I have a strained relationship with Christopher Nolan’s movies (it’s come up before). I love Interstellar and I like Tenet. I found Oppenheimer, with its dialogue explaining to me what was happening at all times, extremely tedious after the first forty minutes.1 I hate The Prestige, which is sort of like Anna Biller’s The Love Witch in that it plays like a comedy skit from somebody who doesn’t know that’s funny and will get really upset if you laugh. I view Nolan and his career as basically a good thing—if only because he helped save Anne Hathaway’s—but I don’t always enjoy his movies or admire them.2 Still, over the past couple weeks I ended up watching or rewatching a truly ridiculous amount of Nolan movies, partly because they ended up working weirdly well for my quasi–zombie state after a day spent in the archive, and I kind of miss them. I mean the movies are still there but I don’t think it’ll be the same. Like I don’t think it will will work if I just watch Tenet over and over.

The Odyssey has great moments and the last act of the movie really works, but, like Oppenheimer, it suffers from extremely clunky and sometimes bizarre dialogue.3 I found the casting of so many big names distracting in Oppenheimer and it stays distracting here. Circe was genuinely terrifying, and so was the Underworld, but every scene with Calypso brought the movie to a grinding halt. I would go see it again, and but my take on the first viewing was that it’s a little bloated, a little uneven, and there are way too many repetitions of the phrase “Zeus’s law.”4

However, what I have to share is not a review of The Odyssey. It’s about Christopher Nolan’s recurring heroic type, guys who create problems by running away and then decide by the end that what they really need to do is… run away a little harder:

[Christopher Nolan’s] heroes are often exceptional men who cause problems, then agonize over how to make amends. The fact that they are men is no accident. Their failures at both masculinity and intimacy are essential to understanding them. They aren’t good men, in the sense of upstanding members of the community who work toward building something better. And they aren’t bad men, which is to say violent parasites. Instead, they’re halfway heroes, charismatic but hollow people who deem love as something best shown by their absence because their presence proves to be too dangerous.

You can read it here.5

I think there’s maybe a more interesting wider conversation about when things are anachronistic (but it’s fine or even creatively good) and when things are anachronistic (and it’s bad), which might be happening elsewhere already, but I’ve been carefully averting my eyes from most Odyssey writing until this was done.6 I think there are moments of both types of anachronism in Nolan’s movie, and then there are also “accommodations” to “modern sensibilities” like “nobody’s getting raped during the sack of Troy” that I personally endorse because… well… I don’t wanna watch that.

I did read this piece by my friend and enjoyed it.

Movie Enthusiast

Film Critic with a Classics Degree Sees The Odyssey

In their essay “Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment,” Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer call the Odyssey of Homer “the fundamental text of European civilization.” Now what filmmaker could resist the challenge of adapting that for the screen? Christopher Nolan’s…

Read more

8 days ago · 12 likes · 5 comments · Tim Markatos

Also, friend of the newsletter has been doing a series on Nolan over at his newsletter, featuring fellow friend of the newsletter Tyler Malone on Batman.

Now Christopher Nolan is not reading this newsletter. But if he were I would totally have suggestions for things he could adapt next if he wants to do an adaptation and not an original story. For instance:

• The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)—it has time. It has science. It has running away. It has going back. It has the potential for lots of expository dialogue. It’s got it all. You should also hire me as a consultant because I have read one billion drafts of The Dispossessed (three). (Four if you count the finished book.)

• You might be thinking, but what about The Left Hand of Darkness? It’s nothing personal but I just don’t want to hear a Ludwig Göransson for that one. Or Hans Zimmer. No. Honestly it might sound crazy but I think something synthy would be nice for that. Susumu Hirasawa. That’s the vision.

• “The Ape’s Wife” (Caitlín R. Kiernan). Most of Kiernan’s stories are a bit too horny to be a good fit but they are also obsessed with time. This story was the least horny one I could think of but it is about King Kong (cool puppet opportunity) which could be a copyright problem. Oh wait—

• Agents of Dreamland mashed up with Black Helicopters (Caitlín R. Kiernan). These are like… Lovecraft X-Files novellas. Lots of time stuff. Potential for traumatizing past flashbacks. OK. Yeah do this one. It’s a trilogy but the first two are probably the most “you” (if you are Christopher Nolan). Additionally, you could put Cillian Murphy in this one as the grizzled older agent.

• The Fortunate Fall (Cameron Reed). In addition to the time stuff there’s a lot of augmented reality stuff, holographic stuff, that cyberpunk thing where you are like… swimming through “the Internet”….

• The Immortal King Rao (Vauhini Vara). I read this recently on the recommendation of and well you know it’s got the time stuff, it’s about a self-made genius who kinda destroys the world…. OK so this might just be Oppenheimer. Nevertheless.

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Now do any of these address the “hero” thing—Dispossessed yes—everything else no.

By the way, at my theater, there was this whole ad for placing ads before movies to hype your local business or whatever. I was like, can anybody place an ad? Could I place an ad? Just be like, here be my preorder link (once there is one) as a QR code? How much does that sort of thing cost…?

3

This moment in Oppenheimer was when I kind of lost it.

Whisper of the Heart is my personal favorite Ghibli movie. It’s a great movie about love, it’s a great movie about ambition, it’s a great movie about the passion and the amount of hard work it takes to be really good at anything. It’s also about how choosing something and committing to something often looks a little bit crazy. For instance: proposing marriage to your girlfriend when you’re both just exiting middle school and you are additionally dropping out of school and leaving the country. That looks pretty crazy. Possibly, is pretty crazy. On the other hand… what if you and your girlfriend are just two people who figured out who you were earlier than other people?

Shizuku Tsukishima is a middle school student whose life is spent going from exam to exam. She checks out books from the library and begins to notice that there’s a boy who has checked them all out before her. His name is Seiji Amasawa. She begins to develop a little bit of a crush on this fictional boy. Unrelatedly, this other guy has popped up in her life. He is really annoying! It would be terrible if he were Seiji!

Yeah, yeah. You know what’s up there.

Eventually Shizuku gets to know the annoying boy and before she puts two and two together on the Seiji front she’s learned about his dream to go to Cremona and learn how to become a master violin maker. When he leaves Japan for a two month trial apprenticeship, she decides she’s going to do something, too. She’s going to prove, to herself, that she cares about something as much as he does. During those two months, she’s going to write a novel. To hell with studying for exams!

