← Ologies with Alie Ward
Ologies with Alie Ward
Literary Olfactology (THE POLITICS OF SMELL) with Ally Louks
01:19:03
Smell and culture. Scent descriptions in novels. Fragrances and class. Stink and stigmas. We cover it all. Scholar, author, and Literary Olfactologist Dr. Ally Louks burst into the zeitgeist in 2024 with her PhD thesis “Olfactory Ethics, The Politics Of Smell In Modern And Contemporary Prose” and we finally got to sit down and talk about the intersection of art and smell and culture. Breathe in the fouls, the fragrant, the peppermint, the tobacco, why motel rooms smell the way they do, the forgotten organ that could control your love life, spices at the root of xenophobia, perfume ads that cruised a movement, obscenity trials, explosions, following your first love and getting the last laugh. Follow Dr. Louks on Instagram and Bluesky A donation went to UN Crisis Relief’s Occupied Palestinian Territory Humanitarian Fund More episode sources and links 400+ Ologies episodes sorted by topic Smologies (short, classroom-safe) episodes Other episodes you may enjoy: Rhinology (NOSES),...
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- [00:00]
Alie Ward
What'S in my stomach you ask ritual vitamins daily it's my multi of choice they have an essential for women eighteen plus it contains nine key ingredients my bod needs they're in two delayed release capsules they're these little beads and kind of oil they look like a lava lamp they also have a minty flavor and they are designed to be gentle on the stomach something i like especially if you take your multi every morning as you're running out the door or some people take it at night i'm also trying to eat more protein they have essential protein daily shakes which i love it's vegan and it won the pure award which is one of the strictest certifications i love that ritual is a female founded b corp and i love that they're like here are the essentials you need so i make it part of my having a good day and instead of striving for perfect health you can aim for supporting foundational health and get twenty five percent off your first month only at ritual dot com ologies you can start ritual or add essential for women eighteen plus to your subscription today that's ritual dot com ologies for twenty five percent off these statements have not been evaluated by the food and drug administration this product is not intended to diagnose treat cure or prevent any disease we have to say that.
- [01:13]
Verizon Representative
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- [01:33]
T-Mobile Representative
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- [01:43]
Alie Ward
It'S the ashtray you used during the quarantine years that you repurposed as a watercolor paint dish alie ward this is ologies this is a subject that none of you know jack shit about because what even is it it's great that's what it is so this ologist came to my attention after a very very weird very very public thing that happened to them last fall and i had so many messages begging me to interview them and it was not a hard sell i waited until life calmed down a bit and then got em on the line to chat about what they do now smell and culture scent descriptions in novels fragrances and class stink stigmas we cover it all including their very weird and gripping backstory so they have a bachelor's in english literature from the university of exeter and a master's in issues in modern culture from the university college london they recently completed a phd at cambridge university they're now a supervisor in english lit at cambridge we talk about all kinds of smells and a few are gross but just hang in there that's kind of the whole point of this also this isn't our primary olfactology episode we still need a whole episode about how smell works but this is a social science academic deep weird dive into how we talk about smells and i love every minute of this boy howdy this is a wild ride it's an instant classic so we're gonna get into it in a second but first thank you to patrons who support the show for a dollar a month or more at patreon dot com ologies thanks to everyone walking around in ologies merch from ologiesmerch dot com and for no dollars you can leave a review of which i read all including this one from mehad seventy nine who wrote that ologies is a perfect example of the ability of passionate knowledgeable people to make any subject fascinating things that i would never have thought could keep my attention they say are made into a delicious cocktail full stories and humor for my thirsty brain from string theory to asking if scallops have buttholes mejad seventy nine thank you for celebrating our essence also if you don't celebrate it because you don't like swear words or you need to listen with your kids we have shorter classroom safe g rated episodes in a spinoff show called smallogies it's hours and hours of free entertainment wherever you get podcasts also you can find a whole catalog of our four hundred plus regular ologies episodes anywhere you get podcasts or just by hitting up ologies dot com where they're all organized okay so let's get into this episode and wait around for their absolutely bonkers life story and toward the end they make a revelation about them that shocked me it left me gagged so hang tight breathe in deep the foul the fragrant the peppermint the tobacco why motel rooms smell the way they do the forgotten organ that could control your love life spices at the root of xenophobia perfume ads that cruised a movement obscenity trials explosions following your first love and getting the last laugh with scholar author and literary olfactologist doctor ali lukes.
- [05:00]
Dr. Ali Lukes
I am ali lukes and i use she her.
- [05:03]
Interviewer
Pronouns and doctor ali lukes correct yes.
- [05:09]
Dr. Ali Lukes
Yes honestly other people care more about whether people use my title than i do but it has kind of become a bit of a persona yes so i do quite like being able to say doctor ali lukes it's still a novelty to me do you remember off.
- [05:27]
Interviewer
The top of your head the full title of your phd oh my gosh.
- [05:31]
Dr. Ali Lukes
I definitely do it's olfactory ethics the politics of smell in modern and contemporary.
- [05:38]
Interviewer
Prose and you have a bound thesis.
- [05:42]
Alie Ward
Of it as one does right i.
- [05:45]
Interviewer
Do not have a phd but you get it bound you have the work that you've been working on for several years in a volume and there it.
- [05:53]
Dr. Ali Lukes
Is yes it's kind of like a book i mean it's book length so it feels like it ought to be a tangible thing that you can interact with after it's been a word document for the best part of four years.
- [06:08]
Interviewer
And have you always been a big.
- [06:11]
Alie Ward
Reader i imagine like what was your.
- [06:13]
Interviewer
Childhood like were you just curled up in the most adorable reading nook with like a stack of library books yes.
- [06:19]
Dr. Ali Lukes
Basically i i read in a very self directed way from a very young age and yeah books of bas basically been my life my entire life when.
- [06:31]
Interviewer
Did you start to realize that literature would be the focus of your career was there a point where you said oh i can continue to study this.
- [06:40]
Alie Ward
And teach this or were you like.
- [06:41]
Interviewer
I just don't want to put books down and i'm going to keep going as far as i can take those.
- [06:46]
Dr. Ali Lukes
Kind of both i suppose when i was applying for university i was really stuck about whether to apply for philosophy or english and i've always had kind of one foot in each discipline kind of melded the two by working on ethics in literature i could look into philosophy if i wanted to or critical and cultural theory and history and that's something that i love about english literature is that it allows you to amalgamate a lot of different things which is great and i love stories they kind of give meaning to my life so i couldn't possibly give that up and i feel very privileged that i've managed to spend pretty much a decade making stories my life's work what a dream.
- [07:34]
Interviewer
Was there a particular book that sort of really ignited your curiosity about how smell is portrayed was there one in particular where you kept noticing it as.
- [07:42]
Dr. Ali Lukes
A theme or yes but i had to become interested in smell before i could notice it so i became interested in smell in the second year of my undergraduate degree because i took a creative writing module where we had to create a poetry collection around a particular theme and i chose the theme of perfume because i'd become really interested in the conceptual qualities of perfume advertisements how you know when you would watch a television advert for a perfume it never seemed to mention the smell of the.
- [08:21]
McDonald's Representative
Perfume be the man of today boss.
- [08:26]
Dr. Ali Lukes
Bottled that's so true it would always kind of try and sell you like a lifestyle or a feeling and i started looking at like advertisement copy on websites that sold perfume like diptyque for instance and the authors of those advertisements would have to contend with this like linguistic restriction surrounding smell like we don't have a particularly developed olfactory vocabulary in english and so it meant that it created really interesting writing it became kind of synesthetic and evocative and then once i was interested in smell i started seeing it everywhere like whenever i was reading it was kind of like suddenly jumping out at me whereas before it probably would have just not really noticed like most other people when they read and the first book that i really started working on at length in relation to smell was lolita by val heads.
