remember going to see this movie in the theater. I wanted to be Hope Davis, in her amazing Boston apartment, being all sad and literary and wearing brown lipstick (the 90s!), searching for words in poems that would crack open the future. Have a listen:

“Discotheque,” U2. Pop. I am pretty sure I’m one of five people who love this album. In fact, it’s my second favorite U2 album, right behind Achtung Baby. I thought it was an interesting departure, and I admire U2 for not just putting out version after version of The Joshua Tree.

“Deep,” Pearl Jam. Ten. I can’t get over the fact that this album is almost twenty years old. Sometime around 1998 I grew tired of Pearl Jam, but lately I find myself going back to No Code and earlier albums and remembering how great they were. Just a note to radio DJs everywhere: “Daughter” and “Can’t Find A Better Man” are not the only Pearl Jam songs out there. Thanks.

“Silver,” Pixies. Doolittle. I swear, I have bought music since the 1990s. Remember the other day when I said I could never remember my favorite things when asked? Let’s just put it on record: The Pixies are one of my favorite bands.

“The Only Living Boy in New York,” Simon & Garfunkel. Garden State Soundtrack. I swear, my iTunes thinks the only music in my library is Beck and this soundtrack. I let this one play because it’s Simon & Garfunkel, whom I saw at the Cotton Bowl in August 1983, drenched in the rain from Hurricane Alicia. Paul Simon had just married Carrie Fisher, and he brought her out on stage to wave at the crowd. Princess Leia! Oh yes.

“Invisible City,” The Wallflowers. Bringing Down The Horse. Jacob Dylan is not his father, but he does a fine job of being himself. “The imitation of good faith, is how you stumble upon hate…”

“Pouring Rain,” Fishbone. Truth and Soul. If I had a soundtrack for my college years, Fishbone would feature on it more than most. This is a pretty, sad, sad song: “He had one foot in the gutter/Another on dry land/ His ship had sailed without him/ Across life’s burning sands/He cried out in the distance/ And non one, no one heard a word…“ Back then it made me think of inequality and injustice. Now it makes me angry that things never seem to get any better. But maybe they still will. I have hope. They sing it better than I do:

“Man in A Suitcase,” The Police. Zenyatta Mondatta. In middle school I had a friend who went nuts for Duran Duran in general, and John Taylor in particular. She bought every magazine and cut out every picture she could find, even teeny tiny ones from ads in the back of the magazine, and these would float out of her scrapbooks like confetti. Her walls were covered with posters. Me? I had two posters in my room in high school only: one of The Police, and one of Sting. Zenyatta Mondatta is my favorite Police album, and they were another band I got to see, in 1983. Good grief. Fourteen was a good age for music.

“Try A Little Tenderness,” Otis Redding. The Otis Redding Story. For my generation, this song will always evoke Jon Cryer serenading Molly Ringwald in Pretty in Pink. My grown-up self now sees that Ducky should have been the man, but in all honesty, no one could beat James Spader. Sorry. Andrew who?

“I Don’t Want to Know,” Fleetwood Mac. Rumours. Sorry. Can’t type anymore. Have to sing: “I don’t want to know the reasons why love keeps/Right on walking on down the li-ine…”

*images from amazon.com

Repeat Performance

2009-02-16T11:10:00.002-05:00

This post, "The Promiscuous Reader," originally "aired" here on March 22, 2008. I'm almost through Delicate Edible Birds, so look for thoughts on that Wednesday of this week.

How many of you out there are promiscuous readers?

Not sure what I mean by that? Let's say you go to the bookstore or to your favorite online bookseller, and you carefully select four or five books that you've had on your wish list for a while. As you're driving home with your books, or as you're waiting daily for the books to be delivered, you develop a plan. You know, for example, exactly which book you will read first, and it makes your heart pound just to think about it.

When you arrive home with your books, or when they are finally delivered to your door, you plan the best time to read, a time when you know you'll have minimal interruptions for the longest possible stretch of time. If you're the impatient type, like me, you may flip through several of the books and read the first few pages. But "the chosen one" remains in its virgin state, spine uncracked, until the appointed hour.

Finally, the moment arrives. You're in your favorite chair, or propped up with pillows in some cozy reading spot. You have the right lighting; you have a cup of tea or coffee, a glass of wine or a Diet Coke. You open the book. You read the dedication and acknowledgments, just to make that divine suspense last a leeetle bit longer, and then: There it is. The first page.

As you settle in and start to read, you think to yourself, "This is so exciting. I'm finally reading this book! The use of language...oh, that phrase there! That dialogue!" But in the back of your mind, something else is happening. You notice that your enthusiasm feels forced. You keep reading and hope it will begin to feel more natural. After all, haven't you been waiting for this moment for hours, days, or weeks on end? Didn't you picture how great it would be a thousand times over when you finally settled in and started to read, how you would be carried away, forgetting work and chores and all the troubles of the world for a few hours?

You keep reading, but the more you read, the more conscious you become of a most disturbing fact: You're faking it. Sure, you're looking at the words and turning the pages, but be honest. You're not really present. And why is that?

Because you're thinking about another book, that's why. You might even be thinking about several books, or a whole other genre. "This book is so serious," you say. "Beautifully written. Amazing. But maybe I need something lighter. I had such a long day at work, and I just need something to help boost my mood." Maybe you're reading a novel and you realize you're more in the mood for short stories. Maybe you're reading fiction but you also bought a couple of new biographies you've been wanting to dig in to for a couple of weeks. Or maybe, just maybe, you got a new copy of your favorite magazine in the mail that day, and you can hear it calling to you from the coffee table.

You put your bookmark (always use a bookmark, people!) in the book to keep your place and set it down. You tell yourself you'll come back to it tomorrow, or on the weekend, or next week when you're off for a few days and have more time. Then you start the search. You go through your TBR pile, your bookshelves full of things you've already read, your magazines. You think it's only going to be this one time, but it continues for days, weeks, this restlessness.

You cannot commit to a book. The book you thought you wanted sits untouched where you left it, gathering dust. All over the house are books you've picked up and discarded, bookmarks noting the exact moment you abandoned them. You think maybe you should just stop reading for a while. You should watch movies or television. You should listen to books on your iPod. You should go for a run, clean out your closet, wash your car, or repaint the house.

As you go on distracting yourself in any number of ways, something happens. One day, a book pops into your head. Maybe you hear someone else mention it, and like a word or song that suddenly seems to be everywhere, it's constantly on your mind. It makes you a bit nervous and concerned. What if it happens again? What if you pull the book down from the shelf, or make a special trip to the bookstore ("If they have a copy, I was meant to read it now," you think.) to buy it, and the same thing happens? You get so far, and then you start thinking about other books? You wait, but eventually you decide to throw caution to the wind. Maybe you and the book can make a go of it. Maybe this time will be different.

Oh, sweet relief when it works! The book is just the thing you needed! You read and read it; you think about what will happen next when you're away from it. You recall your favorite scenes during boring meetings, think about especially well-turned phrases in chapter fifteen as you drive. You finish the book, and you can practically hear the Rocky theme song playing as you snap the book shut after the final page. You did it! You finished a book! You are back on your game! Things will be different now! You will pick up other books and read them in full. You will be committed and serious. You will not cheat.

Okay, so, I've been using "you," but I suppose you all know: I'm talking about myself. Perhaps you've noticed the Winesburg, Ohio image that's been in the sidebar for--oh, I don't know--a month? Six weeks? I haven't changed it because at certain points it would have meant changing it almost daily. Here's a list of books I've started and stopped in the meantime: Conversations with Woody Allen, The Emporer's Children (Claire Messud), Away (Amy Bloom), Quakertown (Lee Martin), Jenny and the Jaws of Life (Jincy Willett), Rare and Endangered Species (Richard Bausch), Remembering Ray (essays about the late, great Raymond Carver), two current issues of Real Simple and Domino, plus several back issues, and Getting Things Done, for work, by David Allen. I've also listened to Selected Shorts on my iPod, short story readings that go on at Symphony Space in New York, and I've actually listened to Ron Carlson's "Towel Season" and John Updike's "Walk with Elizanne" repeatedly. I also got addicted to Project Runway, but as soon as it ended...well, let's just say it was difficult, and I seriously considered renting the first three seasons.

The book that finally broke the spell for me, as you probably know because of the image on the post, was Prep, by Curtis Sittenfeld. I read this when it was first released, as a "summer read," and I remember being surprised at how good it was, how solid and non-chick-lit it seemed. I've always meant to re-read it, and a week ago I decided to give it a shot. I had nothing to lose (as long as I ignored my ever-growing TBR pile). And I'm happy to say I'm finding it quite good the second time around, and I'm almost finished with it.

Almost.

*image from Powells.com

Sunday Salon: I’m Reading As Fast As I Can!

2009-02-15T11:49:00.006-05:00

Today I had hoped to talk about some of my favorite novels, but between Valentine’s Day and home improvement projects, I couldn’t pull it together in time. For me, compiling lists of favorite anything is difficult. When people ask me about favorite books or movies or bands, I typically draw a blank. Every title of every book I’ve read or movie I've seen, every name of every band I’ve heard, recedes like the taillights on a speeding car, and I end up saying something like “Nancy Drew” or “The Turtles.” Um, yeah. Still, because I’m new to Sunday Salon, I thought it would be a fun “getting to know you” post. I’ll try again next week. If you see Nancy Drew in the list, you’ll know I panicked. (Not that I don’t love Nancy! I do!)

A small progress report: I have 130 pages left to read of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, my first book for the 9 for ‘09 challenge, and I’ll be posting my thoughts later in the week. Wednesday I have to return Delicate Edible Birds to the library so I’ll finish and post thoughts on that as well.

Most likely I’ll choose something for the World Citizen challenge next--I’m thinking Falling Leaves, by Adeline Yen Mah--so I get a good balance. I am amazed, looking at other people’s blogs, how far along some people are on these challenges. Of course, I’m only doing two (three, if you count trying to keep up with Andrew’s Book Club), so I suppose I have the leisure of spacing things out over the year, which is a fine because I have three other books to get through before I start the next challenge book. Taking books out of the library forces me to read the books I bring home instead of just putting them all over the house, so I’ll be reading:

Goldengrove, by Francine Prose. I enjoyed Blue Angel, so when this was released last year, I added it to my list. Goldengrove is a coming-of-age story about a girl dealing with the recent death of her sister. You can read the first chapter here, and you can read a review here.

Isabella Moon, by Laura Benedict. Long story short: I found Laura Benedict’s blog Notes from The Handbasket through another blog I read called The Swivet. I liked her personality, so when it turned out she was a writer, I put her books on my TBR list. Also turned out that Laura happens to be a friend of one of my very best friends, Michelle. Small world! Isabella Moon is a thriller about a woman with a secret past and how her arrival in a small Kentucky town unravels the mystery of a nine-year-old girl's death--and unlocks some of the town's darkest secrets. You can read an excerpt here.

The Pact, by Jodi Picoult. This is my book club read for March. Generally I stay away from these books because I hear they’re formulaic, taking popular controversial topics and spinning fictional stories around them with a twist. Law and Order has been doing this for well over a decade, so what the heck. The Pact deals with the always-fun topic of teen suicide. I’ve only read one other Picoult, My Sister’s Keeper (also for book club, and it was entertaining), so we’ll see how it goes. You can read an excerpt here.

Have a wonderful week, and happy reading!

*images from amazon.com

Happy [Valentine's] Day

2009-02-14T09:59:00.007-05:00

For fun, head over to NPR's Monitor Mix blog and see what kind of Valentine's Day song you are, or what not to put on a mixtape for a loved one.

Or visit the Discover Magazine blog to view images of astronomical Valentine events. The image to the left here is the Mars Valentine Crater. Who knew Madison Avenue's power was so great?

Lalique Le Parfum EDP

2009-02-13T09:49:00.003-05:00

This is the time of year I get anxious for spring, especially when we have such beautiful weather. I know it's a cruel trick, the spring equivalent of an Indian summer, lulling us all into complacency with slight warmth, bright blue skies, buds on trees.

I find it impossible to wear anything too heavy on days like these. Instead I want to use perfume like a spell to call forth more fine weather. Lalique Le Parfum serves nicely for this, the way it seems to mimic spring deepening into summer.

The notes in Le Parfum are:
Top: bergamot, bay leaves, red pepper
Heart: jasmine, heliotrope, almond
Base: patchouli, vanilla

The opening is pale green and tender, and before I saw the notes I thought for sure I detected lily of the valley. After the first few minutes, though, the juiciness of the bergamot peeks through, and the bay leaves keep the young spring feeling alive underneath. I must admit, my nose detects very little of the pepper. As it moves through the heart, the scent sweetens with the jasmine and heliotrope, but the green remains and this is less powdery than you might expect, what with heliotrope and almond. The base is deep and lovely, sweetening further but remaining fresh. Le Parfum starts off as the palest blush of pink and moves into a deep fuschia. It's quietly elegant, and if you stood near someone wearing it, you might be tempted to believe someone had left the window open to let the spring breeze blow through.

*image from aedes.com

Big Giveaway! BIG!

2009-02-12T18:40:00.002-05:00

Random House has teamed up with Lisa at Books on the Brain to sponsor a giveaway celebrating 100K hits on her blog! To enter, head on over to her blog and leave a comment by Thursday, February 19. (And psst...if you have a blog and mention the giveaway, Lisa will give you three extra entries! That means four chances to win!)

The books are:
Welcome to The Departure Lounge: Adventures in Mothering Mother by Meg Federico
American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld
Gardens of Water by Alan Drew

Lisa has full descriptions and rules listed on her site. She'll have TWO grand-prize winners who'll receive a copy of each of the three books, and nine more winners who will each receive a copy of a single title. (I want American Wife, myself. Who am I kidding. I want them all.) Go! Go now!

And congratulations Lisa!

TBR List

2009-02-12T09:32:00.007-05:00

Every time I venture out into the vast vastness that is the "internets," I manage to find something to add to my TBR list. Mind you, my list is different from my pile. (Does that sound icky? My pile?) My list contains books I want to read but have yet to acquire, whereas my pile consists of actual physical books in my possession that are, well, piled around the house. While I’ve made a firm agreement with myself not to add to the pile, I am free to add to the list as much as I please. I thought I’d share selections of this list with you, so either you can add items to your list, or so you can say things like, “I read that. It sucked.” Then I can make space on the list for something else. Or maybe you’ll say, “You must read that now!” and then I can get it from the library, because we all know library books can never be part of the TBR pile because you have to return them eventually. I love loopholes.

Without further ado, here are this week’s TBR list items:

Any Bitter Thing, by Monica Wood.

Synopsis: “After surviving a near-fatal accident, thirty-year-old Lizzy Mitchell faces a long road to recovery. She remembers little about the days she spent in and out of consciousness, save for one thing: She saw her beloved deceased uncle, Father Mike, the man who raised her in the rectory of his Maine church until she was nine, at which time she was abruptly sent away to boarding school. Was Father Mike an angel, a messenger from the beyond, or something more corporeal? Though her troubled marriage and her broken body need tending, Lizzy knows she must uncover the details of her accident — and delve deep into events of twenty years before, when whispers and accusations forced a good man to give up the only family he had.”

It occurs to me that even as I’ve compiled a TBR list, I haven’t kept track of where I found these books. That might help me remember why I picked them, because I’m not sure what drew me to this one. I think I may have picked it because it has what sounds like a good story and also some suspense.

The Dart League King, by Keith Lee Morris.

Synopsis: “An intriguing tale of darts, drugs, and death. Russell Harmon is the self-proclaimed king of his small-town Idaho dart league, but all is not well in his kingdom. In the midst of the league championship match, the intertwining stories of those gathered at the 411 club reveal Russell's dangerous debt to a local drug dealer, his teammate Tristan Mackey's involvement in the disappearance of a college student, and a love triangle with a former classmate. The characters in Keith Lee Morris's second novel struggle to find the balance between accepting and controlling their destinies, but their fates are threaded together more closely together than they realize.”

As a former league pool player (Oh yes. It was quite fun and I was actually good at it, so naturally I had to quit.), the framework of this novel intrigues me. You always hear that everyone has stories, and I used to find myself sitting in the pool hall, wondering about the people I saw once a week, both on my own team and on our competitors’ teams. Morris actually took the idea and did something with it. Imagine! You can read an excerpt here.

Comedy at The Edge: How Stand-up in the 1970s Changed America, by Richard Zoglin.

Synopsis: “In the rock-and-roll 1970s, a new breed of comic, inspired by the fearless Lenny Bruce, made telling jokes an art form. Innovative comedians like George Carlin, Richard Pryor, and Robert Klein, and, later, Steve Martin, Albert Brooks, Robin Williams, and Andy Kaufman, tore through the country and became as big as rock stars in an era when Saturday Night Live was the apotheosis of cool and the Improv, Catch a Rising Star, and the Comedy Store were the hottest clubs around.

In Comedy at the Edge, Richard Zoglin gives a backstage view of the time, when a group of brilliant, iconoclastic comedians ruled the world — and quite possibly changed it, too. Based on extensive interviews with club owners, agents, producers — and with unprecedented and unlimited access to the players themselves — Comedy at the Edge is a no-holds barred, behind-the-scenes look at one of the most influential and tumultuous decades in American popular culture.”

Back in 1986, between my junior and senior years of high school, I got the idea that someone--well, I--should write a book about Saturday Night Live and the impact it had on comedy in America. At that time, I still thought I would be a writer for Rolling Stone, you know, instead of a person who writes about books other people have actually written on thissere blog. I had this idea that Saturday Night Live was to comedy in the 1970s as Paris was to American fiction in the 1920s: it was the place all the talented people gathered to create. While this book is not exclusively about Saturday Night Live, it is about the growth of a comedy culture that made it possible.

So share if you like. Any opinions on these? Other suggestions?

*images from amazon.com

Writer, Heal Thyself

2009-02-11T13:30:00.004-05:00

A few weeks ago I met a friend of mine for lunch, and she told me she wanted to write a book. We were co-workers long ago, but we formed a friendship because we discovered that we both loved to read. At some point, I told her that I also really, really wanted to write, that I had been trying to write for years, and would likely have something to show her even, in just a few weeks. She’s a kind person. She nodded and smiled and said, “That would be great!” Of course, as soon as I promised I would finish something, I froze. It was a bit like promising to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro and then finding myself unable to climb over a speed bump in the driveway. Probably she had accepted my offer of a story draft in passing, with pleasure but without much thought. Sure! Fun! A draft!

I don’t think she knew at that point how very serious I was. It’s not just that I want to write, but I am obsessed with writing, not just with my own but with everyone else’s, too. So naturally, when I heard she was planning a book, I offered to help. Actually, I’m pretty sure I held a spork to her throat and threatened to poke at her jugular with it until she agreed to let me be one of her readers and editors. What can I say? We were at Boston Market. Their cornbread does strange things to me.

She agreed. Consented. Relented. Whatever you want to call it. Like I said, she’s a kind person, and she had no idea what she was getting herself into. After I calmed down a bit and released my grip on the spork, I started bossing her around. She told me she was having trouble getting started, facing the blank page and all, so I told her--in all my great wisdom--to write 200 words a day. I told her, “That’s what Anne Lamott says. Two hundred words, and if you can keep going then that’s great. Stephen King writes 10,000 words a day, you know, but no reason to start there. Have you read Bird by Bird? You should read it. You just write 200 hundred words without worrying about it. Don’t edit yourself. Just write.”

I should note here that I give myself this exact same advice every day, but I rarely heed it. Or I should say, I heed it, but I can’t get 200 words on the page. I’ve read Bird by Bird so many times that, well, let’s just say that if the number of times were a person, that person would be old enough to vote. Maybe even old enough to drink. Legally, I mean.

But my friend? That very day, she put Bird by Bird on hold at the library, and then she went home and wrote 200 words. And then she kept going. And she kept on every day writing her 200 words or more, and she hasn’t even read Bird by Bird! What the hell is up with that?

She called me a week after our initial meeting and told me she’d written two chapters. Two. Chapters. She wanted to know if we could get together over the weekend and talk about them. Of course! We met for coffee this past Sunday, and, as promised, she handed over her two chapters. She even had a good title and a little cover sheet with a picture. I suck at titles.

Now, before you start thinking that I might try to sabotage my friend just because she managed to produce something and show it to me all within the space of a week, you would be wrong. She has a terrific premise, a great story to tell, and by-gosh-and-by-golly, just because I can’t get my own words on the page does not mean I can’t help her get her story on the page. Oh no. I’m full of help. In fact, I was the most pompous asshole you ever heard, or at least that’s how I sounded to myself: “Just write the narrative part. Just tell the story. Don’t worry about the order. You can change that later. Don’t edit yourself, don’t leave anything out. It’s easier to take away than add blah blah blah blah….”

And the whole time, I was thinking “Asshole! You can‘t even do that! How can you expect someone else to do it?” I was thinking of myself the night before, sitting in front of a mostly blank screen for several hours. I say “mostly” because the evening went something like this:

TYPE TYPE TYPE TYPE. READ. DELETE.

TYPE TYPE TYPE TYPE. READ. EDIT. EDIT. READ. TYPE. READ. DELETE.

TYPE. DELETE. TYPE. DELETE. TYPE TYPE TYPE. DELETE.

Leave desk, find husband, rant and cry. Drink martini.

See how all those lines up there end with the word DELETE? Hence the blank page. Hence the martini. Hence my long stupid speech to my friend about just getting it down on paper! Why? Because even if I cannot seem to, I know others can, and do. Because I know it’s the truth and if I hear myself say it enough times, eventually it’s bound to work. After all, I wasn’t always like this. I actually used to write things that had a beginning, middle, and end (They were atrocious, but complete!), instead of just a beginning, beginning, and beginning.

And I’m still trying to forgive myself for using the phrase “aspiring writer” in my post on romance novels. Gag! Not only is that phrase pompous and annoying, but it tells an ugly truth: aspiring writer. Aspiring. Trying. Thinking about it and yammering about it and handing out advice, reading about it and giving it even more thought and consideration, but never actually writing. Never actually finishing anything.

So I dug out my copy of Bird by Bird, and it’s sitting on my desk but I’m not going to read it. I’m going to write 200 words. I’m just going to let it sit there and remind me, “Two hundred words!” Because all I want to do is finish something. The goal is not to be published, to go on Oprah, to have Sofia Coppola adapt it for the screen. It’s just to finish something that isn’t so horrible that I could at the very least put it in the share folder on Google Docs and hope I can swindle a couple of people into reading it.

Of course I will continue to impart all this wisdom to my friend. I suffer, so she won’t have to.

And by the way, you can buy Bird by Bird here.

*image from amazon.com

Ten Random Tunes 02.10.09

2009-02-10T10:41:00.008-05:00

“One of These Things First,” Nick Drake. Garden State Soundtrack. I’m ashamed to admit, I didn’t discover Nick Drake until Volkswagon used his song “Pink Moon” as a soundtrack for one of their commercials seven or eight years ago. I went right out and bought the album of the same name, and I listened to it all the time for several months. I hate to admit, I haven’t listened to it in years. Maybe I’ll do that today. Music is like books that way--too many good things fall away from us, are easily forgotten in the light of something new.

