1
The ancients shared stories through ears, for them literature was an oral (or aural) tradition spoken to audiences and passed down to each new generation. In modern times stories are mostly shared through the eyes; with the advent of the printing press, literature became an almost purely visual medium with meanings derived from symbols grouped together on the page. We, in our arrogance, thought this was the end of our literary evolution. That whether a story was in a paperback or an e-reader, it would be enjoyed visually. But Charles Cartwright has proven us all wrong. In his latest novel Common Scents, the author boldly embarks on a completely new way to tell a story, through the nose.
In the book each page, starting with the cover, has a different smell or combination thereof. There are absolutely no visual words anywhere to be found. The cover is a smattering of scents you would find almost anywhere. Towards the bottom of the cover you detect the strong odor of alcohol and sweat, an olfactory representation of Mr. Cartwright. The book proceeds from there. Characters are introduced with smells as diverse as lavender and rain. Plots are described in the same way. In one memorable scene, gunpowder pervades the page as British soldiers fire on our hero, Nehemiah Orange. He escapes them by diving into the Atlantic as the scent of brine invades our nostrils—later stowing away on a vessel that smells of tar and fish.
True to the pun of its title, the book is a work of historical fiction that takes place during the American Revolution and includes Thomas Paine as a minor character. It deftly weaves together settings in Manhattan, Cape Cod, and a North Carolina shanty, solely through its scented pages. Although the book does take some baffling liberties with history (I hardly believe that General Washington smoked marijuana, especially the odorous type represented in these pages) I’m sure your nose will be delighted with the narrative.
I do have a couple pieces of advice for you to follow while enjoying this perfumed tome. Because the book is not meant to be read visually, it can be purchased in a variety of colors. Feeling a little wild when the author and his press asked me to review this title, I requested it in hot pink. This might not have been the best choice. This is because of my second piece of advice. Common Scents is not a book to experience in a public setting, especially in the hot pink format. If you will allow me a brief anecdote, on a recent subway trip I was inhaling deeply of the hero’s reunion with his brother, clutching the hot pink cover in a wave of olfactory felicity, when the elderly woman in the seat next to me struck me violently with her purse and called me a pervert. Rest assured, I finished the book alone in my apartment, hiding it in the hamper whenever my boyfriend or another guest stopped by.
If you’re looking for the future of literature, look (or smell) no further than Charles Cartwright’s nasal masterpiece, Common Scents. This work was so convincing that the next time I complete a review, you may be smelling it!
2
Eleanor Vasquez is a pillar of the Los Angeles literary scene. A former poet laureate of Pasadena, she is the author of eight books and the host of the Poetry Bucket Reading Series. She also teaches and mentors at-risk youth in the Los Angeles Juvenile Detention System. Due to her stature in American poetry, I was shocked by her newest volume, Barb: A Biography in Verse; a book that crosses several lines, both artistically and ethically.
The book begins on a Tuesday. The narrator has just finished masturbating and now she is bored, “with a flash of bliss/I felt the day pour out of me.” After an eight-page exposition about her childhood and her last boyfriend, she announces that, “like Rilke, I must change/my life” and embarks upon an artistic project that she believes will make her whole again through unity with a subject.
This is when we meet Barb, the public bus passenger who has the great misfortune of sitting in the seat the narrator has deemed, “muse throne/fashioned from chimerical skins.” By means of an uncanny lottery, Barb has become the subject of this book, “studies of insects crawling/across bark, stones wet with waves/the common that thumbs its nose at the great.” As soon as she leaves the bus, Vasquez begins following her. She must be coming home from work because the poet pursues her through a series of dilapidated side streets until she enters a small three-story apartment building. Barb quickly slams the building’s main door shut behind her (probably realizing that she is being followed and wondering what this strange woman could want). Vasquez tries to enter but the door is locked. She steps out into the street in front of the apartment, “the building could have/devoured me then and I’d be/one more floor tile/a step on a stairway to an empty life.”
Vasquez returns later that night. Somehow, she has convinced her ex-boyfriend to let her use his car and she begins a month-long stakeout to investigate her subject’s life. From a neighbor she learns the subject’s name and what apartment number she lives in. She begins going through her mail, and many pages are spent ridiculing Barb for her subscription to People magazine. She follows Barb to work, a nondescript dentist office where she is a receptionist. Vasquez is now even more confused by the People magazine subscription since Barb could probably read the magazine for free by taking home back issues from the office.