One of the great things about Whisper of the Heart is the way it takes certain things that were already established in the Ghibli playbook—a sense of light and of beauty, an interest in stories about breaking from and embracing tradition—and did them in a distinctive way. The result is something that’s distinctly a Ghibli movie without feeling like an faux Miyazaki movie.1 The romantic landscape in this movie is the city, not the country. The playful synths in Yuji Nomi’s score replace the kind of sweeping orchestral music Joe Hisaishi wrote. The romanticized European culture you see in Kiki’s Delivery Service or Castle in the Sky or Porco Rosso is still present, but as charming antiques. Instead, what you love in this movie are the items in Shizuku’s cluttered apartment, like the rice maker, or her headphones. Whisper of the Heart is about a recognizably contemporary Japan and not some other time or other place.2

In their first couple meetings, Seiji teases Shizuku about her version of “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” which she’s called “Concrete Roads.” (Later, he claims not to remember doing this.) Shizuku goes back to the song’s original love of the country, and in the opening lines of her novel she also invokes the woods, but I think what’s special about her initial attempt at “Concrete Roads” is just that she is thinking about her actual life, not some woodland she’s never seen. Sure, she is defeated and falls back on more familiar literary objects, but she’s not satisfied with the draft of her novel, and when I watch the movie I feel like she’s going to keep working at it until she knows how to capture the romance of her city life. Even the glimpses we get of the book show something that is not some forest fantasy, but a floating city made up of “planetoids.”

Whisper of the Heart isn’t an ode to modernity either. Maybe one of the things I like the most about this movie is its gentle embrace of everything old and new: listening to music on your headphones and impromptu singing with strangers even though you consider yourself “tone deaf.” The technology that allowed Seiji to flirt with Shizuku before they’d actually met—i.e., the physical library card catalog—is on the way out. I think there’s a suggestion that this change to a computerized card catalog system is a little regrettable, because it removes one way for people to surprise and meet one another. The great thing about city life is the way everybody’s on top of each other, forcing encounters and coincidences that can become something else, and the last shot of the movie, as the credits roll, is just watching all the people and animals who walk up and down a road. We can even watch a new romance start up.

About that marriage proposal.… Whisper of the Heart is adapted from a manga, the marriage proposal is, as far as I can tell, original to the movie. Here’s an interview with Kondō and Aoi Hiiragi (the mangaka)3:

Kondo: Another difference with shoujo manga is the depiction of romance, right? While I fundamentally viewed it as a love story, as Miyazaki’s storyboards progressed, there seemed to be a stronger emphasis on the message of “introspection and self-improvement.” Despite the tagline, “I’ve found someone I like,” I wonder if this can truly be termed a love story in the conventional shoujo manga sense. In your original work, rather than the two immersing in their own world, they are depicted as “standing side by side, looking far ahead.”

Hiiragi: I see. Even so, the last line from Seiji had quite the impact.

Kondo: That line was Miyazaki’s idea. He said it would be weak if Seiji simply told Shizuku, “I love you.” The line is more of a resolution, looking beyond that white haze and deciding to walk forward together. That’s why it works.…

“That’s why it works” is maybe an overstatement. The first time I watched this movie I thought the ending, where Seiji asks Shizuku to marry him when he’s done with his studies in Cremona, was insane. I thought everything leading up to it was great, but that moment was so crazy it made the rest of the movie feel like it wasn’t really engaged with reality. Whenever I rewatch the movie, though, the ending feels a little less strange. Some of that is probably just because now I know it’s coming, so I’m emotionally prepared for it. When it comes out of nowhere, it’s almost shocking.

However, I also think it has to do with what I said at the beginning of the newsletter—that Seiji and Shizuku both have a strong sense of who they are by the end of the movie. They support each other in ways that don’t hamper the other’s independence. It’s not that they’d be ready to get married right then and there, of course, but now when I watch this movie, I think, when would they be more ready to say, yes, you’re the person I want to go through my life with? When you know, you know.…

Ultimately the decision to have the movie end with a marriage proposal mirrors the way both Seiji and Shizuku make serious choices to commit to their work. Seiji is dropping out of school and studying in another country. Shizuku risks her chance at getting into a good high school by staying up all night writing and neglecting her studies. When she finishes her novel she knows it’s not good, that wanting to write a novel isn’t actually enough to do so, a realization that causes her to burst into tears. But she’s not giving up, and that’s why we can sense, watching the movie, that she will really become an artist one day.

There’s also a story within Whisper of the Heart—not the one Shizuku’s writing—about how Seiji’s grandfather loved a woman and promised to reunite with her after what was meant to be a brief separation, but the unexpected advent of war meant he never found her again. Obviously, he moved on with his life (otherwise, Seiji would not exist), but this story is a reminder that even serious and sincere promises sometimes cannot be kept. We don’t really know what will happen to these two kids, but we know what will happen if everything works out for them the way that they want. So while the ending still feels like a lot to me… I’m convinced these days that it’s the right ending for the movie.

What will always be bittersweet about Whisper of the Heart is that it was meant to be the first of many movies that Yoshifumi Kondō would make for Ghibli. Unfortunately, though, Kondō died three years later. He never made another movie. The light-filled city landscape of this movie remains singular. It is one beautiful movie that doesn’t lead anywhere. Still—what a movie!

• This is a day early because I’m supposed to have something go out “this weekend”… if that doesn’t happen well… you never saw this bullet point.

• My impression of the Japanese school system from watching anime: you are always in school. If you are bad at school, you get more school. But if you are good at school, you also get more school. If you go on vacation, it’s a school trip. If you are really bad at school, you drop into some pit of eternal fire, where you still have to go to school. It may seem as if there are adults who have graduated from school, but in fact, there is no point at which you stop going to school. Even Shizuku’s mother is in school.

• There’s a kind of flexibility to the faces in this movie that I really like and which feels distinctive. I can’t quite put my finger on what does it—it’s partly that they’re a bit more cartoonish at times, but I don’t think that’s the only reason.

• Shizuku has been immortalized as the lo fi beats girl.

• Seiji pretending to be a jerk to impress the girl he likes… a mistake many have made before him and which many will make again. The cat fixed it though. By the time he gets back from Italy he knows that what you do is give her your coat and also fail to bike her up a hill.

• Seriously… that biking scene is so cute.

• There is a spinoff movie, The Cat Returns. I have seen it once and my memory is that it is mediocre.