“Middle of the Road,” The Pretenders. The Singles. So let’s see, this song was released when I was thirteen or fourteen. It cracks me up to hear her sing about being thirty-three: “I’m not the kid I used to be/I’ve got a kid/I’m thirty-three baby,” since back then that seemed so far away and so old, and now I’m older than she was. Back then I expected something like what Bridget Fonda’s character Janet expected in Singles: “I thought people were going to be traveling in air locks, and I would have five kids.” Except in the movie, that character is only 23. I probably felt that way then, too. Hah! Tricky life.

“All the Things You Are,” Ahmad Jamal. Cross Country Tour 1958-1961. If you are a Mad Men fanatic like I am, then you would probably love this. I cannot listen to this music now without thinking of being in some Manhattan club, dressed to the nines, listening to Jamal play. Sometimes I think I was born in the wrong era. There was some real grace to being an adult then. Marketers weren‘t shoving wrinkle creams and toxins at us, the clothes were wonderful (a world without “business casual”--how nice!), children were children and not tiny tyrants, and adults were grown-ups. Of course, that show does a fine job of showing us the dark side as well, but I sometimes wonder if all that’s really gone, or we just got better and better at masking things.

“Oldest Story in the World,” The Plimsouls. Everywhere at Once. The Plimsouls made it onto the list last week, too, so the little man in my iTunes must have decided he’s tired of Beck (most days, every other song is off Odelay) and that he likes these guys. This song is actually featured in Valley Girl, if you remember--right after Julie breaks up with Randy and he goes back to the club where they went the first night with Fred and Stacey…Yes, this movie is burned on my brain. Want to make something of it?

“What We Do Is Secret,” The Germs. GI. Nothing like a little Darby Crash to get your blood flowing on a Tuesday morning. I don’t have any Cramps on here with which to pay tribute to Lux Interior, so I’ll just say this is a general tribute to punk rock.

“The Love Cats,” The Cure. Staring at The Sea. Two words: high school. Oh, the Eighties. I remember seeing this parody on MTV of Robert Smith as a guest on “This Old House.” You may laugh out loud, so be careful watching this at work. You don‘t want people to think you‘re having fun.

“After You’ve Gone,” Eddie Lang & His Orchestra. Woody Allen Film Music. This song is from Sweet and Lowdown. You might as well know if you don’t already: I love Woody Allen. Sean Penn is wonderful in the role of Emmett Ray. This one and Purple Rose of Cairo (same time frame) are two of my favorites.

“Take Me to The River,” The Talking Heads. Stop Making Sense. The first time I heard The Talking Heads was in the movie Times Square, a movie about two teenage runaways living the punk life in New York City…a Robert Stigwood production! Old Robert Stigwood was responsible for, among other things, Tommy, Saturday Night Fever, and Grease. The movie is terrible but the soundtrack is terrific. I think he must’ve seen something in the punk/new wave movement of the late 70s and believed he could do for it what he did for disco. It also featured XTC, Roxy Music, Patti Smith, The Pretenders (ha!), Lou Reed, and The Cure (ha!). It definitely made me a Talking Heads fan, just on the basis of one song, “Life During Wartime.”

Strangely enough, even though Stop Making Sense is one of my favorite albums of all time, I’ve never seen the film!

“Gasoline Rain,” Moondogg. SLC Punk Soundtrack. Okay, little iTunes man is clearly on a punk kick today. Truth be told, I don’t like this song and usually skip it when I listen to the whole album, which includes tracks from Blondie, The Dead Kennedys, and Generation X (you know--Billy Idol!). SLC Punk tells the story of two best friends--punks!--in Salt Lake city in the mid-80s. Don’t tell anyone, but last I checked, you can watch the whole thing on YouTube.

All this punk music. I’m almost 40, and I’m thinking you would laugh if you could see how preppy I am.

“Let’s Get Lost,” Chet Baker. The Best of Chet Baker Sings. Bringing it all back around to what seemed like a more civilized era, the 1950s. Were we talking about the dark side earlier? Poor Chet Baker, so silken-voiced, had a wee bit of a heroin problem (uh, it killed him in 1988). He sounds so melancholy, and I imagine that like a lot of artists he was too romantic for his own good, hence the need for escape. I leave you with this:

*videos from YouTube, images from tvguide.com and amazon.com

Reader’s Journal: The Stone Diaries

2009-02-09T14:56:00.003-05:00

Many years ago, I planned to write a dissertation centered around Lawrence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, in which the main character tries to set down his entire life story, day by day, from the moment of his conception to the present day. Several conundrums face Tristram, not the least of which is the fact that he finds his history is inextricable from his relations and friends. To tell his story, he must also tell their stories. Some of these stories he imagines, and some he knows but misconstrues, so he records them incorrectly. The other issue he faces is time: he literally plans to write down every day of his life, but for every day he writes, he loses a day. At the end of the book (which is approximately 900 pages long), he is only nine years old. He is unable to contain the narrative of his life.

Some people consider Tristram Shandy to be the first “postmodern” novel, and in recent decades several writers have sought to produce this same sort of self-referential loop-de-loop of personal history in novels and memoirs. Often these books are the literary equivalent of a child riding his bicycle without using his hands for the first time. (“Look Ma! No plot! No reliable narrator! And looky here--footnotes!”) The problem is that all the trickery often gets in the way of the narrative, and the reader simply tires of all the sleight of hand and verbal wowza.

When a writer understands the finer points of such play, however, the results can be stunning. Carol Shields’s The Stone Diaries tells the story of Daisy Goodwill Flett, from beginning to end. Daisy herself is the narrator of this story, moving through her narrative both as participant and observer, changing point of view as necessary, sometimes even slipping into first person in order to give voice to other characters. Unlike Tristram, who brings in other people’s stories and gets caught up in them, losing himself as the point of reference, Daisy remains tightly at the center. She pulls the reader along through what seems like an objective account of her history, but will suddenly break through the surface of the story to let the reader know she’s still there, and even that she might not be giving the reader all the facts, or even telling the truth:

“Maybe now is the time to tell you that Daisy Goodwill has a little trouble with getting things straight; with the truth, that is.
…
[A] childhood is what anyone wants to remember of it. It leaves behind no fossils, except perhaps in fiction. Which is why you want to take Daisy’s representation of events with a grain of salt, a bushel of salt.

She is not always reliable when it comes to the details of her life; much of what she has to say is speculative, exaggerated, wildly unlikely…Daisy’s perspective is off. Furthermore, she imposes the voice of the future on the events of the past, causing all manner of wavy distortion. She takes great jumps in time, leaving out important matters…
…
[Hers] is the only account there is, written on air, written with imaginations invisible ink.”

She begins in the first chapter with her birth (and a sly wink to Sterne, for there is an adamantine clock keeping time through her birth and her mother’s death, and in Tristram Shandy, the winding of the clock is a metaphor for Tristram’s conception). Subsequent chapters focus on life events: Childhood, Marriage, Love, Motherhood, Work, Sorrow, Ease, Illness and Decline, and Death. My favorite chapter is “Sorrow, 1965.” Daisy has fallen into a funk in this period, and she provides first person accounts from other people--her children, her best friends, her former boss, even remote characters from her childhood--as to why. What I enjoyed about this chapter is the idea that while we never know what other people actually think, we cannot escape our own idea of what we think they think. Other people’s ideas of ourselves always bear the impression of our own opinions.

My other favorite part of this book is the narrative of Magnus Flett, Daisy’s father-in-law, which she imagines in full. In reality, Daisy has no knowledge of Magnus Flett other than these “facts”: he came from the Orkney Islands to Canada as a boy; he married and had three sons; his wife left him and took the baby Daisy to live with their son in Winnipeg; he stayed in Tyndall, Manitoba until 1936 when he returned to the Orkney Islands. In truth, nobody heard a word from him after that time, and Daisy knows nothing of him until she finds him in Scotland in 1977 (or so she says). Daisy fills in the gaps for us (for him), telling the story of his passage, his long walk across the U.K. to the Orkney Islands. She has him memorize Jane Eyre. He even earns some local celebrity for it. Magnus’s escape to the Orkneys is juxtaposed with Daisy’s story of her first marriage in 1927. Such freedom set against such constriction, romance against duty.

It’s no surprise this book won the Pulitzer (1995). I originally read this back in 1996, and when a woman in my book club suggested it, I was eager to read it again, and I’m glad I did. Shields gives Daisy such depth, and her additions and subtractions, her omissions and flights of fancy offer a singular, flawed life, beautifully told. In the end Daisy shares her physical impressions of death, but the most poignant thing to me is a simple list of addresses for every home she knew in her life. On paper these are numbers and streets, and no one can really know what each of these places have meant to the people who’ve lived there. Not even we can know what they meant to Daisy.

*image from amazon.com

Sunday Salon: A Little Romance

2009-02-08T14:39:00.006-05:00

In graduate school, I worked for a professor who told me she had an aunt who believed romance novels had ruined her life. Now I can’t remember if the aunt had been married multiple times or not at all, but I suppose either one could feel like ruin to the right person. Whatever she took away from those books, it was not anything that could sustain her in the real world. I still think about the aunt from time to time, especially when I cruise past the aisles marked “Romance” at the book store, and I wonder, how many other women are there like her?

In junior high and high school, I read plenty of romance novels. I read Danielle Steele, Colleen McCullough, Susan Isaacs, Rona Jaffe, and Sidney Sheldon. As an English major in college I abandoned those books for the requisite Russians and other general Western lit fare, even though I still re-read some of them secretly. (Almost Paradise by Susan Isaacs was a particular favorite of mine. Isaacs can be laugh-out-loud funny.) And then there was grad school. Most graduate students in English think romance novels are the lowest of the low, and not even up for discussion, certainly not in a writing class. By that time I'd sold the few romances I had left, and stuck to a strict diet of modern short fiction and novels as prescribed by my peers.

Right after I moved to Atlanta, a co-worker learned I was an aspiring writer and invited me to a romance writing workshop at a Piccadilly Cafeteria. You had to pay a couple hundred bucks (not sure if this included any Piccadilly fare), and in return you got a sort of template for writing some series romance novels and a day-long workshop. Because I had a babysitter long ago whose idea of playing with me was to have me help her act out her Harlequin Romances with my Barbies, I could guess how this might work: a lonely heroine with mousy hair, a wallflower; a handsome mysterious stranger with a wounded heart and a past; a red-headed, man-eating rival. They’re in Italy, or a castle on the Moors, or perhaps on a cruise in the Bahamas. Lonely wallflower not only turns out to be stunning (sassy gay co-worker or best friend talks her into getting a makeover), but she beats the redhead at her game and gets the guy. I politely declined.

While I’m still not interested in writing romance novels, I am much more interested now in why people read them. As an aspiring writer, I want people to read my work, but at what price? And how far am I willing (or would I need) to go? Although I suppose I’ll always gravitate toward literary fiction as my first choice as a reader (and a writer), I am trying to branch out and read some genre fiction: mystery, science fiction, and yes, romance. In the last month I’ve read three novels that could classify as romance in some sense, three novels that give me a sense of paths to take as a writer:

Luanne Rice, Summer of Roses. I found a recommendation for this book here. This thriller writer said romance wasn’t her thing, but she thought this book was well written as far as romances go, so I thought I'd try it. (Confession: I don't read thrillers either, but I've put this writer's first book, Isabella Moon, on my TBR list. I'm branching!)

In a nutshell, the heroine has gone into hiding with her young daughter to escape an abusive husband. While she’s in hiding, she nurtures a relationship with a kind but wounded (both literally and figuratively) man, and together they find love. They are drawn away from their safe haven when the evil husband returns and tries to kill the heroine’s beloved grandmother. Another story intertwines with this one, as the detective who brings the heroine out of hiding develops a relationship with another woman who’s hiding (in the same place, just so happens) from the same abusive man.

Truth be told, I couldn’t finish it. Still, this was some of the cleanest prose I’ve seen in a genre novel. Rice doesn’t even fall into the “-ly” trap. You know: “She said hotly,” or “He remarked disparagingly.” She also does a lovely job with the scenery, and the pacing and suspense were perfect. My main problem was the…well, it was the…I guess that it was just so…emotionally overwrought. And a little bit contrived. Okay, a lot contrived. The wounds are too large (and too many) and the recoveries are too pat, and it’s all very dramatic. I wonder, genuinely, what attracts readers to these types of books?

Jeanne Ray, Julie and Romeo. Probably you can work out from the title that this book follows along the same plot lines as Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Julie and Romeo are two single sixty-somethings who own rival florist shops in the same small town outside Boston. Their families have been enemies since everyone can remember, and everyone’s more than happy to keep it that way--except for Julie and Romeo, who are in love and looking for a way to be together.

I’m not sure where a book crosses over from romance into chick lit (a debate in-and-of itself), but this book works either way. Julie narrates the story in first person, and her voice is so convincingly real and humorous that the thin plot is not a problem. Instead, it’s more like having a girlfriend dish her relationship over a glass of wine. Her problems are real problems--a failing business, getting back into the dating game after thirty-something years of marriage, buying sexy underwear for a first date--so she’s relatable. I wonder if that’s the key for me: the situation in Rice’s book seemed so far-fetched, I simply couldn’t relate to it, no matter how well-written it was.

Alice Hoffman, The Ice Queen. Remember (you know, a few paragraphs ago) when I said that the plot for Summer of Roses was too emotionally overwrought? The Ice Queen could’ve easily fallen into the same trap, but for some reason, it didn’t. The story begins when the narrator is a child. She wishes never to see her mother again, and the same night her mother dies in an accident. The narrator comes to believe she has a strange power to cause harm to people through wishes. As an adult she wishes to be struck by lightening, and she is. The story follows her romantic relationship with another lightening-strike victim, and also her relationship with her estranged brother.

In some ways, this plot is just as contrived as Summer of Roses, but for some reason, it works better, and I think the simple reason is that the narrator is not a stock character, and the voice is unique. The main character in Rice’s book is interchangeable with any of the hundreds (thousands?) of characters in romance novels. The narrator in Hoffman’s story has a particular tale to tell, and only she can tell it. And also, the self-consciousness of the narrator (the character is unnamed throughout the book) and her situation:

“What was the difference between love and obsession? Didn’t both make you stay up all night, wandering the streets, a victim of your own imagination, your own heartbeat? Didn’t you fall into both, headfirst into quicksand? Wasn’t every man in love a fool and every woman a slave?”

She knows her ardor is overwrought, and this makes her believable in a way that Rice’s characters are not. The romance, the trouble, everything in Summer of Roses is too stock--but then, perhaps that’s the point. With stock characters, it’s easier for the reader to insert herself in the story than if the main character is unique. Maybe that’s where my professor’s aunt ran into trouble: she wanted too badly to live inside a romance novel, and the books made it too easy for her to do so.

*images from Sunday Salon and amazon.com

Betsey Johnson

2009-02-06T09:53:00.008-05:00

A reader sent me a sample of Betsey Johnson perfume sometime last year. (Thanks Kim, if you're out there!) This week has been so cold (for Atlanta, and I'm a wimp), and the job search so bewildering, that I decided I needed a little kick. Originally I planned to wear Bandit today, but when I saw that vial of Betsey Johnson, I instantly though of the hot pink interior of her stores, her ruffly feminine dresses, so I pulled it out and set it on my desk. The news said Friday would be warmer, with temperatures near sixty. With a little boost, I thought I could help spring arrive early, at least mood-wise.

The notes in Betsey Johnson are:

Top: pear, tangerine, grapefruit, black currant
Heart: freesia, lily of the valley, red apple
Base: cedar wood, sandalwood, praline, amber, musk

That Vegas showgirl of a bottle pretty much says it all: pink and sparkling, a little exotic (it's billed as an Oriental on the Betsey Johnson site), a little artificial. This is a "happy face" perfume, a costume (fitting, really, given her designs), something to wear when you need to fake it, when you need neon lights and a little glitz, however false. The opening goes from tart to sweet in a heartbeat, the juiciness is fresh but it falls away rather quickly. The red apple keeps the heart sweet and upholds the delicate freesia and lily of the valley, which would probably pale too much on their own. As it warms into the base, it has caramel-apple mixed with a pretty typical Oriental dry down.

Right now, all I want is a vacation. I want the middle of summer in searing desert heat, I want the singing and clanging slot machines, a fruity cocktail, and the Bellagio fountains. I want to put on this dress and some strappy sandals, spritz myself with this scent, and be someone else for a weekend, someone faking she has not a care in the world.

*images from betseyjohnson.com

Fifty-Two Stories

2009-02-05T13:20:00.002-05:00

Harper Perennial has put up a site, Fifty-Two Stories, where they're publishing short stories every Sunday for a year. They are publishing both original and previously published works from all kinds of authors. Something to read during the lunch hour!

First Step: Admit You Have A Problem

2009-02-04T12:49:00.003-05:00

Today I got a library card, my first in over ten years. I needed to check out the book for my "real" book club that meets next Tuesday. All I had to do was go in, sign up for the card, grab the book, check it out, and go home.

In some ways, public libraries sadden me. So many of the titles on the shelves look like they haven't been checked out in a decade or longer, it feels a bit like a government nursing home for books. I feel like I should check some of them out and take them to the mall or a movie, just to get them a bit of fresh air, let them see what's changed around the neighborhood.

In other ways, public libraries remind me: I have a serious problem. I’m like one of those people who cannot stop adopting pets from the shelter, or like that woman who just had the octuplets even though she already has six kids under age eight at home. I am a book addict. Nobody would be foolish enough to suggest to an alcoholic that she attend parties with an open bar because THE DRINKS ARE FREE AND YOU CAN HAVE AS MANY AS YOU WANT. But time and again, people tell me, "You like to read so much, you should get a library card. I am surprised you don't have one!

Sometimes an alcoholic stays off the sauce long enough to forget its power. So it was with me and the library. I walked in, calmly applied for my card, and went straight to the shelf to grab my book. Walking through the stacks on my way to check out, I thought it couldn't hurt to take a look and see what else they had. The next thing I knew, I'd spotted five more books I wanted to pick up and take home with me (these at a cursory glance--I knew there were more), along with a running list in my head of titles to check for at other branches so I could place them on hold.

From the far corner of by brain came a voice: "Remember your TBR pile."

Oh that. Right. The sixty-or-so some-odd books at home, books I own, waiting to be read. Bunch of party-pooper goody-goodies sitting quietly on the shelf, waiting for me to pick them up and read them. Your basic buzz killers, reprimanding me from afar.

“Too bad,” I told the voice. “All these books are here, and I want to take them all home with me.”

But then I thought of Bob, of the look on his face when I arrived home with a giant stack of books. (The limit is twenty-five, people. Twenty-five!) I pictured the questions forming behind his brown eyes: “Where will you put them all? When will you read them? What about the other stacks of books all over the house? Who will take care of them?”

For Bob’s sake, I stopped, took a deep breath. In the end I managed to get out of the library with only two books, my book club book (The Stone Diaries) and one of the January selections for Andrew's Book Club, Lauren Groff's Delicate Edible Birds. I also placed a hold on one of this month's selections, Swimming with Strangers. And I swear that's all. I'm not going to add more books to my hold. I swear. I will think of the TBR pile. I can do this.

Ten Random Tunes 2.3.09

2009-02-03T13:51:00.013-05:00

Last night I watched Almost Famous for the upteenth time. Every time I watch that movie, all I want to do for days is sit around and listen to music. Back in college I went through a serious "I'm with the band" phase. Nothing was more exciting than standing off to the side of the stage (or right in front) and watching people make music, nothing more fun than breezing past the line of people waiting to get in to see a show because we were "on the list."

In the movie, Lester Bangs (played by the always-terrific Philip Seymour Hoffman) tells William (the Cameron Crowe character): "The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you're uncool." That's my blog, me here with you, being uncool.

Without further ado, this week's tunes:

"Wooden Ships," Crosby Stills & Nash. Crosby Stills & Nash. My parents had this album, and possibly the eight-track, and now I have it on CD. I cannot remember a time when this album was not in my life. My inner hippie loves CSN, and this song definitely goes with my Almost Famous vibe.

"What Becomes of The Brokenhearted," Jimmy Ruffin. MP3 single. See, I do buy single songs, although I admit I bought this as part of a Motown playlist. This is the song that plays on my internal soundtrack when I am upset about something, anything: "I walk in shadow, searching for light..." It's wrenching, but such a pretty song.

"Unsatisfied," The Replacements. Let It Be. This song was on a mixtape someone made for me in college, and I still have the tape even though I no longer have a way to play it. Up to that point, I had a real prejudice against The Replacements, because I lived next door to a girl who played "Kiss Me on The Bus" at least ten times every morning while she got ready for class (even scarier--she alternated that song with "Breakout" by Swing Out Sister). Clearly, I recovered from the trauma, came to my senses, and now love The Replacements as I should.

"Paint It Black," The Rolling Stones. Aftermath. I am a lifelong Rolling Stones fan. (Yes, I prefer them to The Beatles.*) They were also my first stadium concert, with The Fabulous Thunderbirds and ZZ Top at the Cotton Bowl in--wait for it--1981. Seventh grade! It rained on us through the entire show, and it was completely worth it. I still have the t-shirt. Almost Famous tie-in: Dennis Hope (Jimmy Fallon), trying to convince Stillwater to use him as their manager, says, "If you think Mick Jagger will still be out there trying to be a rock star at age fifty, you are sadly mistaken."

"Play The Breaks," The Plimsouls. Everywhere at Once. Valley Girl shaped many a young girl's dreams in the early 1980s. Oh, Nicolas Cage, you are the reason I spent years developing crushes on punk boys who would not look twice at me. Thanks for that. Incidentally, this is a good album, and if you like The Replacements and the early Goo Goo Dolls, then you should definitely seek this out.

"Shadrach," The Beastie Boys. Paul's Boutique. I can't say I am huge fan of The Beastie Boys, but I do think this is their best album, and I still listen to it (it was released in 1989). It's better now for the treadmill instead of the drinking of the beer, if you get my drift.

"A Time to Be So Small," Interpol. Antics. The pull to this album for me was the song "Slow Hands," and I thought for sure I would get the album and only like one or two songs. Oh no. This was one of those albums I listened to over and over, the whole thing. It took me about a year to get tired of it. Funny thing is, when I hear one song off this album, I have to listen to the whole thing from that point on. It's like when you click past a show on television and even though you've seen it before (many times), once you run into it you have to watch the whole thing.

"I Am Weary, Let Me Rest," The Cox Family. O Brother, Where Art Thou? Soundtrack. Yes, another soundtrack. I admit up front, I don't care at all for modern country music, and by modern I mean anything after about 1982. But I do love bluegrass, and this album has some terrific songs on it. It's the side of the South that I like, these songs.

"Spit on A Stranger," Pavement. Terror Twilight. I am pretty sure I am the only Pavement fan who claims this as her favorite Pavement album. I like the low-key twists and turns. This was another album I listened to over and over. Just a little OCD. Nothing harmful.

