Heaven Scent

Just finished rereading The Emperor of Scent for the umpteenth time. I love this book, and am fascinated by Luca Turin. Not quite sure that I would like to meet him in person (sometimes he is manifestly unkind and uncivil, which is a huge detraction), but I would love to attend a lecture, or get my hands on an English translation of his scent guide sans shelling out $500. But back to the issue at hand ...

Although I love this book, I have extreme angst about recommending it to friends ... the title belies the subject's masculinity, at times it can be dificult to understand/follow the science for non-science types, and not many people seem interested in reading non-speciality-related non-fiction. However, it really is one of the most suspenseful books I've ever read, fiction or non. The first time I read it, I couldn't not finish, and was decimated at work the next day due to lack of sleep. Maybe because I have a thing for geniuses, or rooting for the underdog, or maybe I'm just invested in a better smelling world?

Turin is also noted for his extreme perfume savvy and taste. My proof? Besides his acclaimed Perfume Guide, he also praises Angel by Thierry Mugler, to the skies, and it is one of my favorite fragrances. Maybe it's the combination of bizzare chocolate-other notes? No matter. After my reread, I now have a list of perfumes I want to try out this summer: Shalimar, Beyond Paradise, Tommy Girl, Tocade, etc. I never thought I'd say it, but here goes: Thank heaven for the perfume girls at Bloomies!

A good alternative to reading the perfume guide is to read his scent blog, which I downloaded from his US-based Flexitrol (an unauspicious name for a scent company ... conjures up a whiff of Bengay) website (via Wikipedia, which I love ... talk about connections). Sad to say, the Flexitrol site is really disappointing visually, but I guess even geniuses have weak spots. Turin does have a blog-site, but I wanted the best bits, and so have 548 pages of text to peruse at my leisure. And if I wasn't already hooked, his sharp prose keeps me engagingly entertained by the hour.

Perhaps one of the most interesting things about Turin is his ability to work outside of his specialty. His PhD is in physiology, but he seems equal part physicisist, chemist and microbiologist. So many different hats for just one head. However, I'll end this post by letting Turin speak for himself on interdisciplinary wanderings.

"Metaphor is the curency of knowledge. I have spent my entire life learning incredible amounts of disparate, disconnected, obscure, useless pieces of knowledge, and they have turned out to be, almost all of them, extremely useful. Why. Because there is no such thing as disconnected facts. There is only complex structure. And both to explain complex structure to others and, perhaps more important -this is forgotten, usually- to understand them oneself, one needs better metaphors. If I was able to understand this, it was because my chaotic accrual of information simply gave me better metaphors than anyone else.

"My father always said if you translate a proverb from one language into another, you pass for a poet. The same for science. Work strictly within one area, and it's diminishing returns, hard to make progress. But translate a concept from its field for use where it is unknown, and it is always fresh and powerful. In buying outside, you are doing intellectual arbitrage. The rate limited step in this is your willingness to continuously translate, to force strange languages to be yours, to live between, to be everywhere and nowhere."