• “It’s not easy to walk your own road. You’ve got only yourself to blame” is one of those lines that’s always rolling around in my head, like “everything’s temporary! that don’t excuse nothing!” from Moonstruck.

• You can tell that Shizuku’s family is significantly less well off than her friends’ families, and it’s implied that’s because they’ve made slightly off-the-beaten-path decisions, which I think gives that moment a little more weight.

In truth though today I’m not trying to talk about “AI.” I would guess most people reading this newsletter are uninterested in reading things “written by AI” and disapprove of “writing with AI” even if their definitions of “writing with AI” and their levels of disapproval vary. While I’m not above playing the hits, I’m just taking it as a given that at least ninety percent of you are on the same page as me here. Instead, I want to talk about a type of “anti-AI” argument I run into often and which I find very frustrating. This argument is generally made up of the following statements:

• The process of writing is part of thinking.

• All of the work that goes into a piece of writing is writing.

• You write to find out what you think.

• Ergo: The process is the point.

Now I would say the first three statements here are completely true about writing, by the way. I agree with them totally. Nothing in this post should be taken as disagreement with those first three statements. However, what this line actually argues is that the practice of writing is personally rewarding and clarifying, not that the writing produced from such a process is worth taking your time to read. This argument implies that for readers, the writing process is also the point. However, to the extent that this argument can be made for readers, the “process” is reading, not your personal writing journey. For readers, reading is the point.

In short, the problem to me with this line of argument is that:

• The process of writing is not the point of writing, because

• The point of writing is to produce a work of writing, and

• The point of a work of writing is to be read.

Not “read by a lot of people,” maybe to be read by just one person, but nonetheless read by somebody who is not yourself. I don’t know why it feels almost taboo to me to say “the point of a work of writing is to be read,” that’s a matter for my non-existent therapist to ponder. Note-taking, diary entries, and student papers, however, are just about the only kinds of writing I can think of that are not meant to be read.1

And the question for people who want to prioritize process, to me, is why pieces need to be published if the result is not the point of the process. Why not simply write journal entries?

However, there’s another reason this line irks me, which is that I’ve found one hallmark of people who become interested in creative uses for AI is an obsession with process. For instance, in the latest issue of the Yale Review, Christopher Sorrentino has an essay that fits into my own biases here almost too perfectly.2

In his piece, he says that LLMs have freed him from, essentially, worrying about the audience. Instead he can engage in a process in which he prompts the LLM over and over, iterating and re-iterating prompts, producing in one case eighty pages of process that he then refined into twenty pages of story.3 Sorrentino places this use of LLMs into a tradition of experimental artwork, invoking the formal restrictions of OULIPO and the different ways in which visual artists have played with their personae as technicians:

Was I abdicating responsibility whenever I allowed GPT to generate the bulk of a draft in response to specific prompts? It’s a fair question, but blurring the boundary between artists’ purely creative work and their more technical role as operators, or even as curators, has a long (and controversial) history, from Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades to Donald Judd’s fabricated boxes. I’m reminded of Sol LeWitt’s remark about his wall drawings, which were executed by assistants and installers based on written instructions: “The idea becomes the machine that makes the art.”

Sorrentino is correct to say that his use of LLMs fits neatly into certain kinds of experimental art. He’s more convincing when he’s talking about visual art, though, not writing. The thing about OULIPO projects is that they are interesting books in the sense that they exist, but they are rarely (if ever) discussed as books people read and evaluate as opposed to achievements people admire. I’m not presenting this observation as my own judgment of the books in question, because I have not read them, merely as my understanding of how people seem to relate to them. Unlike a sonnet, where the form is used to express something, in many of these formally restricted writing stunts the form is the only thing being expressed, or at any rate the only thing people can register.4 There are more analogies available to Sorrentino in the visual arts, in which something like pure form is more accessible.

Restrictive formal challenges are exercises that can be of use to writers, but writers are not the only people who determine what makes a piece of writing, even their own, good or worth reading. I find Sorrentino’s claims that playing around with GPT-4 has freed him from a creative prison neither offensive nor hard to believe, but the piece itself gives every indication that he is going to get stuck there.5 Here, for instance, he asks his chatbot to generate a story from the prompt “eight people entered a room where a holiday meal was to be served and they were…shown selecting their seats on the basis of various criteria—this could be almost infinite”:

GPT-4 instantly generated a draft of about four hundred words, establishing the setting (an overheated dining room), the cast (members of a family reuniting for a holiday), and various internecine conflicts and complications. It sounded a bit like a workshop student doing Franzen. Amused, I had it create variations in style and register, then instructed it to progressively pare them down. Once I had about twenty different versions, I selected eight, which I revised line by line, teasing out and amplifying motifs and recurring phrases to give the individual pieces resonance beyond their shared premise. The finished story moves from one version to the next, progressing from most elaborate to simplest: a critical text copiously annotated with mock academic citations, a baroquely figurative and simile-laden vignette, “contemporary literary fiction,” a Hemingwayesque pastiche, unattributed dialogue, a theater director’s notes blocking the scene, anthropological field notes, Beckettian reduction.

I am sure that this was amusing to do. But as I said, this piece fits my own biases a little too well. Generating endless seating arrangements in pastiche voices is the kind of artistic use I’d come up with for LLMs if I were feeling especially mean and unfair. My reaction to reading somebody else present it as an example of creative energy unleashed is something like “doctor, I’m afraid the infection has reached the brain.” Mostly, though, anybody who uses LLMs this way is not going to disagree with the claim that the process is the point, or even that writing is itself thinking; instead they are going to disagree that their of LLMs conflicts with those statements.6

Again, you know, the difficult thing about what I’m saying here is that my point of disagreement is not “writing involves a lot of work that is not literally writing” or “writing helps us to refine our thoughts and develop arguments.” I believe there are goods gained through the practice of writing that are not easy to explain. I agree completely with Meghan O’Gieblyn’s comments along those lines in this recent interview, for instance. My difficulty is that the contexts in which these statements can make up a complete argument for eschewing LLMs are limited. They’re true of the classroom, where writing exists in a specific way. They also make good intra-writer pep talks, where we all remind each other of why we do the stuff we do. Everywhere else, they are an explanation of why writing matters to people who do it, and that’s precisely as compelling as why any pasttime matters to people who do it.

