Word: smells
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...divine, and back again. He can write about food with lip-smacking enthusiasm; at the same time, he soars far above standard cookbook prosody. His loving description of how to peel and cut an onion, for example, is a poetically existential commentary on being and creation: "Reflect how little smell there is to a whole onion-how it is the humors and sauces of being that give the world flavor, how all life came from the sea, and how, without water, nothing can hold a soul...
...girls who crowd with the boys-but how innocent their faces and how full of light! Ten women sing and walk in serried ranks. They are as triumphant as though all around them were people crossing themselves, praying, repenting, bowing to the ground. These women do not smell the cigarette smoke, their ears are closed to the obscenities, their feet move across the yard not sensing that it has turned into a dance floor...
...Vian's heroes live unperturbed in a world where broken windows heal themselves, where clouds smell of wild thyme or cinnamon sugar, and where a rectangular bedroom becomes spherical when "The Mood to Be Wooed" is played. If we find these anomalies disconcerting, it is because, as Jacques Bens points out in his afterward to the French edition, we are used to fairytales where the supernatural of flying carpets or seven-league boots is inserted in an otherwise normal world. In Vian, on the other hand, the symbolic "pianocktail," which allows one to get literally drunk on jazz, is placed...
...didn't like the Boston Garden last Tuesday night. I thought I would. But I didn't like the smell of the old wooden floor that is rotting from years of Coke, popcorn, cigar butts, and spittle...
...trains smell of dust and tobacco. There is hardly any view through their windows, they are fogged and dirty. All you can see are the fences and backyards of the slums of Providence and New Haven and Bridgeport through which the trains sneak slow and silent, like a scabby do in a Dostoevski story. And, in the aisle, an old man hawks the sandwiches and beverages. The sandwiches are larger than the toast bits served on planes, but they are also seventy-five cents and aged in Saran Wrap...