"Letter to Memphis," The Pixies. Trompe Le Monde. iTunes tells me this is the most played song on this album (in my collection, that is--not universally), next to Alec Eiffel. This song reminds me of college, the time when people were starting to disperse. It was an exciting but melancholy time. Everyone was leaving, but at the same time, all doors and windows were open. This song fills me with nostalgia the same way Almost Famous does, so it's an appropriate end to today's list.

*In fact, I was well into my 20s before I started to appreciate The Beatles. I still like The Stones better.
**images from amazon.com

Andrew's Book Club: February Picks

2009-02-02T18:21:00.004-05:00

Andrew Scott has revealed his Andrew's Book Club story collection choices for February. The mainstream publisher pick is Nothing Right by Antonya Nelson. I'm especially excited about this one, because she's one of my favorites. I expect this will be quite good, and I can also recommend (as additional reading) her excellent collection, Female Trouble, and her novel, Nobody's Girl. I admit I prefer her stories to her novels, but they're all worth picking up. And while I'm at it, I'm just going to go ahead and mention her husband's (Robert Boswell) fine novel, Crooked Hearts. Read that one too, if you can find a copy. It seems to be out of print!

The indie pick is Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum's Swimming with Strangers. And--oh!--apparently Chronicle Books, the publisher, also published Don Kurtz's South of The Big Four, which apparently Andrew loves as much as I do. This makes me trust his selections all the more. Ms. Lunstrum is the author of another collection, This Life She's Chosen, and her stories have appeared in One Story, The American Scholar, and Willow Springs. Click here to read an excerpt of and author interview about her story, "Familial Kindness," published in One Story.

*images from amazon.com

Giveaway "Winners"

2009-02-02T10:52:00.002-05:00

Because I had only three entries in the Brooklyn drawing, I'll be happy to send each of the three of you a sample of this lovely scent. Please send your name and address to sweetdivablog at yahoo dot com. Congratulations!

Bond No. 9 Brooklyn

2009-01-30T09:46:00.004-05:00

In all honesty, I've been to Manhattan and the Bronx and Queens, but I've never been to Brooklyn. I'm pretty sure it was the setting for "Welcome Back, Kotter." I also know that currently it's home to countless writers, actors, artists, and musicians. The Hold Steady hails from Brooklyn. Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicola Krauss live there, and Heath Ledger and Michelle Williams lived there at some point during their relationship. Pretty much, Brooklyn may turn out to be for the new century what Greenwich Village was to the last.

But how to bottle all of this and put it into a perfume? What's the scent of trendy (but, you know, hip, alternative) celebrity? Silver Factory painted a picture for me, of a person, time, and place, but I suppose I knew enough about Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick and the 1960s to be able to conjure up those images. Having never been to Brooklyn, living a life so far away from that scene, I have a hard time finding the appropriate metaphor, the vision to bring this to life for a reader.

Let's talk notes, shall we?

Top: grapefruit, cardamom
Heart: cypress wood, geranium leaves, juniper berries
Base: cedar wood, leather, guaiac wood

Citrus and I, we aren't really friends, but the hit of grapefruit suffused with cardamom at first hit make me wonder why I never thought to sprinkle my grapefruit with cardomom instead of sugar for all these years. As the scent mellows, the notes mingle, and nothing makes an overwhelming impression on its own. Instead, everything melds into an herbal woods, a soft, refreshing green, dry but warm. Bond No. 9 might have hoped to produce an edgy, hip scent, but they've done something else, in my opinion: they've created a classic.

This scent transcends the trendy and the unusual. I wouldn't call it traditional, but I do think it's timeless, and it's a true unisex. There's no hint of aftershave, and the woods are not too dry. The juniper lends a bit of a summery kick even, grounded by the cardamom. I've been wearing it for three days, and I cannot get my wrist away from my nose. I knew at first spray that something wonderful was about to hit my wrist. Even Bob cannot stop commenting on it.

Brooklyn launches in March, but I'd like to share some with two readers. If you're interested in trying Brooklyn (And you must be! You must try it!), let me know in the comments, and I'll do a drawing on Monday.

*image from Bond No. 9
**Full disclosure: I received my sample from the lovely people at Bond No. 9, and have given it a positive review without coercion. I always tell the truth...remember Union Square? Chinatown?

The Sweet Smell of Success

2009-01-29T10:31:00.003-05:00

In Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster, Dana Thomas devotes an entire chapter to perfume. Next to handbags, perfume is the most successfully mass-marketed item for many luxury brands, bringing in around $15 billion a year. None of this is a surprise to people who read perfume blogs, or who’ve read Chandler Burr or any other of a handful of writers writing about perfume today. We know all too well how large the market is, how prolific the releases are each year. Businesses of all sorts have launched perfumes (Coach), and it’s de rigueur now for every designer with a collection to also have a fragrance (Stella, Narciso Rodriguez). Even the most obscure celebrities (Eau de Gary Coleman, anyone?) are launching fragrances, while decent department store brands are cannibalizing their own lines by launching flanker after flanker (Pleasures Most Super Intense Pleasure EVER).

Thomas begins briefly with a visit to La Petit Campadieu, the French flower farm that produces the Centifolia roses that go into Chanel No. 5. She offers a brief history of perfume, explains the differences in concentration between parfum/extract, eau de parfum, eau de cologne, and eau de toilette, and gives a short biography of Chanel and the development of No. 5. She interviews Jacques Polge and Jean Claude Ellena, talks about the large conglomerates and cosmetic companies that develop perfumes for designers, discusses briefly Givaudan and IFF and synthetics versus “naturals.”

In the context of the book--when I was reading along and absorbed by the overall idea of mass-market luxury (oxymoron, anyone?)--this all seemed fine. She spends a great deal of time on Chanel No. 5, but that’s understandable: it’s been a symbol of luxury for generations. But when I re-read the chapter in the context of reviewing it here, I saw her treatment as a bit generic, and I thought I’d point out some other areas I wish Thomas had addressed:

First, she never talks about the importance of Estee Lauder in conjunction with the rise of an American fragrance market. After all, was it not Estee Lauder who was one of the first to market a perfume (okay, perfumed bath oil), Youth Dew, as something women should buy for themselves? Talk about the creation of a market! Through the 1950s and 1960s, French perfume may have continued as a “luxury” item, but ultimately the opening of the market would force them to compete.
Second, she goes on at great length about Chanel, but she never once mentions Chance, which was a great mainstream hit for them. She only gives the briefest mentions to Coco and Coco Mademoiselle, two other mainstream market big hitters. I think this is important because it does show how a luxury brand can do mainstream well, and without resorting to flankers and trends. She also says nothing about the Rue Cambon series.
Third, she talks with Jean Claude Ellena, primarily about the creation of Un Jardin Sur Le Nil, but she never mentions the Hermessences, which are not mass-marketed and are available only in Hermes boutiques, nor do they discuss Ellena’s own perfumery, The Different Company. I found this strange, because I think it’s interesting to have a nose working for a “mainstream” luxury brand who clearly sees the need for niche.
Fourth, she never talks about any niche (luxury) perfume houses, such as L’Artisan, Serge Lutens, Frederic Malle, or JAR--all of which could easily change our idea of luxury (or already have), displacing the traditional brands. What sort of new standard are they setting? How will the traditional houses compete? In the end, will they pander to the masses, or go back to being exclusive?

If you read this book, I’d love to hear your thoughts. The book overall is a great platform for discussion, and I recommend it thoroughly. And speaking of niche, visit me tomorrow. I'll be sampling Bond No. 9 Brooklyn.

*image from amazon.com

Inspector Handbag

2009-01-28T18:20:00.003-05:00

Back in December, Bob and I decided we would go see the terracotta warriors exhibit at the High for our anniversary. Naively, we thought that because we'd bought our tickets online and we had a queue time early in the day on the Tuesday before Christmas, we wouldn't have any trouble with the crowds. Wrong. The place was packed, and we had to wait in a long line to get on the elevator that would take us up to the exhibit. The lobby area of the High is cavernous, with wood floors and glass everywhere, so the noise of the crowd, while not deafening, was challenging.

As we turned the last bend in the line, we passed a security guard. When I was next to her, she said to me, "Hello. I need to inspect your handbag." I obliged, unzipping and opening my handbag so she could see its contents. When we were closer to the elevator, Bob turned to me and said, "That's a weird name."

"What are you talking about?" I said. Around Bob, I say that a lot.

"That lady. 'Hello, I'm Inspector Handbag,'" he said.

"No," I said, shaking my head. "'I need to inspect your handbag' is what she said. She wanted to see what was in my purse."

"Yep," he said. "That's how I hear music."

Bob is famous (you know, with me) for mangling song lyrics. I've never heard anything like it. The first was the most memorable, when I heard him sing, "I Want to Be Sedated" and it came out, "I want a piece of candy." Really, I should keep a list. After almost nine years together, what generally happens now is a song comes on the radio, he starts to croon, and if I really like the song I yell, "Don't sing!"

My point for telling this story is that I was able to profit from said mangling (although it wasn't a song lyric, but that's a mere technicality). Fast forward a few weeks, when I see a contest post on the Emerging Writer's Network to win Michael Shilling's novel, Rock Bottom. To win the contest, I had to submit some fake band names (limit three), and the author himself would choose five winners out of all submissions. Fake band names are one of my geeky pastimes! Really, I should keep a list of these, too, but I don't. I could only think of my two favorites, the only ones I can ever remember: Frigid B*#ch (the obvious would be a punk band, but it would be great for alt-country) and Pedestrian Saints (which in all truth sounds like a band I probably wouldn't like). I thought about it for days, trying to come up with another entry. I didn't have to have three, but I wanted every chance. And it hit me: Inspector Handbag!

And wouldn't you know, when Michael Shilling picked the five winners, Inspector Handbag was on the list! I got my copy of the novel today, and I can't wait to read it. In college, practically every guy I knew was in a band. I loved live music, but what a hard life those people have (and a lot of fun too, I'm sure). Making it in the music industry is tough enough, but it's worse when the band can't get out of its own way. I can't wait to read this. I'll post my thoughts when I do.

*image link provided by amazon.com

Support Short Story Collections

2009-01-28T12:31:00.002-05:00

Wow, say that three times fast. Through Emerging Writers Network, I learned about the following "challenge" hosted by Andrew Scott at Andrew's Book Club. I'm posting the rules directly from his site:

"1) The first rule of Andrew’s Book Club is you should talk about Andrew’s Book Club.

2) The second rule of Andrew’s Book Club is you should talk about Andrew’s Book Club. Spread the word.

3) Each month I will select two short story collections to be released that month, give or take a few weeks. One will be from a NYC publisher, while a second selection will spotlight a book from an indie or university press. Buy at least one of these books each month. 12 books a year (24 if you buy both selections) is not too much to ask. It would be great if you also supported your local independent bookstore. But you may prefer Borders or Barnes & Noble, or maybe you live in the middle of nowhere and rely upon Amazon or Powell’s. But buy the story collections. If your bookstore doesn’t have the book, order it. Talk to the owner about the book, and about how much you love to read (and buy) story collections. Put your mouth where your money is.

4) Read beyond the Andrew’s Book Club selections. I will only select two books each month. In reality, there are likely dozens of worthwhile books for you to read and support each month. Buy one of my selections in order to bring the power of short story readers together and make our collective voice heard by publishers. Buy the books of your choice to quench your other readerly thirsts.

5) Stop by this blog [Andrew's] every so often and post your thoughts."

Andrew's picks for January are Lauren Groff's Delicate Edible Birds and Allison Amend's Things That Pass for Love. He'll be announcing his picks for February next Sunday, February 1. Myself, I'm going to have to use the library, as unemployment leaves me no room for purchasing extras. However, I pledge that when I can afford it, I'll buy the picks I can't get at the library. Hopefully that will be sooner, rather than later.

Sad News

2009-01-27T13:56:00.001-05:00

John Updike died today. What a great loss to the literary world.

Ten Random Tunes 1.27.09

2009-01-27T09:05:00.005-05:00

Welcome to my new Tuesday feature, Ten Random Tunes, where I put the iTunes on shuffle and just let it go. It's a little like taking a personality quiz every time I do this, because I get bits of history with every song I hear, and it helps me see what's shaped not only my taste in music, but my sense of the world. Feel free to play along!

A-Ha, "Take On Me." Grosse Pointe Blank Soundtrack. This song was popular my junior year of high school, but was not one of my favorites. At that time I was all about Depeche Mode and Tears for Fears, if I remember correctly. I like this song better as part of this soundtrack, and I love this movie. And, oh yes, the video is still pretty amazing.

The Ramones, "Judy Is A Punk." The Royal Tenenbaums Soundtrack. I owned two Ramones albums only, in my time (on vinyl, thank you very much): Rocket to Russia and Rock N' Roll High School. At the time (1980) I was sure I was the only person in Odessa, Texas who owned a Ramones album. I "discovered" them through the magic of HBO, which seemed to run Rock N' Roll High School (no, the album was not the soundtrack...the movie is named after the album) on an endless loop the summer before seventh grade. I was an early, secret punk, in my head of not in my dress.

Frou Frou, "Let Go." Garden State Soundtrack. I swear, I own lots of music that's not part of a soundtrack. Soundtracks are easy, though, because they are like playlists you don't have to exert any effort to create. I listened to this one a lot when I first bought it, even though I wasn't nuts about the movie. (*Spoiler alert, although surely you've seen this by now*: I think he should have gotten on the plane.) This track is okay, but my favorite is Zero 7, "In The Waiting Line."

Madonna, "Justify My Love." Immaculate Collection. I selected all the songs in my iTunes, to be fair, and this one comes up. I don't care for this song, but I bought the album for the handful of songs I do like. I haven't gotten used to the idea that you can buy one song at a time it's okay. Call me old-fashioned. Is it cheating that I clicked through and didn't listen to the whole thing?

Elvis Costello & the Attractions, "Watching the Detectives." The Best of Elvis Costello & the Attractions. A couple "Best of" Elvis Costello albums exist out there, but this is the first one, from the 1980s, with Elvis's face in profile on the cover. I own it on vinyl and CD. I listened to this album over and over in college. I still listen to it over and over. Never get tired of it.

Modest Mouse, "Bury Me with It." Good News for People Who Love Bad News. I've never gotten as deeply into Modest Mouse as I should have, is my opinion. Back in the 90s I bought their first album, This Is A Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About because I loved the title, but I listened to it once and sold it. I don't remember why!

Sebastian Tellier, "Fantino." Lost in Translation Soundtrack. Seriously, I am more than the sum of my soundtracks. This is probably in the running for my favorite soundtrack, though (Rushmore might be the only one that can beat it), and I love the movie. This is the song that plays when she visits Kyoto. I always think about her tying her wish to the branch of the tree.

JTQ, "Spirit of the Sun." This Is Acid Jazz. In the early 90s I worked as a receptionist at a hair salon, and we listened to this album constantly. This is great driving music.

Aretha Franklin, "Chain of Fools." The Best of Aretha Franklin. Dear Everybody, Please lay off Aretha about the hat she wore to the inauguration. She is The Queen of Soul, and you are a Nobody. Sincerely, Me.

Nico, "These Days." The Royal Tenenbaums Soundtrack. Before I lose street cred (ya, book and perfume blog street cred), I own actual Velvet Underground albums. CDs. Whatever the kids are calling them these days. This popped up randomly, but makes me think there are no accidents because it's just too fitting: "Please don't confront me with my failures/I had not forgotten them..."

*images from amazon.com

Reader's Journal: Deluxe

2009-01-26T11:45:00.009-05:00

*Note: I'm planning a separate post on the chapter in Deluxe about perfume, "The Sweet Smell of Success."

Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster, by Dana Thomas, was on my reading list since it hit bookstore shelves back in 2007. What a time for me to decide to pick it up! When I bought my copy last summer, everything seemed on the surface to be okay, with the exception of the slowing housing market. Strange to think I waited not only until the country was in crisis to read this book, but also until I was facing my own challenge with trying to find a job as the unemployment rate climbs steadily toward ten percent.

But this book is about luxury, and one thing is certain: the luxury market will obtain. What Ms. Thomas does an excellent job of making perfectly clear is the difference between luxury and perceived luxury, between the real thing and the image. We are citizens in the cave, casting our eyes upon the shadow of luxury goods, believing in the market, pouring our hard-earned money into it. The premise of this book follows along the same lines as the discussions of the beleaguered housing market. Who is at fault here? Is it the people who’ve grown the industry, created the desire, and put the goods in reach of consumers who want or need to afford these luxury goods, or is it the fault of common consumers for reaching too far beyond their financial capabilities?

Too many people believe that credit is money. While credit companies have filled people’s mail boxes willy nilly with outlandish offers for even people with the worst credit ratings, these companies are not responsible for picking up the pen and filling out the application. If you know how much money you make, if you know how much money is in your bank account and how much money you owe for rent or mortgage and so on and so forth, then you have some idea of whether or not you can really afford that credit card. The problem is, we want stuff. And when we fill out the applications, we’re not thinking about our bank account balance and our credit limit, but about the stuff we can buy when we get the card. Possibility. That’s the name of the game.

Don’t get me wrong--I am as easily seduced by possibility as the next person. While I do a fair job of keeping spending in check and adding to my savings, I still understand what it means to want something, not for the thing itself but for the possibilities it represents. Anyone who says she’s above such desire is most likely lying, for the things we buy are as much items to satisfy ourselves as to persuade those around us that we are a certain kind of someone. You are as guilty of pandering to your own image if you proudly announce you only buy clothes at WalMart or Goodwill (assuming you do so by choice rather than necessity, of course) as you are if you’re showing off your new Louboutins from Neiman’s. On the one hand, you advertise yourself as a person of thrift, and on the other, as a person of luxury.

Thomas covers the luxury market from several angles, including the formation of luxury conglomerates and global luxury markets, “it” products--bags, perfumes--marketed (or “produced” by) celebrities and their stylists, and the demand for and damage brought by an ever-expanding market for fakes. All throughout the book, a dichotomy presents itself: luxury versus status, summed up nicely by Miuccia Prada: “…To fake luxury today is easy. You put some details from the brand’s past, you put a little bit of gold, and that’s it. I can’t bear that…Real luxurious people hate status. You don’t look rich because you have rich dress. When you look at a person, do you see the spirit or the sexiness or the creativity? Just to see a big diamond, what does it mean? It’s all about satisfaction. I think it’s horrible, this judgment based on money. It’s all an illusion that you look better because you have a symbol of luxury. Really, it doesn’t bring you anything. It’s so banal.”

The point seems to be, status can be bought, or we like to believe it can. I kept thinking about the Sex And The City episode “The Caste System,” where Miranda invites Steve to her law firm’s annual shindig and offers to buy him a new suit. She loves Steve and doesn’t care that he’s a bartender who makes far less money than she does. She would like to be able to spend her hard-earned money to buy him nice things and fails to understand his discomfort at the inequities in their salaries. When she discusses the problem with the girls, it’s Charlotte who gives voice to the actual problem at hand: “You’re talking about more than a difference in income. You’re talking about a difference in background and education. This guy is working class…[You’re] trying to pretend we live in a classless society, and we don’t.”

Even though Carrie calls Charlotte “Marie Antoinette” for making such a comment, I think it’s true, and I think it’s at the heart of what’s presented in Deluxe. The mass market for “luxury” goods has not grown so much as the market for “status” goods. And although Americans make up one of the largest groups of consumers of status goods, we are not alone, and we are not the largest group. According to Thomas’s figures, the Japanese make up half of the luxury or status goods market, and while they claim “durability” is the greatest factor in their decision to purchase branded luxury items over anything else, Thomas posits this theory, based on sociologists’ research: “According to the polls, Japanese consider themselves to be a classless society--in one study, 85 percent stated they were middle class. At the same time, in Japan, conformity is prized. By wearing and carrying luxury goods covered with logos, the Japanese are able to identify themselves in socioeconomic terms as well as conform to social mores.” In other words, to pretend class does not exist, but at the same time to clearly define oneself as a certain type of person belonging to a certain class.

Not surprisingly, the Chinese are rising quickly through the consumer ranks for much the same reason. Thomas reports that Vogue China editor Angelica Cheung told her, “ ‘Most Chinese buy luxury as a status symbol rather than taste. They want people to know they are carrying around something expensive…They can’t pronounce the names and they don’t know where it comes from. They just want it because it’s expensive.’” It seems that so many burgeoning economies are taking their cues about luxury and status from the West. No chance exists for new entries into these markets, because they are dominated by Western brands. But are we selling them the lie?

And what about the lies we sell ourselves? The most disturbing chapter in the book is the one concerning the rise of the counterfeit luxury goods market. Thomas explains, “When the luxury goods market went democratic, they thought they could satisfy the middle market with lower-priced handbags and perfume. What they didn’t count on was middle-market consumers satisfying their craving for higher-end items by buying fake versions that they could pass of as real.” She goes on to describe the ways in which these counterfeit goods are produced, touring factories that employ people working literally around the clock until they pass out from exhaustion, or children who’ve been sold to factories because their parents are so poor they believe they are actually giving their kids a chance at a better life. And for what? So we can carry our fake bags to Target? So we can fool ourselves into believing we are better off than we really are?

What I like about this book is that I keep going back over things in my head, and I could write at far greater length about my thoughts if I had space and time and didn't want to be a tiresome windbag. The premise is about so much more than logo-ed handbags or couture fashion--it’s about all the ways we trick ourselves into believing in dreams, in mobility. The real rich--the true purveyors of luxury--stay hidden. They don’t shop in stores; they don’t attend fashion shows; they don‘t walk the red carpet. They are from many countries, and they are beyond reach. And as one South American woman tells Thomas at the end of the book, “We buy from luxury brands, but not ordinary products. Special items. There’s always something special. You can see what is mass and what is special. Luxury is not how much you can buy. Luxury is the knowledge of how to do it right, how to take the time to understand and choose well. Luxury is buying the right thing. [Thomas‘s emphasis]” What then, we must ask ourselves, are we really reaching for?

*images from powells.com, louisvuitton.com, chanel.com, hbo.com, and nytimes.com

2008: Fragrance Year in Review

2009-01-23T08:29:00.008-05:00

Looking back, 2008 was a strange year, rocky and difficult not only personally, but for so many people in so many ways. I had big goals for the blog and sampling, and they didn't quite pan out. I got off to a strong start with Estee Lauder, but I could not seem to keep the momentum with any of the other houses. I was too distracted to keep a plan together. I remember distinctly trying many of the Penhaligon perfumes, but only managing to produce a review for Bluebell. I made it through the Le Labo samples as well, but only after I stopped writing longer reviews, which was a shame because they deserved more time than I was able to give them, and now the samples are mostly gone.

Since August, I've primarily worn my own perfumes. A strange thing happened: when I felt things starting to careen downhill at work, I became very sensitive to what perfume I wore. I'm not a superstitious person, and I don't believe in talismans or good luck charms or lucky items of clothing, but I do tend to hang on to fragrance associations, and no matter how good something smells in an "objective" sense, if I associate it with a negative event, it's ruined for me, if not forever, then for a long, long time.

