My connection to my former selves is sometimes so tenuous that I feel compelled to reach across the years. I inspect old photos and journals, and even conduct tests, eager to discover if the me that I seem to be now can still do what previous versions of me learned to do. As a youngster, […]
Read More The queerness of rediscovering the trumpet in middle-ageOne of the most remarkable features of bodily experienced arts such as perfumery, fashion or cuisine, is that there is often very little distance between our emotional selves and the experience of curiosity, pleasure, or disturbance they may bring. Because some creations are actually meant to be put on, or even in, our bodies, the […]
Read More The embodied intimacy of artistic perfumeryAs philosophers have long noted, human beings are remarkable, in part, for being the sort of beings for whom the very fact of being matters. It’s an existentialist observation that sounds very lofty and celebratory until you consider that we are, simultaneously, driven to cover up and deny knowledge about existence, including suffering, destruction, and […]
Read More The know-nothing animal: Our costly addiction to willful ignorance“If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.” Wittgenstein For the second night in a row, my dog, restless from storms, has woken me up. Her routine involves walking on my sternum and neck, and panting midnight dog breath onto my innocent face until I escort her downstairs for an interlude of Netflix […]
Read More Egocentric cats and narcissistic humans: the mysterious minds of othersAfter some years of both admiring and cringing at reviewers’ efforts to translate scent into words, it finally occurred to me that the very impossibility of doing so was part of the attraction, that if one could, finally, once and for all, verbally reduce the scent of Amouage’s Jubilation XXV or Guerlain’s Apres L’onde, then […]
Read More Daring to speak the impossible language of beautyThe first dog I had as an adult was spectacular, an enormous, mostly black Malamute. Adults gawped, and kids would sometimes ask from a respectful distance, “Is he a wolf?” Though it’s been decades, there are people in that town who still remember me as that magnificent dog’s companion, folks who recall the tableau of […]
Read More An invisible woman with an invisible dogI was walking across a Menard’s parking lot a couple of months before the 2016 election when a car swerved toward me as if to run me down. It was a fortyish white guy in a white Buick with a red Trump bumper sticker. He got so close I could see the McDonald’s cup in […]
Read More When the MAGA fashion police decide you’re a faggot