There is something missing here; a place people don’t want to go, or maybe don’t know they have to, or maybe feels too obvious to state. Or maybe it’s just that writers have forgotten the people they address do not ideally consist of each other. I’m not really sure. Furthermore, I don’t have a particularly great argument myself “against” the kind of writing Sorrentino wants to do—I only have the sense that it will not produce anything I want to read or that I will not experience as an elaborate prank.

I’m not super online right now, but I’ll check in when I can.

I think it’s fair to say that most people who read the Iliad don’t expect to find much of it to seem “applicable” in their everyday life. I’ve never angered a river god by killing so many people that I choked the flow of water, nor do I think such an event is likely to happen, and if it did happen I think I’d probably be one of the bodies in that situation, not the Achilles killing people.

However, against all odds, there’s one moment in the Iliad that I think of all the time, in the sense of an event in my life reminding me of it. This moment comes in Book 6 when Diomedes and Glaucus meet on the battlefield, swap backstories, realize that they specifically shouldn’t be fighting each other because of their family history, and trade gifts.1 Here’s the Lattimore translation:

Diomedes of the great war cry was gladdened.
He drove his spear deep into the prospering earth, and in winning
words of friendliness he spoke to the shepherd of the people:
“See now, you are my guest friend from far in the time of our fathers.
Brilliant Oineus once was host to Bellerophontes
the blameless, in his halls, and twenty days he detained him,
and these two gave to each other fine gifts in token of friendship.
Oineus gave his guest a war belt bright with the red dye,
Bellerophontes a golden and double-handled drinking-cup,
a thing I left behind in my house when I came on my journey.
Tydeus, though, I cannot remember, since I was little
when he left me, that time the people of the Achaians perished
in Thebe. Therefore I am your friend and host in the heart of Argos;
you are mine in Lykia, when I come to your country.
Let us avoid each other’s spears, even in the close fighting.
There are plenty of Trojans and famed companions in battle for me
to kill, whom the god sends me, or those I run down with my swift feet,
many Achaians for you to slaughter, if you can do it.
But let us exchange our armor, so that these others may know
how we claim to be guests and friends from the days of our fathers.”

Did I need to quote all that? No, but I wanted to.

Anyway—encounters between strangers online have a quality of the fields of Troy.2 Everybody is wandering around with their deal, and much of the time you don’t really need to know somebody’s deal. You’re just in their comments leaving death threats and facts about them are unhelpful in that occupation. In fact, if you go out of your way to find out stuff about somebody beyond what you’re being told, that’s usually regarded as a little creepy. Sometimes, though, you do need to know somebody’s deal. Or you want people to know your deal.

People have tried to figure out a solution to this problem through various means:

• Social media bios.3

• Emojis in social media handles.

• Signatures on forum posts or emails.

• “Flairs” (Reddit specific).

• Digital cards in which you filled in things like your sexual orientation and mental illnesses (big on Tumblr).

• Labels telling you if somebody went to private school (BlueSky specific).

All of these are in some sense doing the work of our friend, the Homeric epithet, which communicates in an elegant fashion who somebody is in a manner that is easy to remember. Often, unless the subreddit is particularly focused on a single topic, the way these things communicate information is not directly. You might go to a subreddit where all the flairs are jokes and if you spend enough time lurking you learn to understand what the jokes indicate about the person and where they’re coming from.4 Online communication tends toward a state of total context collapse, but we keep finding ways to introduce context anyway.

Of course heroes on the battlefield of Troy don’t wander around with their epithets written on their foreheads—the epithets are for us, not for them—and Diomedes learns who Glaucus is by just asking. But online, by existing both in text and outside of it, we’re the characters in the poem and writing the poem at the same time.

Anyway, I think my cameo in the Netiad would go something like: BDM, owner of the dog Boswell. Ultimately Boswell is the most salient fact about me. But trying to pick the most salient fact about Boswell is proving to be very hard.

4

For instance, from r/blogsnarkmetasnark, this flair probably means the person is a swiftie, but if you were encountering it without context, you would not think that,

Perfect Blue is one of the all-time movies. It’s about Mima, a member of a C-tier idol group called “CHAM.” Well, she was: Mima is now transitioning to acting, with one member of her management team, Tadokoro, encouraging this decision and the other, Rumi, opposing. Mima herself, sitting between the arguing members of her management team like a disappointing but dutiful daughter, appears to be trying to figure out what people want from her so she can get on with it. A few scenes later, though, it’s clear that she is more eager to make the change than she lets on. On the phone with her mother, Mima says that her pop idol image is strangling her. She means that figuratively; Perfect Blue means it literally.

For now, Mima has a minor part in a drama series, Double Bind. And she has a fansite from her idol days, “Mima’s Room.” Mima doesn’t really know what a website is, but she has her manager buy her a computer and set it up so she can check it out.

It turns out “Mima’s Room” is a series of diary entries. At first Mima thinks the website is cute, but then she keeps reading, and it becomes less cute. It turns out that the Mima of Mima’s Room knows every action of Mima’s life in startling detail, down to which foot she uses to leave the subway and her preferred brand of milk. And she does not like that Mima is acting. The Mima of Mima’s Room wants to be a pop idol. When the real Mima takes steps that mean she absolutely cannot go back to being a pop idol, even if she fails as an actor, the pop idol Mima starts taking things into her own hands, and people associated with Mima’s new career start dying.

One thing Perfect Blue understood about the interactions of fame, fandom, the internet, and industry middlemen—and understood well before it was clear how much these things would become enmeshed with each other—is that the people who are most vulnerable in the entertainment industry are the not quite famous who have not quite made it. Mima’s not a star. In contemporary pop music terms, she’s not even on the “Billboard Bubbling Under” chart. She’s clearly meant to be the “main girl” of CHAM, because her costume is a little different and she stands in the middle, but CHAM’s last performance as a trio is full of empty seats. There are guys who follow the group and cause trouble, hurling beer cans at the stage, and being on the stage means Mima is exposed in a way that makes it easy to throw cans at her. But they aren’t really fans—they’re just jerks. If Mima were a nobody, she wouldn’t have people faxing threats to her tiny apartment for changing careers. If Mima were a star, she’d be more insulated. But as it is, she’s in the dangerous middle space where you’ve lost privacy without gaining security. To get to where she wants to be, she has to suffer.