- [09:29]
Alie Ward
Up this isn't much of a spoiler but in the nineteen fifty five book lolita this is a classic work of fiction it involves a man obsessed with young girls who he calls nymphets and he is enraptured with a twelve year old named dolores nicknamed dolly or lolita and he becomes her stepfather he sexually assaults and abuses her it's horrifying but based on decades of cultural references and movie adaptations you probably already knew that plot so when you see mentions in the news of a private plane named the lolita express there's a little context.
- [10:01]
Dr. Ali Lukes
And i mean most people who have read lolita would not really be aware of the smell content in that book but i promise if you were to go away and reread it or read it for the first time with smell in mind you would realise that it is absolutely fundamental to the story really.
- [10:21]
Interviewer
Like what types of things jumped out.
- [10:23]
Dr. Ali Lukes
To you so initially like within the first few pages we discover that humbert humbert this horrible fiendish narrator was actually a perfume advertiser in his previous career it says that he worked in advertising for his uncle's perfume company no way and what i suggest when i talk about lolita and when i write about it is that actually the whole novel becomes a kind of perfume advertisement for dolores and for the kind of the nymphet creature that humbert humbert kind of creates in his head as this demonic race of little girls who have this incredible magical power gross and when i wrote my undergraduate dissertation on lolita and i actually included little smell samples oh that's amazing for each of the sections of the thesis based on the smells.
- [11:24]
Interviewer
In the novel what types of samples were they what types of notes did.
- [11:28]
Dr. Ali Lukes
They have so i'll give you a couple of examples one of the things that humbert humbert says of dolores hayes is that she smells like chestnuts roses and peppermint oh that's specific which is actually a very complicated smell and he also adds onto that you know the smell of a very special french perfume.
- [11:48]
Alie Ward
As well so humbert writes a poem in the book that reads dolly my folly her eyes were ver and never closed when i kissed her know an old perfume called sole ver are you from paris mister and humbert describes this old perfume as the quote very delicate very special french perfume i latterly allowed her to use and it's suspected by readers of the book to have notes of anise and fennel and absinthe hence the green and its name sole ver it translates to green sun now this perfume i looked doesn't actually exist but a fascinating fact i went down a rabbit hol the nineteen sixty six harry harrison sci fi novel about the threat of overpopulation it was called make room make room it was adapted into the movie soylent green in the book soylent is a portmanteau of soy and lentil but in france the movie is titled sole vert so perhaps harry harrison was a nabokov fan or just really liked fictitious french perfumes so we've got this.
- [12:49]
Dr. Ali Lukes
Special french perfume plus all of these kind of incongruous notes and i also included towards the end where there's this section about humbert's own smell where he kind of describes himself as in his moments of moral clarity if there are any he kind of describes himself as this horrible stinking beast and so i included a sample of secretion magnifique which is this horrible some people actually quite like it but i find it really repulsive this horrible kind of niche perfume which is supposed to smell like bodily fluids and like blood and that kind of thing so the intended effect was for it to evoke in the examiners the kind of moral repulsion that nabokov is trying to evoke in the reader.
- [13:38]
Interviewer
Oh that's brilliant how did your advisors and how did the committee react to.
- [13:43]
Dr. Ali Lukes
That they loved it they really did it got a yeah an incredibly high mark i think probably just because it was so unique i can't imagine that many other people have ever scented their.
- [13:55]
Interviewer
Dissertation i picture those kind of folios in magazines where you can fold back the little flap and then scratch and sniff you know i used to love.
- [14:06]
Dr. Ali Lukes
That kind of thing i think they.
- [14:08]
Interviewer
Took them out of a lot of magazines which i'm bummed about i used to rub them on my wrists and neck and be like free perfume i'll.
- [14:15]
Alie Ward
Take it okay i looked into this and for decades it's been known that those really delicious perfume samples in magazines have been an issue for folks with asthma and allergies there was a nineteen ninety five study titled inhalation challenge effects of perfume scent strips in patients with asthma and it confirmed that chest tightness and wheezing occurred in nearly twenty one percent of asthmatic patients after perfume challenges but with the decline in sales for print publishing and more people just taking fashion inspo from whatever isn't being shamed as millennial on tiktok magazine sales and thus ad sales have fallen and so that's really been the driving factor of why we can't sniff vogue as much although those in the perfume industry do give the heads up that in april and may before mother's day and in december before the gift giving frenzy of the holidays you might be able to smell more magazines there might be some more perfume ad revivals in them if.
- [15:16]
Interviewer
You miss them and what about some other smells in novels and in poetry the way that people are portrayed do you find that that goes through their bodily smells or their food smells or their perfumes like what types of notes.
- [15:34]
Alie Ward
What do those notes draw on a.
- [15:35]
Dr. Ali Lukes
Lot gosh big question the nice thing about literature is that very often it kind of replicates but also intensifies life so all of those things can be found in literature you know comments on people's bodily smells comments on people's food especially when that food is kind of new to someone the whole point of smell really is for us to notice new things in our environment so my former supervisor steve connor says that smell is the sense of discrimination it helps us distinguish the ripe from the rotten and the good from the bad and that's its kind of function for us so very often in real life as in literature smell kind of acts as a way of sometimes othering people but also kind of registering discomfort with the otherness of people and their weird ways and behaviors and foods did you have.
- [16:39]
Interviewer
To talk to any olfactologists about the olfactory bulb and its role in memory and the hippocampus like i understand that we can't really identify smells unless we have something in our memory to compare them to or kind of a simile.
- [16:58]
Alie Ward
Like how are smells processed in the.
- [16:59]
Dr. Ali Lukes
Brain oh my gosh that really is a big question so okay i know more about smell science than i do any other kind of science that's for sure so smell has this very unique relationship to parts of the brain that really evoke memory and emotion and association as well the hippocampus and one of the things about smell is that it doesn't go through the same kind of processing as other sensory perceptions so when we smell something it evokes very visceral immediate responses and then another thing about smell and memory is that the brain can store away olfactory memories basically indefinitely and particularly if they're related to kind of key moments especially in our childhood but also just in our lives in general they become very visceral triggers for certain feelings and memories so as humans we're very good at associative learning so if something has the same kind of qualities as something else then we're quite good at kind of thinking oh okay that has a kind of eggy compound which i know is associated with gas and therefore i should be concerned by this particular smell people have quite a strong reaction to the smell of sulfur for instance even though the smell of sulfur doesn't really cause us any physical harm it has components in it that we associate with you know the kind of gas itself is odorless but they will put in a chemical to make us aware of it that kind of eggy sulfurous horrible smell yeah that kind.
- [18:50]
Alie Ward
Of gas gotcha okay so this is called very simply gas odorization and it's added to natural gas and propane so we know when something might blow up and kill us now why do we do this because when pipelines were filled with these naturally colorless odorless gases things blew up and killed us and in one nineteen thirty seven explosion in texas nearly three hundred kids and their teachers died after that someone said let's make this stinky so people notice so what notes you might notice when you leave a bunsen burner unlit and you start to panic are tetrahydrotheophene which lends a garlic like stench while mercaptans which are delightful little sulfhydryl groups bonded to a carbon atom they lend it the classic timeless rotten egg smell and then rounding out the fragrance profile are additional sulfides that just keep the stench lingering now why the sulfides why do those get our attention okay hydrogen sulfide it's already present in nature in both rotting eggs and the guy next to you on the plane who just cannot hold it in you know he's trying and so.
- [20:01]
Dr. Ali Lukes
When we associate that smell with anything else in the world even if it's not quite the same smell we know to be suspicious of it yeah but also slightly related i think but i'm on a slight tangent smell is the only sense that we can create new completely new sensory perceptions for so like you can't imagine a new colour for instance it's not possible but for smell because we've gotten so good at synthetic perfumery we can create entirely new smells that nobody has ever smelled before which i think is pretty much remarkable i.