So what does one wear for the trip down the rabbit hole? First I tried something to keep my attitude positive, alternating between Estee Lauder Bronze Goddess (beachy, summery) and Viktor & Rolf Flowerbomb (rosy, robust). Didn't work. I felt increasingly agitated and unhappy at work, despite my aromatheraputic attempts, so rather than have Flowerbomb associated with a bad time and ruined for me forever, I put it away. As for Bronze Goddess, I unfortunately purchased that in "celebration" of the new job last spring, so it seems tainted and unrecoverable. Next I tried something to keep me calm and centered, and for that I chose Andy Tauer's L'Air du Desert Marocain, which I wore through September and October. I admit it brought me a sense of peace, and while I always admired this perfume from the beginning (which I won from sweet Andy, way, way back in the beginning), I don't think it's overstatement to say I grew to love it so much as to believe I can never be without a bottle--which is why, as things got even worse, I put that away as well. For several weeks during November, I didn't wear any perfume at all. When the holidays rolled around, I settled on Jo Malone Pomegranate Noir. I have to say, that perfume did a wonderful job of both lifting and comforting my low spirits. On the day I was "resource actioned," it was warm (for January) and humid, and because it was my first day back at work in the New Year, I wore L'Artisan La Chasse aux Papillon. I hate that such a pretty fragrance is associated with such a negative experience, but the good news is, I wore so little of it (I'm always careful with the white florals) that I don't think it suffered any permanent damage. And finally, to recover my spirits? Iris Poudre.

But what about the first half of the year? I found much to love in the year 2008, in the way of fragrance. As I said before, not everything got the treatment it deserved: the Le Labo fragrances, the Hermessences (if I ever buy one, the race is on between Vetiver Tonka and Osmanthe Yunnan), and several from L'Artisan (Timbuktu, in particular) would have definitely made the list, but I decided to discuss only scents for which I wrote full posts. So, without further delay, here are my picks:

1. Estee Lauder Estee. "The floral aspect of this is quite deep, and it dangles just at the edge of a chypre, with slightly detectable aldehydes to keep the wearer from feeling smothered by flowers. The jasmine and muguet make the rose slightly crisp, and the heart is golden with a touch of spice. I keep thinking of a picture I saw once of Natalie Wood from the early 1960's wearing a fur hat, with a coat and matching fur stole. She looks both poised and poised for adventure, ready for excitement and change. How little she knew what would happen next."

2. Tann Rokka Aki. "After about thirty minutes, Aki begins to lose some of its sweetness, and it feels like night coming on, the patchouli moving across the amber twilight like a darkening sky, the vetiver lighting it up softly here and there like stars. This phase is decidedly more grown-up than the opening, and easier to wear overall, even though I did enjoy the trip down memory lane that the opening notes provided. Aki is pretty and uncomplicated, like youth is or should be..."

3. Hermes Elixir des Merveilles. "This perfume is most definitely not a strict gourmand scent. If you were worried about all the vanilla and orange and chocolate, don't be. The opening is the most gourmand part of the scent, with a dark, dark chocolate note that almost translates as pepper on my skin. The orange is not sparkling or sweet, but a bit bitter, more like the rind than the fruit inside. The tonka bean lends to the spice as the scent develops, bringing out the dark heart which gets rounded rather than sweetened by the vanilla. It has a slight booziness, which is approprite because it's absolutely intoxicating. In the dry down the scent truly does get drier; the woods take away the booze and the cedar, frankincense and patchouli take over."

4. Guerlain Mahora. "One whiff of this scent, and I long to be on vacation somewhere. Permanently. Just after winning the lottery. What I enjoy so much about Mahora, which goes from bright and tropical to creamy to powdery and comforting--think a long day basking in the sun, followed by an evening on a patio with a warm breeze off the ocean--is the sophisticated yet quiet approach it takes. There's no mistaking the tuberose, to be sure, but it's as though she's donned a sun hat and picked up a book to retire to a poolside chaise."

5. Ineke Evening Edged in Gold. "Evening Edged in Gold begins with ripened, honeyed fruit, a deep but not overly sweet nectar, lightened considerably by the osmanthus, which, for lack of a better word, is dappled through the top, a whiff here and there...the scent ripens on my wrist, the fruit becoming deeper, the cinnamon bark and floral notes mulled in among the top notes. I find it almost a miracle that I didn't have wasps thrumming around me as soon as I stepped out the door wearing it. This has terrific lasting power, and the longer I have it on, I feel like it actually gets lighter, sweeter."

What were your favorite discoveries from 2008?

*images credited in original posts

Changes

2009-01-22T19:00:00.002-05:00

Good evening friends! I've been making some changes, signing up for challenges and listing book reviews and whatnot. As I add reviews for challenge books, you'll be able to access them from the sidebar on the right, or to refer back to the other few reviews I've had here. I've started my first reading challenge book (see sidebar)!

I'll have a review up for Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster in the next couple of days, and for now I'm planning to have perfume reviews on Fridays, so if you are a friend of this blog for the perfume, I hope you'll at least visit at the end of the week.

Have a lovely evening, everyone!

Reader's Journal: Nonfiction

2009-01-22T18:53:00.003-05:00

Works of nonfiction (alphabetical by author) I've reviewed:

Baumann, Leslie - The Skin Type Solution
Branch, Shelley and Sue Coleman - What Would Jackie Do? (mini review)
Colt, George Howe - The Big House
Garcia, Nina - The Little Black Book of Style (mini review)
Kimmel, Haven - A Girl Named Zippy
Nelson, Sara - So Many Books, So Little Time
Ollivier, Debra - Entre Nous: A Woman's Guide to Finding Her Inner French Girl (mini review)
Thomas, Dana - Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster
Valentine, Helen and Alice Thompson - Better Than Beauty: A Guide to Charm (mini review)

Reader's Journal: Fiction

2009-01-22T18:51:00.005-05:00

Works of fiction (alphabetical by author) I've reviewed:

Grimes, Martha - The Old Wine Shades
Groff, Lauren - Delicate Edible Birds
July, Miranda - No One Belongs Here More Than You
Martin, Lee - The Bright Forever
Mason, Bobbie Ann - Shiloh and Other Stories
Ng, Faye Myenne - Bone
Patchett, Ann - Run
Prose, Francine - Goldengrove
Shields, Carol - The Stone Diaries
Smith, Dodie - I Capture the Castle
Waters, Mary Yukari - The Laws of Evening
Wilcox, James - Heavenly Days

Reading Challenge: 9 for '09

2009-01-21T14:52:00.004-05:00

The second challenge I decided to enter this year should also help me attack my to-be-read (TBR) pile, and that's the 9 for '09 Challenge. I chose this one because the categories seemed fun, and nine books didn't seem too overwhelming (even though I generally read many more books than that in a year, committing to more just sounds overwhelming). This challenge is hosted by Isabel from Books and Other Stuff, and I found her challenge through A Novel Challenge, which lists just about any and every reading challenge you can possibly imagine. If you're looking for one to join, that site lists them all.

For this challenge, you pick nine books from your TBR stack, one from each category. I've listed the categories and my selections below:

Long. A book that's longer than the books you usually read. I've chosen Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke, coming in at a whopping 800 pages. I'm pretty sure that counts as long.
Free. A book recieved as a gift or through a swap or mooch. I chose Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, by ZZ Packer, which was originally on my Short Story Challenge list last year. My mother swapped for it and then sent it to me, so it was, uh, double-free, in a sense.
Dusty. A book that's been on your shelf for three years or more. I have plenty of these, but I chose The Red Tent, by Anita Diamant. I borrowed this book from my mother-in-law about four years ago. *cringe*
Used. A book you bought used. I buy a lot of used books, so I had plenty to choose from here. I'm going with The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon (purchased from Powell's), because I am the last "well-read" person in the world who hasn't read it, and may lose my self-appointed status if I don't.
Letter. A letter from your name, matched to a letter in a book's title. I went with the first letter of my first name, which is "P," and decided to read Postcards from The Edge, by Carrie Fisher.
Strange. A book from an unfamiliar genre. I am trying to branch out, and my mother loves to read mysteries, so she's sharing some of her books with me. I chose one she loaned me, Haunted Ground, by Erin Hart. I've read the first few pages, and it looks great.
Distance. A book by an author whose birthplace is more than 1000 miles away from where you live. I am going to read Norwegian Wood, by Haruki Murakami. He was born in Kyoto, and I live in Atlanta.
Alive or Not. This is a funny one: read a book by any living author who has won or been nominated for a literary prize, or read something by a dead author. I just got a copy of Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro, which was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize (so the cover tells me), so that's my pick here.
Cover. This was a tough one: pick a book based on its cover--ugliest or prettiest--and explain how the book does or does not live up to its cover. I went through my stacks of books, and while some covers were more compelling than others, nothing was strikingly pretty or horribly ugly. I chose the memoir Summer at Tiffany by Marjorie Hart because its cover is Tiffany blue and it seems to promise a sweet, carefree story of another time. We'll see!

As with the other challenge, I'll be posting my reviews here, so stay tuned.

*image from the 9 for '09 site, courtesy of Isabel

Reading Challenge: World Citizen Challenge

2009-01-21T14:26:00.002-05:00

Last year, I tried a couple of reading challenges, but I petered out sometime in the late spring. That's not going to stop me from trying again! The first challenge I decided to sign up for this year is the World Citizen Challenge, hosted by Eva from A Striped Armchair, and I chose this one to get outside my comfort zone. I buy a lot of non-fiction books, but I don't necessarily read them, so this will also help me attack my to-be-read pile.

For this challenge, I'm joining at the Major level, which means I must read five books from three different categories. The categories are: politics, economics, history, culture/anthropology/sociology, world issues, and memoir/autobiography. I've settled on the following books from my shelves (I think I have the correct categories):

History - Mary Queen of Scots, by Antonia Fraser
World Issues - The World Is Flat, by Thomas Friedman
Memoir - Falling Leaves, by Adeline Yen Mah
Culture/Sociology/Anthro - A History of God, by Karen Armstrong; A Perfect Summer, by Juliet Nicholson; How the Irish Saved Civilization, by Thomas Cahill

I'll be posting my reviews here, so stay tuned!

*image/challenge button provided by Eva at A Striped Armchair

So. Many. Books.

2009-01-21T13:11:00.002-05:00

If you were overwhelmed at the thought of reading, say, the New York Times's best American novels of the last twenty-five years, or the Modern Library's 100 best novels, then this may throw you for a complete loop. The Guardian has listed 1000 novels everyone must read.

Yep. Going to get right on that. Just as soon as I figure out this whole world peace thing.

*image from The Guardian, and shows Steve Coogan in the film version of Tristram Shandy

Yes We Can!

2009-01-20T09:16:00.002-05:00

Today is an historic and amazing day.

Doing My Part

2009-01-19T13:57:00.002-05:00

Hello? Hello? Is anybody out there? (Besides you, Mom.) Happy New Year! Long time, no post. If any of you are out there, I'd like for you to know that I've missed you all terribly. I've been thinking about getting back into this blogging game for a while now.

If you're out there, how are you? What are you doing these days? Me, I'm doing my part to raise the country's unemployment numbers. Yes, as of a few weeks ago, I was--ahem--"resource actioned." Honestly, I thought that was the stupidest term I'd ever heard, until a colleague (also recently, uh, released from duty) told me that her company used the term "redeployment." Way to remove the humanity! I am writing, or trying to write, and also trying to figure out what the heck I am going to do with myself now. One thing I've learned: trust your gut. If you sense something is wrong from the get-go, then get out, otherwise you may end up out of the frying pan and into the mouth of the volcano.

But you all know me. I don't like to dwell on the negative much. I'd rather think of this as a new beginning, an opportunity to change, at least for a little while. Perspective is key in this economy, as is creativity. With the extra time on my hands, I thought I should do something productive, like getting back in touch with old friends. Of course, I must make a few changes, given the circumstances. While I have enough samples left, still, to eke out a perfume review now and again, I'll mostly be focusing on my first love, books and writing. I thought about starting a "new" blog, but I could not abandon Sweet Diva. Somehow, it just didn't feel right. I hope you'll continue to visit, from time to time, just to say hello...if you're out there, that is.

Perfume Week in Review: July 27 - August 2

2008-08-02T09:38:00.006-04:00

This week I decided to stick to a plan. Some weeks, even if I pull everything out on Sunday that I think I want to try during the week, I'll go crazy by Tuesday and start wearing things willy-nilly, leaving my carefully chosen samples neglected. Which makes me wonder: How many of you out there are planners when it comes to sampling, and how many of you just pick and choose at random?

Sunday: Les Parfums de Rosine, Rose d'Ete de Rosine Eau Fraiche. Vida included a rather generous sample of this in the bag of goodies she gave me. A lover of rose, I let out a little squeal when I saw it. The notes in this are: at the top, citrus, tangerine, and pear; in the heart, lime tree flower, lotus, rose essence, and rose absolue; and in the base, musk and ambrette seed. The fruit here is refreshing, the rose light and lively. I know I've been resisting lighter florals, but this was just the thing to cure me. I think of this as a poolside fragrance, which means as I wear it I picture myself on a chaise next to some wonderfully appointed resort or hotel pool, resting under the shade of an umbrella with a book and a refreshing cocktail, without a care in the world. It lasts nicely for an eau fraiche, but it's not so heavy one couldn't spritz several times throughout the day.

Monday: Le Labo, Rose 31. I've got three words: Holy. Grail. Rose. Strangely (at least to me), Le Labo markets this as "an assertively virile fragrance for men." I found nothing about it to be particularly masculine, to tell the truth, nor do I find it "unisex," which usually means some mix of citrus, woods, and/or vetiver. I find this instead to be something that should transcend marketing hype. I find it odd that a company who claims that perfume should defy description falls into this trap, but so be it. All that really matters is what's in the bottle, and this one is a stunner, with Centifolia rose, cumin, olbanum, cedar, amber, Gaiac wood, and cistus ("highlighted by a distinctly physical animal note," no less). The woods and the rose blend seamlessly, and the scent is quite dry, but it is also lovely, and I think quite feminine in its own way, a bit woodland nymph dressed to the nines.

Tuesday: L'Artisan, Bois Farine. I almost can't talk about this one. I'm not sure what happened. First, I have my favorite perfume house. Second, I have Jean Claude Ellena, who's batting about ten million as a perfumer as far as I am concerned (you can probably tell from this that it's a bad idea to mix sports metaphors and perfume, but I do what I have to do). Third, I have iris and woods and a host of other lovely notes. All of this should add up to WINNER, right? I don't know if it was my lotion, something I ate, the heat, or a combination of all three, but here's what I smelled: peanut butter and sawdust. That combination was not as pleasant as it might sound. If that doesn't prove the subjectivity of the nose, nothing will. It was so awful that on my drive to work I had to roll down the window and let some fresh (smoggy) air into the car. I work less than a mile from my home people! When I got to work I scrubbed, and after that it was a bit better...in fact, enough better to even seem pleasant. I will try it again. I refuse to believe that I would not love this one.

Wednesday: L'Artisan, Dzing! Wednesday was my birthday, so I went with Dzing! because it makes me feel comfortable and happy, the way everyone should feel on her birthday!

Thursday: Le Labo, Jasmin 17. Mmmmm. Jasmine, musk, sandalwood, and vanilla. This is quiet, slightly powdery, caught-a-whiff-of-it-on-a-walk-this-evening jasmine. I tread very lightly with white floral samples, so I'm not sure if it was my under-application or the gentle tone of this perfume, but it seemed not to last, leaving only a faint, soapy trace behind. While it lasted, I found it quite pretty, but no match for Rose 31 for my affections.

Friday: Le Labo, Ambrette 9. Seeing a trend here? I have all these Le Labo samples, and I've heard such wonderful things about these fragrances. The best thing about Le Labo is their Discovery Set (probably all of you already knew about it, but what the heck), where you can choose three different 5ml scents for $52. We all know 5ml decants don't even always come so cheap when you break it down, and I think it's great they let you pick and choose, instead of having to buy three of the same (can you hear me, Frederic Malle?). Anyhow, I digress. Ambrette 9 is marketed for babies, and as ludicrous as I find this, I very much like this sort of scent, and I do like this one in particular. It's rather golden, honeyed, and soft, staying clean and close to the skin. It has a brightness to it that keeps it from feeling soapy, though, as a lot of lighter scents like this one can. I also like that it really almost smells like nothing--meaning, it doesn't smell like citrus, or like tea, or like a soliflore. Ambrette 9 is one of those scents where people make the delightful mistake of thinking this is just how you smell. And by the way, it's not babyish--not in the least--so you don't have to feel creepy about wearing it, as you might with, say, Clean Baby Girl.

Saturday: Repeat! I am going to wear the PdR Eau Fraiche again today. It's supposed to be hot, but maybe the haze will stay out of the air, and they sky will be a bright clear blue like it was yesterday, and this fresh bloom will keep the cheer going. I hope you all enjoy the rest of your weekend, and have a lovely week!

*images from Le Labo, LuckyScent, and First in Fragrance

Perfume Week in Review: July 20 - 26

2008-07-26T09:37:00.009-04:00

My apologies for not getting this post up yesterday. What a week! My perfume selections were all over the place, kind of like the weather. One thing hit me early yesterday morning on my way to the gym, when I realized that it was still quite dark even though only a month ago the sky held imminent brightness, that the days are getting shorter and fall is on the way. After that I sensed fall in the air all day. Most likely this is all psychological, because my birthday comes at the end of July and for me still marks that short span between birthday and back-to-school, even though it's been many years since I actually lived by that calendar. If my perfume choices this month tell me anything, it's that I have been more anxious than usual this year for fall's approach. I've wanted nothing but spice and incense, even as I try now and again to wear something light and summery. Anyway, enough babbling. Here are the perfumes:

Sunday: Annick Goutal, Eau de Ciel. This is a light, lovely, iridescent fragrance, like a dragonfly's wing. The notes are Brazilian rosewood, violet, Floretin iris, and lime blossom, and while they are lovely, they were not strong enough to convince me that I should continue to wear light, breezy scents, even in the heat, which is why on Monday I went with...

Monday: 10 Corso Como. This was a bit more like it, with notes of frankincense, musk, rose, geranium, vetiver, and Malay oud wood oil, although I must admit, it left me feeling a bit like Goldilocks. That is, Eau de Ciel was too light, too ethereal, and 10 Corso Como, while sophisticated and lovely, proved to feel a bit to dry for me. Perhaps it was my mood, but it made me think of leafless branches and high, icy clouds, and even though I'm ready for fall, I'm not that ready. It made me a bit melancholy, so on Tuesday, I went with...

Tuesday: Donna Karen, Wenge. This is one of my oldest samples. I'm pretty sure I picked this up in the first few months of blogging, which means it's been floating around in my stash, neglected. Wenge is part of Donna Karan's Essence Series, which also includes Lavendar, Jasmine, and Labdanum. I think it might be beautiful blended with something else, but alone it translated to something like saffron on my skin, and I found it a bit stifling. I have this same problem with Safran Troublant, which is quite pretty, but in summer tends to make me feel as though someone has soaked a rag in the stuff and tried to smother me with it. Having decided to leave Wenge alone until it gets cold and give it another shot, on Wednesday I decided to buck up and wear something summery, so I went with...

Wednesday: Estee Lauder, Private Collection Tuberose Gardenia. Even in its straightforward, simple beauty and elegance, it could not sway me. The perfume matters less than the fact that on Wednesday I met my first ever friend of Sweet Diva, Vida. She had offered me a sample of one of her favorite perfumes, and after emailing back and forth we realized that we work inside a mile from each other. Vida is quite cool and generous and fun, and she brought me a lovely bag of goodies! We had a lot of fun over lunch chatting about perfume and blogs and Sniffa and so on. How lucky I am to have such fun readers! I told her that the next day I would be sure to try...

Thursday: Montgomery Taylor, Ambra di Venezia. This warm, elegant floral, with notes of narcissus, jasmine, mandarin orange, lime, sandalwood and mango was certainly much more fitting with my mood. I agree with Vida that this is one of those perfumes that, instead of developing by note, from the first makes you feel as though someone has handed you an exquisite bouquet of stunning flowers. I think this would be lovely year-round, and who wouldn't want that bottle sitting on her dressing table? Apparently Montgomery Taylor is quite an artist when it comes to glass as well. Too bad for me, the hand-blown limited edition bottle is too costly, but the juice is still available in a regular bottle and well worth it. The next day, I thought about wearing this again, but I didn't want to use it all up right away, so instead I decided to wear...

Friday: Santa Maria Novella, Eva. With notes of citrus fruits, Italian bergamot, black pepper and vetiver, you might think this was more up my alley, after all my complaining about florals and my quest for something drier, spicier. This was lovely, but I think this one is suited to cooler weather. I also tend to have trouble with fragrances bearing black pepper (I cannot abide Rose Poivree, for example), but this one wasn't overwhelming. I'm afraid I can't do it much justice, though, because I was coming down with a cold, even though I didn't realize it until today, when I decided to wear...

Saturday: Estee Lauder, Private Collection. I could still smell when I put this on before going to the hairdresser this morning (I make it sound like I went to have a wash and set or something), and at the top, this one is too too green for the likes of me. Luckily, after about twenty minutes or so, it becomes something wonderful, or at least I trust it does because both my colorist and Bob said I smell good, and I'll just have to believe them!

I hope your week has been an adventure of scent as well, and that you'll share some of your fun! Have a wonderful rest of the weekend, my friends!

*images from Aedes, Donna Karan, and Montgomery Taylor

Perfume Week in Review: July 13-18

2008-07-18T10:37:00.011-04:00

I got this brilliant idea around the middle of this week, to change "What's Your Friday Perfume?" to "Perfume Week in Review," mainly because I was sampling away this week and realized I didn't want to keep any of it from you. Of course, the problem with having such an epiphany on Wednesday means I can't totally remember little details about other things I wore earlier in the week. Doh! I'll try to keep notes for next week, so I can pull it all together, but for now I'll do the best I can from memory.

Of course, I still want to hear about what you're wearing or sampling, not just on Fridays, but any time!

Sunday: L'Artisan Patchouli Patch. With notes of osmanthus, patchouli, white musk, anise, and spices, this is not your Woodstock hippie's patchouli, so if you've been avoiding this one because you're afraid it will remind you of the guy in your college English class who never seemed to change clothes (or bathe, for that matter), have no fear. This is patchouli with a refined, bright edge. I happen to like patchouli even in its "hippie oil" form, so this one worked well for me, although I have to prefer, I like a richer treatment of patchouli, more like the way it represents in Flowerbomb--a little sexy oomph.

Monday: Etro Shaal Nur. This was a "do over" of sorts, because I haven't worn Shaal Nur since the first time I sampled it, almost two years ago. that doesn't stop me from telling everyone how much I love it, though, so I thought maybe I'd better check on that. Results: Yep. Still love it. It's a pretty spiced rose, soft and calming, dry and spicy, and really rather modern, I think. I've linked to my review, and I stand by what I said!