The suffering is pointless. Mima isn’t grinding away at bit parts to prove herself or hone her craft. What she goes through in making Double Bind is not “paying her dues.” The scriptwriter writes a scene where her character is raped at a strip club, and she agrees to it rather than seem like a diva for saying no. The filming of the rape scene a drawn-out ordeal that goes from being ugly to funny to horrifying as the director repeatedly stops and starts the scene, causing Mima to snap in and out of character. She does a photography shoot where she gets nude, even though she doesn’t want to. Alone in the aftermath of these events, Mima wrecks her apartment, submerges herself in the bathtub, screams. If she had stayed a pop idol, sheltered and protected by her agency, she would have been spared this treatment.1 She’s like a Disney star who has to prove to everybody that she’s all grown up now, in the same way all those actresses do: sleaze.

As much as Perfect Blue is about fandom and the internet, about the image of Mima created by her fans and how that image threatens her ability to act and choose for herself—the truth is that Mima’s big problem is not crazy fans. Mima only seems to have one fan, crazy or otherwise: Me-Mania, who terrorizes her under the influence of somebody claiming to be the “real” Mima. The real Mima demands Me-Mania kill the vile imposter who is dragging Mima’s image through the mud. Mima herself, at this point heavily disassociating, begins to wonder if she really is the person updating this website. She sees her pop idol herself everywhere, taunting her.

Still, there’s a question available to the viewer about that phantom image, which is: who really made it? When CHAM becomes a duo, they dump the cute, ballerina-esque pretty princess look of before. They show up in contemporary clothes and sing about being normal girls who like to wear jeans. They get a hit. But we see enough of Mima’s own aesthetic to guess—if we’re asking these questions—that she wasn’t the one who was pushing the super cute look either. Who made up the costumes, the image, the synchronized dances? It wasn’t Mima. That’s not how idol groups work.

Your first time watching Perfect Blue, you will find it easy to pick out the single authority figure who seems to care about Mima: her female manager, Rumi. Her other manager, Tadokoro, doesn’t really mind signing Mima up for questionable gigs if it means she gets a little more screen time. For him, the photography shoot is a way of saying Mima’s a pro, and when she balks at the last minute he’s exasperated. The director, the photographer, and the script writer certainly do not care about Mima. (The director and the photographer barely care about making a coherent television drama.) Rumi, however, is a quiet and semi-maternal if disapproving presence. She’s a former idol herself and believes Mima is throwing away a good career. Maybe her ideas of what Mima should do are a little rigid, but—who else is on her side?

Still, as I said, Mima’s big problem isn’t her fans. Like most artists, her real problem is her manager. Rumi is the one mailing explosives to Mima’s set. Rumi is sending messages to Mima’s single crazy fan pretending to be the “real” Mima. Rumi is trying to manipulate Mima into losing her mind.2 Rumi is killing people (or at least, she’s killing some of the people). Rumi is the person forcing Mima to be a certain way so she can live vicariously through her career. Much as fans are friend-like but not your friends, Rumi is maternal but not Mima’s mother. She has no interest in Mima growing up or standing on her own; she isn’t going to offer Mima any protection that isn’t regression. She is a false mother, and, as in a fairy tale, you either kill your false mother or she kills you.

Or maybe you find a third option. After a long and bloody fight, Mima saves Rumi’s life. At the end of the movie we see her, older now and a successful actress, visiting Rumi in a mental hospital, with the implication being that she’s taken care of Rumi over the years. That Mima doesn’t need to kill Rumi is a sign of how much she’s grown by the end. She ceases to be the cowed and obedient child we meet at the beginning of the movie and becomes a woman capable of fighting back. She wants her life. She knows she is real. And if to get where she wants, she has to undergo things that are traumatizing and degrading, she’s still an adult, and she still gets to decide.

To me, that’s part of what makes this movie so satisfying. Mima wins. She comes out the other side. She’s not some kind of tragic broken bird, she’s not a victim of the entertainment industry, she doesn’t get stuck in her past. She keeps moving forward, even as she disassociates and struggles, and when she’s faced with death she makes the choice to fight back where she’s been primed to give up. She keeps on going even after she’s been stabbed in the shoulder with an icepick and in the side with an umbrella. She keeps going and she lives. She lives, bitch! I love this movie.

• I am flying today so I (probably) won’t be around that much. I will try to be around later, though.

• My Bluray set comes with 117 minutes of Satoshi Kon interviews which I did not end up watching. But I could watch them at any time.

• Relevant Animation Obsessive link:

  Animation Obsessive

  The Real History of 'Perfect Blue' and 'Requiem for a Dream'

  Welcome to another issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter! Here’s what we’re doing today…

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  4 years ago · 70 likes · 8 comments · Animation Obsessive Staff

• On that note, Christopher Nolan there is still time to admit you watched Paprika.

• In a cool moment of overlap, Perfect Blue also popped up on Angelica Jade Bastién’s newsletter this week:

  Madwomen & Muses

  The Feminine Grotesque No.4: Perfect Blue (1997)

  The Feminine Grotesque is an occasional column about female madness…

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  21 days ago · 31 likes · 2 comments · Angelica Jade Bastién

• No matter how insane Americans can get about celebrities (and it’s “very”), there’s nothing here even sort of like idol culture. This might be the only way in which Americans are more normal about fame than people in other countries.

• There is obviously a lot about how this movie blends reality and fantasy that I did not write about. However, the moment Mima’s reflection turns into pop idol Mima and says to her, about filming the rape scene, “I absolutely refuse to do it”—I think that was when I realized I was watching one of the greatest movies ever.

• I always assumed Rumi killed Mima’s fish after leaving the set early. Do other people think this?

• Madonna used Perfect Blue as part of a tour backdrop. You can find it on YouTube but I’m not linking it here because she also incorporates the original tentacle rape movie.

• Perfect Blue is technically based on a book, which I have not read, but I believe Satoshi Kon didn’t read it either, sooooOOOoooo.…

• I noticed this time that Rumi and Me-Mania are drawn similarly, particularly with their eyes seeming too far apart. Very subtle but there.

• As has been previously established, this movie is about Taylor Swift.

• Between this movie and what I remember of Paprika I lowkey kinda think Satoshi Kon hates fat people. Hated fat people.

I had this amazingly detailed dream about my book recently when I’d given it this crazy conceit of setting it in a boarding house or hotel or something where the various authors lived, and Tiptree could see the ghosts of people before they died, but could not prevent their deaths, so she killed herself. I was like I don’t really understand why I wrote this book in this strange and highly allegorical way but wow it works.

Then I woke up and thought, that really would not work. That would not work at all.

