Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.
Smell and interest in smell and the kind of perverse, like, ways people relate through smell is one of those things forcefully educated out of people. It
Ally Louks:throws into question these kind of accepted facts that we think about our bodies. If it's not the case that smell and taste are separate, then what else do we take for granted?
Hsuan Hsu:Hello, and welcome to this episode of the University of Minnesota Press podcast on the forerunner's book, Olfactory Worldmaking. I'm Hsuan Hsu, the author of the book and a professor of English at the University of California Davis. I'm really happy to be in conversation today with Allie Lukes, a brilliant scholar who has been doing exciting work on smell, literature and culture, and in the public humanities more broadly. So I want to first thank Allie for joining me today and also to thank Maggie Sattler for her work on coordinating and producing this podcast. To start things off, I'll say a little about the book and then ask Ali to tell us about herself and her work.
Hsuan Hsu:So to quickly introduce myself and the book, I've been teaching and researching topics in the environmental humanities, race studies, sensory studies, and geography for a while now, and I've become especially interested in how we make the air perceptible and the kinds of stories we can tell about atmospheric sensations like smell and thermoception, or the sense of temperature. I wrote Olfactory World Making as a sort of sequel to my 2020 book, The Smell of Risk, which investigated how writers and artists work with smell as a medium for communicating about air pollution and other modes of atmospheric violence. Olfactory world making takes a more speculative approach, and it focuses on olfactory encounters in literature, art, and scent making that draw attention to how smells connect people with the world, and how smells might move breathers toward other ways of making community, experiencing time, imagining futures, and inhabiting the world. Allie, can you say a little about your background and your work before kicking off our conversation?
Ally Louks:Absolutely. I'm Ally Louks. I'm a literary scholar, an author, and a public academic. I currently teach at the University of Cambridge, and I'm currently working to turn my PhD thesis into an academic book with Oxford University Press. It's about the politics of smell in modern and contemporary prose.
Ally Louks:I'm at the editing stage of another more public facing book, what we tend to call a trade book in academia, called 'Under Your Nose: The Pleasures and Politics of Smell', which draws on work in the sciences, social sciences and humanities, along with lots of examples from popular culture to completely change the way that people understand their sense of smell. I've got various other smaller writing projects on the go, I'm forever working laterally across lots of projects, which I think is the life of all academics, really. And I'm really delighted to be in conversation with you today, Sean. It was a real privilege to be one of the first readers of olfactory world making, which I know is going to shape our field in much the same way that The Smell of Risk did.
Hsuan Hsu:So Ally, I'm really excited to hear about your projects. And I wanted to ask about your experience writing for a broad audience, and maybe also just like in juxtaposition with revising the dissertation. So you're at the same time doing this kind of like work of writing for an academic audience, revising work that was like already just super rigorous to begin with. And on the other hand, you mentioned writing for, you know, the kind of general public. So what has that been like?
Hsuan Hsu:What are some of the adjustments that you've made?
Ally Louks:Yeah, I wonder if it's worth saying that you would think my work is super rigorous because you are my examiner. But yes, I do take the compliment. I think writing for a broad audience has taught me a great deal about myself, actually. It's really forced me to consider much wider perspectives than I ever did before. This is partly because I cut my teeth as a public writer on Twitter, where everyone argues about everything.
Ally Louks:I became very good at anticipating potential responses, and it requires a kind of first principles procedure when you're writing for the public, because you can't take for granted that people will be familiar with the concepts that we often refer to in literary studies such as affect, for instance. And so, you know, clarity is king, and it's made me work quite hard to phrase things as directly as possible without relying on any kind of academic terminology, or at least explaining academic terminology when I use it. So it's been really good for me actually, and it really has taught me to think much more broadly about how my work and my ideas will be interpreted, because you never know who's going to be reading your tweets or indeed your book. How about you? I mean, you've done quite a lot of crossover work at this point and written articles for the public, And I wonder how you feel the shift is when writing from an academic perspective compared to a more public perspective.
Hsuan Hsu:I think that I'm more somewhere in the middle of the spectrum than you are with my, like, somewhat public facing writing. I've written for avidly, not on smell, or I've written texts to accompany art exhibitions or art installations, which are for like a public, but they're for public readers who are already really interested in conceptual art, not only to visit the exhibition, but to actually read the piece that comes along with it. I mean, in this book, I did think of it as like having to bridge disciplines, at least hopefully, and to, you know, hopefully interest readers well beyond literary studies and art criticism or art history.
Ally Louks:So, from my understanding, this book uncovers how smell and representations of smell in various kinds of artworks can help us to imagine and create more liveable worlds, especially for marginalised communities. And two things that I'm particularly drawn to throughout your work and always have been since I first encountered it is your multimedia approach and your interdisciplinarity. You have an amazing corpus of different texts in this work. You have historical novels, memoirs, fiction, artworks, perfumes even, and I wondered, you know, why is it important to you to take a multimedia approach to the texts that you include?
Hsuan Hsu:Thanks for that question. I actually started working across media before thinking about why I was doing it, in part because I'd come across some fascinating olfactory art projects. I mean, this is just like in the longer history of my work on smell, so projects by artists like Sean Raspitt, Annika Yee, and Beatrice Glow that I wanted to spend time thinking about. I'd say that also pertains to this book where I just had been really struck by work by artists like Warren Carreyu, Renee Stout, and again, Anika Yee's more recent project, In Love With the World. More broadly, I'm partly just drawn to olfactory aesthetics as a practice that literature makes important contributions to, but that extends way beyond the medium of language.
