A meditation on sound, inviting us to listen through the nose and open the mind to the musical potential in unpleasant odors. The stinkhorn mushroom is one of the weirdest wonders of the fungal world, certainly the smelliest. Ever since it was described by a Dutch doctor in a sixteenth-century pamphlet, the stinkhorn has been reported to emit odors resembling damp earth, dung, rotting cheese, decaying flesh, and even semen. It also happens to look like a phallus, bursting out of a subterranean egg to poke above the ground, where it lures insects towards its slimy, fetid cap. In
Stinkhorn, artist, musician, and writer Siôn Parkinson asks: What can the pervasive stench of this mushroom and the droning noise of the flies compelled towards it reveal about how sounds and smells are combined in the imagination?
A heady mix of natural history, science writing, musicology, philosophy of the senses, and illness memoir, Parkinson uses examples of so-called bad smells to argue for a theory of Stink as a kind of "smelling sound." Alongside images and insights from the author's search for stinkhorn fungi in nature, the book expands upon the philosophy of listening to consider the role of the nose and the "nasal imaginary" in how we make sense of sound.
In this treatise on malodors and how they can transform the conditions for listening, Parkinson considers John Cage's silent fungal forays, Brian Eno's compositions with perfumes, the hum note of a vibrating bell, the "eggy" odor of space, and the author's own hallucinated stench as the result of an epileptic seizure. What links these disparate ideas and sensory experiences can be found in a single encounter with a ripe stinkhorn mushroom.
Includes 16-page insert of a facsimile of the Neo-Latin-English translation of
The Description of the Phallus by Hadrianus Junius, translated by Caroline Spearing.
一場關於聲音的沉思，邀請我們透過鼻子傾聽，並打開心靈去探索不愉快氣味中的音樂潛力。
臭角菌是真菌世界中最奇特的奇觀之一，無疑是最臭的。自從十六世紀一位荷蘭醫生在小冊子中描述它以來，臭角菌就被報導散發出類似潮濕土壤、糞便、腐爛起司、腐肉，甚至精液的氣味。它的外觀也恰似陰莖，從地下的卵中破土而出，探出地面，吸引昆蟲朝向它那黏滑、惡臭的帽子。在Stinkhorn中，藝術家、音樂家和作家Siôn Parkinson提出：這種蘑菇的普遍臭味和被吸引而來的蒼蠅的嗡嗡聲，能揭示聲音和氣味在想像中是如何結合的？
這本書是一個自然歷史、科學寫作、音樂學、感官哲學和疾病回憶錄的濃烈混合，Parkinson利用所謂的壞氣味的例子來主張一種「臭味聲音」的理論。隨著作者在自然中尋找臭角菌的圖像和見解，這本書擴展了聆聽的哲學，考慮鼻子和「鼻腔想像」在我們理解聲音中的角色。
在這篇關於惡臭及其如何改變聆聽條件的論文中，Parkinson考慮了約翰·凱奇（John Cage）的靜默真菌探索、布萊恩·伊諾（Brian Eno）與香水的作曲、振動鈴的嗡嗡聲、太空的「蛋味」氣味，以及作者因癲癇發作而產生的幻覺臭味。這些不同的想法和感官體驗之間的聯繫可以在與成熟的臭角菌的單一遭遇中找到。
包括16頁的插頁，為Hadrianus Junius的The Description of the Phallus的Neo-Latin-English翻譯的摹本，由Caroline Spearing翻譯。
Siôn Parkinson is an artist, musician, performer, and writer. Originally trained as a sculptor, he received his PhD from University of Leeds in sound studies where he was an Amanda Burton scholar. He is a Research Fellow at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. He lives with his family in his hometown near Dundee, Scotland.