- [20:38]
Alie Ward
Too think it's cool as hell and it's worth the hyper focus i took.
- [20:42]
Interviewer
Latin in high school and the word perfume always delighted me just that it's through smoke you know its meaning being through smoke do you find a lot of historical texts that talk about things like you know incense and the smells of churches and smoke do you find.
- [21:00]
Alie Ward
That as time goes on those references.
- [21:02]
Dr. Ali Lukes
Change a little bit yeah absolutely i mean incense firstly was the kind of earliest way in which we produced perfumes or at least produced fragrances and incense are these naturally occurring materials that when burned release their fragrance it used to be absolutely fundamental to especially practices related to religion but it was also you know since antiquity used in the households like personal household altars it became kind of synonymous with offerings to the gods perhaps the most special kind of offering because it offered a kind of proximity to the divine because smell is taken into the body and so it offers that kind of connection and in our.
- [21:53]
Alie Ward
Momiology episode about mummies we cover how the wealthiest ancient egyptians just spent a grip of cash to preserve their corpses with this sticky goo herbs and aromatics so not only did this goo get them safely to the afterlife but it also landed their bodies and bandages in nineteenth century apothecaries as vials of powdered mummy became a prized item for people just a little dusting of the dead with a botanical earthy bouquet to heal what ails you now a little less divine if i can just back this thing up so to speak oh i.
- [22:31]
Interviewer
Was gonna say you know you're mentioning sulfur and gas i don't feel like i've read any passages about farting in any book does it come up i mean considering how part of the human condition it is why don't we why.
- [22:44]
Alie Ward
Don'T we read more about that.
- [22:47]
Dr. Ali Lukes
Well okay one answer is that censorship was a thing for a long time it was too sexy it's too sexy you know if you were to take for example james joyce's ulysses which obviously was kind of heavily condemned for being too erotic and obscene okay so this nineteen.
- [23:08]
Alie Ward
Twenty novel by the irish author james joyce it is a whopper at seven hundred pages it's a dense one but wanting to buck irish conservatism at the time joyce made it real juicy exploring themes of love and sex in the bushes and even wankin it and it was published in these serialized chapters via one literary magazine in the us which landed the publishers in court and at one point a passage involving someone nutting was gonna be read in the court but the judge objected because there were ladies present and the lawyers were like the ladies are the publishers of the magazine and the judge famously said that they probably just didn't understand what they had printed okay but yeah that trial was a big one and the publishers were found guilty and they were charged a fine of like a hundred bucks so why was it so sensual and bog and threatening to the general public in the eyes of the law partly.
- [24:05]
Dr. Ali Lukes
Because of certain scenes that revolved around smell you know there's this kind of much quoted scene that became prominent in the trial for ulysses the obscenity trial where bloom is seated above his own rising smell on the toilet he's reading.
- [24:23]
Alie Ward
The newspaper to be fair this scene was set in an outhouse so rising smells like a poltergeist are likely not subtle but at the time rising smells never made cameos and that absolutely shocked.
- [24:38]
Dr. Ali Lukes
People even though it's a super mundane thing you know everybody at some point in their day or week depending on how much fibre you eat is sat on the toilet above their own rising smell but people were like you cannot possibly put that in literature i mean i think we're we're experiencing more bodily realism in contemporary literature now i've certainly read some quite vivid yes yeah good word vivid descriptions of bodily processes in literature kind of produced in the last twenty years or so any passages you.
- [25:25]
Interviewer
Want to shout out any passages of smell in books that really made you go holy shit wow.
- [25:33]
Dr. Ali Lukes
So there's a book called wetlands by charlotte roche and it has a great cover which has kind of been emblazoned on my brain it's like bright pink with an avocado on the front and the entire story revolves around a woman who is hospitalized because a cyst near her anus has gotten infected i don't like that and she requires surgery to get it fixed and it becomes very clear how this could have occurred to this woman who does not abide by standard hygiene practices at all interesting and so that i think would have absolutely scandalized joyce's readership ways that i don't think they could possibly have imagined at the time yeah it's a good and interesting book but it definitely tests the boundaries of what can be considered pleasurable reading if this.
- [26:37]
Alie Ward
Was gross for you i get it you can see our disgustology episode to learn more about how your brain is protecting you by retching now if you loved it we do have a colonoscopy how to episode for you and we have one on how zoologists analyze freezers full of animal scat okay so we're through most of the gnarliest parts of this episode we're good let's get to other aromas let's get to good ones.
- [26:59]
Interviewer
What about pheromones do you find that that smell of attraction i mean to flip it on the other side is used in a lot of romance novels or a lot of like very like erotic scenes do you find that they use smell to make things more physical.
- [27:16]
Dr. Ali Lukes
Yes definitely smell is a really really important part of the romance genre in general you know you have characters who have their kind of characteristic smells often which are typically masculine or feminine depending on the gender of the character and yes i think smell is a way to signal a kind of desire and attraction that is difficult to explain through reason and i think we're all intrigued by that i think that's why so many people are interested in the notion of pheromones and i kind of actually a little bit invested in the existence of pheromones now in general we have not got any evidence really that human pheromones exist and that we are able to detect them it kind of makes sense that they would exist because they exist in other primates like other mammals yeah but we have spent decades and decades and like a lot of scientific resources trying to work out whether pheromones exist in humans and whether we can perceive them and nobody has come up with any hard and fast evidence that is replicable yeah it's still very much up in the air up in the.
- [28:26]
Alie Ward
Air oh my word bless her for that also in terms of human pheromones according to the textbook neurobiology of chemical communication chapter nineteen titled human pheromones do they exist they say like all vertebrates humans excrete or secrete many different chemicals via their urine and anal excrement breath genitalia saliva and skin glands and i just realized i told you guys that we were through with most of the gross parts but human smells are human smells okay so it continues most proponents of the human pheromone concept assume that skin glands are the source of the active phormonal agents and all three major skin glands two sweat and one sebaceous or oil can produce chemicals that become odorous so why can't we smell love then is this why online dating is just such a crapshoot and we should just go back to having dances where you only have to twirl around someone for the length of one song to know if you want to see them naked well there's this twenty twenty three paper the clinical significance of the human vomeronasal organ in the journal of surgical radiologic anatomy confirms that yes there has been a long standing debate on the presence and the functionality of the vomeronasal organ also known let's just call it a vno because it's hard to pronounce or a jacobson organ in adult humans and this paper for sinus surgeons warns that if the vno is a functional organ in humans it would be important to preserve the organ during nasal surgery and there's apparently a little pit in the sinuses that could be like a portal to it but the paper concludes that the human vno is probably a vestigial organ with a non operational sensory function so it's okay if you accidentally hack it off in an operation but we do have a great episode with an ethno sinologist about the current and the ancient role of dogs in human life as well as an ecooderology episode about how dogs are better at detecting ecological samples than machines and in it we discuss the jacobson organ in dogs and why when you're smells or tastes something it might make like a chomping puppet movement with its mouth to shove the air up into their vomeronasal organ in my home when our goblin dog grammy does this when she tastes something new we call this doing the thing she's doing the thing but back to romance though for more on the smell's role in romance we have a philomatology episode too about kissing with the famed biological anthropologist doctor robin dunbar who told me that when you kiss you're tasting a partner's immune system and the people you like tend to be people who have a different set of immune genes to the ones that you have and that episode delves into hundreds and thousands of years of evolutionary anthropological evidence but it happened to come out we released that one a week after the world shut down for covid which was just honestly such cruel fate but we'll link it in the show notes i know.
