personally hygienated, smelling like magnolia blossoms.
magnolia blossoms. when my mother came to new york city to visit me just before i moved down here, so that would be, 1989? in 1989 in Brooklyn, in November, it was as miserable as you might imagine and my mother occasionally walked around my dreary block with me, bravely despite the absence of unimpeded knees, and would pause by a large pink magnolia on the grey corner. it didn’t smell! it’s supposed to smell, she insisted, overpoweringly sweet, but even gargantuan magnolias don’t smell outside the south, i guess, which is why i didn’t know.
now i live here and magnolias don’t seem to smell here, either. perhaps it’s that magnolias don’t smell in urbanish areas? at any rate i smell like magnolia blossoms. hove perfumeurs, my friends (accent ague) 824 Rue Royale, New Orleans Louisiana (nee--accent ague again--723 Rue Toulouse, the location of my favorite house.) hove will have you smelling of your heart’s desire, unless your heart’s olfactory desire happens to be, as mine is, the particular scent that envelops one upon entering hove perfumeurs itself. they don’t bottle that, it’s everything, the young woman says.
that’s what i want, everything. they do what they can.
off i go.


This reminds me of another book plot which is slowly emerging from the recesses of my brain and which title may come back to me eventually—about a man able to not only identify any scent, but once he perfects the art of perfumery, recreate it.
After once smelling perfection in scent, he sets out to make it, bottle it and then… (can’t give away the ending).