Tuesday: The Different Company, Sel de Vetiver. I think at one point I had about four or five sample vials of this perfume. I somehow worked worked my way down to two (some of you out there may have received this from me), and I'm glad I finally heeded what the universe was obviously trying to tell me and tried this perfume. With notes of grapefruit, patchouli, cardamom, geranium, Haitian vetiver, iris, and ylang ylang, Sel de Vetiver is, to me, a very feminine vetiver perfume (as opposed to being a feminine perfume that contains vetiver), and luckily I wasn't overwhelmed by the citrus at the top. I'll have to talk about this one again, because as you can see, it was Tuesday. Tuesday was a long time ago, people.

Wednesday: L'Artisan, The pour un Ete. With notes of jasmine tea, green tea, lemon, and peppermint, this perfume is exactly as advertised: a refreshingly fragrant burst of tea on your wrists. It also happens to have terrific lasting power. I like tea scents, although I admit to not having tried many of them. If someone were to hold a gun to my head and tell me to buy a tea scent now dammit, I could choose this and not regret it, even if there were some other tea-based scent out there (Osmanthe Yunnan) I liked better.

Thursday: L'Artisan, Timbuktu. I love L'Artisan, and I'm amazed I haven't worked my way 'round their full offering not only once but twice by now. Sadly, I have a few samples that simply got lost in the crowd before I cleaned things out, and this was one of them. Probably this was a good thing, because I'm in a place right now where I am being very budget conscious and thoughtful, so I'm not tempted to GO OUT AND BUY IT NOW OH MY GOD I LOVE IT. Ahem. Excuse me. The notes are green mango, pink pepper berries, cardamom, karo karounde flower, smoky incense of papyrus wood, myrrh, and vetiver. This perfume is indescribably wonderful, but I promise to wear it again and try a better review. I even got a compliment on it, for the simple fact that it's so unusual and wonderful it stands out like the most elegant woman in the room at a party. Bottle worthy, and at the top of my list, possibly superseded only by the perfume I am wearing today, which is...

Friday: Hermes Hermessences, Vetiver Tonka. The Dark Knight premiers today, so in the spirit of things, let me just say, "Holy gorgeous vetiver perfume, Batman!" Vetiver Tonka is one of the more interesting treatments of vetiver I've tried. It's something much sweeter, even softer (dare I say powdery), yet without losing its own character. To me this perfume has the same presence as my beloved Elixir de Merveilles (no surprise, with JCE as creator); it's rather dry, but less gourmand. Elixir de Merveilles to me has a looser feel, more bohemian, if you will, where Vetiver Tonka is...well, a more self-assured, confident version of the same. It's less gourmand than Elixir, more floral, and it feels as though it's had everything unnecessary stripped away (not that anything in Elixir is unnecessary--no!) The notes are neroli, bergamot, vetiver, roasted hazelnuts, dried fruit, cereals, and tonka bean. My favorite Hermessence of the bunch so far. Oh yes.

So that's my two cents for the week. How do you all smell out there?

Have a lovely weekend!

*images from basenotes, luckyscent, and aedes

Etro Messe de Minuit

2008-07-11T09:51:00.003-04:00

I don't care how hot and sticky it is outside, all week I have been craving incense. I tried for several days to force myself into something "summery" (Prescriptives Calyx, Clinique Happy Heart, Serge Lutens Fleur d'Oranger), but the days I've been happiest with my perfume choices I've worn something dark. Wednesday, it was Black Cashmere, and today, it's Etro Messe de Minuit. We've had quite a bit of rain this week, and outside just feels swampy, but there's something about Messe de Minuit which suits this weather perfectly. It feels as though I've escaped the rain by running into an old wooden church full of mildew and incense. This might not sound appealing, but I assure you it is. Something about this fragrance feels so full of history.

I can also tell my incense phase has yet to run its course. Even though it's not technically an "incense" scent, I almost broke out the Jo Malone Pomegranate Noir this week as well--and I'm not saying it still won't happen.

What about you, friends? Are you spritzing to beat the heat, or to suit your mood?

Have a lovely weekend!

*image from Aedes

What's Your Holiday Perfume?

2008-07-03T10:38:00.007-04:00

First off, I need to come up with something better than this lame "What's Your [X] Perfume?" for these posts. They're all starting to run together, and me no likey.

I thought I'd get a head start on the weekend and post today, since it's Friday for most of us. Today I'm wearing Laurence Dumont Vanille Violette, from a sample sent to me by reader Nikki C. I can assure you that I will most definitely NOT be wearing this perfume tomorrow, though, because there's no way I'm going to be that casual with the precious drops I have left. This was one of those perfumes that as soon as I had dabbed it on my wrists, I knew I was going to be in trouble, because the first thought in my head was to look it up online and see if I could get my hands on some. Wouldn't you know, Sephora is out of stock, but they kept the image and description up just to taunt me, along with the fact that at some point in time this lovely juice was marked down to $10 a bottle! That's right! TEN DOLLARS!

It occurs to me that maybe I shouldn't be telling you how pretty this is, because there's likely no way you're going to find any unless you know someone who has a bottle. (The Perfumed Court doesn't have it, and Nancy over at Fishbone Fragrances is on vacation until July 14 and is not displaying her current inventory. Bah!) The notes are rose, ylang-ylang, bergamot, violet, lily of the valley, sandalwood, and benzoin, but I smell nothing but the most perfect, sweet summery blend of violet and vanilla, just enough of each so it is neither candied or foodie. This is how I had hoped things would work out between me and Christian Dior La Collection Particuliere Passage No. 8. We all remember how that turned out. This is a much happier ending--or would be, if I could get my mitts on a bottle.

Now, something else I've been thinking about: patriotic perfume. Stay with me here. For the holiday season, the wondrous events from October through January, we have all sorts of choices in terms of holiday perfumes--beautiful spicy, incense-y scents that reflect both the season and its spirit. For those who celebrate Easter, you have your choice of perfumes based on lilies, or anything that means, essentially, that spring has sprung.

But what about the Fourth of July? Let me admit right off the bat that this is my least favorite holiday of the year. In the few places I've lived in my life, this holiday is generally represented by drunk rednecks towing boats to and from various lakes, whilst wasted on Budweiser. I like fireworks, but I hate crowds, particularly when said crowds are filled with the aforementioned rednecks, who are usually so drunk by twilight as to be more obnoxious than usual.

I guess if I were being literal about it, I would say that any perfume representing the Fourth would contain notes of hot asphalt, grilled hot dogs, beer, lake water, sweat, watermelon, and firecrackers. (Are you listening, Christopher Brosius?)

Ugh. Let's not be literal. Let's instead think: what's the best perfume to represent the Fourth, and what are the criteria? Obviously, the perfume must be an American perfume, or at least by an American designer. I feel like it should also be somewhat classic, although I'm not averse to having more modern releases on the list. Most likely it would be friendly. I also believe it should be iconic, and therefore most likely popular. I know that makes some of you shudder, but think of it like the flag. Someone may have a niche flag out there that he thinks represents America better than the Stars and Stripes, and his friends may know about it and love it and agree--it's much better--but, uh, who cares? I've come up with some ideas, and you can either weigh in on these, or add your own. Here are a few I thought of (and these all happen to be "women's" fragrances, and all of them launched in the 1970s. Does this have something to do with my childhood, I wonder, or a particularly good era for American perfume?), but I'm amazed how short my list is:

1. Lauren, by Ralph Lauren (1978). Notes: green notes, violet, rose, carnation, spices, woody notes. I hear this has been reformulated, but it's image is still classic to me. This was a popular perfume when I was growing up, and to me it represented all sorts of chic Americana: monogrammed cable knit sweaters, penny loafers, deck shoes. This is what you wear watching fireworks from your sailboat in the Cape, no? (Do they have fireworks there? Can you watch them from boats? Doesn't matter. This is my fantasy. And note that the boat here is a SAILboat, not a motorboat pulled behind a giant pickup truck sporting a confederate flag sticker.)

2. Charlie, by Revlon (1973). Notes: citrus oils, peach, hyacinth, tarragon, jasmine, lily of the valley, cyclamen, carnation, cedarwood, sandal, oakmoss, vanilla. You cannot get more American than some kicky gal named Charlie in her white suit and bright smile. I loved those commercials. I wanted to grow up to be a Charlie gal, much more than I wanted to bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan. (Name that perfume!)

3. Private Collection, by Estee Lauder (1972). Notes: green note, orange blossom, linden, jasmine, reseda, chrysanthemum, rose, sandalwood, heliotrope, musks, amber. Sure, I could have gone with the more obvious Youth Dew, or even with White Linen (see sailboats and Americana above), but Private Collection is sort of like the American Chanel No. 5, don't you think? I would like to think of Private Collection as sort of an American perfume ambassador, representing us in its stately, sophisticated yet casual way. I fear, though, that people think of us more like Giorgio of Beverly Hills--loud, obnoxious, and insistently cheerful. I'm also going on record here: I think Estee Lauder might be THE American perfume house. What say you?

I would be tempted to add a few others, like Elizabeth Arden Bluegrass, which was my very first "grown up" perfume aside from Love's Baby Soft. Or how about Clinique Happy? Anything by Calvin Klein? I know I must be leaving off the most obvious, and I will want to come back and edit as soon as I've published this! Oh well, I'd rather hear from you all, anyway!

Have a safe and happy Fourth!

*images from Sephora and OsMoz

What's Your Friday Perfume?

2008-06-27T10:31:00.002-04:00

Hello all! Sorry to be late again this week! I may have to start asking about your Friday perfume on Thursdays just to keep up! I'm wearing Caron Fleur de Rocaille today, with notes of violet, gardenia, lilac, rose, jasmine, ylang-ylang, mimosa, sandal, rosewood, orris, and musk. This is a perfect "warm" warm weather perfume, perfect when you need a bit of coziness from a scent, even if it is scorching outside. As much as I love lighter florals for summer, sometimes they can't wrap me up in the comfort I need.

What are you wearing today or this weekend? Have you discovered anything new? Please do share!

Have a wonderful weekend.

*image from FragranceX

What's Your Friday Perfume?

2008-06-20T10:46:00.003-04:00

Sorry to be so late this morning! Lateness is becoming a habit with me these days, it seems. I blame Mercury retrograde (as always). I'm constantly forgetting things, dropping things, running into things, and running late these past three weeks. To add a bit of sweet calm to my life, today I am wearing Annick Goutal Petite Cherie, with notes of vanilla, peach, musk rose, and grass. As I run into doors and spill Diet Coke today, I'll be humming "I feel pretty, oh so pretty..." all because of this perfume. (Well, okay...I'm wearing pink, too. That helps.)

What are you all wearing today? I hope you feel as lovely as you are!

*image from annickgoutal.nl

What's Your Friday Perfume?

2008-06-13T08:12:00.002-04:00

Hello all! My perfume today: L'Artisan Orchidee Blanche. I haven't worn this in well over a year. In fact, I had sort of forgotten about it. Shame on me! My collection isn't so large that I don't know what I have, but it's easy to get into a rut of sorts. If I am not wearing a sample, I'm usually wearing the same two or three perfumes from my collection. Does this happen to you? Any forgotten favorites languishing in the drawer or cabinet?

I hope you all have a lovely weekend!

Prize Update

2008-06-07T12:37:00.002-04:00

Hello! Just an update to those of you who won prizes in the "Going Away Giveaway": I have everything packed up and ready to ship. I was unable to get to it this past week with the new job (which went quite well the first week!), but I hope to get everything to the post office on Monday.

Three people have yet to claim their prizes: Gina, Vida, and Kimber K. If any of the three of you sent me an email, please re-send it and be sure to indicate something in the subject line about the giveaway, especially if I cannot recognize you from your email address, as I mark anything suspicious as spam (including emails with the subject line "hello").

Hope everyone is having a great weekend!

What's Your Friday Perfume?

2008-06-06T08:52:00.001-04:00

This week I decided to break out of the back-and-forth pattern I've developed, going between L'Artisan Dzing! and Estee Lauder Bronze Goddess--oh, that's right! I didn't tell you! On the day I officially accepted my new position, I was passing through Nordstrom to meet friends at the cafe for lunch, and there it was: the last bottle. Yep. I got the last bottle (besides the tester...do they sell those? do the SAs get to keep them?) at Perimeter Nordstrom. Ha! Oh...but I was breaking a pattern, right? Yes, I decided to break out of the back-and-forth and try something new, so I pulled three sweet Carthusia samples from my sample drawer and gave them all a shot. Today I'm wearing my favorite of the three, Fiori di Capri, with notes of wild carnation, lily of the valley, oak, amber, sandal, and ylang ylang. This represents as a peppery white floral with an oaky base, sweet and heady at the top, but still rather dry, which makes it wonderful in the heat.

I also tried two others, Via Camarelle (lemon, bitter orange, marine musk, cedarwood) and Io Capri (wild fig and tea leaves), but to be honest I was too nervous and distracted by all the new things at work to pay them much notice. I liked them both at first shot, particularly Io Capri, which is probably the best treatment of fig I've found in a perfume so far because it veers away from the beachy-ness most fig perfumes seem to have and really does become something wild and green. I'll definitely be trying them again...but of course my favorite of the three is the most floral. Old habits die hard, and also, I was less distracted on Thursday because I was getting more used to my new digs.

And in case you were wondering what I wore on my first day at the new job...Dzing! of course. It's the closest thing I had to a security blanket!

Okay, your turn! What will it be today, or this weekend? Discover anything terrific this past week?

Happy Friday, everyone!

*image from Carthusia.com

Thoughts, and What's Next

2008-06-02T20:36:00.002-04:00

Hello Friends! Congratulations to those of you who won something in the drawing. If I could, I would give something to each and every one of you. You have all done me the kindness of reading this blog.

I've been thinking about ways to stay in touch, and I decided a couple of things. First, if you'll still visit, I could keep up "What's Your Friday Perfume?" so we could all touch base with each other. Second, I still have to finish my reading challenges, so I will still be posting my thoughts here and over at the Short Story Challenge blog. If you ever read this blog for the books, I hope you'll still drop by now and again.

Wow, I did this backwards: I did "what's next" before "thoughts." A reader (Uma) asked me in one of her comments:

"...it would be just interesting to know what were the most interesting and breathtaking (both positive and negative) discoveries you've made during your time as a perfume blogger - lines, scents, notes - whatever. What's your personal résumé?"

I've been thinking and thinking about this. The first thing I thought was this: When one is new to this sort of perfume experience, as I was, practically everything is breathtaking. I'm not entirely sure I ever got over that, because it seemed that almost everything I tried, I was moved by it for one reason or another. I suppose, though, the most consistently breathtaking line for me has been Frederic Malle. I can't think of one of these scents that didn't grab me by the collar and shake me around at least a little bit. Two of my very, very favorites, Iris Poudre and Une Fleur de Cassie, are from this line.

That said, the line that holds more favorites than anything, where I'd own a bottle of every single perfume if it were possible, is L'Artisan. The only ones I might be able to pass up are Ananas Fizz and Verte Violette, because the first one doesn't suit me at all and the second lasts...well, for just about a second. The other line I love is Hermes, although I didn't write about too many of their perfumes.

And this may sound nuts, but I was truly blown away by how much I loved Flowerbomb when I finally got around to wearing it. For some reason I expected it to be really awful, very "woman wearing too much perfume in the elevator," but instead I got an elegant hippie. Lovely.

The biggest disappointments to me? I didn't have many. I wrote about the few that I had. I wasn't in this long enough to be jaded about too many releases, but I will say this: I don't understand flankers. It's too much of a supermarket experience for me. It's like buying Wheat Thins--you can get original, low fat, low sodium, garlic and herb, roasted vegetable, cheese flavor, and on and on. Okay in a cracker, not so good in perfume.

The other thing that disappoints me are perfumes that are supposed to smell like soap or laundry detergent. (Come out from behind the draperies, Clean Fragrances. Everyone knows I'm talking about you.) If the idea is to blend in with the rest of our blandly scented environment, then why wear anything at all?

I suppose the last thing (because it's the end of the day, my brain is taxed, and I like to end on a positive note) is that I learned I am most definitely a white floral fanatic. Gardenia, jasmine, tiare, tuberose...I find them absolutely intoxicating. I thought for sure I'd come out on the side of heavy incense, and while I very much appreciate a good dark perfume, the crisp or creamy white petals will win every time.

I know there's more! I'll try to add as I think of it!

Prizes!

2008-05-30T10:22:00.002-04:00

This drawing was tough! I wish I had something to give each and every one of you...but Bob drew the names, and the lucky winners are:

Kimberly Kaye - Fragonard mini perfume set

Gina - Penhalogon's sample set, plus other fun samples

Joanna - Mini pack, including Annick Goutal, Susanne Lang, Robert Piguet and more

Nikki C. - Bond No. 9 sample pack

Uma - Sample pack

Claudia - Sample pack

Flora - Apercu!

Vida - Sample pack

Rosarita - Ivoire de Balmain

Veronica - Yves Rocher Neonatura travel pack and minis

Kim - Zents Sun Body Spray

Janet - Estee Lauder mini pack

Justine - Czech & Speake Neroli

Congratulations to you all! Please email me at sweetdivablog@yahoo.com, and send me your name and address.

Going-Away Giveaway!

2008-05-27T10:24:00.003-04:00

Friends, today will be the first day of the Sweet Diva Going-Away Giveaway! I have sample packs! I have full (or mostly full) bottles to share! I sound like I should be selling mattresses! Or perhaps used cars!

I've been trying to think how best to work this, and I think I've decided on the best approach: If you would like to be entered to win any prize, leave your name in the comments. I'll line up the prizes randomly, and then draw a name for each one. I may mix and match depending on how many people are interested. How does that sound?

Among the prizes are:
Balmain Ivoire (full bottle)
Sample Packs: Yves Rocher, Fragonard, Penhaligon's, Bond No. 9, Liz Zorn, etc.
Yves Rocher Neonatura Cocoon Travel Spray w/ refill
Houbigant Apercu (mostly full bottle...passed to me from a friend of Sweet Diva)
Zents Body Spray - Sun (full bottle)
Mixed sample packs and minis
Czech & Speake Neroli (mostly full, generously passed to me by the perfumer)

I'll keep the comments open for this until Thursday, and then I'll draw prizes and announce the winners on Friday. Come on, try your luck!

Some News...

2008-05-26T17:57:00.002-04:00

Hello Friends! I am so sorry for my ongoing absence. I have some news to share--some good, some bad. The good news is: This past Friday was my last day at my old job! I am going to work for a much smaller company, a startup that focuses on social networking and gaming. A friend of mine went to work there recently, and the whole vibe is much friendlier, more creative, more passionate than at the corporate monster I just left. I think it's going to be great fun!

The bad news is: With all this change, I've spent a lot of time reflecting on my life and what the future holds, and I've made the decision to "close" Sweet Diva. For a long time, it has been my dream to write fiction. I've tried off and on over the years, and I've come to the conclusion that it's time to give it a serious try. A big part of what's propelling me forward is you. Connecting to you all through Sweet Diva gave me more confidence. Unfortunately, this means devoting as much of my free time as possible to pursuing that goal. The blog takes a great deal of time, and I have realized over the last few months that I cannot do both.

That said, I don't want to leave you all empty-handed! I still have a number of sample packs and items to give away, so over the next week or so I'll be holding daily drawings for different items. You may enter a drawing every day, if you like, and if I don't get much participation, some of you may find your selves with a large amount of booty indeed.

Please visit again tomorrow when I'll hold my first "going out of blog" drawing of the week!

What's Your Friday Perfume?

2008-05-16T08:27:00.003-04:00

Hello friends! My Friday perfume is L'Artisan Premier Figuer, from a sample reader Nikki C shared with me. I cannot believe I haven't tried this. The notes are fig, fig leaf, milk of almond, sandalwood, and coconut. Sounds rather fresh and summery, no?

What are you wearing today?

Have a happy Friday!

*image from luckyscent.com

Two Years!

2008-05-09T07:53:00.002-04:00

Happy Friday everyone! The first thing: Today is Sweet Diva's second anniversary! I can hardly believe I've made it two years, and it's been touch-and-go at times. (Listen to me, making this sound like it's the Tour de France or something.) The reason I keep the blog going is you. I am so happy to have this little online community with friends who drop by and share. Thanks to all of you, from the bottom of my heart, for reading.

The second thing: Today I'm going to wear my sample of EL Bronze Goddess Eau Fraiche. Last night I just did a quick spritz on the back of my hand, and just that little sniff was enough to send me into a frenzy of Internet searching, trying to find a bottle to buy. Alas, this seems to be sold out everywhere online. I'm hoping that after wearing it today, maybe I'll decide it isn't worth all the fuss...I hope so!

And my friends, what are you wearing today? I hope your weekend is lovely, and if you are a mother or have a mother, I wish you a Happy Mother's Day!

*image from esteelauder.com

And the Winner Is...

2008-05-05T19:31:00.002-04:00

Jennifer S. S.! Congratulations, you are the winner of the latest grab-bag giveaway! Please send your name and address to sweetdivablog@yahoo.com.

Thanks to everybody who entered! I'll have another giveaway in a couple of weeks, so you can always try again!

Tommy Girl

2008-05-05T18:30:00.004-04:00

I have a confession to make. After a lot of thought, I've decided not to read Perfumes: The Guide by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez. I realize that many of you may quietly delete me as a daily read for this. How can I be a serious perfume fan if I choose not to read said book? Well, maybe I'm not serious. Maybe I'm just a fan. The truth is, I'm turned off by some of the reviews I've seen that say it's rather snarky, almost to the point where they just seem to be snarking for snark's sake. I've found that happens on some blogs as well, either in posts or in the comments sections, and I generally stop reading those blogs. It isn't that I love everything, or even believe taste is taste and everyone's equal in that sense.

I'm simply bothered by people who take the easy shot. If you know a perfume is sub-par, why even give it air time just to bash it? Leave it on the shelf and move on to something else. I do try to be honest when I dislike a perfume, and I'll go in for laugh now and again, but generally, I do try to keep the spirit positive. Making people feel bad doesn't make me feel good. Call me a pollyanna, but I feel that if someone has taken the time to read my blog and try to join the conversation about perfume, then I must only give credit. How many perfume releases are there a year to wade through? How many people live in places where there is no Barney's or L'Artisan boutique on the corner? How many people have discovered their love of fragrance by trying everything that's at the drugstore because it's all they can afford? Am I going to shut these people out or make them feel stupid? Hopefully not. I would rather open the door and say, "Welcome."

I'm also bothered by the idea that if an expert loves a perfume, we should all gather 'round and praise it. I don't happen to like Estee Lauder Beyond Paradise. I wore it for four straight days, gave it my best shot, and it fell flat for me, so I said as much. What did I get? A comment telling me Luca Turin loves it. Well, then, let me change my opinion! Not. I tried it again, and I still don't like it. So. There.

I see the benefit of working from "must smell" lists, particularly for people new to sniffing. It helps to smell the classics, or to sniff across types, if you will. But I'm bothered by the notion that lists tell us what we should and should not like. I'm not accusing Mr. Turin and Ms. Sanchez of doing this, by any means, but I do think some readers out there are going to start waving that book around like a bible, thumping on it and persecuting the rest of us if we don't toe the fundamentalist perfumista line. It also bothers me that snottiness is held up as discrimination.