- [31:30]
Interviewer
That they did some like sniff tests of like body odors that are different genetically from you or more attractive i mean a good insurance that you don't fall too in love with your cousin i guess you know but have you seen that research where they put dirty.
- [31:46]
Dr. Ali Lukes
T shirts in jars yes the sweaty t shirt experiment yeah it's separable from pheromones because pheromones are like a very specific thing so one thing about pheromones is that in other animals they have something called the vomeronasal organ which allows them to detect pheromones so pheromones aren't strictly speaking smells but they are kind of chemical compounds that different species will use to communicate messages about their you know sexual availability or their emotional state etcetera but they're not technically smells they're not perceived through the nose per se they're perceived through this vomeronasal organ which we don't have at all we do when we're in the womb but then it stops working practically straight away after.
- [32:37]
Interviewer
Birth oh what a bummer i wanted that i grew that come on yeah.
- [32:45]
Dr. Ali Lukes
We'Ve been robbed of our marinasal organs all of this is where you get the no you know what it's too early although we have already been talking about anal cysts and farting but this is it's always the way it goes isn't it we cover it head to.
- [33:04]
Interviewer
Toe and you know do you find that in literature they look to smell to really explore grief a lot do.
- [33:12]
Alie Ward
You find that that comes up a.
- [33:14]
Interviewer
Lot cause i know that if you smell a perfume of someone who's passed away or if you have a shirt of someone who's broken up with you those smells they can be so reminiscent i know that they obviously can convey disgust and attraction and nostalgia but do you find that grief comes up a.
- [33:31]
Dr. Ali Lukes
Lot that yes definitely the text that automatically comes to mind is a novel by jm kurtzier who is the author of disgrace who won the nobel prize for literature but one of his lesser known novels is called the master of petersburg and it's a kind of fictionalized account of dostoevsky's life and at the beginning of the novel we see this fictionalized dostoevsky enter the room of his recently deceased son and he kind of picks up various things in the room to smell them he smells his pillow he even smells the armpit seam in one of his son's suits and kind of philosophises on how his kind of ghost is entering him and is perhaps gaining life again through that experience of kind of being revived through smell oh.
- [34:29]
Alie Ward
That'S such a beautiful passage it is.
- [34:31]
Dr. Ali Lukes
But also the book itself is really really horrible it's all about corruption and oh dear that particular scene gets very perverse very quickly does it but it starts off nice do you ever have.
- [34:47]
Alie Ward
People who ask for copies of your phd can you go buy it sisyphus a crazy is that a big yes.
- [34:53]
Dr. Ali Lukes
I feel so bad about this because there is someone at the university of cambridge who now spends a portion of every single one of their working days pressing a button on their computer to send me requests of my thesis and i have apologized to them multiple times i'm really sorry tony i got i could never have anticipated this how many.
- [35:18]
Interviewer
People have requested it do you have.
- [35:20]
Dr. Ali Lukes
Any idea well over three thousand what.
- [35:25]
Alie Ward
But in a victory for tony i.
- [35:28]
Dr. Ali Lukes
Can'T actually send anyone my thesis i feel like i should say this because i know that people will probably send me an email and say can i have a copy of your thesis i can't because it's under embargo because i'm turning it into well two books actually i mean i'm turning the thesis into an academic literary monograph and i'm writing a trade book about smell amazing this is you know an unprecedented situation but because there are so many people interested in the work it actually makes a lot of sense and the advice that i've received is to keep it under.
- [36:04]
Interviewer
Wraps for now good okay love that.
- [36:07]
Alie Ward
So let's get into the absolutely boggling twists of destiny that led allie to be talking to me in between writing two different books about the nichest of subjects my god so what exactly happened.
- [36:22]
Dr. Ali Lukes
Sure yeah okay so i had just finished a very long day of teaching and on my lunch break i had taken this picture of myself with my hardbound copy of my thesis ready to deposit in the university library because that's the kind of final hurdle that you have to get through for your phd to be done basically i had picked up my two copies of my thesis i put one in the university library and i got my personal copy and i took a photo with it and i put it on twitter well x formerly twitter i kind of think of them as slightly separate things now because the version of twitter that i was used to to talk to people in my field whilst we were all in lockdown just no longer exists yeah yeah it's a very different platform now than it was back then so this was.
- [37:15]
Alie Ward
A tweet she posted in late november twenty twenty four with the caption thrilled to say i passed my viva with no corrections and am officially ph done and in the tweet's photo she's like happily cradling a yearbook sized volume it's hardbound in this deep crimson color with foiled gold lettering and it reads olfactory the politics of smell in modern and contemporary press it's cool so basically i.
- [37:41]
Dr. Ali Lukes
Put it on there because i was used to using it to talk to my not very many at all followers who are basically all academics and i thought i should let them know that i'm done in case they're working on any projects that need a postdoc and then they'll think of me hey are you guys hiring and then it kind of broke containment immediately i guess for the first twenty four hours actually maybe even best part of forty eight hours it was like skyrocketing in terms of the engagement but the people who were commenting were really friendly they were just congratulating me on my accomplishment which was very nice and i really appreciated it even though it was slightly discomforting to have that many people seeing my face.
- [38:30]
Alie Ward
So people just said whoa that's fascinating who knew congrats on that and then.
- [38:35]
Dr. Ali Lukes
And then it got got retweeted by a couple of kind of big right wing accounts who were i suppose not necessarily criticizing it more kind of mocking it or mocking me or the institution at large and then it got nasty for a little while it kind of was bouncing around a side of the platform that i had never encountered before and and the comments were unhinged and a lot of them gained quite a lot of traction you know they became the kind of most liked ones because it was kind of blue tick people interacting with each other because they get money from that yeah within a week.
- [39:21]
Alie Ward
This post had nearly one hundred twenty million views in the grab bag of responses were a lot of male avatar photos clearly triggered saying things such as what a stupid fucking thing to study and you have made no valuable contributions in your thesis and perhaps your entire life another said instead of a baby you spent three years producing junk three years becoming less intelligent what a wasted life another claimed you should be deported to haiti i don't know why they wrote that because she doesn't live in the us but ali also relayed to one media outlet i did receive one rape threat in my personal inbox which i felt really significantly crossed the line because my email was not readily available on the internet so that person had to go to some trouble to find it just in case you wanted a peek into what it's like being a non male gender on the internet you.
- [40:17]
Dr. Ali Lukes
Probably already knew and then people started defending me and it was like some kind of strange culture war war going on with me at the center baffled thinking actually that a lot of it was very very funny apart from the like crazy threats to my life etcetera a lot of the comments were very very funny because they were so far fetched they were like worlds away from reality which was quite entertaining for me if a bit stressful and do you.
- [40:51]
Alie Ward
Feel like this is part of a.
- [40:52]
Interviewer
Way and maybe this is mostly american of just anti intellectualism anti so called like elitism i mean did you find that that was part of the center of that culture war was it a lot of americans too yeah mostly americans.
- [41:09]
Dr. Ali Lukes
It was a lot of americans who thought that i was american oh my god i think they thought maybe i was from cambridge massachusetts or people out.
- [41:21]
Thrive Market Representative
There in our nation don't have maps.
- [41:24]
Dr. Ali Lukes
And they just didn't really think very hard at all there were a lot of comments about you know using federal funds but i'm british oh my god so that's not that's not a problem for you guys don't worry about it yeah it definitely kind of struck a chord with that particular particular kind of anti intellectual slash kind of just straightforwardly misogynistic group of people there was a lot of just like women should be in the kitchen we're back in you know well nineteen fifty i don't know.
- [41:59]
Alie Ward
She quickly gained two hundred thirty eight zero zero zero followers and interest from literary agents all over the world and one scholar of literary studies doctor mushtaq bilal proclaimed that doctor ali luke's phd thesis is set to become one of the most influential theses of the twenty first century and the funny thing is.
