I am trying to get back to 2018-level perfume cabinet fullness. In an effort to downsize my fragrance collection, I sold a few bottles on Mercari. Mercari transferred my earnings to a bank account that does not exist, and they tell me that they will try to get it back but can’t make any promises. Ugh!
Posing these bottles against the backdrop of my current knit-in-progress, because this lurid neon pink yarn just screams Lestat, as far as I am concerned!
Armand(white musk, iris, frankincense, resinous woods, blackened clove, blood-tinged incense) Low-pooling smoke and a warmth that feels recently abandoned: a fleecy blanket fort someone else built, the air inside already breathed. A dim flashlight glow of clean, freshly laundered light carves out a lit radius in the resinous dark; the shadows retreat to the corners, tuck themselves in for the evening. The saggy-ceilinged gloom sticky and sweet, cooked-down fruit leather [raisin / plum jam / fig] secret snacks for dear amber-eyed velveteened friends, sleepy-whisper warm and pulled close, feet all the way to your chest, after all the monsters cannot touch you if the blanket covers you completely (also this blanket fort is through the back door of the vampire club in Blade; so close you can feel the bass through the floor, but the blanket rule applies here too). Sanctuary nested inside menace? Or was the coziness compromised all along? Undetermined. But the doorway is hands-and-knees only, and nothing out there kneels.
Butterscotch Bitch (saffron, pink pepper, scorched butterscotch, cognac, red labdanum, woodsmoke) A sticky sunbaked resin, rust-red, hay-dry, sugar-cured shed snake skins and scorpion husks. Horizon line of pudding skin sagging in the heat. A paper wasp nest rattling in a sweet, smoky, candied mesquite branch breeze Salt flats, amber glare, a confectionary lizard skirting the ruinous edge of the pan.
Gabriella (pale lily, silvered sage, mountain air, leather, ancient moss, 18th-century Italian perfume) A whipped, creamy, floral, elegant, and restrained; a candied hush, the inside of a vanity drawer emptied two hundred years ago and still faintly, sweetly powdered even now. Moss at golden hour, sugar-glazed, dreaming under a crystalline cloche. Diffuse, wistful, and yet somehow vast. Soft paired equivalences, huge gentle things addressed by small transparent ones, makes me think of when Wes Swing sings in his song Sleeping Moon, “you are a drifting sound/And I am a veil of glass—”
Long Face (ambergris, frankincense, gold velvet, greasepaint, sweat, orris root, leather) Someone has thrown you down the long, lightless void of a leather well. Monolithic, hide-soft, oiled and airless, the walls too tanned and yielding to grip and too daryk to gauge for fall or distance, leather all the way down, and then more of it, the same cave-damp animal hush at fifty feet as at five, at five hundred as at fifty. Far above, a small cool rectangle of green floral light, the last clean air in the world, forever receding.
Louis (dark vetiver, bitter coffee, bay rum, osmanthus, magnolia, scorched sandalwood, dry patchouli, blood) A gloved hand clapped over your mouth, but the thing inside the glove is not a living thing, not really now not anymore. Scorched black grounds at the bottom of a pot, bitter past all drinking. Three creamy blooms, wafts of wax and rind and cold cream, tea brown at the edges. Dusty tonic on a shelf. Apricot-skinned upholstery. Suffocating sadness in the form of chandeliers, powdery, dim, low-hanging. The melancholy of a front room nobody sits in and the windows painted shut. Kid leather mourning gloves, three pearl buttons at the wrist, a seam pressed against your cheek.
Vampire DJ Of Some Renown (dry ice, fog machine juice, ozonic, dark rum, patchouli root, black amber, clove, incense) Concord grape shrub and blackstrap, a float of something dark and molasses-heavy, a bitter aromatic rinse swirled around the glass and discarded. Served in an upturned chrome helmet over one enormous clear cube, condensation beading down the visor, the drink and the vessel chilled with ghostly thermokinetic energy. A cold hoppy bitterness, the tang of cutlery curls in underneath and arrives a beat after everything else, the taste of the cup itself in the last mouthful. Garnished with a violet pastille on a silver pick, velvety, glossy, the better end of the lollipop.
Black Licorice (black licorice, black plum, champagne, labdanum, benzoin, rosin, leather) The gothest plum to ever exist. Purple so deep it reads black until light hits it, everything reduced to bloom and shadow like silent film reduced a face to kohl and cheekbone. Dark-sweet at the flesh and a low bitter anise hum near the stone, wet-eyed, glossolalia. Bruises decoratively, in mottled patches, like artfully smudged eyeliner, like careless lovebites, like ligature on a lovely corpse.