And this may be where the project would have ended, a perceptive treatise on the banality of American life. However, Vasquez soon has a vision, “muse become poet/poet become muse, I will drive my pen/through her flesh to bleed her song.” Essentially one gets the feeling that the subject was beginning to bore her and so Vasquez felt the need to stir things up. She sleeps with her subject’s boss, an obese orthodontist named Clark with a wife and five kids, whom she convinces to fire Barb. Then she terrorizes the unemployed Barb at home; throwing rocks through her windows in the early morning hours, leaving death threats on post-it notes stuck to her door, arranging disfigured dolls purchased at a local thrift store on the front lawn of the apartment complex. Finally, after weeks of this, Barb returns home one morning after a quick trip to the store to find Vasquez spray painting a 9/11 conspiracy theory on her door. Surprised at first, Vasquez grows excited at the literary possibilities of her subject’s nervous breakdown. But Barb just puts her face in her hands, sliding down the wall to the floor. And in the end all that we are left with is the emptiness of greatness.
3
There is a whole subgenre of autobiography released when an American candidate announces a run for political office. Perhaps the Iliad, the Moby-Dick of this subgenre is Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope, the political autobiography by which all others are measured. And while it would be impossible for any one person to read through all of these books, pumped out as they are by the Big Five Publishers like flyers at an Iowa campaign stop before being discarded in the graveyard of an overstock warehouse, there are certain tropes one will find throughout this subgenre. There will be stories of humble beginnings, obstacles overcome, a wholesome message of faith and family, and some staid belief in the inherent goodness of the United States and its people. American King: How to Restore Order to Our Lives by Bob The Jesus Shaman, the Monarchist Party candidate for commander in chief, is truly a genre-busting tome.
This may be due to the fact that Bob isn’t actually running for president, he’s running for king. Make no mistake, this would be a true monarchy with power passed down to Bob’s biological heirs (currently his children Mimi and Rex). Since Bob’s candidacy is a request of the American people to grant unfettered power to him and his descendants, his task is not to represent his origins as humble but rather as unimpeachable. Thus Bob traces his lineage to Lucius Antius, a Roman soldier whom he credits with “discovering America” in the second century A.D. According to Bob, Lucius married the daughter of a local chief and later established a kingdom in what is now Missouri that was never overthrown, giving his family legitimate rights over the country. Bob also lists a long line of family heroes that include wise chiefs, legendary warriors, a wealthy railroad baron, and a brilliant physicist. None of these anecdotes are as interesting as the story of Bob’s own childhood which he describes as taking place in a “vast nineteenth century mansion surrounded by rednecks.”
It is not until his late twenties that Bob embarks upon the spiritual and emotional journey that will change his life. Not much is told of the intervening years except brief mention of a job at a bowling alley. At the age of twenty-seven at a bus station in Duluth, Minnesota he is approached by a stranger who informs him that he is the rightful king of America and that she has been searching for him all her life. Her name is Beth Norton and she will later become his wife. The subsequent chapter is an unreadable chronicle of their sensual pleasures in the bus station restroom. Suffice it to say that Bob soon moves to Des Moines to live with Beth and reclaim his throne.
Sadly, at first his efforts amount to little more than blogging conspiracy theories on his own website and experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs. Here are a few examples of the conspiracy theories he references in American King: JFK killed by industrialists on the eve of recognizing Bob’s mother as Queen of America, George Washington planning to establish Bob’s family as royal rulers until being thwarted by Thomas Jefferson, the Walt Disney Company secretly run by bureaucrats from the former Soviet Union.
One afternoon, while ingesting DMT, he has a vision that he is the latest in a long line of shamans extending all the way past Lucius Antius, back to Philip, the apostle of Jesus. In the vision Philip renames him Bob the Jesus Shaman, ordains him as a “divine monarch”, and convinces him to destroy the Liberty Bell. As you know, Bob’s attempt to demolish the Liberty Bell with a sledgehammer fails, leading to a two-year prison sentence and the notoriety through which he will launch his long-shot bid for unchecked royal dominion.
In the last section of the book, Bob makes a case for monarchy as the most enlightened system of government. He also excuses his own criminal acts as “inspired by God” and “necessary for American renewal.” I can’t say that he convinced me of this or anything, but he has certainly revolutionized the genre of political autobiography and I hope that the books of future candidates are inspired by his unorthodox tale.
— Benjamin Schmitt
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