- [42:20]
Interviewer
Is like booyah you have like a book deal like more people interested in this work than ever so many people didn't realize that this work even existed i had so many people being like get her ontologies get her ontologies and i'm like she is busy right now and our listeners were very stoked that you're coming on and i have questions from them can i ask absolutely okay.
- [42:44]
Dr. Ali Lukes
Yes i would love to answer questions.
- [42:46]
Alie Ward
But before that strikes let's take a quick break and donate to a cause of doctor luke's selection which this week is the un crisis relief specifically the occupied palestinian territory humanitarian fund which is managed locally under un leadership and immediately available to a wide range of partner organizations at the front lines of response and this way funding reaches the people most in need when they need it and for more on the conflict and gaza and the humanitarian crisis we're all unfold you can listen to my twenty twenty four chat with doctor dirk moses who's a leading global expert on genocide that episode is titled genocidology and in it we talk about crimes of atrocity and yes the nature of genocide so that donation went to un crisis relief specifically for the occupied palestinian territory humanitarian fund and on a side note several separate ologies donations were made this week directly to families in need who are suffering aid blockades and starvation in gaza again highly recommend the genocideology episode okay finally finally we put out episodes about ocd and by now you know ocd is not just about liking things organized or liking things in color order it is a serious it's a highly misunderstood condition it can show up in so many sneaky ways in the episode we talk about how ocd can be managed and treated with the right kind of therapy which is why i want to talk about no cd so with the right kind of kind of help a specialized therapist who gets what you're experiencing is trained to treat it ocd can become so much more manageable at nocd every therapist deeply understands ocd nocd is covered for over one hundred fifty five million americans and they make sure that between sessions you're supported they have in app tools therapist messaging they have support groups putting out the ocd episodes were really important for me because a few years ago i was diagnosed with it after years of thinking it was just anxiety and getting the right therapy has helped so much and it's been really heartening to hear how much these episodes have already helped people with ocd and people who know others who are suffering from it so if you're ready to start getting help from a therapist who truly understands ocd visit nocd dot com to book a free call that's n o c d dot com.
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Verizon Representative
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T-Mobile Representative
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McDonald's Representative
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Thrive Market Representative
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- [46:43]
Alie Ward
Okay let's get back to smelling stuff and let's take in the essence of your question amy.
- [46:48]
Interviewer
Ford rosa and robin cohen asked about.
- [46:51]
Alie Ward
Vocabulary amy asked could you speak on.
- [46:52]
Interviewer
The emotional baggage of the word smell versus scent versus odor versus stink they each have different meanings that i'm interested that you used smell for your thesis.
- [47:02]
Dr. Ali Lukes
Instead of scent yes okay so the word that i use most often in the thesis is olfactory because i think that it is probably the most value neutral i think it's definitely the most value neutral actually of all of the smell terms i think smell is supposed to be value neutral but actually in practice has negative connotations yeah i can.
- [47:26]
Interviewer
Understand that if someone says what's that.
- [47:27]
Dr. Ali Lukes
Smell yes yeah like the chances are you're probably talking about something negative smell ya later right and in general in the english language anyway we have this very bifurcated olfactory lexicon like the words that we use to describe smell fit into two categories the kind of foul and the fragrant that's alan corbin's kind of way of thinking about it so.
- [47:51]
Alie Ward
This is professor of history alain corbin's classic nineteen eighty six work the foul and the odor and the french social imagination which explores personal scents in the seventeen and eighteen hundreds and i can only imagine what a richly aromatic time it was in france as the first words read today's history comes deodorized and it's of course not just history it's also the present just a few months ago a french and a british tennis star faced off in a match with the brit who was behind in the match requesting an intervention from the umpire saying on camera can you tell her to wear deodorant she's smelling really bad now now that player team britain lost the match anyway and then had to issue a retraction and an apology on social media for the insensitivities toward the l' air du tenis in general the.
- [48:46]
Dr. Ali Lukes
Words that we have to talk about negative smells are pretty over provided i would say like we have a lot of finely differentiated words for negative smells and not very many really for positive.
- [49:00]
Alie Ward
Words so i consulted a thesaurus and sure enough unpleasant odors can be noxious putrid revolting malodorous rank smelly rotten stenchy stinking stinky and reeking but it's not often you smell something that you would describe as ambrosial or redolent this is why doctor lukes who wrote a phd and now two books about it is.
- [49:24]
Dr. Ali Lukes
A pro it's kind of become a little bit language game that i'm very familiar with and i'm good at playing.
- [49:30]
Interviewer
And a few people fran izzy b and erin white wanted to know about food and fran said why do so many white americans especially claim to hate the smell of garlic or garlic breath they've never noticed anyone with bad garlic breath and garlic is delicious however coffee breath is terrible and izzy v wanted to know i'm curious about if there's connections between the smoke of cultural cuisines mentioned indian or mexican cuisine for example or diet culture and racism classism other prejudices so yeah the different smells of different types of cuisine and how that.
- [50:06]
Dr. Ali Lukes
Gets mentioned oh gosh there's so much so much interesting stuff there so i've actually read not recently but read quite a lot of academic work on the smell of garlic and the kind of particular sociopolitical and historical situations in which people being averse to the smell of garlic arises and how it relates to not always necessarily racism but certainly xenophobia so against for example italians i think is maybe the most obvious now but also the jewish community where garlic and onions were used in their kind of.
- [50:46]
Alie Ward
Traditional cooking okay so i'm mostly italian like seventy five percent so i honestly did not know that the waft of simmering onions or garlic could possibly be perceived poorly like what else does food taste like how do you like it.
- [51:02]
McDonald's Representative
I like it very much i think.
- [51:04]
Dr. Ali Lukes
Did we add salt and pepper i.
- [51:05]
T-Mobile Representative
Think we needed salt and pepper no.
- [51:08]
Interviewer
There'S no salt and pepper in it.
- [51:10]
Alie Ward
And there's this twenty sixteen paper i of the history department of king's college london titled grease and sweat race and smell in eighteenth century english culture and it notes that at the heart of bristling at a so called difference in odor was essentially the fear of otherness and given our two part vampirology episode about eastern european folklore and garlic as a repellent for the undead there were likely deep fears and associations made with certain food smells and the paper mentions that under oppression any group associated with poverty is associated with contamination it brought.
- [51:47]
Dr. Ali Lukes
Up this enormous discourse about the smell of garlic and it became this kind of foundational derogatory feature of that group and became a bit of a trope basically so that's that coffee breath coffee breath reminded me of this novel called come join our disease by sam byers who writes so wonderfully about the smells associated with the commute kind of the work commute and the like long incubated farts and like dehydrated spit and like it's incredibly like just so precise the way he's able to evoke these particular smells and i think you know stale coffee breath is one of those things that he locates as well as a kind of pervasive feature of the london.
- [52:40]
Alie Ward
Commute especially we have a whole episode about coffee and yes we delve into coffee breath in it and it turns out it's not so much the coffee itself but it's the things that you are splashing into the coffee like creamers and milks and sugars and by you i mean me and by splashing i mean pouring liberally and those are what make your mouth a mid morning stink bog but that whole episode is stellar we're gonna link it in the show notes for you now what about lunch.
- [53:07]
Dr. Ali Lukes
Though and then the other question was about kind of racism and ethnic cuisines we actually talk about this a fair amount i think in public discourse the kind of the idea that people will go to school or to their workplace and they'll bring with them a lunch that is specific to their culture you know the food that they grew up eating which is really comforting to them and other people will will kind of turn their nose up and make them feel bad about eating it and we've seen actually like bans on this kind of thing in public libraries where you'll say like don't bring in smelly foods and sometimes they'll specify what kind of smelly foods they mean and they'll say things like samosas and you think well you know fish and chips are really smelly as well but you're not isolating that as a thing that you're not allowed to bring into this public space so that clearly has some kind of racial component i think we should take it seriously actually it's worth having those conversations i think okay so remember her.
