WRITING PERFUME

In honor of Perfume Perfume week I'd like to pay tribute to one of my favorite works of fiction, Jitterbug Perfume, by Tom Robbins. Incidentally, Opus Oils in Hollywood has recently done the same, opening a perfume parlour last year named after the book. I think this is great, of course, and wish I could go to California to dream of speak easies and lie on one of the velvet chaises, a parfume attendant dragging viles of the Absinthe scent line under my nose and all of it taking on a dramatically burlesque quality. Revivalists are neat. They also offer classes for "The Art of making Natural Perfumes."

I imagine one of these natural perfumes is the parlour's signature scent--Jitterbug--which has a base note of jasmine. It's a decadent oil, from what's sometimes called the night-flowering tree, which Krishna planted for his wives in Hindu mythology. It's about as mystical as a plant gets, which is probably why Robbins used it in his 'epic' (or at least sprawling) mythology story as the potion at the bottom of a three-hundred-year-old blue glass bottle, as a scent that trails a New Orleans vagabond with a crown of swarming bees, as the cloud that engulfs Pan in the 8th century, and, most relevant to the plot and to Opus Oils, as the base note of fictional perfumer Madame Devalier's fragrance.

Robbins got giddy with alchemy and created a fake scent for the book, which just happens to be the basic formula for Opus Oils' Jitterbug Perfume. They also just happen to not mention that the signature scent was created by an author, not their team of expert parfumers. In fact, the website only offhandly mentions Robbins' novel amongst a string of other inspirations for the shop. I'm not hating on Opus Oils, but come on. They seem to be lacking a little imagination for their own products.

Robbins, on the other hand, is probably brilliant, and a prolific writer in every sense of the word. Though most of his novels were written between the seventies and nineties, they read timelessly (despite the sporadic Nader reference). He has an affinity for the obscure, and his work is the best social satire I've read to date. I'm probably soliciting that you read the book.