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
I try really hard not to read reviews of my books because I believe reviews are for readers, not authors, and what people have to say about my books is kinda none of my business! But! Curiosity overcame me, and I just had to check and see if there was even a single early review for The Art of the Unknown out there in the world…and there is! And it’s pretty great! I have the reviewer’s permission to share it, so I put my janky Canva skills to work and tried to make it pretty, heheheh.
I have copied it below as well, and many thanks to @lalaisalwaysreading over on Instagram for the thoughtful review.
✦•┈๑⋅⋯ 𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝙰𝚛𝚝 𝚘𝚏 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚄𝚗𝚔𝚗𝚘𝚠𝚗 by 𝚂. 𝙴𝚕𝚒𝚣𝚊𝚋𝚎𝚝𝚑 ⋯⋅๑┈•✦
➝ • 3.5/5 ☆ •
☆꧁✬◦°˚°◦..◦°˚°◦✬꧂☆
This was such an absorbing little dive into the strange. It feels like wandering through someone’s personal collection of oddities and hidden corners, and the way each piece of art is paired with a short reflection works really well. The artwork is honestly my favorite part. There’s so much variety, and a lot of it was completely new to me, which made the whole thing even more fun to move through.
A few sections were less interesting for me, but honestly the unevenness weirdly works here. It’s a book you drift through, picking up bits of history, weird facts, and unexpected connections along the way. I enjoyed learning new things while also just soaking in the visuals.
I wanted a little more depth in a few places, but overall it’s a beautifully curated look at the uncanny and the offbeat, and I really enjoyed it.
Over on my Midnight Stinks Patreon, I have a monthly feature called the Stinker Spotlight, wherein I interview a fellow fragrance obsessive about their collection, their rituals, their origin story, and whatever else I can get away with asking. This month’s subject is Genevieve, who you may know from her Instagram @eaulalabygenevieve, where she runs the Shelfie Sunday series, a weekly peek into the shelves and collections of different fragrance enthusiasts that is always a lot of fun, because sneaky peeks at people’s shelves are an irresistible temptation.
Genevieve is a kindred spirit in curation, a kitchen witch, a bedtime ritualist, and someone who is arguably more interested in the people who collect perfume than the perfume itself…which made her an ideal Stinker Spotlight subject!
This particular interview is free to read, but if you like what you find over there, consider poking around. The good stuff lurks behind the paywall: uncensored reviews (sometimes my public-facing reviews have gone through several edits!), the occasional unhinged scented meditation, and periodic giveaways for all paying subscribers. And if you join at the Aromatic Angel tier, I send you scented mail every month. Yes, actual mail! In this economy!
Periodically, I go through a thing where I get overwhelmed by the sheer abundance of stuff I have, and I just want to get rid of everything and run away into the woods. Now is one of those times.
…and you could totally benefit from it! I have reopened my Depop shop, where you will find lots of my extremely cool clothing and jewelry; I have opened a Mercari shop where I am selling quite a few of my lovely perfumes (heavily discounted). And FYI, on both of these sites there is an option to make me an offer if have a better price in mind! AND right now I am running a 40% off sale in my Pango book shop!
So please help soothe my existential angst by taking some of this stuff off of my hands!
When I was writing this book, I read everything I could get my hands on. Thinking about how artists engage with mystery, with the uncanny, with liminal space, with things that resist explanation, means understanding mystery from about fifty different angles at once. A color theorist sees it one way. A mystic sees it another. Someone writing about the history of an artist’s practice sees it differently still. You can’t really explore the unknowable by staying inside a single framework. You have to move between them, hold multiple versions in your head at the same time, slot one way of seeing beside another and see if they line up, or overlap but don’t quite fit, or point you somewhere you weren’t expecting.
So I read about wonder and how to think about it. About ideas that haven’t surfaced yet, the ones you have to go diving deep, sometimes holding your breath, in the dark. About words that almost exist, all the emotions we feel but can’t name. About how to look at something and actually see it, not just recognize it. About color as a language, how certain blues and golds change what your brain does. About the weird and the eerie as their own separate territories, not just variations on creepy.
I read about women painting things nobody else could paint, who saw invisible worlds and made them visible anyway. Those who understood that the body was a place where ceremony happened, where suffering happened, where magic was real. I read about stones and what they’ve witnessed, what they remember. About journeys through actual landscape and journeys through the landscape of your own mind, and how sometimes they’re the same thing. About spaces that don’t quite belong anywhere, the in-between places. About how artists have always been trying to show us what we can’t see: the hollow earth, the spirit world, the thing beneath the thing beneath the thing.