- [54:16]
Alie Ward
Controversial viral tweet one of the top replies read when i was in elementary school the kids used to make fun of us brown kids by saying you all smell like curry and many of us hated it when our parents would send us indian food for lunch because of that so what this academic is studying the tweet said about allie is a real thing and should not be ridiculed by the uneducated masses of twitter and that tweet was left by doctor khalil andani who is a harvard professor of religion also for those of south asian descent you may be in possession of the abcc eleven gene which means that you have fewer active apocrine sweat glands in your pits and in your groin which means that stink making bacteria are not thriving in there which means you have won the bo lottery now for the rest of us and i'll talk to my people the stinky one i consulted many message boards and apparently our sit down air especially americans are widely agreed to smell like wet dogs or old milk or cold hot dogs or dirty pennies now part of that might be diet related and as a person who lives within walking distance of three hot dog and four hamburger shops i can vouch for a cultural predisposition.
- [55:31]
Interviewer
It'S interesting how smell instantly jumps to association and it can be revealing of what people's association is and then once they've experienced it their last association is oh that was pretty good you know.
- [55:44]
Dr. Ali Lukes
Spectacular give me fourteen of them right now really do you know what's in here i don't care don't tell me.
- [55:50]
Interviewer
So much of that is just tied to ignorance or lack of exposure or xenophobia and going back in the past a little bit he mentions commutes which made me want to ask this but melissa hall asked did everyone in the.
- [56:01]
Alie Ward
Past smell like cigarettes all the time.
- [56:03]
Interviewer
They say i love old hollywood movies and everyone is always smoking inside in fancy places and melissa says i'm a smoker and i feel like now cigarette smoke is associated with the lower classes and i'm super careful not to smell like my beloved cancer sticks but what about the fifties and abigail riggle also says is there a scientific explanation behind why fresh and stale smoke smells so different has there been a change in how cigarettes cigarette smoke has been portrayed in literature as kind of a tell for someone's class or habits oh that's.
- [56:40]
Dr. Ali Lukes
Okay well a i wasn't alive then so i can't tell you from experience but i can say that it's fairly safe to assume that probably yes it was more common for people to smell like smoke but we also very easily habituate to smells that we're around a lot it doesn't take very long at all really only about thirty seconds for us to habituate to a smell like even the worst kind of smells you know like a pigsty or whatever so long as the smell isn't shifting and changing or coming and going we just stop noticing a smell basically so if you're in a room where people are smoking you will pretty much just get used to it after not very long my colleague will tullett has done some really interesting work on cafes and salons and smoking and has traced when smoking became a kind of more communal experience why the fact that genders mixing in these public spaces meant that smoking became less popular because women who weren't used to the smell would complain about it there's a great deal of work on stigmatisation and smoking as it relates to smell and how people who smoke are very often often represented as being foul smelling and disgusting and they have decaying teeth and yellow fingers and that kind of thing and it certainly does in some ways lead to a kind of moral stigmatisation of something that is in most cases not moral there is a kind of argument to be made for it affecting other people because it's a kind of a behavior that's associated with poor house as we were saying before smell is deeply deeply emotionally associative and so if you have positive emotional associations with smoking which you very well might if you had say a grandparent that smoked or a parent that smoked then it can be a very comforting thing to smell i was thinking about the parent trap both the book and the film at the end where i think it's halle hugs her grandfather and says that she's making a memory yes i remember that every time i think about.
- [58:52]
Alie Ward
My grandfather and how he always smelled.
- [58:54]
McDonald's Representative
Of tobacco and peppermint smell of tobacco and pepper well i'll tell you i use the peppermint for my indigestion and the tobacco to make your grandmother mad.
- [59:09]
Dr. Ali Lukes
I'Ll remember that he smelled like pipe tobacco and peppermint i think there's a distinction between tobacco and and cigarettes and then there's also of course online this kind of big discussion always being had about the difference between cigarette smoke and.
- [59:25]
Interviewer
Weed smoke yeah it's interesting because i live in california where cannabis has been legal for a while now essentially and it more recently has become legal in new york and so when i'm walking around in new york the first couple times i went to new york when.
- [59:40]
Alie Ward
It was legal i thought it smells.
- [59:41]
Interviewer
Like home right now like it smells like california right now and then i was like oh that's just weed and now i've become habituated to it you know i smell it in new york and it doesn't raise any flags of like oh just because you're in some parts of the country you're used to people smoking it wherever but it's yeah it's funny that i would get homesick.
- [60:02]
Alie Ward
If you're like i wish there was a book that mentioned the smell of drugs head on over to say hunter s thompson fear and loathing in las vegas which sprinkles in a little hash smoke and the smell of huffing ether through a drenched kleenex and then stumbling through circus circus or get a hit of inherent vice by thomas pynchon which contains gorgeously thick prose like at the moment she was lying in an unlit room of uncertain size which smelled of pot smoke and patchouli oil and they moseyed some down the alleys of gordita beach in the slow seep of dawn and the wintertime smell of crude oil and salt water also there's a description in inherent vice that is so striking it just might as well be a teleportation device made of words and it reads there were black light suites with fluorescent rock and roll posters and mirrored ceilings and vibrating waterbeds strobe lights blinked incense cones sent ribbons of musk scented smoke ceiling word and carpeting of artificial angora in various tones including oxblood and teal not always limited to floor surfaces beckoned alluringly i feel like you know exactly what that motel room smells like as soon as you turn the key which brings us back to patron abigail riggle's question is there a scientific explanation behind why fresh and stale smoke smell so different and the answer is yes science calls this third hand smoke and it's made of the mix of nicotine formaldehyde and naphthalene that settles on surfaces into fibers and builds up over time time so the mayo clinic cautions that you can't get rid of third hand smoke with more airflow so fans open windows not going to help you and it's hard to clean off thirdhand smoke with typical household cleaning so please science tell us how well a twenty twenty paper titled remediating third hand smoke pollution in multi unit housing temporary reductions and the challenges of persistent reservoirs said that using a combination of dry and wet methods is most effective so dry cleaning involves involved simple green all purpose cleaner followed by some distilled white vinegar left on surfaces for a few minutes but then wet cleaning was a bigger job with like professional steam cleaning teams and enzymatic preparations attention paid to ph and all that so this is why the fine print says that if you smoke in your rental kia they can hunt you down they can hit you in the face and they can take your wallet in hotels don't even think about it unless you're a newly divorced guy whose wife found your whatsapp and you're forced to stay at a weekly rate hotel for a while thirdhand smoke is your new girlfriend last listener or almost.
- [62:46]
Interviewer
Last listener question ghoul nextdoor first time question manna and scott hanley wanted to know a little bit more about perfumes ghoul next door said this is fascinatingly exciting and hadn't heard about this before but they're so curious and mana says oh my god this is heaven for a scent nurse nerd i'd love for doctor lukes to dive into her opinion on the way people interact with perfumes and over consumption and on that note we had a couple teachers thorpasaurus jess said as a high school teacher i am subjected to many smells on a regular basis they see firsthand how much scent is deeply important to students like a forty five second continuous stream of axe body spray or fifty seven consecutive squirts of vanilla bubblegum lilac princess peach perfume and bed bath and body work stuff yeah so perfume like when did.
- [63:38]
Alie Ward
That become such a part of our.
