Say what?

Avast ye, mateys, and hoist yer scurvy selves to a benign bit o' bloggery.

'Tis International Talk Like a Pirate Day.

Arrrrrrrrrrrr.

(Thanks to pirate bits like that, th' tongue can be shared across th' Seven Seas...what ye lads and lassies yell te be "intarnashn'l.")

Shiver me timbers, 'tis Anne Bonny!

P-}

(That thar be a bucko emoticon, if yer fixin' to savvy.)


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(chooppy seas)

Also today, perhaps and perhaps not, the anniversary of the creation of the emoticon.  Wired is running a "This Day in Tech" bit about the purported perpetrator of perplexing symbolage, Scott Fahlman.  However, the story of the attempt to concoct symbolry to clarify text communications gets immediately murky, for as Wired points out, typesetters have been pressing (HA!) type-based non-verbal communication upon us for many moons before that.

Oddly, I myself had a bit of an emotical dust-up with the OAITH (Other Adult in the House), when he perceived that a virtual missive I sent came with barbed tongue, rather than gentle greeting.  Why?

:)

That's right, a smiley face.

Apparently, geeks have used this archly, to convey, well, an edgyness, rather than the placid contentment I was trying to convey.

The scallywag was ready to hop aboard the Man-O-War and make sharkbait o' me.

Fortunately, all was cleared up before he blew the messenger down.  But Blimey! who knew I had stepped into a bilge-sucking morass of hempen halter code.

So, I've been thinking on these two things today, Local Talk Like a Pirate But Watch Yer Emoticons Day.

And then of course, fixed it upon myself to link it all to perfume.

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What perfumes have the potential to flub the message between perfume-lubbers?  Or even perfume lovers, for that matter?

I for one hold Chanel No. 19 aloft.  You know, Luca Turin's wire-hanger mother?  The one folks refer to as "cold" and "distance keeping"?  I mean, okay, the galbanum is bracing, but people, there is green flower in there.  I don't wear it as a "buzz off" kind of fragrance; I wear it in the same manner I might pick a pair of Italian shoe boots for the day.  They are both beautiful, have clean lines, and support me when I need to attend to business, but don't quite cross over into bee-yotch territory.

Not to me, at least.

Here, here's another one:  Serge Lutens Musc Kublai Khan.  You know what that says to me?  It says "me and my men have just been out riding on horses and camels for a few days with no shower in sight and we might have rolled in something along the way and we're just going to plonk down next to you here and if you don't like it you better run FAST because we're already enveloping you and if you don't faint you might retch."  You know what I've heard someone else say about it?  "MMMMmmmm, cozy."

Is what we have here a failure to communicate?  In this case, I don't think so; I think here it is simply different languages.  Like, say, German and Chinese.  Phonemes and graphemes.  You say potato, I say rubber stamp.  Because I think we are not even experiencing the same thing, let alone deciding what that something means.  So let me take this moment to clarify what I am trying to find in terms of examples of perfume mis-communication:  We both agree it is a smiley face.  I mean, say, a lily of the valley.  But what does lily of the valley signify?

Speaking of lily of the valley, let's hop to that gem of a note for the moment.  Have you noticed folks waxing nostalgic about, say, Diorissimo?  It is a lovely creation.  I can acknowledge that a) it smells like lily of the valley, and b) it is pretty.  But from there, you and I might diverge.  Because, truth be told (here I go into a Very Quiet Voice, so as not to offend), it is this|close to being, well...simpering.  Blow me down if one of my fiercest friends, she who dons Mitsouko like a cutlass and Femme like a come hither va-voom dress, says it makes her feel pretty.  Me?  I feel like...oh, I don't know, Nellie Olsen, stripped of sass, left with nothing but banana curls and a very clean pinafore.

Hey, speaking of Femme...let's talk cumin for a moment.  There's a note that I frequently find myself nodding along with the crowd when we determine whether or not it is present.  But then...what does it mean, to have it there?  To me, it's generally B.O. or panties, which trust me, in my world does not mean "come hither."  It means hither was reached 3-5 hours ago.  But wait, that's not how I *receive* a message, that's how I interpret what is sent.  Hmmm.

Here.  How about Big Flower Bombs, and/or Big White Florals.  Like...let's go classic here...Fracas.  What does that say to you?  Sexy bombshell coming through?  Or Tennessee Williams character who is slightly unaware of being past prime?  Undulating vixen?  Or flat footed floozy with floy, floy?

It's a problem that has been posed before:  for whom is our message in the bottle?  Sender, or receiver?  Directly connected of course to the question "do you wear perfume for yourself, or for others"?

All I know is, there are times when folks have described what message a particular scent conveys, and my head tilts to the side.  ("Are you talkin' to ME?")  But I know that unless they ARE talking to me, there's room for different translations.

However, if we are trying to talk to each other, it would probably be best if we made sure our lingua franca was all simpatico.

:)

image of Anne Bonny taken from Hanging Cup Pictures,

also found at the delightful Geography All The Way

engraving apparently by the peripatetic "anonymous"

oil painting of a message in a bottle by  Nancy Poucher at Daily Painting

Reverberations

There is in souls a sympathy with sounds;

And as the mind is pitch’d the ear is pleased

With melting airs, or martial, brisk, or grave:

Some chord in unison with what we hear

Is touch’d within us, and the heart replies.

William Cowper

from "The Task: Book VI, Winter Walk at Noon"

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It is a music weekend for me, so my attention is drawn for the moment.

Intellectually and emotionally, I find sympathetic chords in the reception of music and perfume.  Overlays in language and expression when it comes to describing construction and reception.

All fascinating.

Tied in to that is a thought that was most recently expressed in comments to Denyse's second post on Gender and Perfume over at Grain de Musc.  The commenter observed how many language-stimulated/facile people were attracted to perfume...or at least, could be observed enjoying and discussing it over the blogs.  I agree, you can see plenty of literate folks who love language chiming in to the conversation.

But that is somewhat a factor of the medium, no?  We are not, after all, exchanging abstract videos or short musical compositions to express how we feel about the topic.  A thing which would be, I think rather cool.  But is time consuming, and would require devoting a lot more time on one "perfume" or aspect of perfume than quickly landing on and moving from topic to topic, creation to creation.

I'd love to hear/see it, though.

They say language is cumbersome, and is dying.  And yet it remains a useful medium.

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I must go make my contribution within an orchestra voicing the expressions of Brahms and Dvorak.  The collection of us playing as one organism, laying out an overarching idea and subplots over a single thread in time, in various tonal expressions at any given moment of the performance.  Ideas and mood expressed through music as language.

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I recently helped judge a round of a film competition, where we evaluated how "successful" were cinematic expressions of a set length and goal (narrative fiction).  So many choices the filmmaker has, in what is presented on the screen, from what view, for how long, with what type of performance, in what photographic style, with what sonic mix, etcetera etcetera etcetera.  Ideas and mood and story expressed through cinema as language.

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There is a blog (Inspire!) devoted to representations of perfume in visual art.  No playing out over time in the way that the procession of words, or linkage of tones, or motion of pictures does.  But an expression in a language nonetheless.

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And then there are all the similarities we find in other human activities, like cooking, which only sometimes get thought of as "expression."  And yet, sometimes I wonder...


Hope you are enjoying your weekend.  See you after the curtain.