I read neuroscience alongside mysticism. I read about the brain’s capacity for wonder next to essays on being human in an age that doesn’t seem to value wonder. I read about artists who fished in their dreams for images. I read color theory. I read sci-fi art from the 1970s. I read about artists working in impossible spaces, making impossible things.
Some of the reading confirmed what I was already seeing—the same questions showing up in different mouths, different eras. Some of it sat uncomfortably next to the other stuff, didn’t fit, and made me hold both ideas at once without picking a winner. Some of it hassled and wrassled with my preconceived notions and things I thought I understood.
A bibliography is useful if you want to know what someone cited. It’s a paper trail, a record of the official sources. But I think … it’s not the same as the actual reading that shapes a book. I want to know what other writers were living inside when they created their work. Not just the stuff they quoted directly, I want the things that haunted them, that rerouted their thinking, that squatted in their head taking up space and changing the shape of how they see. I assume there are people like me who want that too. People who are curious about the texture of someone else’s musings, the threads of their obsessions, the fabric of their focus, the full tapestry of their inquiry. So that’s how I handle this list at the back of the book.
The further reading list at the back of The Art of the Unknown isn’t organized by relevance or by how directly each book appears in the text. It’s not a ranked list of “essential” sources. It’s arranged alphabetically because that seems logical and fair. The books that shaped this work, all weighted equally, with no hierarchy. Some I read cover to cover. Others I dipped into for a single image or idea. Some I quoted, some I referenced vaguely, some merely colored the way I thought about this, that, or the other thing. Some I just absorbed in a way that only I might ever know, and I lived in them for a moment while I was pondering a particular detail, and maybe it made no difference to the caption about a painting or sculpture I wrote, or maybe it did, but it felt right to include.
The books on this list don’t all point toward the same thing. They don’t all agree. Some of them would probably argue with each other if they could! But that’s exactly what you need when you’re thinking about the unknowable. One answer is never enough!
What book have you read that changed how you see without ever being directly “about” the thing you were working on? What have you read that became essential even though it seemed tangential? Tell me about a book that’s still shifting and reshaping the way you think about things and exist in this world? I want to hear all about the mysteries lining your shelves!
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
The incredibly brilliant Michelle ( @smallinklings on Instagram) has painted a portrait of our little Lucy, depicting our cranky old lady as a saintly beast, Our Lady of Perpetual Hope, always trusting that a crumb of toast or a crispy bit of salmon skin or a rich pat of butter might fall into her mouth.
Sometimes it does! The power of Lucy compels us!
A vision robed in forget-me-nots and salvia and immortalized in watercolor stained glass, the actual Lucy gave her beatific doppelgänger a sniff and wagged her tail, and I guess that seems like a blessing as much as anything else.
Last year Iris Van Herpen sent dresses down the runway that were alive, gowns pulsing with millions of bioluminescent algae that had to be tended like houseplants. And the only way to top living couture, it turns out, was to leave Earth entirely! Her Fall 2026 collection, “Sonic Starquakes,” begins with the fact that stars are not silent: pressure waves ripple through their plasma depths the way earthquakes shudder through stone, and each star sounds its own note, the giants droning low like tubas and double basses, the small ones piping in thin celestial flutes.
Van Herpen translated that unheard music into cloth. Tens of thousands of hand-blown glass spheres, graduated in size from seed pearl to soap bubble, float on illusion tulle so the body seems to dissolve into a fizz of light at its edges. Hand-pleated chiffons sweep into half-wheels suspended within moon-curved carbon fiber boning, drifting as if moved by an unseen current. Laser-cut velvets undulate down the body in dark vertical rivulets past the hem of the fabric onto bare skin in hand embroidery, so that garment and wearer blur at the border. The palette descends through the night sky: midnight black into sapphire, cobalt into moonstone green, nebula red, storm-lit silver, all of it unspooling across the Élysée Montmartre over a floor boiling with dry ice.
The showpieces, though, weren’t merely inspired by science; they were made of it. The Helix Nebula dress carries two crescent lunar forms of hand-blown glass arching from the shoulder, each one filled with actual plasma, the luminous fourth state of matter, a charged cloud of ions and free electrons that constitutes more than 99% of the visible universe and, until this month, zero percent of haute couture.
Its deep red glow is the light of electrons leaping between energy levels, the same physics that paints the auroras and ignites the nebulae where stars are born. Bring a hand near the glass and the filaments inside bend toward it; worn, the dress draws the body into its electrical field, wearer and gown briefly sharing a single electromagnetic system. And then, the Fractal Universe look, a molded glass-like minidress charged inside a particle accelerator and kept cryogenically preserved at minus 100 degrees Celsius before the show, a garment holding billions of trapped electrons in suspension, a wearable reservoir of storm.