- [63:40]
Dr. Ali Lukes
Identity well i mean affordable perfumes are still a relatively recent invention not so much as an invention but i suppose a commodity that is actually available to the kind of average consumer now i could be wrong about this but the nineteen eighties were really the time when a lot of kind of ordinary middle class people decided to buy fragrances to use so obviously women have always worked they've always performed labour in various ways but the nineteen eighties saw women going into professions and jobs that they hadn't been able to before for and there were certain perfumes that were very much kind of marketed towards those particular groups these kind of new professional women at relatively affordable prices so with the rise.
- [64:39]
Alie Ward
Of synthetic ingredients the normies had more access to smelling like flowers by the late eighteen hundreds but perfume really started to permeate the air of the late nineteen seventies and the early eighties explains his essay fragrance as class performed performance sent signifiers across socioeconomic boundaries and in nineteen seventy three cosmetic companies like revlon dared to show sassy working women wearing pants smelling hot and controlling their own.
- [65:08]
Dr. Ali Lukes
Destinies so i'm thinking of like reeve ghosh and charlie and they kind of became almost synonymous with that new style of femininity which was like take me seriously but also so i still want to smell like a woman there's only one fragrance to wear when you're living.
- [65:30]
Alie Ward
In a fast lane and that's charlie.
- [65:32]
Dr. Ali Lukes
And so you got those kind of fragrances were pretty overpowering in general they're still pretty much on the market but they've all been reformulated since their initial conception but if you smell kind of the original decants they're quite strong as with everything you know in fashion music smith smells and our smell preferences change over time and so we now don't have quite so many floral notes in the average perfume than we would back then we're now kind of in the era of the gourmand in general by.
- [66:05]
Alie Ward
Gourmand perfumes i thought she just meant fancy but it apparently means like edible smelling like chocolate or honey or caramelly scents a lot of sugar vibes even some coffee nice notes and fruit now tom ford makes a lost cherry fragrance with notes of almond and tonka bean and yes black cherry it sells for over two hundred dollars a bottle and those in the know report that it happens to smell exactly like embalming fluid.
- [66:35]
Interviewer
Okay scott hanley asked top fragrances fetch.
- [66:38]
Alie Ward
High prices and are not available to.
- [66:39]
Interviewer
Lower income noses like think creed et cetera if that isn't a cultural disparate i don't know one but do you find that certain perfumes are described in novels to note like this person has a lot of money and is old money and maybe this person not so much i know that that quote too with marilyn monroe like what do i.
- [66:59]
Alie Ward
Sleep in what do you wear to.
- [67:01]
McDonald's Representative
Bed you wear pajama tops the bottoms of the pajamas are a nightgown or so i say chanel number five because it's it's the truth and yet i don't want to say nude but it's.
- [67:16]
Alie Ward
The truth chanel number five yeah you.
- [67:19]
Interviewer
Know like that but yeah do you ever find that types of perfumes are like oh this person is rich or like this person's new rich or something.
- [67:29]
Dr. Ali Lukes
Yeah the thing that is interesting i think about fiction is that it's quite rare to come across references to specific specific fragrances but there are examples i mean toni morrison in her novel tar baby references chloe like the brand chloe and that very very famous original perfume.
- [67:50]
Alie Ward
So toni morrison won the nobel prize for literature in nineteen ninety three and tar baby is her nineteen eighty one novel about a black fashion model named jayden who lives in a house with a wealthy white family and they go to the caribbean and she falls in love with someone named sun a black man who is on the run murder so the novel follows how they balance their identities apart and together amid their surroundings and in an interview morrison said of its title tar baby that it's also a name that white people call black children black girls as i recall she says and at one time a tar pit was a holy place at least an important place because tar was used to build things she says it held together things like moses's little boat and the pier for me she says the tar baby came to mean the black woman who can hold things together now ali mentioned that there's a reference in this book to the fragrance chloe and i found the passage which reads usually when margaret the white daughter overslept jade woke her up with a smile some funny piece of mail or an exciting advertisement and they would begin the day with some high spirited girlish nonsense look chloe has four new perfumes four so chloe it's this classic high end luxury perfume by lagerfeld and it came on the market in nineteen seventy five so right before the book came out it's in a short ribbed square bottle with this crisp ballet pink bow at the nozzle and it smells rosy and floral so that tracks for the characters but the only other mention of chloe in tar baby is the very first page which is a biblical quote from corinthians one eleven which reads for it hath been dec unto me of you my brethren by them which are of the house of chloe that there are contentions among you what i would say.
- [69:41]
Dr. Ali Lukes
About perfume and exclusivity and classism is that obviously these kind of luxury brands are making you pay much more than you need to but there are alternatives there are affordable alternatives and there are so many more brands who are doing things affordably now you know you can buy a sample for like one or two pounds and it will last you a week's worth of wear and i think that's special oh that's actually a.
- [70:14]
Interviewer
Good note last listener question is megan reaser wanted to know they said this is so exciting i'm wondering right off the bat what your favorite smells are wanted to know if you've had any scents that you previously hated but you changed your mind about once you learned more about it and learned more context do you have something that through your work you suddenly smell lilac differently or suddenly smell jasmine differently that's so interesting.
- [70:38]
Dr. Ali Lukes
Okay were you gonna say something else.
- [70:42]
Interviewer
I was just gonna buy you some time but i was gonna say there's david lynch recently passed away and he's buried in hollywood forever cemetery and he was such a champion for la and filmmaking and the only thing on his tombstone his epitaph just says night blooming jasmine and that's it and it's so interesting because makes me want to tear up just saying that because there's certain times of the year that the night blooming jasmine and it happens this time of year is so it's so pervasive in the city and it's so nostalgic and it's such a fingerprint of la if you've walked around the hills or if you've walked around parks at night and i just thought it was so interesting that his last words were just night blooming jasmine because it says everything in three words about la and about nighttime in la anyway oh that's so.
- [71:32]
Dr. Ali Lukes
Special i'm so glad that you shared that and it's i will get round to answering the question but it reminded me of this extremely recent experience that i had where one of my students submitted to me without letting me know that they were working on this which made it even more wonderful an essay about a short story by julian barnes called pulse which is about a man who loses his sense of smell at the same time that his wife is diagnosed with motor neuron disease and so the story is kind of trying to think through these very very different kinds of disability and towards the end of the story there's this really really special scene where his wife is kind of lying in a hospital bed and she can't really move anymore and she can't really use many of her senses because but her sense of smell is still working and so is her hearing and so he kind of talks about walks that they've been on and crushes herbs between his fingers so that she can imagine he doesn't even really know if she's still kind of cognizant of this but he does it anyway because he knows that it will be a way of kind of connecting her to better times oh that's so beautiful and i just thought it was an amazing story and i hadn't come across it before despite the fact that i work on smell disorders so it was a really kind of remarkable thing that my student had just kind of submitted this this essay offhand it was like here you go but yeah okay so favourite smells my two favourite smells are vanilla and fresh garden sage not the kind that you like you know like the dried stuff that you burn to like get rid of spirits but like the the kind of herb that you would use with like potatoes we have a big sage bush in our garden and every time i go out there i pick a leaf and i just walk around with it because i think it's like one of the best smells ever i have come to think about smell very differently and i've come to think about my kind of responsibility for how i react to smells very differently so as a kind of young person before i lost my sense of smell to covid for eighteen months oh my god what.
- [73:55]
Alie Ward
Yeah no yeah oh my god i.
- [74:00]
Dr. Ali Lukes
Will explain this whole yeah okay it wasn't my villain origin story because i was already working on smell when it happened which made it you know all the more ironic oh my god but as a young person i was very perturbed by smells i think i had quite a sensitive sense of smell and would often kind of be affected by smells that other people either couldn't smell or just were in kind of such small quantities that it didn't bother them i felt very kind of overwhel do i smell very often so sitting on the bus next to a smelly person you know wearing like a coat that had been out in the rain and then dried that would make me feel a bit like i need to get out of here and i do think that doing my work has made me think quite seriously about those situations and like how i interact with people who might smell different or strongly but my my relationship with with most smells has changed since losing my sense of smell because i kind of experienced the whole panoply of smell disorders on my road to recovery and it's still not quite there i think it's probably about seventy five percent of what it used to be which in some ways is quite helpful because it's less annoying i was.
