I'm a little ashamed of the fact that I follow a show like Project Runway so closely, though I like to think that my interest is almost entirely in commenting (largely to myself) on how utterly ridiculous the fashion industry is. I know the argument is out there (re:
The Devil Wears Prada, the film, mind you; a book about the fashion world is a bit of an anachronism, don't you think?) that what goes on in the highest peaks of high fashion has a bearing on what you see in your local Kohl's or Target. This argument reeks suspiciously of trickle down economics. Taking the metaphor to its logical conclusion, would that make for trickle down style?
Academia has its fashions too, its trends that seem at times to dictate (for all literary scholars, I think, in the end wish they were a kind of autocrat) what one should not and should not talk about, what one should and should not be reading. For example, in my "field" (of poppies) it's very hip to know Baudelaire, Dickinson, [national poet of choice, preferably writing in a non-Roman orthography], Wordsworth, Blake, Sappho, Anne Carson, etc. It's not so cool to be into, say, Edmund Spenser, Edgar Allan Poe, Robbie Burns, [any Modernist], and so forth. I don't necessarily have a problem with this, as neglected poets will come into fashion as overworked corpses, i.e.
corpora, fall into disfavor. But some things and some poets always seem to stay in the limelight while others persistently elude it. Lyric has its "little black dress" in a poet like Dickinson or Sappho, two poets about whom biographically we know quite little, so their unusual lyrics lend themselves to, let's say, creative interpretation often bordering on the absurd. I generally place myself in that category.
One topic that always seems to elude the academic is the sensual. Sure, you may have someone as prestigious as Susan Stewart tackle the senses, but even then the senses are generally little more than an intellectual construct. Sometimes, I feel like Hugh MacDiarmid, but being myself a bad descendant of the Gaels, it doesn't keep me up at night.
"The Sense of Smell"
Smell they say is a decaying sense
In civilized man,
And literature that pays much attention to it
As decadent comes under the ban.
So they say who not knowing even themselves
Think to know all else.
It’s a different story of smell altogether
That modern science tells.
Its monopoly of direct access to the cortex demands
From disparagers of this sense
Who yet rely on cortical knowledge good grounds
For their different preference.
Scandal to have no fit vocabulary even
For this mighty power,
—Empyreumatic, alliaceous, hircine;
Blind windows in a magic tower!
But reason unconcerned with what is of such
Overwhelming concern to the mind
Is only a false face the nature of consciousness
Continues to hide behind.
Like mo comrádaí Crìsdean ("my comrade Christian," the name not the religious orientation), I too have chafed at the inadequacy of our language to treat the non-visual senses with any degree of precision. With smell, in particular, we must generally resort to simile to get our point across: "it smells like a bag of farts in here." This is particularly trying when you have to try and write about a poet whose primary aesthetic modes are based in scent and taste.