All this to say: I don't like Beyond Paradise, and I will never, ever like Chinatown, but I will stand with Mr. Turin on Tommy Girl. Just trust me on this one: close your browser and go to Target and buy a bottle of this perfume. Do it now. I got my little half-ounce bottle for $7.99. With notes of apple tree, blackcurrant, camellia, mandarin, mint, honeysuckle, lily, rose, magnolia, sandal, and cedar, it IS summertime. It's children playing outside as the night sky darkens and the streetlights pop on. It's june bugs banging against a screen door. It's a game of tennis on a dewy summer morning. It's a hot car after a day spent in a cold movie theater. It's hamburgers and milkshakes at a drive-in at dusk. It's the beach, the lake, the golf course, the stoop, the porch swing. Whatever is your most pleasant memory of summer, when you spray this on your wrists, that is what you'll smell.

*image from Imagination Perfumery

Friday Poll (Yes, A Poll!) and A Giveaway

2008-05-02T07:58:00.003-04:00

Today it just doesn't seem like enough to know what you're perfume is for the day. Let's have a little Friday fun!

What's your perfume? Mine, of course, is Dzing!, but I feel it's time to get back into some florals now that May has arrived. I can hear Eau de Ciel calling me from my perfume cabinet.

What are you reading? I'm finally finishing Amy Bloom's Away, and then I have Jhumpa Lahiri's new collection (already read the first story) and then Lee Martin's River of Heaven. I may have a lineup, but I'm always open to suggestions!

What are you listening to these days? I need some new music. Help me! I recently discovered The Cold War Kids, and I downloaded their album but haven't listened to the whole thing yet. The other thing I've been stuck on is Neko Case's Fox Confessor Brings The Flood.

What activity are you most looking forward to this weekend? Here, it's cleaning. Yes, I'm actually looking forward to it. We also have two movies to watch, The Savages (love Laura Linney) and Gone Baby Gone.

It's time for another grab-bag giveaway! Leave your name in the comments if you want to be entered in the drawing. I'll keep it open until Monday evening at 7:00 EST.

Have a happy Friday, friends!

Apologies

2008-04-30T21:03:00.003-04:00

Friends, I offer you my most sincere apologies. Forgive my absence (again). I never wanted this to be a personal blog, nor do I plan to turn it into one, but I can say outright that I'm having a career-related crisis. Nothing earth-shattering--just the dreary in and out of the days at a job that brings little satisfaction. I hate how whiny that sounds, and I spend time counting up things to be thankful for instead. A dreary job is not the worst thing that could happen to a person, but it is an energy sapper in its own way. I am not looking for sympathy, and I know what I have to do is find something else. The prospect is daunting, but also exciting.

I have been wearing Dzing! for two weeks straight. I have not wanted to wear anything else. A few mornings I've thought of wearing a sample of something or other (this morning I almost wore Premier Figuer, which the very kind Nikki C sent to me), or getting back to the Penhaligon's I started trying so many weeks ago, but then I find I must wear Dzing! I find it so comforting and effortless, and I need a little of that in my life right now.

What have I been doing? Mostly hanging around with my nose in a book (The Emperor's Children is old news to me now...but a pretty good book!), or watching movies. So many movies! And I could not be happier that my only night of television is back and going strong: Earl, 30 Rock, Scrubs, The Office. Is anybody else dreading the end of Scrubs? I can watch the reruns of that one over and over...it always makes me smile.

I promise to try to get back to posting more regularly. And I'll be continuing my giveaways, not, as some have snarked, because I want to get comments, but because I am working very hard to de-clutter my home (and I am obsessed with this blog). I sort of started this last fall when I was trying to figure out what perfumes in my collection to sell or give away. I think I've come to more resolution about that now. Part of the effort is giving away samples, and the full bottles will most likely go up on eBay. I can notify you all when I put them up for auction if you wish, but it would feel very strange indeed to have that sort of transaction with a reader! But then, I also like the idea of a reader getting a perfume she/he really wants. I might even consider trading. I hope to work that out in the next few weeks.

I will be back on Friday--to hear what you're wearing, of course! Have a happy rest of the week until then.

What's Your Friday Perfume?

2008-04-11T08:30:00.003-04:00

Happy Friday everyone! I'll be continuing my Penhaligon's sampling with Artemisia, with notes of nectarine, green foliage, green apple, lily of the valley, jasmine tea, violet, vanilla, oakmoss, sandalwood, musk, and amber. Lovely for spring, no? I plan to post about this and Malabah, so I'll say no more. Shhh.....

What are you all planning to wear today? From the look of the weather forecast, spring is not being a cooperative season this year. Some of you are buried under snow, while we here in Atlanta are buried under pollen--for now. Early next week we are expecting highs in the low 50s and lows in the low 30s! I am sorry to sound like the Weather Channel, but this is unheard of! I'm so tired of my sweaters...I am ready to wear a skirt and sandals!

*image from Penhaligon's

Penhaligon's Bluebell

2008-04-08T18:59:00.004-04:00

Finally, in the first full week of April, after hemming and hawing my way through March with a post here and a post there, I am ready to get down to business. I've been randomly picking things up and putting them down again, spritzing on scent and then forgetting about it during the day, thinking of something fine to say about a fragrance now and again and finding myself without pen, paper, or occasion to write. I know for a fact, if someone were to look through my notebook at work, they would find notes scrawled in the margin like "mentholated vanilla powder--sophisticated and sort of fresh" or "truly the juice, real rep. of or." I also have all kinds of scraps of paper floating around in my purse with nothing but notes on them. If someone were to happen by my desk, he would see a sticky note with something like, "galbanum, muguet, cyclamen, jasmine, rose, cinnamon, clove."

At least today he would, because those were the notes I scrawled on a piece of paper this morning, the notes for Penhaligon's Bluebell. Penhaligon's was one of the perfume houses on which I chose to focus this year, so the coming week or so will feature these scents. The terrific Gail (and where is Gail, these days, anyway?) sent me their sample set, which contains generous samples neatly packaged in a cute tin box. I'm a sucker for this line for the bottles and the labels--I find them so charming. Luckily, in the case of Bluebell, the juice lives up to its appearance. It's both old-fashioned, like the label, yet streamlined a sort of modern, like the bottle.

From the look of it, you might expect something powdery, but this scent is--while flowery--also earthy and spicy in the best possible way. I've never traipsed through the woods in Britain during April or May, so I've no idea what a bluebell really smells like, or whether in fact it has a smell at all, but when I smell this perfume, I picture this exactly:
It has the exact smell of dense blue, of shadow, of the cool, damp ground, of the wood and bark on the trees. This scent seems to me the perfect representation of the thing, even if it were nothing like the actual scent of a bluebell (according to the Penhaligon's site, it is an "authentic" soliflore, so I'll take their word for it). I was excited when I saw this picture on Wikipedia, because it matched so perfectly the image in my head...or almost, because in my head, it was cloudy and raining a bit. The only other scent I can think of that brings me this amazing feeling of being comforted by cool blue shadows is Annick Goutal's Eau de Camille, which is a bit headier because of the lilac, but also more delicate in the base, more fleeting, where Bluebell holds its intensity quite nicely through the day, offering a peaceful glance of woods after rain.

*images from Penhaligon's and Wikipedia

What's Your Friday Perfume?

2008-04-04T09:12:00.003-04:00

I thought this week would be a "comeback" of sorts. I had everything planned for my reviews this week, and then...another stomach bug. Half the office seems to have it. I make a solemn vow that soon I will have more than one post a week about perfume!

Today I'm feeling much better, and I've decided to go all springy and try Diorissimo, even though it's a bit rainy and not super warm. I'm hopeful.

What are all of you, my friends, wearing today...or this weekend? Are you trying something new, or wearing an old favorite? Either way, I hope it enhances a happy weekend!

*image from FragranceX.com (which unfortunately has none of this in stock)

Parfums de Nicolai Balkis

2008-04-01T10:10:00.003-04:00

I've encountered few perfumes that make my mouth water. Granted, I don't wear many gourmand fragrances, which I suppose would be the most likely candidates for getting those salivary glands a-working. I could be wrong. And please note, I'm drawing a distinct line between perfumes that make your mouth water, and perfumes that make you drool. Plenty of perfumes make me drool with desire, but this thing with Balkis--it's completely involuntary. I get a whiff and my mouth draws into a pucker, and I cannot help myself.

The notes in Balkis are raspberry, Turkish rose, black pepper, coffee extract, iris, benzoin, and vanilla pods. One whiff of the raspberry here, and I'm transported back to childhood. I loved (still love) sour candy. In the opening notes, this scent has the same effect on me as a sour lollipop. I want to unwrap it and roll it around on my tongue for a while, and then I want to go outside and ride my bike or play in the dirt.

The raspberry in Balkis comes across to me as dried and a bit chewy, the tang softened by the rose and the coffee. The pepper is underneath, but the strangest thing of all to me is that Balkis smells not peppery but salty. Even with a rather gourmand list of notes, there's something very organic to me about this scent on the skin, and I think that's partially what makes me think about childhood. As adults, many of us sit in sterile offices all day, away from our physical selves. We're locked in with a computer and a phone rather than out among the elements. As children, we rode our bikes and made mud pies and planted imaginary gardens. We carried the scent of the world with us wherever we went; we had leaves in our hair and grass stains on our knees. I'm not sure if today's children get the pleasure of being dirty--randomly dirty, not dirty in an activity-oriented, sanctioned way.

As Americans, we tend toward the squeaky clean. Everything from perfume to household products is lauded for being fresh. What I like about Balkis is that, to me at least, it seems to be the opposite, without having to go the route of obvious skank or animalic properties. The iris, benzoin, and vanilla pods (ever smelled a vanilla pod? it isn't sweet like extract, but a spicy and dirty vanilla essence) especially give the base an earthiness that's incredibly appealing. And it's strange to admit, but the one thing that Balkis--this perfume that makes my mouth water--most reminds me of is sweat. (Have I never told you my sweat smells like raspberries and roses? Ha!) I'm not talking about Olivia Newton John "Let's Get Physical" sweat. I'm talking about the scent of your own bed, the warm and familiar smell of the person sleeping next to you, the mornings you wake up and stay in your pajamas and read a book and can smell the coffee, the raspberry jam on your toast, the remnants of last night's fire. It is the subtle yet sour, salty smell of familiarity, comfort, and desire. It makes me think of the French phrase bien dans sa peau, to feel comfortable in one's own skin. If you really think about it, all that obsessive scrubbing and ordering and anti-bacterializing does not exactly scream, "I am at home in the world!" But I'm not here to change anyone's habits. You can bathe once or twice a day and still wear Balkis, at least.

*image from Luckyscent.com

And the Grab Bag Winner Is....

2008-03-31T19:43:00.002-04:00

Nikki C! Congratulations Nikki! Please email me at sweetdivablog@yahoo.com with your name and address.

Thanks to everyone who entered. I'll be holding another grab bag drawing in the next few weeks!

What's Your Friday Perfume? (Psst...and a Giveaway)

2008-03-28T08:53:00.002-04:00

Good morning all! I'm planning to wear Penhaligon's Bluebell today. I've never tried it before...should be interesting!

What are all you lovelies wearing today or this weekend?

I have a little prize for you. Over the past couple of years I've collected a number of samples from purchases, friends, and well-wishers. I hate to see them languishing in the drawer, so I've assembled a bunch of sample grab bags. These are samples I've tried, or duplicates of things I already own. Some have several days' worth, some have just enough to wear once to see if you like them. I've distributed all kinds of scents across five bags, and I'm giving the first one away this weekend.

Let me know in the comments if you'd like to be included in the drawing. I'll keep this open through the weekend, and I'll draw a name on Monday evening.

Happy weekend, everyone!

Guerlain Mahora

2008-03-24T20:33:00.003-04:00

Not a long post tonight, but I had to tell you all about Mahora. Sweetlife (Alyssa, to fans over at Perfume Smellin' Things) kindly sent this to me, most likely because she knows I love white florals.

The notes in Mahora are:
Top: orange, almond tree blossoms
Heart: ylang-ylang, neroli, tuberose, jasmine
Base: sandal, vetiver, vanilla

One whiff of this scent, and I long to be on vacation somewhere. Permanently. Just after winning the lottery. What I enjoy so much about Mahora, which goes from bright and tropical to creamy to powdery and comforting--think a long day basking in the sun, followed by an evening on a patio with a warm breeze off the ocean--is the sophisticated yet quiet approach it takes. There's no mistaking the tuberose, to be sure, but it's as though she's donned a sun hat and picked up a book to retire to a poolside chaise. I love this tuberose, so happy and relaxed on vacation. And I love that there's no coconut, or anything approaching coconut--or suntan lotion--nothing that shouts blatantly: "Yoo hoo! See my grass skirt? Want to rub some oil on my back?"

I need to do a little test, but Mahora reminds me of another white floral I recently fell in like with, Michael Kors EDP. That perfume is also an interesting approach to tropical, a bit sweeter if my nose remembers correctly, but still refined, a lady in a white linen dress. Perhaps later this week I'll cover that and see.

*image from 99perfume

Reader's Journal: The Promiscuous Reader

2008-03-22T10:48:00.003-04:00

How many of you out there are promiscuous readers?

Not sure what I mean by that? Let's say you go to the bookstore or to your favorite online bookseller, and you carefully select four or five books that you've had on your wish list for a while. As you're driving home with your books, or as you're waiting daily for the books to be delivered, you develop a plan. You know, for example, exactly which book you will read first, and it makes your heart pound just to think about it.

When you arrive home with your books, or when they are finally delivered to your door, you plan the best time to read, a time when you know you'll have minimal interruptions for the longest possible stretch of time. If you're the impatient type, like me, you may flip through several of the books and read the first few pages. But "the chosen one" remains in its virgin state, spine uncracked, until the appointed hour.

Finally, the moment arrives. You're in your favorite chair, or propped up with pillows in some cozy reading spot. You have the right lighting; you have a cup of tea or coffee, a glass of wine or a Diet Coke. You open the book. You read the dedication and acknowledgments, just to make that divine suspense last a leeetle bit longer, and then: There it is. The first page.

As you settle in and start to read, you think to yourself, "This is so exciting. I'm finally reading this book! The use of language...oh, that phrase there! That dialogue!" But in the back of your mind, something else is happening. You notice that your enthusiasm feels forced. You keep reading and hope it will begin to feel more natural. After all, haven't you been waiting for this moment for hours, days, or weeks on end? Didn't you picture how great it would be a thousand times over when you finally settled in and started to read, how you would be carried away, forgetting work and chores and all the troubles of the world for a few hours?

You keep reading, but the more you read, the more conscious you become of a most disturbing fact: You're faking it. Sure, you're looking at the words and turning the pages, but be honest. You're not really present. And why is that?

Because you're thinking about another book, that's why. You might even be thinking about several books, or a whole other genre. "This book is so serious," you say. "Beautifully written. Amazing. But maybe I need something lighter. I had such a long day at work, and I just need something to help boost my mood." Maybe you're reading a novel and you realize you're more in the mood for short stories. Maybe you're reading fiction but you also bought a couple of new biographies you've been wanting to dig in to for a couple of weeks. Or maybe, just maybe, you got a new copy of your favorite magazine in the mail that day, and you can hear it calling to you from the coffee table.

You put your bookmark (always use a bookmark, people!) in the book to keep your place and set it down. You tell yourself you'll come back to it tomorrow, or on the weekend, or next week when you're off for a few days and have more time. Then you start the search. You go through your TBR pile, your bookshelves full of things you've already read, your magazines. You think it's only going to be this one time, but it continues for days, weeks, this restlessness.

You cannot commit to a book. The book you thought you wanted sits untouched where you left it, gathering dust. All over the house are books you've picked up and discarded, bookmarks noting the exact moment you abandoned them. You think maybe you should just stop reading for a while. You should watch movies or television. You should listen to books on your iPod. You should go for a run, clean out your closet, wash your car, or repaint the house.

As you go on distracting yourself in any number of ways, something happens. One day, a book pops into your head. Maybe you hear someone else mention it, and like a word or song that suddenly seems to be everywhere, it's constantly on your mind. It makes you a bit nervous and concerned. What if it happens again? What if you pull the book down from the shelf, or make a special trip to the bookstore ("If they have a copy, I was meant to read it now," you think.) to buy it, and the same thing happens? You get so far, and then you start thinking about other books? You wait, but eventually you decide to throw caution to the wind. Maybe you and the book can make a go of it. Maybe this time will be different.

Oh, sweet relief when it works! The book is just the thing you needed! You read and read it; you think about what will happen next when you're away from it. You recall your favorite scenes during boring meetings, think about especially well-turned phrases in chapter fifteen as you drive. You finish the book, and you can practically hear the Rocky theme song playing as you snap the book shut after the final page. You did it! You finished a book! You are back on your game! Things will be different now! You will pick up other books and read them in full. You will be committed and serious. You will not cheat.

Okay, so, I've been using "you," but I suppose you all know: I'm talking about myself. Perhaps you've noticed the Winesburg, Ohio image that's been in the sidebar for--oh, I don't know--a month? Six weeks? I haven't changed it because at certain points it would have meant changing it almost daily. Here's a list of books I've started and stopped in the meantime: Conversations with Woody Allen, The Emporer's Children (Claire Messud), Away (Amy Bloom), Quakertown (Lee Martin), Jenny and the Jaws of Life (Jincy Willett), Rare and Endangered Species (Richard Bausch), Remembering Ray (essays about the late, great Raymond Carver), two current issues of Real Simple and Domino, plus several back issues, and Getting Things Done, for work, by David Allen. I've also listened to Selected Shorts on my iPod, short story readings that go on at Symphony Space in New York, and I've actually listened to Ron Carlson's "Towel Season" and John Updike's "Walk with Elizanne" repeatedly. I also got addicted to Project Runway, but as soon as it ended...well, let's just say it was difficult, and I seriously considered renting the first three seasons.

The book that finally broke the spell for me, as you probably know because of the image on the post, was Prep, by Curtis Sittenfeld. I read this when it was first released, as a "summer read," and I remember being surprised at how good it was, how solid and non-chick-lit it seemed. I've always meant to re-read it, and a week ago I decided to give it a shot. I had nothing to lose (as long as I ignored my ever-growing TBR pile). And I'm happy to say I'm finding it quite good the second time around, and I'm almost finished with it.

Almost.

*image from Powells.com

What's Your Friday Perfume?

2008-03-21T09:07:00.002-04:00

Happy Belated First Day of Spring! I am wearing Ormonde Jayne Champaca today, which is one of my favorite perfumes for spring. What are you all wearing to celebrate the first day of spring?

Have a happy Friday, everyone!

Ineke Evening Edged in Gold

2008-03-18T19:26:00.004-04:00

I feel rusty. I don't at all feel up to the challenge of creating a meaningful description of this perfume. But I have a dilemma: I only have a wee drop left, and when I write about a perfume, I have to wear it. I cannot do it from memory. Often I have the "aged" version on one wrist, to verify the dry down, and the "new" version on the other, so I can re-experience the top notes.

Chaya sent me this sample, and I have ordered another from Ineke (if that tells you anything), but as much as I don't feel up to the challenge, I also don't feel like waiting. Several of you have asked what I think about this one, and all I can say is: It works for me. Oh, how it works.

The notes in Evening Edged in Gold are:
Top: gold osmanthus, plum
Heart: angel's trumpet, saffron, cinnamon bark
Base: midnight candy, leather, woods

Let's start with the obvious: What the heck is "midnight candy?" I actually went so far as to type that into Wikipedia. How am I to know whether that's a thing or not? I've been amazed at some of the ingredients in perfumes, thinking surely they were made up, when they turned out to be real.

But no matter the names of the notes. All that matters here is the experience. To give you an idea, a visual sense, I looked and looked for a suitable still life:

I'm still not sure that does it justice. So the words, the words...Evening Edged in Gold begins with ripened, honeyed fruit, a deep but not overly sweet nectar, lightened considerably by the osmanthus, which, for lack of a better word, is dappled through the top, a whiff here and there. I was surprised, honestly, that Evening Edged in Gold contains only plum, and not a heck of a lot more fruit, particularly peaches. But now that I smell the top notes again, there is a little something there of plum wine. And really, the scent ripens on my wrist, the fruit becoming deeper, the cinnamon bark and floral notes mulled in among the top notes. I find it almost a miracle that I didn't have wasps thrumming around me as soon as I stepped out the door wearing it. This has terrific lasting power, and the longer I have it on, I feel like it actually gets lighter, sweeter. Maybe it's the midnight candy, but this scent seems to work in reverse--and that's not a complaint. No, no way. The leather here is not as pronounced on me as in, say, Femme, which is probably closer to it than any other scent I've tried, and because of this it's better for the warmer weather (or at least the 70s).

Now here's the thing: I think I like it better than Femme. (I ordered the sample so I could be sure. Ahem.) Blaspheme, I know, but it's true. In considering what to say about Evening Edged in Gold, it occurred to me that this is one of those perfumes for which, if you tried it and really loved it, you might be able to give up everything else. I don't say that lightly. I've worn it three different days, and each time I felt like I was wearing something favorite, something me, not unlike a signature sweater or treasured piece of jewelry, yet not in an obvious way. That's unusual for a perfume, I think. We love lots of things, we perfumistas, even in all our self-acclaimed snobbery and persnicketyness. But how often do you put something on and think, "This is just me."? Not often, I imagine, although I'd love to hear in the comments if you have had that sort of experience. Maybe it isn't as uncommon as I imagine.

*images from Ineke and WebMuseum (Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Fruits from the Midi, 1881)

What's Your Friday Perfume?

2008-03-14T08:31:00.002-04:00

Hello Friends! This morning I spread out all my new goodies, closed my eyes, and selected Ineke Evening Edged in Gold. I haven't even sniffed it yet, so this should be an adventure.

What are all of you wearing today? I hope your Friday is a happy one, and your weekend is full of fun and relaxation.

*image from Ineke

Blessings

2008-03-12T20:34:00.003-04:00

Friends, I am sorry again for the lack of posts this week. Please bear with me! Work and the time change, among other things, have me in a tizzy. I hope all of you out there are breaking out of these end-of-winter doldrums. I believe I see light at the end of the tunnel, or at least at the end of March.

I would like to say a public THANK YOU! to some very kind people who've sent me treats: Kim, Sweetlife, and Chaya. Kim sent me Mitsuoko in EDP, among other things, and I'm both curious and afraid. I've ony tried the EDT, and it did not fare well. In a nutshell, I smelled like I'd been hosed down by an exterminator. I've heard time and again, however, that the EDP and the parfum are a completely different story. Keep your fingers crossed for me. In her package of goodies, Sweetlife sent me more Organza Indecence (one can never have too much) and Tom Ford Black Orchid Voile de Fleur, which I have been dying to try. I have a feeling it might be love. Chaya's care package included Miller Harris Geranium Bourbon and Ineke Edged in Gold--I think that one will be a killer, as in budget killer. I feel very lucky to have made such friends through this blog, especially during these past few weeks. You all remind me that life isn't all about toil and the paycheck, and these things do not define us.