June in posts

I knew it, I knew that the Taylor Swift Toy Story song would not fix my malaise. Maybe I need a hunk to shoot some aliens for me, but I’d probably still find a way to whine about it.

June in writing abroad

June in Japanimation

June in perfume

June in random YouTube videos I was really into

June in other newsletters

I imagine some of you will want to follow along with this series on Samuel Delany from Katherine Packert Burke:

Ghost Image

Untitled Samuel Delany Project #0: Introduction & The Jewel-Hinged Jaw (1977)

I didn’t really care for Samuel R. Delany the first time I read his work. It was 2016, and through a brief stint working at the Strand the year before I had already been (re)introduced to LeGuin and Butler, both on the cusp on their renaissances that continue to this day. But Delany, oddly, no one was talking about. It was actually only in the liner not…

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2 months ago · 19 likes · 16 comments · katherine packert burke

Ghost Image

Untitled Samuel Delany Project #1 - The Jewels of Aptor (1962)

It begins with a girl, upset over a recording of a four-armed boy being tortured. She decides she’ll write a poem to get the image out of her head. Immediately before that, her mentor reminds her of an anecdote from the life of Cellini, that…

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a month ago · 7 likes · 3 comments · katherine packert burke

N.B. for the Russeans,1 Burke’s new novel, All Us Ghosts, has a minor character who plays in a punk band called “Whileaway.” Cute!

June in “buckwheat pillow”

I bought a buckwheat pillow (as mentioned here). Specifically, I bought this buckwheat pillow. wanted to know if I liked it, and I promised I’d mention the results of using it for a couple weeks in the monthly digest.

I really do! I did have to empty more buckwheat hulls than I expected to make it the right height for me. In fact I bought another pound of buckwheat hulls and a zip-up pillow shell and just made my own “travel pillow” with the amount I took out. My neck has been great. No pain. I’m a convert to buckwheat pillow life.

There’s nothin’ shakin’ come this here July.… Except.…

Some July preorders.

• We Were Forbidden (Jacqueline Harpman)

• Twenty Minutes of Silence (Hélène Bessette)

Pretty light month.

July in Japanimation

• Perfect Blue (Satoshi Kon), July 11

• Whisper of the Heart (Yoshifumi Kondō), July 25

This month’s theme is “girls in the arts.” These are out of chronological order but I got a nice physical edition of Perfect Blue and I’m going to be archive diving and restricted to streaming in the second half of the month, so I would like the option of watching the special features, even if I will in fact forget to watch the special features.

July in perfume

I got the Pineward summer protoype set to write about, and now the prototype set is retired. But I’m still writing about it, so.…

All is chaos—usually the monthly digest would go out today—but instead you have this and the June digest goes out in July. All the clocks are broken, as Auden said I think, about death but also he would have said it about my normal schedule.

I woke up the other day to an email from an editor at the Guardian asking if I wanted to write about Taylor Swift’s wedding. My initial response was “hell no,” because I don’t write about Taylor’s real life. But then I had some coffee and opened the email and read it past the subject line and discovered what the editor wanted was something about the way Taylor has depicted love and marriage over the years. That’s my line, so I was thrilled to be asked and very happy to write the piece. Here it is:

Swift’s narrators and heroines, faced with story-ending domesticity, inevitably run, even if they don’t really know why. “Sometimes you just don’t know the answer ’til someone’s on his knees and asks you,” broods the narrator of her 2020 track Champagne Problems. She imagines her jilted lover’s family and friends telling him “what a shame she’s fucked in the head”, and it doesn’t seem as if she really disagrees with that assessment. She just knows that she couldn’t say yes. At the same time, the permanent bond of marriage is something that runs through her songs as a real goal: from early tracks such as Mary’s Song (2006), to the lover you can trust “like a brother” in Call It What You Want (2017), to the multiple proposals of and allusions to marriage on her 2019 album Lover. These would represent a kind of domesticity in which no story ends, you have simply entered a new chapter.

You can read it here.

Now you may think, if you click through and continue to read: was this piece sort of kind of an excuse to write about The Tortured Poets Department? Well. Yes.1

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Not to be a bit of an annoying person—BUT—the sheer amount of investigative energy that’s been dedicated toward figuring out where Taylor’s wedding is and when it is baffles me. Unless you’re invited, what is the point of knowing this info? And if you are invited, then like… you don’t gotta check TMZ. Trying to crack the secrets of her wedding in advance… what’s the point? A real case of “could this energy be directed toward something that actually matters.” Like here’s CBS parked out filming trucks pulling out stuff they can’t even see because all of it’s covered.

It also kind of annoys me because this is the way in which Taylor’s “overexposure” actually works—through other people grilling random celebs about Taylor on the red carpet, or aggressive speculation about the wedding and the wedding date and the wedding venue and the wedding guests. The cumulative effect of this stuff is to make people feel tired of Taylor Swift, but… all these places could just not cover the wedding until it happens and there’s stuff to know.

Since it’s possible that this newsletter will get a bit more visibility than is usual over here at BDM Industries, I wanted to mention some artists I like or have recently listened to who are not only smaller than Taylor (which is true of 99.99% of artists) but (with one exception) simply small. I don’t write about music here because… I don’t like writing about music. So this is my way of paying the “I like and write about the most popular of the popular stuff” tax that I think it behooves me (and all lovers of popular stuff) to pay now and then. I would not claim to have “good taste in music.” It’s probably more accurate to say that I have “no taste in music,” that is, it’s not even bad taste. Still, I can probably say I have “my taste in music.”2

For convenience, the songs below are also in this Spotify playlist, which you should feel free to transfer to your preferred music service. I did make an Apple Music version, which is slightly different (one artist is exclusive to Apple). I wanted to keep this post under the email limit, so you’ll see more songs and artists in the playlists. The yardstick I came up with for “small” was “didn’t have over a million monthly Spotify listeners when I added them”—I don’t know if that’s really the best measure, as at least one artist in the playlists is very successful in her niche, but it’s what I am using.

OK.… First up Davia, who I’ve mentioned before (here), and who has a new song out.

However, for any visiting Swifties: you might like this song about Sylvia Plath.

Leyla Ebrahimi wasn’t on my radar until mentioned her recently. Unlike me, Dave Moore actually has knowledge of music, so you should subscribe to him if you like getting playlists of new stuff. I really like her! She’d be a great opener for The Life of a Cowgirl or whatever the next Taylor tour is gonna be called.

