How can this article get only two likes (one of which was mine) and no comments?! I stayed up half an hour past my bedtime and laughed more than I had the last few days. I’m drowning in books I can’t find the time to read, but I guess I’ll be adding another.
It also inspired me to go out and smell a bunch of perfumes. Sadly, when I finally tracked down and smelled some "Rush," I did not get the "warm breath whispering crazy things in my ear" that keeps you up at night, plotting indiscretions. Quelle dommage.
I'm not sure why, maybe the accountants got to it in the intervening years - it certainly seems likely, given the time gap. And of course, Dioressence was already lost to the accountants decades ago, so said voice can't be accessed there either!
I can only judge based on your snippets, still I think Burr comes off as catty but in a very fun way. He’s passionate about perfumes and tries to share that passion. The only villains are the bean counters who get in the way. I wish more people would talk about what they love. Life’s too short to read people complaining about crap they hated.
That guy ostensibly loved dance, but the real heroes were… critics like himself, writing for other critics. The villains were the rest of humanity. He was a snob, by which I mean that his real interest was status, and the dance was simply the means to put others in their place. Unbearable!
I guess I need to get that off my chest.
In case you are not already familiar, try searching Amazon for “Nez du vin”. I picked up one of these last year, and it is fascinating how difficult it can be to find the word for a smell, even one that we recognize immediately. It has not helped me with better appreciating wine in any way, but I can still recommend it.
In any case, thanks for your great work. I made it a New Year’s resolution to go through all my RSS feeds, Substack subscriptions, YouTube subscriptions, etc. and cut out all the people I felt weren’t carrying their weight. I might not have considered doing this if I hadn’t discovered all your content: it’s good but demands time due to your inhuman ability to produce interesting work. Lesser work needed to be tossed overboard to keep a good balance! Life got quite busy in December, and despite plowing through lots of the backlog, I’ve still got TEN of your posts waiting for me. Insane! I’ll stop rambling now and just say thanks again.
> I wish more people would talk about what they love. Life’s too short to read people complaining about crap they hated.
100% agree - happily, the content world is big enough that we can curate the vibes and idiosyncratic and surprising corners we find most engaging, which you allude to.
I didn't know about nez du vin, thanks for pointing it out! I'll have to get one. One of the recurring conceits in the book is exactly that - smelling a smell, even knowing the molecular composition, means basically nothing - it's the *descriptions* that let you map a given smell to a given idea that's the rare / hard thing, and those internal mental schemas are what separate people with an attuned sense of smell.
It's also why Turin's descriptions of the perfumes are so fun and engaging - it's like being walked through a particular work of art by somebody who knows the art world really well overall, and the history and social context and that artist's specific oeuvre deeply.
> I might not have considered doing this if I hadn’t discovered all your content: it’s good but demands time due to your inhuman ability to produce interesting work.
Wow, that's high praise indeed, thanks!
On my content volume, I've actually deliberately scaled it back based on some similar feedback, and am aiming for "roughly once a week" now. I put a little more time into other stuff and do more wide-ranging reading on non-reviewable books (just finished the Dark Forest trilogy, for example), but have still built up a fairly healthy backlog of completed and "scheduled" posts nevertheless. 😂
One of the hazards of retiring young, I suppose.
But I can say, I'd already deem this a success. I started writing because I was inspired by the psmith's substack, where they pointed out that you engage with a work more deeply and have more interesting thoughts and conversations if you do it this way (as well as better retention), versus just passively reading and absorbing. I've found that to be very true, and then if anyone else gets to enjoy those thoughts, or if you get to engage with new folk because of what you've written, so much the better!
How can this article get only two likes (one of which was mine) and no comments?! I stayed up half an hour past my bedtime and laughed more than I had the last few days. I’m drowning in books I can’t find the time to read, but I guess I’ll be adding another.
Thanks much! Definitely a real compliment.
The book is well worth it, it was so much fun.
It also inspired me to go out and smell a bunch of perfumes. Sadly, when I finally tracked down and smelled some "Rush," I did not get the "warm breath whispering crazy things in my ear" that keeps you up at night, plotting indiscretions. Quelle dommage.
I'm not sure why, maybe the accountants got to it in the intervening years - it certainly seems likely, given the time gap. And of course, Dioressence was already lost to the accountants decades ago, so said voice can't be accessed there either!
One of the tragedies of our age, I suppose...
I can only judge based on your snippets, still I think Burr comes off as catty but in a very fun way. He’s passionate about perfumes and tries to share that passion. The only villains are the bean counters who get in the way. I wish more people would talk about what they love. Life’s too short to read people complaining about crap they hated.
I’d contrast Burr with the recent article in Persuasion : https://open.substack.com/pub/persuasion1/p/how-art-lost-its-way
That guy ostensibly loved dance, but the real heroes were… critics like himself, writing for other critics. The villains were the rest of humanity. He was a snob, by which I mean that his real interest was status, and the dance was simply the means to put others in their place. Unbearable!
I guess I need to get that off my chest.
In case you are not already familiar, try searching Amazon for “Nez du vin”. I picked up one of these last year, and it is fascinating how difficult it can be to find the word for a smell, even one that we recognize immediately. It has not helped me with better appreciating wine in any way, but I can still recommend it.
In any case, thanks for your great work. I made it a New Year’s resolution to go through all my RSS feeds, Substack subscriptions, YouTube subscriptions, etc. and cut out all the people I felt weren’t carrying their weight. I might not have considered doing this if I hadn’t discovered all your content: it’s good but demands time due to your inhuman ability to produce interesting work. Lesser work needed to be tossed overboard to keep a good balance! Life got quite busy in December, and despite plowing through lots of the backlog, I’ve still got TEN of your posts waiting for me. Insane! I’ll stop rambling now and just say thanks again.
> I wish more people would talk about what they love. Life’s too short to read people complaining about crap they hated.
100% agree - happily, the content world is big enough that we can curate the vibes and idiosyncratic and surprising corners we find most engaging, which you allude to.
I didn't know about nez du vin, thanks for pointing it out! I'll have to get one. One of the recurring conceits in the book is exactly that - smelling a smell, even knowing the molecular composition, means basically nothing - it's the *descriptions* that let you map a given smell to a given idea that's the rare / hard thing, and those internal mental schemas are what separate people with an attuned sense of smell.
It's also why Turin's descriptions of the perfumes are so fun and engaging - it's like being walked through a particular work of art by somebody who knows the art world really well overall, and the history and social context and that artist's specific oeuvre deeply.
> I might not have considered doing this if I hadn’t discovered all your content: it’s good but demands time due to your inhuman ability to produce interesting work.
Wow, that's high praise indeed, thanks!
On my content volume, I've actually deliberately scaled it back based on some similar feedback, and am aiming for "roughly once a week" now. I put a little more time into other stuff and do more wide-ranging reading on non-reviewable books (just finished the Dark Forest trilogy, for example), but have still built up a fairly healthy backlog of completed and "scheduled" posts nevertheless. 😂
One of the hazards of retiring young, I suppose.
But I can say, I'd already deem this a success. I started writing because I was inspired by the psmith's substack, where they pointed out that you engage with a work more deeply and have more interesting thoughts and conversations if you do it this way (as well as better retention), versus just passively reading and absorbing. I've found that to be very true, and then if anyone else gets to enjoy those thoughts, or if you get to engage with new folk because of what you've written, so much the better!