The smell of Chinatown
The taste of lychees
Arthur Machen
Moss
A place that is well-known to you personally
Places where no human has ever been
Silence
Things for which there are no words, but which you recognise as a distinct, recurring experience nonetheless
Foreign languages
Someone who hates the same things as you do
Realising that you have a native tongue
Dare Wright
Personal history
Ukiyo-e
Realising that literature is better than rock'n'roll
The Journey to the West
Meeting someone with whom you can discuss books
Weeds
The futurism of dreams
Misanthropy
The British coast
The orgasm of disgust conveyed and induced by the endings of certain tales by H.P. Lovecraft
La-Bas by J-K Huysmans
Being contrary
Leaving some things forever unsaid
Robin Davies writes:
These sort of lists remind me of a J. G. Ballard piece called What I Believe:http://sdicht.wordpress.com/what-i-believe/
Round about “in the mystery of multi-storey car parks” that becomes incredibly brilliant. I like the fact that he doesn’t care about the hints of repetition. It seems very spontaneous, in an inspired rather than a sloppy way.My own more modest list is kind of the bones of a diary entry that I haven’t written – just stuff that’s on my mind recently, really. I’m reading The Hill of Dreams, for instance, and it looks like being my favourite Machen so far. I’m also planning to write a blog post on Dare Wright (and why she is better than Sonic Youth), but I’ll probably never get round to it.
Leaving out Japanese teapots and the fine works of the illustrator of your book covers, eh?
Well, I couldn’t possibly be exhaustive. Especially not on a Sunday.
Glad you put the smell of China Town on top. I suppose you meant the one in London. It is cleaner than most in the US. Just had quite a bit of Lychees in the past two weeks. Will get some more.
If I go into a small Chinese supermarket, selling dried mushrooms, biscuits, tinned foods, tea, and so on, it’s like poetry for the nose. Other supermarkets don’t smell like that. Somehow it feels to me as if I’m smelling thousands of years of history.I suppose I was thinking mainly of the London Chinatown, but also Chinatown in Kobe and in Newcastle. I’m not sure I’m familiar with any other Chinatowns, though I might have passed through sometime. I did live in Taipei for a while, of course, but the smell there – at least as far as I remember – was somewhat different.