Four Books on The Power of The Pong

[Katie-Ellen]

We have been hearing about anosmia and Covid- loss of smell, hopefully temporary, due to inflammation of the nasal cavity. It can be a symptom of meningitis.

Writers do not omit to mobilize the power of the olfactory sense. Happy smells, the ones that take us back. Likewise the sad ones, or the gopping ones.
I smelled gas many years ago, Il Matrimonio said I was imagining it. But no. I called out the Gas engineer, there was a leak, and the engineer said this happened quite often, that the wife would be the one to smell the gas.

Anthropology has suggested it is down to historic divisions of labour; women cooking, women foraging, having to judge what was safe, but I don't know. What about hunting? You need to stay downwind and all that.

I worked in museums for a while a long time ago. It was a challenge for the curator at Nottingham Castle Museum, to have the smells of a 18th C street scene or not. What would that be like for the attendants, day in, day out?

One of my sisters worked on a pig farm for a while, and came home smelling of pig shit, and it was BAD, but she didn't smell it anymore. She had gone nose-blind.

In making visitors aware of the smells of this street, the curator was perplexed as to whether that would be making them artificially aware of smells to which people of the day may have become nose-blind.

Four Books on the Science and Sensation of Smell | Issues in Science and Technology


Well, you know what they say about billy goats....

 

[Hannah F]

We have been hearing about anosmia and Covid- loss of smell, hopefully temporary, due to inflammation of the nasal cavity. It can be a symptom of meningitis.

Writers do not omit to mobilize the power of the olfactory sense. Happy smells, the ones that take us back. Likewise the sad ones, or the gopping ones.
I smelled gas many years ago, Il Matrimonio said I was imagining it. But no. I called out the Gas engineer, there was a leak, and the engineer said this happened quite often, that the wife would be the one to smell the gas.

Anthropology has suggested it is down to historic divisions of labour; women cooking, women foraging, having to judge what was safe, but I don't know. What about hunting? You need to stay downwind and all that.

I worked in museums for a while a long time ago. It was a challenge for the curator at Nottingham Castle Museum, to have the smells of a 18th C street scene or not. What would that be like for the attendants, day in, day out?

One of my sisters worked on a pig farm for a while, and came home smelling of pig shit, and it was BAD, but she didn't smell it anymore. She had gone nose-blind.

In making visitors aware of the smells of this street, the curator was perplexed as to whether that would be making them artificially aware of smells to which people of the day may have become nose-blind.

Four Books on the Science and Sensation of Smell | Issues in Science and Technology


Well, you know what they say about billy goats....

I think we have to be aware of that in our writing too - use all the senses, yes, but don't smell through the nose of the POV person what they wouldn't smell themselves because it's around them all the time.

 

[Katie-Ellen]

That's right, and we see a lot of this kind of thing on Pop- Ups. POV where the writer asks us to be inside the person's head while also looking at them God Omniscient from the outside. The smell thing is a potent marker for something new, perhaps; a change of scene, environment or mood.

 

[Steve C]

One of my sisters worked on a pig farm for a while, and came home smelling of pig shit, and it was BAD, but she didn't smell it anymore. She had gone nose-blind.

This happens for sure. I once worked on a fishing boat on the sea of Galilee and despite scrubbing myself raw everytime I came ashore my girlfriend complained. It was nearly the end of us.