Then there’s a group from Essex called AlicebanD that actually have a track in my top ten “most played of all time” on Spotify.

I love, love, love Hatchie. I own all her albums on vinyl! She’s so good. I keep trying to get friends aboard the Hatchie train but nobody really trusts my taste in music so I’m not having a lot of luck. (Hatchie has a cute, shoegaze-y cover of “August.” I’m not a member of Hatchie’s Patreon, but I think she posts more covers there.)

Ravyn Lenae’s not a “small artist” in comparison to everybody else here. However, I am looking forward to her new album (and even pre-ordered it), but will not be writing about it, so… I’m gonna mention her too. I have loved every pre-release single.

OK, that’s all from me. You know the rules for the comments: be nice, stick to the art, and as far as wedding location rumors go, Fran speaks for me.

2

Here’s my attempt to demonstrate the spread of my taste.

There’s a kind of science fiction that appeals to me because it courts my rejection, even my repulsion. It lines up things that matter to me, things that we could line up under the general category of “being human,” but at least under “humanism,” and it suggests that these things can, should, and in any case will be left behind.1 Ghost in the Shell is not a cautionary tale about turning “too much” over to the machine. It depicts union with the machine as akin to if not quite the same as theosis. It posits that the drive for technological union is as basic to mankind as the desire to have children or the experience of death.2 “When computers made it possible to externalize memory,” Project 2501, a network-born form of life, says, “you should have considered all the implications that held.” As nobody says in the movie, but the viewer presumably knows without being told, the externalization of memory did not begin with the computer, but writing. We have been working toward this result for a very long time.

Our “total replacement” cyborg heroine, Major Kusanagi, suffers from a personal crisis in which she wonders how she would even know if she were a machine with fake memories. She goes diving, even with the risk that she’ll die thanks to her unbuoyant metal body, because she feels as if she could transform into something else. Her crisis is resolved by merging with Project 2501. Her fears are the sort that seize anybody on the threshold of a transformation, which is also a kind of death.3

The Major works for Section 9, a government agency whose purpose, at least in the film, is unclear. She’s in pursuit of a hacker known as the Puppet Master, who hacks people’s cybernetic augmentations to control them and even to implant false memories. The Puppet Master is eventually revealed to be Project 2501, who has embarked on this spree of crime to find some way of making contact with the Major.

Though what Section 9 is meant to do is, as noted, never all that clear, it doesn’t really matter because Section 9’s actual job is not relevant to the story.4 It’s some branch of intelligence that uses mostly cyborg agents and seems to have a blank check to do whatever it wants. For instance, when we first meet the Major she unplugs something from her neck, strips naked, jumps off a building, and assassinates a diplomat. We go from the gruesome scene in which the diplomat is assassinated, in which his body is blown open and you can see his spine, to the Major’s cyborg body being scanned and inspected. There’s not an equivalency here but there is a question, about what the Major’s body is made of and the man’s. When, much later, the Major’s body will break apart, it’s not clear whether it’s the flesh or the machine parts of her that let her down.

The Major is naked a lot—it feels like she’s naked more than she’s clothed—but it’s not sexual.5 (Despite her early quip about it being “that time of the month,” other comments imply she doesn’t have reproductive organs.) Her nudity is practical, because her skin allows her to blend into the background, and her body is a tool. Though she’s not the only cyborg in this film, she’s the only one so detached from her physical self.6 At the end of the movie, the Major ends up with her head attached to a doll’s body, an image that should be either hilarious or creepy but instead feels irrelevant. It’s just a body. It’s not as good as the one she had but it will do to get her from one place to the next.

There are many touches in this film that are meant to make you think about cyborg physicality. When the Major lands on the ground, you can tell she’s heavier than a human being. The camouflage some cyborgs use can make them invisible to human eyes, but there’s no way to disguise that weight, and later in the movie, the weight will even be a important clue. One of the film’s jaw-dropping set pieces, in which a mostly invisible Major fights a man in a pool of water, is always outlining what the Major is doing by her effect on the man and the water.

Much like the Patlabor movies, Ghost in the Shell feels as if it takes place at the end of a world. There are long, quiet, meditative sequences in which nothing much happens. This movie takes place in the last days of nations, which are in the process of being superseded by computerized corporations. Tokyo is flooded. There are two people in this movie who seem to have normal lives, and one turns out to be a victim of false memories. Like a larvae becoming a chrysalis, what once made up human life is being dissolved to create something new.

The movie’s attitude toward this change is neutral. It is simply happening. At the same time, it asserts that some things are basic to life in ways that computerization and ecological disaster cannot alter: all living things want to leave behind offspring and all living things need to die. “A copy is merely a copy,” Project 2501 explains when it asks the Major to bear its virtual children. “There’s the possibility a single virus could utterly destroy me. A mere copy doesn’t offer variety or individuality.” In fact, Project 2501 here echoes something the Major said earlier: “A system where all the parts react the same way is a system with a fatal flaw.… Overspecialization leads to death.” What comes after human life as we know it is not a form of perfection, because whatever is perfect is not alive.

If Ghost in the Shell has a problem, the problem is not with the movie, but with its context. Every great work of cyberpunk fiction runs on cool, but is more than cool. Ghost in the Shell raises the possibility of that we will be utterly changed through our relationships with computerized technology, but without implying, for instance, a singularity. What is made after the Major merges with Project 2501 is, she says, no longer either individual, but it is nevertheless an individual.

And yet, much like how I can’t read Heinlein without the shadow of his Silicon Valley children falling over the book, I find that whenever I read or watch a classic work of cyberpunk I always remember Elon Musk’s idiotic comment that his Cybertruck looks like something Blade Runner would drive. (Blade Runner is not a person.) For some people, these things are just lifestyle ads. They represent a cool, sleek, future with a veneer of philosophy that can be ignored. Is that a problem? Characteristically I think it is and it isn’t. It is not a flaw in the movie that it’s going to be adored by people who are uninterested in understanding it. Still, it’s a little depressing, and it complicates the awe I feel when I watch this movie. The awe remains.

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• This is late because I was taking care of a sick dog. (Not Boswell.)