- [75:13]
Interviewer
Gonna say yeah like you'd had it dialed up to like one hundred fifty maybe it's just at one hundred now maybe you're just on the level with everyone else but did your sense of.
- [75:23]
Alie Ward
Smell gradually come back yeah so it.
- [75:26]
Dr. Ali Lukes
Was gone like gone completely one hundred percent couldn't smell a thing for eighteen months and then it very very slowly like so incrementally that it was practically impossible to know that i was recovering yeah it has slowly slowly come back but a lot of things smell different to how they used to so ali.
- [75:46]
Alie Ward
Points to her desk which has little bottles of perfume and other smell samples and she told me that she's still having to retrain her nose and identify certain and this is the most literary thing i can imagine happening to her like how is she not in a corset with the local stable boy taking her around a flower garden in spring to teach her the smell of daffodils to rehabilitate her nose i used to.
- [76:13]
Dr. Ali Lukes
Be really good at it i used to be able to smell something and know what was in there and now everything smells different it's like having a kind of hard rock reset wow you have to kind of work i suppose i mean it's a this is a maybe a terrible comparison but it's kind of like learning to walk again you know like everything is different you're having to build up your understanding from the.
- [76:37]
Interviewer
Ground up yeah and it's so elemental to your field too that is so specific is that i was going to ask what one of the worst things about your work was i imagine having to retrain your nose as someone who writes about olfactory yeah like what's one.
- [76:54]
Alie Ward
Of the hardest things i mean actually.
- [76:56]
Dr. Ali Lukes
Genuinely think that maybe the hardest part of my work because i love what i do i really genuinely can say that i love what i do the hardest thing is returning to books that are really great examples of olfactory texts in that you know smell is very fundamental to them and it's operating in a way that is you know know necessary for the functioning of the plot or for characterization or style or whatever but the books themselves are just absolutely hideous.
- [77:32]
Interviewer
Just like poorly written i mean.
- [77:34]
Dr. Ali Lukes
That they include representations of just like really horrific things you know like lolita is one thing that's a very it's a special text in the sense sense that it really the kind of linguistic glossing effect that goes on means that a lot of the horror is very subdued but some texts will just throw the horror at you and ask you to deal with it but during the phd i did not very often get to work on positive smells of any description or family friendly fun nice books it was always people doing horrible things to each other in the realm of.
- [78:19]
Interviewer
Fiction oof that's gotta be not easy to shake off do you have to then go to a comfort read right after that just go crack into whatever.
- [78:28]
Dr. Ali Lukes
Comfort read you've got exactly yeah i really do and i really try to resist any kind of snobbery about fiction like i will happily read young adult fiction when i i was finalizing the edits on my thesis i listened to all of the audiobooks for a series of unfortunate events which is a series that i loved when i was a kid again and it actually really rewards a reread because it's very intensely literary there are lots and lots of references to canonical literature in those books so i really enjoyed that it was a way of like completely shutting my brain off at the nighttime what about you.
- [79:08]
Interviewer
You mentioned you love what you do what's your favorite thing about the job about being in this field i love.
- [79:13]
Dr. Ali Lukes
Feeling like i really genuinely have a sense of purpose that i know that whatever i choose to do is contributing new knowledge i think that's the really special thing that i love about smell studies is that because it really hasn't been going for very long it kind of emerged in the nineteen nineties eighties there's so much work to do and it all feels very invigorating and necessary and i love feeling like i'm making a contribution in some way it's interesting.
- [79:44]
Interviewer
To think of how many people who are now familiar with your work might incorporate smell differently in their own writing whether it's screenwriting or poetry or prose.
- [79:54]
Dr. Ali Lukes
I think it's incredibly special actually that people choose to send me messages all the time on social media about how how they have come to think about some aspect of their olfactory life differently and i love hearing from people i think almost everyone has a sense of.
- [80:14]
Alie Ward
Smell sorry to my friend micah who.
- [80:16]
Dr. Ali Lukes
Does not and i love hearing about them i love it when people share it's again it's stories i'm just i'm addicted to stories i always have been and i love when people tell me any kind of stories.
- [80:30]
Alie Ward
So ask literary people literally the stupidest questions because what is life without stories thank you so so much to doctor ali lukes for the chat and you can follow her on instagram at doctorali lukes and ali lukes on blue sky you can stay tuned for her two upcoming books which i will be celebrating i'm gonna climb to the top of a hill and just scream yeah now a donation again was made to the un crisis relief specifically the occupied palestinian territory humanitarian fund again highly encourage a listen to a our very unfunny episode on genocide with doctor dirk moses more links to studies will be up at alieward dot com literaryolfactology you can find a whole catalog of our four hundred plus episodes just by going to ologies dot com ologies merch is available at ologiesmerch dot com you can join patreon at patreon dot com ologies to support the show and leave questions for the ologists before we record erin talbert adminseologies podcast facebook group avileen malik makes our professional transcripts kelly r dwyer does the website the long lasting noelle dilworth is our scheduling producer happy birthday to my sister saucer today who i j' adore get well to our editor jake chaffee who's out with a minor plague susan hale is chanel number one who managing directs this whole situation lead editor is the crisp and elegant mercedes maitland of maitland audio and robust lee muskie jarrett sleeper of mindchime media and also my marriage stepped in to co edit this episode as we have ordered jake back to bed nick thorburn made the theme music and if you stick around to the end of the episode i burden you with a secret from my life and this one is courtesy two thousand nine me when i had a date with this crush who wanted to cook me dinner and he asked me if i was like allergic to any foods or if i didn't like anything and i told him i didn't really like garlic or onions and this was a lie but i did hope to make out with him which is why i said i didn't like him but he didn't and he didn't know how to make a meal like flavorful in their absence so he very sweetly chopped up like a bunch of parsley and rosemary and herbs which was a nightmare the entire time i just kept thinking i had green things in all my teeth and i was like this is my fault i brought this on myself anyway he was very kind wonderful dude in the end we were not each other's people and now me your internet uncle is married to your podmother jarrett and he could smell like anything and i would not mind i hope that's reciprocal okay go stick your face in a rose go waltz maybe through the perfume department at a fancy store don't buy anything you smell things put a little vanilla extract on your wrists that's free it smells great maybe saute some onions for me oh treat yourself to a chapter or two in one of those books out of your nightstand i will do the same okay bye bye pachydermatology cryptozoology litology nanotechnology meteorology olfactology maplology seriology selenology i like.
- [83:40]
McDonald's Representative
The smell of your books the mcdonald's snack wrap is back you brought it back ranch snack wrap spicy snack wrap you broke the internet for a snack snack wrap is back.
- [83:58]
Dr. Ali Lukes
What does possibility.
- [83:59]
Alie Ward
Mean to you um that's a hard.
- [84:01]
McDonald's Representative
Question something that you can strive for.
- [84:04]
Dr. Ali Lukes
I'M able to do anything i set my mind to you're confident in yourself and you believe in yourself stuff that.
- [84:10]
Alie Ward
You could achieve i feel at sarah.
- [84:12]
Interviewer
At ebling is possible when you're more confident shoes are a huge part of.
- [84:16]
McDonald's Representative
That they are the most important part.
- [84:18]
Dr. Ali Lukes
Of my style you can like express yourself in the right shoes anything is.
- [84:22]
Alie Ward
Possible dsw countless shoes at bragworthy prices imagine the possibilities.