*Early Sunday Morning, Edward Hopper (1930) from WebMuseum (This painting makes me think of Mystery Train.)

What's Your Friday Perfume?

2008-03-07T07:37:00.002-05:00

Happy Friday everyone! What's your perfume today? I'm going with Jolie Madame. It's cool and wet today, and supposed to get colder--forty-two degrees tomorrow. Where the heck is spring?

Have a wonderful day!

*image from FragranceDirect

Cate Blanchett Says...

2008-03-06T19:15:00.005-05:00

The winner of The Precious is Bonnie. Bonnie, you must go forth into your email account and send a message with great haste to sweetdivablog@yahoo.com. In many days you will find promising treasure in your mailbox.

Congratulations Bonnie, and thanks to all of you who entered the drawing!

*image from Wikipedia

Christian Dior La Collection Particuliere Passage No. 8, and a Giveaway

2008-03-05T19:03:00.003-05:00

How excited was I about Christian Dior La Collection Particuliere Passage No. 8? Let's put it this way: When Gail very generously sent me a sample, she labeled it "The Precious." Iris! Violet! Even though I knew I'd never be able to afford a bottle, I was itching to try it.

"The Precious" proved to be not unlike the item for which it was named, that shiny gold band that drove Gollum (and almost Frodo) to madness in The Lord of the Rings. As soon as I applied it, it started working its own sort of dark magic. After just a few minutes, I felt slightly less than human. My skin took on an opaque, peachy cast, smoothing out and hardening. My hair coarsened and turned an unnatural shade of red before tightening up into an artificially curled bob. My eyes felt sort of hard and glassy, and I couldn't blink. At my joints, hinges and gaps appeared. I found I could remove my hands and feet and then put them back on. Having a little fun, I attached my feet to my arms and my hands to my legs, but I was afraid a co-worker might happen by my desk and catch me so I put them back. I felt compelled to stand behind my chair in awkward poses: my left hand in the air, almost as if waving at someone, my right hip jutting out as though I'd started to doing the bump and stopped halfway through, my head turned to look back over my right shoulder in a fashion that suggested I'd just heard someone call my name and whipped my head around in response. I stood that way for half an hour before the phone rang and startled me back into motion.

At lunch, my fingers were so stiff I could barely grip my fork. When I finally managed to get a hold of it, I found my mouth wouldn't open so I could get the food in. I'm pretty sure I stabbed myself a few times, but I felt nothing. My co-workers were starting to notice something was off. More than one person in the cafeteria asked me what was up with the Mona Lisa smile, but when I tried to answer (to ask them, "What Mona Lisa smile?"), no words came. My boss accused me of being secretive and looking for another job. "Why won't you tell anyone what's going on?" he asked me. "And why are you wearing that suit?" Until that moment I hadn't realized that the jeans and sweater I'd worn to work that morning had been replaced by an ill-fitting olive green Jones of New York suit, and my matching olive green shoes (high heels? on me?) wouldn't stay on my feet, most likely due to the little metal rods that had emerged through my soles.

But the worst part was the smell, like dusty plastic. It reminded me of certain department stores, the ones that use those really cheap mannequins--wait a minute! It was all coming together: the hardening, smooth skin; the synthetic looking hair; the weird joints; the freakish urge to pose unnaturally. I had turned into a mannequin!

And then I heard a voice. I'm pretty sure it was Cate Blanchett. I was bummed that it was only her voice and not a vision, because I always like to see what she's wearing. "Do not be afraid, Greeneyes," she said, her voice lilting and calm. "For a bathroom is just down the hall. In there you will find great relief."

At first I was a little confused, because it occurred to me that if I couldn't get food into my mouth, I probably wasn't getting anything out the other end, either. Also it seemed an odd for Cate Blanchett to contact me through the ether and tell me to use the restroom when I've been managing this task on my own for years. I was about to say something sarcastic in reply (telepathically, as my mouth was still frozen in that mysterious smirk) when it occurred to me what she actually meant: soap! Soap! All I had to do was wash away The Precious, and I would once again be human!

It took me about two hours to get down the hall to the bathroom. If you think it's easy to walk in ill-fitting shoes and with little metal rods sticking out of your feet, you're wrong. The other problem I had was that I felt compelled to stop every few feet and strike a pose. The only thing that seemed to release me was a co-worker happening by, and after lunch people are generally either in meetings or working (read: snoozing or surfing the net) at their desks, so there's not much hallway action. By the time I got to the sink I was ready to weep with relief, but what with the glass eyes and all, no dice. Thank goodness the faucets are automatic, so I didn't have to work any twisty knobs to get the water on. I pounded on the soap dispenser with the edge of my rigid hand. The cleaning folk aren't always regular about keeping the dispensers filled, but after whacking away at it for a minute or so, I was able to get a few drops out. I rubbed my wrists together so vigorously that if I'd been made of wood, I might have started a fire. I got the feeling back in my fingers first, and as my hands became more nimble I was better able to remove The Precious. My freckles returned, my eyes wept real, wet tears. My hair loosened back into its usual disheveled mess. When I looked down, there were my jeans and black sweater. Oh, to be human again!

And now here I am, back at the computer, typing away. No more urges to stand behind my chair and point at some imaginary bird flying through the sky. The truth is, I have this same problem with Serge Lutens Iris Silver Mist, although it's not quite as drastic. Whatever it is that they've done with the iris and violet, it absolutely does not work on my skin. It gives off the most horribly sweet chemical smell that really does make me smell plastic. If you love Iris Silver Mist (and many people do--it's a great disappointment to me that I cannot wear it), then you absolutely should try this. As for me, I need my hit of iris to have some green or some sparkle, like Prada Infusion d'Iris or Hermes Hiris.

Too bad for me, but lucky for you, because I'm going to pass this baby on to a lucky winner. Let me know in the comments whether you'd like to try The Precious (also known as Christian Dior's La Collection Particuliere Passage No. 8), and I'll draw a winner at 7:00 PM EDT on Thursday, March 6. Only one thing--if you should turn into a mannequin, you're on your own! Unless, of course, Cate Blanchett shows up to help you.

*image of Passage No. 4 from instyle.com

Hermes Elixir des Merveilles

2008-03-04T21:21:00.003-05:00

I didn't wake up feeling lucky. Like the weather, my mood has been all over the place. Trying to make up for being a bad blogger, last night I checked today's weather and selected a sample to wear. It was supposed to be rainy and warm in the morning, with high winds, clearing and cooling later in the day. Early spring confounds me when it comes to perfume, I've decided. When April arrives, I seem to know just what to wear, but March sends me all over the map. I can't abide too much variety, which sounds ridiculous for someone sampling something new every day, but I even try to work my samples with the season, to get into a groove. Trouble is, it's impossible to find a groove when it's seventy degrees one day and fifty the next. I guess that's when I start leaning on the tried and true, especially since I'm afraid of treating something new unfairly.

Before retiring last night, I decided to try out Hermes Eilxir des Merveilles. I worried a little that it might be too heavy or gourmand for the warmish morning, but I was worried that if I didn't try it now, I might not get to it again until next fall.

The notes in Elixir des Merveilles are:
Top: Clemenvilla orange, orange pulp, chocolate
Heart: Tonka, tonka bean, vanilla sugar, creamy (creamy? creamy what?)
Base: Sandalwood, oak, balms, cedar, frankincense, ambergris, patchouli

This perfume is most definitely not a strict gourmand scent. If you were worried about all the vanilla and orange and chocolate, don't be. The opening is the most gourmand part of the scent, with a dark, dark chocolate note that almost translates as pepper on my skin. The orange is not sparkling or sweet, but a bit bitter, more like the rind than the fruit inside. The tonka bean lends to the spice as the scent develops, bringing out the dark heart which gets rounded rather than sweetened by the vanilla. It has a slight booziness, which is approprite because it's absolutely intoxicating. In the dry down the scent truly does get drier; the woods take away the booze and the cedar, frankincense and patchouli take over. To me, this part of the development is reminiscent of (but does not smell like) Etro Messe de Minuit, although a sweetness emerges underneath the dry incense that makes it...well, sort of addictive.

Another thing that occurred to me is that the more I sample, the more I realize how difficult it is to categorize perfumes by the season. Living in the deep South in particular, I find it's probably more accurate to categorize based on how a perfume will hold up against humidity. Some fragrances, like Femme, are overripe in humidity, but might play well in less humid areas. And some fragrances, like Miel de Bois or this one, stand up in the humidity because they are so dry. The ending on Elixir des Merveilles also has hints of green--not lush and grassy, but desert green, cedar and mesquite in the spring.

I've learned a couple of things over the last few years. One is to work with a budget. I spent willy nilly (well, for me...I tend toward the conservative side on buying things) my first year, and even on into the first part of the second year. Now I have a strict, strict budget, partly for samples (Want to hear something really sick? I've priced out all the samples I need to buy this year already!) and partly for bottles. I keep a wishlist (I keep meaning to post it), and every so often I get online and think I'm going to buy something, but I end up closing the browser and walking away. The second thing I've learned is to go with my gut--not with compliments, not with with what everyone else loves. I was much more easily swayed into thinking I loved everything in the first year (and it may still seem that way, but that's just because I'm positive by nature and I think to be snarky most of the time is simply to be lazy...I try to snark only when I feel it's truly warranted--looking at you, Clean fragrances--and I'm generally not interested in dictating taste), but I am much pickier about what I buy.

And I bought this one. (FragranceNet had the best price, in case you're wondering. Not a plug. Just the facts.) For me, it's in the category of Dzing! or La Chasse in the way I just knew I had to have it. I'm wondering now how I'll make my sample last until my bottle arrives. Maybe it's a good thing, though, as I might not want to wear anything else ever again...Right! My first full (small) bottle of 2008! My first Hermes!

*image from Hermes

And the Union Square Winner Is...

2008-03-04T19:30:00.002-05:00

Claudia! Please send me an email at sweetdivablog@yahoo.com with your full name and address.

Congratulations Claudia, and thanks to everyone who entered!

Bond No. 9 Union Square, and a Giveaway

2008-03-03T18:45:00.006-05:00

Note: I'll keep the drawing open until 7:00 PM EDT on Tuesday.

I'm still not feeling much like blogging, even after sampling the latest from Bond No. 9, Union Square. This is the second in a series of offerings themed around the artist Andy Warhol:

"'My favorite smell is the first smell of spring in New York,' Andy Warhol once said. Perhaps in a similar spirit, Warhol began painting and silk-screening a series of highly stylized, phantasmagorically colored flowers during the 1960s. He returned to this age-old painter’s subject in 1970, when he developed a portfolio of vibrantly colored flower screenprints at the first of his two studios on Union Square."

The notes for Union Square are:
Top: lily of the valley
Heart: green stem notes, sweet blue freesia, white birchwood, amber
Base: silver-cloud musk accord

Okay. I love the bottle. In fact, there's a whole portfolio of bottles offered with this scent--and I'd be happy to own them all--but don't think you can pick and choose. Like any art produced in a series (as with Warhol's art), these are sold together, ten bottles for the stunning price of $1500. Problem: I can't think why anyone would want to buy ten bottles of this perfume.

As for the scent, Bob really liked it. He said it smelled "fun" and "like a smile." Me? Well...Union Square is a cheery, uncomplicated scent, and it is green--green not so much like the outdoors in springtime, but green like Astroturf. Yes, that's it. Green like Astroturf populated with those little plastic pinwheel flowers that blow in the wind. The lily of the valley, green notes, and freesia are the most prominent notes on my skin. It feels rather cold and synthetic to me, however sweet and cheerful it is. I wore it for two days, and while it POPS, it feels distorted, like bad reception on a technicolor television.

Some part of me thinks this perfume is pure genius, because it truly does so readily evoke pop art. And like pop art, I appreciate it conceptually without really liking it. Also, it doesn't last very long. It is relentlessly colorful and then it seems to just fall away, all at once. I wore it both days and got about four hours out of it each time, tops. It's rather light, so it would be easy to reapply and not offend anyone, but it's awfully expensive for that, I think.

I'm going to give Bond the benefit of the doubt and hope that conceptually, this really was what they were going for, this over-the-top Technicolor spring. And because I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt and I think it's worth sniffing, even if just for fun, I have a nice amount of my Union Square sample left over to give away. If you're interested, leave your name in the comments and I'll draw for the winner tomorrow.

*image provided by Bond No. 9

What's Your Friday Perfume?

2008-02-29T08:23:00.003-05:00

Hi Friends. My perfume today is L'Artisan Dzing! And yours?

I am sorry again for the lack of posts. I seem to have a real case of the blahs. At first, the samples were still calling, but the words wouldn't come. Next thing I new, the samples stopped calling. I look in my little sample drawers (That's right! I forgot to tell you--I upgraded from Box O'Samples!) and just think "meh," and then go put on something in my own collection. This week Iris Poudre, Flowerbomb, and Dzing! have been in heavy rotation because it's been cold and I've needed something cozy but beautiful.

It must be the season, because I had the exact same symptoms this time last year! I'm ready for spring already, I guess, and I'm just waiting for nature to catch up with me. I may need to buy a decant of Champaca so I have something to look forward to...a little pick-me-up!

Have a happy Friday!

*image from luckyscent.com

Won't You Play Me...Le Jazz Hot, Maybe

2008-02-25T21:16:00.005-05:00

Bob and I have undertaken the arduous task of copying all of our CDs to computer. We've done this several times over the last six or seven years, haphazardly at best. The result was a bunch of files in different folders, random file types, some songs copied three or four times here and there. This weekend we decided we'd had enough, so we're copying everything we own to one location (which we'll backup the second we're finished) and in ONE format.

The fun part of this exercise is going "shopping" in our collection. Tonight I found a bunch of jazz CDs that I've neglected way too long. I never think to copy this stuff over to my iPod because I usually only listen to it while I exercise, but I'm going to change all that! Here's some of the stuff I found again:

Ahmad Jamal Trio, Cross Country 1958-1961. Just classic.

Earl Harvin Trio/Quartet. Earl was a college friend of mine. Now he's Seal's drummer with many successful projects, jazz and otherwise, on the side.

Medeski, Martin & Wood, Shack Man. Very groovy.

Now, how can anything get me down this week?

*images from Amazon.com

Reader's Journal: Pub Challenge Selections

2008-02-23T11:10:00.006-05:00

You might remember that I joined two reading challenges this year, the Short Story Reading challenge and the Pub Challenge 2008. For the Pub Challenge, I'm supposed to read eight (or more) books published in 2008, four of which must be fiction. It seems that several people who joined this challenge are at least halfway through, while I've been waiting for something worthwhile (well, worth my while, as I don't read mysteries or romance, and the majority of releases seem to be in those areas) to be released.

Obviously Chandler Burr's The Perfect Scent is one of my choices, and I am hoping (fingers crossed) to win one through Sniffapalooza's contest, as one of my 2008 goals is to cut spending on books by at least half. If I don't win it, I'll splurge and buy a copy. That will count as one of my non-fiction selections (although I suppose they could all be fiction--easy for me!), but picking out the novels is another thing. Here's what I have so far:

So that's one down, but what else to read? Lucky for me, several terrific writers are releasing (or have released) books this spring, so finally my list is beginning to take shape. Here are come of my choices:

River of Heaven, by Lee Martin (April 15). Lee Martin was a Pulitzer finalist in 2006 for his novel The Bright Forever, which happens to be one of my favorite novels of all time. Martin writes so cleanly and with crystal clear emotion. If you read and loved Kent Haruf's Plainsong, Don Kurtz's South of The Big Four, or Dan Chaon's You Remind Me of Me, then you must read The Bright Forever. The initial reviews for River of Heaven seem to be mixed, but enjoy Martin's writing so much that I'm sure it will be worth the read.

The Soul Thief, by Charles Baxter (available now). I admit, I've only read Charles Baxter's short stories, but he writes so well I'm anxious to read one of his novels. Here's the description from Publisher's Weekly:

" The author of the National Book Award–nominated The Feast of Love, Baxter returns with this ninth book, an assay into the limits of character, fictional and otherwise. The first half of the novel follows the brief arc of Nathaniel Mason's graduate career in 1970s Buffalo, N.Y., which centers on his friendship with the sexy but self-dramatizing Teresa (which she pronounces Teraysa, as if she were French) and her lover Jerome Coolberg, a virtuoso of cast-off ideas. Coolberg, obsessed with Nathaniel, begins taking his shirts and notebooks, and claiming that episodes from Nathaniel's life happened to him. Coolberg drops a hint that something bad will happen to Jamie, Nathaniel's sometime lover; when it actually comes to pass, Nathaniel's world begins to collapse. In the novel's second half, decades after these events have occurred, Coolberg enters Nathaniel's life again for a final, dramatic confrontation. Baxter has a great, registering eye for the real pleasures and attritions of life, but the book gets hung up on metafictional questions of identity (the major one: who is writing this first-person narrative?). The results cheat readers out of identifying with any of the characters, perhaps intentionally. (Feb.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved."

Unaccustomed Earth, by Jhumpa Lahiri (April 1). I read both her story collection Interpreter of Maladies and her novel The Namesake, and I do think Lahiri is a fine, fine writer along the lines of William Trevor and Alice Munro. I admit that I enjoyed her novel a bit more than her story collection, but I am very much looking forward to her second collection. Here's the description from Publisher's Weekly:

"Starred Review. The gulf that separates expatriate Bengali parents from their American-raised children—and that separates the children from India—remains Lahiri's subject for this follow-up to Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake. In this set of eight stories, the results are again stunning. In the title story, Brooklyn-to-Seattle transplant Ruma frets about a presumed obligation to bring her widower father into her home, a stressful decision taken out of her hands by his unexpected independence. The alcoholism of Rahul is described by his elder sister, Sudha; her disappointment and bewilderment pack a particularly powerful punch. And in the loosely linked trio of stories closing the collection, the lives of Hema and Kaushik intersect over the years, first in 1974 when she is six and he is nine; then a few years later when, at 13, she swoons at the now-handsome 16-year-old teen's reappearance; and again in Italy, when she is a 37-year-old academic about to enter an arranged marriage, and he is a 40-year-old photojournalist. An inchoate grief for mothers lost at different stages of life enters many tales and, as the book progresses, takes on enormous resonance. Lahiri's stories of exile, identity, disappointment and maturation evince a spare and subtle mastery that has few contemporary equals. (Apr.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved."

Four for the list. Not too bad for the first half of the year! I'm not planning to overshoot the goal of eight books, mainly because I have so many unread books of my own that I would like to read this year, plus I still have all those short story collections to get through. Looks like I'll be quite busy.

*images and descriptions from amazon.com

What's Your Friday Perfume?

2008-02-22T07:47:00.003-05:00

Hello Friends! How do we smell today?

I'm wearing L'Artisan Tea for Two today. In Atlanta, the rain has been coming down for the last twenty-four hours, and it's chilly. Still, spring is in the air, so something too spicy or heavy would seem more claustrophobic than cozy.

My apologies for the lack of posts the last couple of days. Sometimes when I sample a perfume and I find myself loving it, I get a strange form of writer's block and can't think of anything to say beyond, "It's so pretty! I love it!" Notice, I'm not telling you what said fragrance is. I'll only give you a hint...it has tea. (Nope, it's not Tea for Two.) I guess that's a rather broad hint. Okay, one more: osmanthus. Can you guess?

I must be off to work...Have a lovely Friday!

*image from luckyscent.com

Rose Showdown: Rose Ikebana vs. Bryant Park

2008-02-19T07:38:00.003-05:00

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN!

On this wrist, one of the Hermessences created by Jean Claude Ellena for Hermes in 2004, meant to convey the feel of silk, sold exclusively in Hermes boutiques, and weighing in at 100ml for $170—ROSE IKEBANA!

And on the other wrist, created by Michel Almairac in 2007, meant to represent that district in New York associated with one of the city's greatest events—Fashion Week, sold at the Bond boutique, Saks Fifth Avenue, and various online retailers, and weighing in at 50ml for $130—BRYANT PARK!

Before our showdown begins, let's get to know these two fragrances a bit.

Rose Ikebana, with notes of rose, peony, magnolia, pink peppercorn, rhubarb, grapefruit zest, and vanilla honey, grew up in Paris. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne before embarking on a career in journalism that led her to Paris Vogue. Her pastimes are painting, sculpting, and skiing. She also loves to travel.

Bryant Park, with notes of lily of the valley, rhubarb, pink pepper, rose, patchouli, raspberry, and amber, was raised in Manhattan, home-schooled by her artist parents, and joined a punk band at the age of sixteen. They had a few hits on college radio and were at one time signed to an independent label on the Northwest coast. The band broke up in the late 1990s, when Bryant Park started writing plays. She has yet to have anything produced.

Let's cut to the action—BELL! And they're on the wrists!

Rose Ikebana may look sweet but she's feisty! She comes right out of the bottle with a hit of grapefruit that's sharp and potent, and mixed with the sweet rose and tart rhubarb, packs a juicy, juicy punch! Indeed folks, it makes my lips pucker just thinking about it, and I'm not sure if Bryant Park can stand up to it. It's like a mind-boggling hit of Hawaiian Punch, my friends!

Bryant Park, she also comes out swinging, and she means business folks: This lily of the valley isn't lily-livered, and that pepper may be pink but it's potent, it's dry folks! It might be overwhelmed by the juicy zest of Rose Ikebana, I think it might be going down, but—OH! Folks, there's the patchouli coming in strong and clean! Not going to let this rose back down, not going light or sweet even for one second!

Rose Ikebana is hanging in there, but she's lost a bit of her zing, and she seems a bit bitter, but it's working for her! It's working for her! She's still standing, and the rhubarb is helping her keep it clean, but it feels like she might be going a little soft friends, a little soft with the peony and magnolia. I don't know if she can hold up...

And Bryant Park is mostly patchouli and rose now, patchouli and rose and every now and again she sends out a hook with the pepper, and it seems like both of these ladies are going around and around until—WHOA! Bryant Park has raspberry, she has amber—I'm not even sure if that's legal in this state folks! But she's using it to her advantage, giving a bit of interest to the patchouli again, turning it up another notch before it settles in with the amber!

Rose Ikebana appears to have conceded, folks! She's dried down to vanilla honey, there's nothing left of her but the sweet dregs like a fragrant tea in the bottom of a fine china cup.

THE CHAMPION: BRYYYAAANT PAAAARK!

WHEW! What a night here!

**Author's note: Okay, so Rose Ikebana was the Kool Aid (Tropical Punch, by the way), but really, only for a very short time at the top. On the whole it does remind me of a smooth, cool, pale yellow silk. Still, Bryant Park remains my favorite rose, except for one thing: the real magic happens when these fragrances are together. I haven't formally layered them (yet), but just wearing them together on separate wrists creates one of the most beautiful rose perfumes ever. The patchouli and pepper in Bryant Park makes the grapefruit in Rose Ikebana more subtle, and the floral notes blend heavenly. They also both have terrific lasting power, which is impressive. I thought Rose Ikebana might give out, but it didn't disappoint. If only these weren't so darned expensive! Now I want them both!