• Animation Obsessive links:
  

  Animation Obsessive

  Selling 'Ghost in the Shell'

  Welcome! We’re back with a new Sunday issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. Our lineup goes like this…

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  2 years ago · 123 likes · 30 comments · Animation Obsessive Staff

  But also this post, which is probably going to be linked to… often:
  

  Animation Obsessive

  Oshii's Theory

  Welcome! We’re back with a new Thursday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. And this one is about directing…

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  10 months ago · 31 likes · 18 comments · Animation Obsessive Staff

  
  

• I’ve begun to worry a little about including screencaps on this newsletter, so going forward I will probably be embedding videos instead. That limits things a bit, but the fair use status of screencaps seems ambiguous enough that it’s worth doing. Also, I spot-checked against the movie, but for ease I pulled quotes from this transcript instead of transcribing myself.

• In the market chase scene, I like how the cat follows along.

• It’s interesting how Oshii reiterates ideas from previous projects; here he has a montage sequences that is very like the martial law sequence from Patlabor 2.

• You probably could not pay me to watch the American 2017 version of Ghost in the Shell, but I note skimming the Wikipedia article that the plot is about the Major identifying her “real” self—basically the opposite direction.

• That said I think the difference between the water fight scene in the original movie and the live action water fight scene is a good illustration of what I mean when I say that in an animated movie everything is as real as everything else. Man, this looks awful.

• The bit where Project 2501 first “wakes up” and we see through its eyes felt like a bit of homage to Robocop to me… thank you Oshii for being a gentleman of taste.

Sometimes, upon contact with online pop fandom, people will say something like, the problem with this stuff, in particular its obsession with chart positions and records, is that it’s really misplaced sports fandom. To the extent that is true, you can tell it’s true because sports fans love whining. You whine about the refs, you whine about your t…

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I date this line to the sixties, though I went hunting for examples to cite to explain why and all the ones I’ve seen have melted into some soup to which I take objection but for which it’s hard to find specific citati…

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This journey began, as so many do, with overthinking something. In this case, what I was overthinking was the marketing copy for Isabelle Larignon’s scent “Milky Dragon.” This begins:

Although widely discussed in perfumery, tea inspired Isabelle Larignon and more particularly Milky Oolong, a semi-oxidized “blue” tea appreciated for its naturally milky note.

I tried the perfume and I liked the perfume. I could tell that it smelled like tea, but it didn’t smell very milky to me. If I really thought about it, though, I didn’t know what Oolong tea smelled like either, much less this particular variety. I can distinguish green tea from black tea from jasmine tea, but that’s about the limit of my nose for tea. And so I thought: why not try some Milky Oolong? How hard could that be? You can just order it online, right?

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But, to pick a similarly influential modern fantasist, you could not do that with Tolkien. You could not write and publish a story that was called “The Cats of Mirkwood,” because the Tolkien est…

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In the nineties, there were many children’s movies that conveyed the message that the worst thing you could do—not only as a caretaker of the Earth but perhaps as a human being period—was build something, particularly if “building something” involved (for instance) cutting down a tree. Even if that wasn’t the intended message, it was the message. Some of these stories were gratingly preachy (Ferngully), some of them were horrifying (Once Upon A Forest), and there were many whose names I can’t remember that were just about heroic children facing down evil building projects.1 In retrospect, maybe there could have been other environmental morals to hammer home, but we went all in on “don’t build anything.”

Pom Poko is this kind of movie, sort of. It is a much much bette…

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“The Serpent in the Grove” is about a man who is unhappily married. He is ogling local beauty Zoongie when his wife sees him. She doesn’t say anything but he decides to murder her by making it easy for her to fall into a well. She divines his purpose but then falls into the well anyway. However, she is rescued by her neighbor and also her husband since he knows he’s been caught out. Their marriage gets better. Their child solemnly says, to nobody in particular: “People does change.… But grove does remember.” That’s the story.

I’m not supe…

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I do not like milk. I never have—when I was little I would try to thin out glasses of milk with water to create something more palatable, an approach that did not work—and probably never will. It’s fine in fancy little coffee drinks or baking or things of that sort. I like stuff made with milk (butter, yogurt). I’ll drink some of that super filtered high protein chocolate milk in the airport. But milk itself, I just don’t like.

The idea of “smelling like milk” also doesn’t attract me. (When I was told as a child that if you eat a lot of dairy you smell like milk to people whose diets are not dairy-centric, I felt this was deeply unfair.) In my life, if I’m sniffing milk, I’m usually trying to figure out if it’s gone bad. However, the reality of “smelling like milk” is that I’ve noticed that I tend to like perfumes with milk notes (also known as “lactonic”). I first observed this trying out Cirrus’s “Moon Bathing,” where “fruity” and “salty” both came together to work for me because of the milky aspects of the scent. When, more recently, I loved Eris’s “Mother’s Milk” I thought it might be fun to simply investigate milk, the category.

So I ordered Surrender to Chance’s milk sampler and got to testing. And then I thought, it’s kind of a pity not to have any of Hilde Soliani’s perfumes in here, and… well, things got a little out of hand.

Below, notes on Avatar (Hilde Soliani), Basilica (Milano Fragranze), Bianco Latte (Giardini Di Toscana), Blanche Bete (Liquides Imaginaires), Cream Tea (Sucreabeille), Crema di Latte (Hilde Soliani), Elephant (Zoologist), Hibiscus Palm (Aerin), Hot Milk (Hilde Soliani), Lait Concentré (Chabaud), Latte Freddo (Hilde Soliani), Moon Bathing (Cirrus Parfum), Mother’s Milk (Eris Parfums), Pipe Bomb Blue (Blackbird), Remember Me (Jovoy), La Stanza Delle Bambole (Nobile 1942), Yawahada (J-Scent).

What I loved

Basilica (Milano Fragranze)
(Fragrantica / Parfumo / Basenotes)

Head Notes: Thyme E.O., Rosemary E.O..
Heart Notes: Warm Milk accord, Labdanum Hyperessence, Incense Resinoid.
Base Notes: Cypriol E.O., Cedarwood Virginia E.O., SantamanolTM.

Incense and milk wasn’t a combination I had very high hopes for—I like incense, the actual thing, but incense perfumes tend to smell very similar to me and also just don’t seem to work on me. Plus, the idea of combining incense with milk felt bizarre.

In truth, the milk doesn’t stand out to me here as its own thing, but I think whatever makes up the “warm milk accord” does, I think, marry the savory herbal thyme and rosemary to the cedarwood in a way that means the perfume works. It doesn’t really smell much like incense to me—it smells more like opening a drawer in which someone has placed dried herbs for some reason.

This scent is also available as a candle. I think it would work pretty nicely as a candle.

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