The plan was to discharge it dramatically on the runway. Instead, before the show, the captive electricity found its own way out: branching Lichtenberg figures erupted across the surface, lightning fossilized mid-strike, fractal channels burned permanently into the material. Van Herpen has been seeing those fern-like patterns everywhere since, river deltas, root systems, the veins branching beneath the wrist. I saw all of it through a screen, thousands of miles away, and the hairs on the back of my neck rose anyway. Electrical fields, spooky action at a distance, awe and shiver arriving across an impossible divide.
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
L’Epoque Dreams and Nightmares Weirdly uneaseful lemons with a bit of pizzazz, some eucalyptus-pink-pepper zhuzhiness, a provocative piquance contrasted with a softly dank, earthy-woody-woolyiness. If the Misfits’ prickly-sour-chartreuse neon Phyllis Gabor was also the fuzzily balsamic-herbaceous The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Freaking gorgeous.
Liis Flower Glyph Kate Greenaway’s floral children’s illustrations as vintage minty-lime toothpaste, foaming mentholated margarita freezee pop, the spit-drip down the wrist before it reaches the elbow. Grass stains, bare feet, summer freckled. Ohio, age six. Periwinkles and snapdragons along the fence, the neighbor kid (a nasty little pervert) who made me look at his ding-dong underwater whilst in our above-ground pool, my eyes stinging from chlorine, pretending to look so that he’ll fuck off. Learning other families’ weirdness during a sleepover, the citrus-shaped soaps you get slapped for using, the processed powdery sweetness of bulk off-brand cereal in a bag, the unfamiliar plastic-honeyed scent of the air freshener that you once saw someone’s mother drinking.
Regime des Fleurs Wildly Fig.At some point in your life, you saw a bowl of plastic fruit in someone’s house. This is undoubtedly what it smelled like. Cool plastic, a synthetic verdancy, a sickly, muted sort of tang that if you encountered it in nature, you’d be like, nope, this is nature’s way of telling me to not put this thing in my mouth.
Choppova Lowena Hay Zhasmina! Sneaking out of the house in the 8th grade with my trouble-maker best friend, some combination of Samba and Exc!amation, Spring Break, Poison t-shirts, and the mini-est of miniskirts. Fruity-fizzy-hairspray-wine cooler nostalgia cocktail, neon bikinis without bodies or beaches.
Prin Emerald Curry smells like what you’d get if a perfumer juiced up the faded cover art for Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest, painted by the surrealist paperback visionary Richard Powers: drowned in green, a wet watercolor green pooling into the tooth of the paper, celadon blooming, chlorophyll bleeding, virescent, grassy and algal, wet-on-wet, fading at the periphery, granulating in the shadows. Lemongrass bright and soapy and sharp, makrut lime peel resinous and pithy, the aromatic ghost of it rather than the juice. The raw grassy bitterness of green chile flesh, no heat, just the verdancy. Cardamom piney and slightly medicinal. Holy basil drifting through, sweet-anise, almost there, already gone. A tangle of pale fronds, blossoms or spores or some secret mycological third thing. The tourmaline halo of private sylvan sun.
The Flower Garden, Matthew Darly 1777
Kuoca is a Korean brand that recently reached out to me and sent me some of their fragrances …which was kinda wild, not that many brands sent me much in the way of PR anyway (though I am of course grateful to anyone who ever did!) but it’s really petered out since I left TikTok. I am grateful that someone still thinks I am relevant, ha! Anyway, I thought they were just going to send me a discovery set, so when I opened the box to find five full size bottles, I was shocked!
These are all fairly pleasant scents, though I will say some were less my cuppa than others. My favorite, which I’ve been wearing nonstop for the past several days, is Dark Tea Spiced with Marrakesh Smoke. It’s dry and a bit earthy with a charmingly world-weary smoky vetiver, and cardamom’s cool soapy-floral-piney wink. A close second is Grapefruit Brûlée, a fizzy, gourmand citrus soda, topped with mounds of chipped ice, with all sorts of aromatic leafy herbs frozen in the tiny shards.
P.S. Are you a brand that appreciates thoughtful, articulate, creative reviews of your perfumes? Are you also ethical and not problematic, and I won’t be canceled by the internet for talking about your products? (I tell you, I’ve been burnt before and it sucks!) But if so, reach out and send me your stuff!
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
Apologies in advance if my cognitohazard column for the current issue of Rue Morguedoes freaky things to your brain!
Inspired by There Is No Antimemetics Division (which I recently reviewed in my latest edition of Stacked), Morgellons Disease, Pontypool, etc., where knowing the thing makes you susceptible to the thing …
53 days until 