*images from Basenotes

Clean Fragrances

2008-02-18T07:51:00.004-05:00

Something about last week's article in The New York Times, “The Sweet Smell of...Nothing,” got me thinking. One perfume trend I've never understood much is perfume that smells like...nothing. By “nothing,” I don't mean absence of scent in general, but instead, perfume that doesn't smell like perfume. Instead, it smells like laundry detergent or dryer sheets or little girls. Enter, Clean fragrances (I can't bring myself to call it perfume).

What I am about to say may invoke the wrath of many readers out there. Probably I am doing myself in from the get-go by immediately stereotyping the sort of woman I think might wear Clean fragrances, but I can't help but get a picture of this:

Woman in her thirties, pushing an SUV stroller through the mall. She has that Meg Ryan You've Got Mail haircut. She wears khaki capris, a denim shirt, and Keds. She wears lip gloss and the tiniest bit of mascara, perhaps a bit of blush if she's daring. One of her children is named Taylor. She goes to church every Sunday. She votes Republican. She's pushing the stroller and her children (most likely, there are three, all under age five) are all over the place, running and screaming and wreaking general havoc. She is talking on her cell phone and remains completely oblivious to both her children's behavior and the nasty stares she elicits from the other mall patrons.

If this sounds sort of like you, but you regularly go to the mall wearing Jicky or Lonestar Memories or even Poison and you keep a close eye on your well-behaved kids, just hear me out. Stereotypes exist for a reason. Here in Georgia, the description above fits a large portion of the female population. These women could just as easily be wearing something mass market that's prettier or more daring, Stella or Donna Karan Gold. But I would hazard a guess that if they're wearing perfume at all, they're either wearing a Clean fragrance or the ubiquitous philosophy Amazing Grace. But my question is, why?

Are these scents supposed to be a trend akin to the “no makeup makeup” thing? Let's consider this for a moment: To apply one's face in a manner that makes one seem one is wearing no makeup—that takes skill and well-made product. We all know that “no makeup makeup,” or le no makeup, looks far better than the natural thing. It's polished, refined. Even Coco Chanel herself could get on board with this sort of thing.

But soapy, girlish perfume? Coco must be spinning like a drill bit in her grave, and with good reason, for I think the great lady would agree: Such a trend seems to be the hallmark of something more disturbing, and that is women who no longer act like women, but girls. I've spent enough time cruising the blogs and MUA to know that most of us grew up with mothers who wore womanly perfumes: the Chanels, Private Collection, Chloe, just to name a very few. I aspired to wear sophisticated scents when I grew up, and I loved it when my mother would let me wear a little bit of her perfume. My mother is very much alive, but I can even now smell Clinique Aromatics or see a bottle of Norrell and be moved by it. To me, those scents are hers alone. I cannot imagine having any memory buttons pushed by something as generic as these Clean scents, but as I hadn't worn them myself, and so I would not be speaking out of turn, I decided to sample two, Baby Girl and Fresh Laundry.

The notes in Baby Girl are: in the top, lemon, cyclamen, orange and Egyptian geranium; in the heart, African violet, heliotrope, lavender, ylang-ylang, and cinnamon; and in the base, white musk and cedar. The list of notes isn't bad, and the scent itself is rather plain and inoffensive, and luckily, happily smells nothing like a baby girl. (Uh, the synthetic, commercial version. I'd like to go on record as saying I love the smell of babies—on babies, that is.) No baby powder here, nothing overpoweringly sweet. The violet and heliotrope are the most prominent notes to my nose, and overall the scent is rather soapy and, well, clean. And also, dull.

The notes in Fresh Laundry are Brazilian orange, Mexican lime, fresh mown grass, cyclamen, rose otto, night blooming white jasmine, petals, heliotrope, and musk. Folks, buy a bottle of Febreze, spray a little behind each ear, and be done with it, for this one smells just like what its name advertises: highly perfumed laundry detergent. While it smells very clean and fresh, again—what's the point? I suppose smelling like laundry might make a man love you for your housekeeping skills, or make your friends believe you possess some extra virtue (cleanliness next to godliness, and all that), but who on earth with any sense of self-worth wants to be loved for that? And if you simply want to smell more clean to yourself...well. I suggest therapy. And a bath.

Of course, in this day and age, women should wear what they like, but that doesn't have to stop me from continually wondering: What is the appeal of smelling like a tween or a basket full of laundry? Do their husbands really like this? Do their husbands' mistresses wear this sort of thing, or are the mistresses wearing Piguet Bandit? Is this how husbands tell them apart? (Kidding!) Of course, I say this, but in an age when people seem to be more and more intolerant of perfume (cheaply made and badly applied—I hazard a guess that few people would refer to any of the Guerlains as a “carnival,” as one man referred to his wife's Elizabeth Taylor-brand perfume in the NYT article), perhaps these are the only choices we'll have left.

Personally, I find this trend rather coy, and coyness irritates me, particularly in women over thirty. I once worked with a woman (single, over thirty) who practically bathed in Amazing Grace and Clean fragrances. She thought they were romantic and would help her find a husband. He would love her purity; he would find her precious. You know, that's perfectly fine. But me, I'd want to be a little more mysterious than that, if I were in guy-getting mode. Come to think of it, I'm married, and I still want to seem mysterious.

My take: These perfumes are expensive for what they offer consumers, which is the smell of soap and clean clothes. If you want to smell like soap, take a shower and don't wear perfume, and then wear clean clothes. Don't spend $40-$55 a pop to smell the way you already smell. These scents aren't “you, only better.” They are “you, only cleaner.” I have to say overall, it's the safety of these perfumes that bothers me, or the illusion of safety, of cleanliness and order, and the sheer lack of sexiness. Perhaps I lack the Puritan spirit to understand, or perhaps I lack the lie of modesty. I don't trust women who don't act like women, or who want to act like little girls or pious Madonnas. And besides, what sort of special memory will your grown daughters have, ladies, if all they remember about you is that you smelled like a basket of laundry?

There is a happy medium, you know. If you don't want to smell like a siren, there are better options. For a sexier, more adult clean scent, run down to the drugstore and pick up a bottle of Skin Musk for ten dollars. For powdery, go online and get Caron Farnesiana or Etro Heliotrope. For freshness, a soft white floral or a hint of green, like La Chasse aux Papillon or CB I Hate Perfume Wild Pansy. Or try a vanilla, like Lea Extreme, which is comforting and sexy in a soft way, or Hanae Mori Butterfly with its gourmand undertones.

Be a bit more daring, ladies!

*images from Sephora and Beauty.com

Reader's Journal: Shiloh and Other Stories, by Bobbie Ann Mason

2008-02-16T10:44:00.004-05:00

Bobbie Ann Mason is one of those authors whose works I'm always meaning to read, but when it comes right down to picking out books and reading them, I forget about her. When I was casting around for titles to put on my Short Story Challenge reading list, her name popped right into my head, so I suppose it was meant to be—I chose her first collection, Shiloh and Other Stories. Particularly with stories, I like to begin with first collections and work my way forward, because I think a writer develops differently through short stories than through novels. Short stories are a specific craft, and they feel more personal—even if they aren't biographical—because you can see the writer change, get better, develop tics and drop bad habits. With novels, the writer conducts an orchestra—if the story hits a false note, you might not recognize it, distracted as you might be by other subplots, by suspense. A short story, though, is the author alone with an acoustic guitar and a spotlight. One mistake can ruin an entire set, put the whole show on the wrong course.

In Shiloh and Other Stories, Mason explores simple territory, the lives of small-town dreamers and earnest farmers trying to get through retirement, illness, divorce, or just the changing times. Almost all of the stories are set in Western Kentucky, that point where the South meets the Midwest, so her characters tend to be less dark, less plagued by the dense woods, alcoholism, religious fanaticism, or all-around Gothic sensibility than those of more Southern writers like Flannery O'Connor or Larry Brown. In many ways these stories made me think of Haven Kimmel's wonderful memoir (published several decades after these stories), A Girl Named Zippy. Both writers have such a talent for looking at the most everyday people and events through their microscopic lenses and finding the tiny hairs and moles, the cracks and hiccups and strangeness that make the ordinary unique. Just as Kimmel's stories are so vivid and well told that they read like the best fiction, Mason's stories are so grounded they seem to be true.

In my favorite story from the collection, "The Rookers," Mary Lou Skaggs comes to realize the burden of her growing power over her husband, who becomes more reclusive with each passing day: "Mary Lou suddenly realizes that Mack calls the temperature number because he is afraid to talk on the telephone, and by listening to a recording, he doesn't have to reply. It's his way of pretending that he's involved. He wants it to snow so he won't have to go outside. He is afraid of what might happen. But it occurs to her that what he must really be afraid of is women. Then Mary Lou feels so sick and heavy with her power over him that she wants to cry." This is a thread that runs through all of Mason's stories, the quiet power women have in families, the binding ties they create with the lightest and most ethereal threads that hold their worlds together like the thickest rope no matter how far family members might stray. I suppose what Mason is ultimately exploring here, though, is that thing called home, the people and the place that make up a person no matter where she is in the world.

In "Nancy Culpepper" (which is also the name of Mason's latest story collection), Mason explores these ties through the story of a woman torn between her childhood home and her marriage home, between two versions of family. Nancy Culpepper travels to Kentucky to help her parents move her grandmother into a nursing home, and while she's there she hopes to find pictures and learn about an ancestor of hers by the same name. The story weaves through time, back and forth between Kentucky and Nancy's wedding day in New York (her parents unaware of and uninvited to her nuptials), between her vision of her family and her husband's: "After supper, Nancy showed Jack the farm. As they walked through the fields, Nancy felt that he was seeing peaceful landscapes--arrangements of picturesque cows, an old red barn. She had never thought of the place this way before; it reminded her of prints in a dimestore." Nancy's husband Jack is a photographer, and Nancy herself is searching for the elusive photo of her ancestor, but the story seems to question the notion of what is seen and what is real, how vision of a person or a thing is skewed by the seer, by his or her need for the person or thing to be something else entirely than what is presented. In the end, Nancy finds the photo, an old wedding portrait of her ancestor Nancy Culpepper and her husband on an old brocade sofa: "The woman looks frightened--of the camera perhaps--but nevertheless her deep-set eyes sparkle like shards of glass...The man seems bewildered, as if he did not know what to expect, marrying a woman who has her eyes fixed on something so far away."

All of Mason's women seem to have their eyes fixed on some point beyond the horizon, even as they're bound to families and farms. They are as knowledgeable and aware in many ways as women in the stories of, say, Alice Munro, but they are also less likely to run. It's as though, by staying rooted in one place, they expect their true selves to appear one day, walk across a field, and announce they've come home to stay.

*image from amazon.com

What's Your Friday Perfume?

2008-02-15T08:20:00.002-05:00

Last week I called this "Personal Choice Fridays," which sounded vaguely political and in the case of perfume, sort of stupid. I named it on the fly, without thinking about how it really sounded. You might have thought I suddenly decided to have some political forum on Fridays. Or perhaps you had the sudden idea that during the rest of the week I must be performing for some sample editorial board hovering over me and making me do their bidding. All of my choices are personal.

I have changed the title to the startlingly original, "What's Your Friday Perfume?" Breathtaking, to be sure. You must wonder how I come up with these things. But at least it get the point across.

I think today I'm going to wear Rochas Femme.

And you, friends? Come on, tell!

*image from fragrancenet.com

What Did I Tell You? White Florals...

2008-02-14T16:55:00.003-05:00

Sometimes the teenager in me cannot help but fall for these quizzes. This one seems fun for Valentine's Day:

You Are a White Rose

You represent youthfulness and purity.

Your vibe: Sweet and heavenly

Falling in love with you: is like falling in love for the first time

What Color Rose Are You?

Happy Valentine's Day!

2008-02-14T08:58:00.003-05:00

Happy Valentine's Day to you all, dear friends! Today I'm wearing Private Collection Tuberose Gardenia. Bob does love white florals. What is your scent for today? A loved one's favorite? A selection for yourself? Or perhaps you're wearing no perfume at all?

Very interesting article today in the New York Times about the growing number of women who have stopped wearing perfume. While I think even the most serious perfume fans out there are feeling a bit fatigued with all the new releases of late, I can't imagine any of us would give up fragrance altogether. One person in the article comments that the issue is not so much perfume, but the application. I tend to agree with this, although I also know that sometimes Bob tires of me smelling like something new every single day. He misses the smell of "me," he says. I have always worn perfume, so he's hardly pining for Greeneyes au naturale, but he misses the constant comfort and association of the identifying mark of my perfume. It stands to reason that whatever sort of identity our perfume might lend us, we want that to be a positive experience for our loved ones as well.

So if you have time today, share with me: If you could pick only one scent to identify yourself, what would it be and why? My pick is the perfume I'm wearing today, not just because Bob loves white florals (plenty to choose from there), but because out of those I've tried, this one feels the most "me," or at least the me I would like to be: classic and straightforward, yet utterly feminine.

Have a lovely day, my friends!

*image from Yahoo

Tann Rokka Aki

2008-02-13T18:45:00.002-05:00

Sorry, no rose showdown today. I did not think my nose could handle it, as neither of the fragrances in the showdown is, if you will, a shy flower. I thought about wearing something comforting and safe, like Theorema, but I am about done with my winter perfumes, even if the weather today (cold, grey, sky spitting tiny bits of frozen precipitation) demands it. Enter, the powdery fragrance. I almost picked up Etro Heliotrope, but then I remembered I had this sample of Tann Rokka Aki.

The notes in Aki are amber, cedarwod, patchouli, and vetiver. The top is almost unbearably sweet and powdery. In college I lived in a dorm full of music and art majors, and the top notes in Aki remind me of the smell of the hallways just after the dinner hour on Thursday and Friday nights: baby powder and incense, that weird mixture of innocence and seduction as we girls prepared for a night out, going to see a band or look for a party and always, always to look for someone to love, for a night or for a lifetime. Up and down the corridors girls would go in and out of open doors, borrowing clothes, sneaking beers, asking each other advice, waiting on boyfriends or friends or phone calls from boyfriends or friends. Music poured into the halls and out open windows (my dorm, built in the 1920s, had stuffy radiant heaters and no air conditioning, so windows were always open, even if just a little). I had not thought much about those times in a very long while, until I smelled this today.

After about thirty minutes, Aki begins to lose some of its sweetness, and it feels like night coming on, the patchouli moving across the amber twilight like a darkening sky, the vetiver lighting it up softly here and there like stars. This phase is decidedly more grown-up than the opening, and easier to wear overall, even though I did enjoy the trip down memory lane that the opening notes provided. Aki is pretty and uncomplicated, like youth is or should be, but unfortunately I find it a tad expensive ($185 for 100ml) for what it finally offers. Still, I haven't encountered anything else like it really, and it's got to be cheaper than an actual ticket to go back in time. Can you imagine what that might cost?

*image from Luckyscent

Soldier On, Indeed

2008-02-12T21:12:00.001-05:00

Friends, I am still out of commission. I recovered from my bug only to suffer the worst allergy attack I've experienced in months. Earlier in the day I thought I might recover, but I found myself requiring a second dose of antihistamine and a long nap. Sadly, my nose is still tender, and I dare not tickle it or taunt it with anything. I had planned a little rose showdown between Hermes Hermessence Rose Ikebana and Bond No. 9 Bryant Park, but it will have to wait until my nose recovers.

I can share with you, though, Bob's impressions upon being offered each wrist just after perfume application: "That one smells like Kool Aid. That one doesn't smell like Kool Aid."

I'll leave you to guess which is which. I hope you all are having a lovely week so far!

*image of Roses et jasmin dans un vase du Delft (1880-1881) by Pierre-Auguste Renoir from WebMuseum

Under the Weather

2008-02-09T17:10:00.000-05:00

I'm sorry for not having a Reader's Journal post today as planned, but I seem to have picked something up at work this week. I hope to be up and running again on Monday.

Have a happy weekend!

What's Your Friday Perfume?

2008-02-08T08:18:00.000-05:00

Friday is the day of the week that I wear whatever I want, whether it's something from my own stash or an extra day with a perfume I've sampled during the week. I thought it would be fun to share my Friday selections with you--but there's a catch. You have to share yours with me!

Let me know in the comments what your Friday perfume is. Today, mine is Private Collection Tuberose Gardenia. You might think I'd had enough Lauder after January, but this is one of my favorite perfumes.

Happy weekend! I'll be back tomorrow with Reader's Journal.

*image from esteelauder.com

I Want Candy: Delices de Cartier

2008-02-07T17:43:00.000-05:00

Candy comes in many different forms. Candy might be some fine chocolate, or candy might be a Cartier tank watch. For those of us watching both our waistlines and our budgets, candy might be nothing more (or less) than something sweet in a bottle. If candy is what you crave, consider Delices de Cartier.

I've had a sweet tooth all week. I had lined up Balenciaga Le Dix for today, but last night I found myself going through my sample drawer like an angry dieter rummaging the refrigerator in an attempt to locate a three-year-old squeeze bottle of diet Hershey's Chocolate Syrup. The pinker and the sweeter, the better. The thing is, my tastes don't generally run to pink and sweet. They run to white or yellow, they play around with red, and they like a little spice. I have lots and lots of white florals, ambers, incense, but very few selections that resembled anything Elle Woods might wear to her Contracts class at Harvard Law. I'd already worn my most obvious choice this week, and I didn't think you all would let me get by with a "Juicy Cooter, Part Deux." Seriously that fragrance just isn't that complex. I suppose I could have come up with some semiotic premise about their ads, claiming I only wore the perfume whilst deconstructing as an inspiration. But that would have made me pathetic. And also a nerd.

I was pawing my way through the tiny vials and carded samples when out popped Delices de Cartier. This fragrance, released in 2006, was all over the blogs when I first started sniffing. Anxious as I was then to plunge into the world of niche perfumery, I studiously avoided it. I lumped it in with all the other fruity florals everyone seemed to be complaining about, and went on my merry way with my Serge Lutens and L'Artisan. Never would I say that was a mistake, but I am happy I pulled this out last night and decided to wear it. If ever there were a fragrance for a very rich Barbie, then this is the one. I'm talking the kind of Barbie that had her own tailor, not the kind that wore those store-bought outfits from K-Mart, pinned to cardboard and shielded with a molded plastic casing. I'm talking about the Barbie who had the horse, and the car, and the townhouse, and the plane, and not one Ken but two--not the Barbie who only owned the camper and also used it as her home and had to share it with Skipper.

Please don't think you shouldn't try it just because I invoked Barbie. Because really you should, you must. True, this is pink and sweet, but it's also effervescent and feminine and wonderfully...well, delicious. The notes in Delices are iced cherry, bergamot, pink pepper, violet, jasmine, freesia, amber, tonka bean, musk, and sandalwood. It starts off with a tart cherry pop, a spicy pucker of fruit and pepper. As it develops the zing! subsides and the flowers bloom, pale and tender, making me long for the cherry trees around town to light up in all their pink glory. The dry down is sexy, sweet and intimate. I personally think this would make a lovely Valentine's Day selection, either for a gift or to wear. Occasionally a woman needs something to make her feel like a girl again. A little candy, if you will. You should. You must!

*image from Sephora

More Congratulations...

2008-02-07T17:24:00.000-05:00

To Robin and company over at Now Smell This, for being listed as one of the best blogs in the March issue of Real Simple magazine. I could not agree more! NST was the blog that got me started on my journey, and I read it every day. Cheers!

The Laws of Evening Giveaway

2008-02-07T09:42:00.000-05:00

Alica, you are the winner of the draw! Please send your address to me at sweetdivablog@yahoo.com.

Congratulations!

Parfums Delrae Debut, in a Roundabout Way

2008-02-06T15:16:00.000-05:00

The last few days here in Atlanta, Spring has been flirting with us, flexing its biceps, or hiking up its skirt and showing a little leg--depending on your metaphor of choice. Yesterday was positively sticky, and I decided I needed to wear something light but not too springy. Enter Annick Goutal's Mandragore. I've worn this and planned to write about it twice, and each time something goes awry. The first time I missed the opportunity because of holiday madness. Yesterday, things didn't work out for a couple of reasons. First--and this is going to sound crazy but I'll say it anyway--I find that certain types of lighter perfumes actually feel sticky when it's humid outside. I can't explain it, but it feels like they won't dry, like they just suck up the moisture in the atmosphere and amplify it. This is particularly true when the temperature is mild, in the 60s or 70s. It's as though there isn't enough heat to keep the moisture at bay, or for the perfume to simply melt away (not that I want that, either).

Anyhow, I went to work Tuesday wearing Mandragore and feeling sticky sticky. (Not a typo. I was double sticky.) Mandragore is pretty (And look at that butterfly flacon! We wants it!), and I'll give it proper time another day, because honestly, the second thing that happened yesterday knocked it right out of my mind. On my lunch break I went to the post office, which is right near Ulta, and I decided to run in and sniff a few things I missed the last time I was there: Valentino Rock n' Rose (must try for real), Bulgari Omnia Amytheste (need to sniff again), Pleasures Exotic (um, no), and Lancome Poeme (which Katie featured on her Top Ten Fragrances of Winter). Problem? I managed to spray Poeme all over my hand. I don't know if you've ever actually smelled Poeme, but if you have, then you know it isn't exactly light. One spritz of Poeme on my left hand, and it was as though Angelina Jolie had walked into a room of fairly attractive housewives. The Mandragore was completely eclipsed. I was a little miffed--until I went outside. No sticky! It occurred to me then that in certain types of humid weather, one needs a perfume with a little bit of body to it, something that can fight back against the damp air and take the edge off that little bit of chill accompanying it. Poeme was getting the job done, and now I know I must also give that one a proper test.

As for the roundabout: With my new lesson learned about a heavier fragrance to combat the heavier humidity, this morning I chose Parfums Delrae Debut. (I have a bad habit of referring to this house as "DelRae," as though it's my cousin Del Rae**, who lives in a trailer with momma and them down the road apiece.) Debut has notes of bergamot, lime, green leaves, lily of the valley, ylang ylang, vetiver, sandalwood and musk. Parfums Delrae is a San Francisco-based perfumery, so I know they are familiar with damp, slightly chilled air, and I trust them to create a scent to withstand such weather. Debut certainly does, opening to a bright lime-aid green at the top that deepens quickly into a luxurious floral. The main heart notes, lily of the valley and ylang-ylang, form a union that does not smell like but reminds me of roses, for it has that same splendid headiness. It is the deepest purple, velvet to the touch, but at the same time the most accurate representation of spring on the verge of summer. In the base, the sandalwood and musk dominate, and I appreciate this. I worried that the vetiver might pull the base back from its deeper heart, and that would feel like a cheat, like a concert where the opening act is better than the headliner. The floral notes linger like the promise of a loved one's return.

Tomorrow it should be cold (well, cooler) again, but I feel hooked on flowers. Even with the warm weather the last few days, I feel the winter doldrums more than ever. A return to amber and incense feels like a resignation instead of a comfort. I'm in fragrance limbo. Does anyone else feel this way? If so, what do you wear these days? Please share in the comments. I know I can't be alone!

*images from Aedes.com
**Not an actual cousin.