Hsuan Hsu:And I think, you know, the multimedia approach allows me to get that bigger picture. Literature and literary methods seem relevant across media because language and narrative play such a powerful role in negotiating the cultural construction of scents and of smelling. But in olfactory art and other multimodal works, scent is also a powerful medium that can intervene in how we smell and how we read and talk about smell. So when scents are put in a narrative or a discursive context, whether it's in a novel or a memoir or a review of a perfume, say, like a text accompanying an art installation, the interaction between narrative and sensory experience changes both sides of the interaction. Language becomes linked to sense and scent based emotions, memories, and other embodied responses.
Hsuan Hsu:And of course, interactions with language and other sensory input, like images, sound, etc, can sensitize people to different aspects of olfactory encounters. So multimedia olfactory projects like art installations or experimental perfumes seem to be inextricable from aspects of language, narrative, and performance that literary scholars like us are well trained to think about.
Ally Louks:That makes total sense. Sometimes in literary studies we're pushed to have a very neat, coherent corpus of texts, and smell really resists that, I think. You know, it's really clear from olfactory world making that smell is of the world and it makes and remakes the world, and so I think it pays to attend to different kinds of texts. Something else that I really like about your work is that you always situate your projects within a broader community of scholarship. You obviously read very broadly, which is, you know, something that I really admire, and I'm often surprised by some of the connections that you're able to draw out from scholarship in other fields.
Ally Louks:And so I wondered whether you could talk a bit about how your work benefits from an interdisciplinary approach.
Hsuan Hsu:I think that interdisciplinary approaches are just like really important in general. For one thing, research should always be aware of how the researcher and their objects of study are situated, especially in relation to power relations. That already opens up a bunch of interdisciplinary questions. For my work on smell, I think about how writers and artists I work on are situated and how smell, which includes both odorous materials and changing ideas about the act of smelling, how all of that has contributed to histories of colonialism, racial differentiation, and especially to the racialized, gendered, and ableist fantasy of the universal disembodied subject of reason. I should say too that the writers and artists I discuss in the book are themselves just deeply interdisciplinary thinkers and practitioners.
Hsuan Hsu:Tanayis, one of the earlier writers and perfumers and novelists that I write about, they are trained in perfuming, they run a botanica, but they're writing, I mean, they read really broadly in post colonial studies, gender studies, black feminist studies, religious studies. So they have this whole take on the concept, the kind of, I think, Buddhist, Vedantic and Hindu concept of Vasanas, which they take to be a kind of inter generationally transmitted desire or inclination. And then they engage in those conversations by refusing the tendency in some traditions to try to shut down vasanas, but rather they think of perfuming as actually activating those vasanas and making those cross generational connections and affirming desire. So I'm a little bit off track here, but which is just to say that Tanis has this kind of like dizzying range of interdisciplinary methods and references. I mean, one other artist that I'd mention is Annika Yee, whose installation In Love With The World, I mean, it's just like staggering how interdisciplinary it is, right?
Hsuan Hsu:She's incorporating research on how different epochs across deep time would have smelled. She collaborates with like robotics people and like biologists. She makes these kind of bio bot flying contraptions that sense the atmosphere and kind of interact with people and the algorithm kind of is designed to evolve based on what they're sensing. So this is not something she could do herself, right? Like she has to have a kind of like, you know, just incredible interdisciplinary team to do this.
Hsuan Hsu:And so, I mean, part of the interdisciplinary work is this kind of following the threads and connections and incredible sort of lines of thinking that the artists and writers are themselves demanding. And maybe I could follow-up here and ask you about your turn to popular culture, because the dissertation was very literary.
Ally Louks:I really like taking a kind of high and low approach. I do refer to Proust's Madeline experience, for instance, because everyone knows about that particular passage because it's become a part of our cultural toolkit almost. But I also like referring to, like, SpongeBob SquarePants, because we're kind of familiar with that too, and something that I suggest in the book is that we're kind of trained to think and feel a certain way about smell through these instances of smell in popular media. That can start really early on in children's media, so I do refer to all sorts of kind of cartoons and other kind of popular, much referenced smell moments. So, for instance, I talk about Twilight and I talk about the Omegaverse, and I'm really kind of reaching across categories to try and bring in as many different examples that as many different kinds of people will be familiar with, because my ideal for this book would be that there's something in it for everyone, including those who can't even smell.
Ally Louks:We're both really interested in thinking about disability and smell disorders, and so that is a big part. An entire chapter in the book, it's about disability. So, that's my kind of reasoning. It's to try and meet people where they're at and to show them that actually it's right under your nose. All of these ideas that we're constantly kind of being saturated with, they're right there, we just don't usually think critically about them.
Hsuan Hsu:Yeah, that's so great. And I love the turn to children's media seems just like so powerful because smell and interest in smell and the kind of perverse, like ways people relate through smell is like one of those things that forcefully educated out of people as they mature. I'm not a SpongeBob aficionado, but there's something about the porosity of the body, right, and this like absorbing of everything. I think children's movies are one of the places where smell o vision or variations of smell o vision are still being done. At least they persisted much longer, so these scratch and sniff cards.
Ally Louks:And people remember them as well, you know. Although, I don't know whether you experienced this as well, but often when I tell people that I work on the sense of smell, they say, oh, wow, that's really niche. And I think it's one of our senses. It's not that niche. And people, once you get them talking about smell, they have so much to say, and they always remember those instances from their childhood where whether it's their mum's favourite cooking or the Rugrats scratch and sniff movie or whatever, these things really stick in our minds, and, you know, there are obviously biological reasons for that.
Ally Louks:I've been working on smell for ten years. I bet you've been working on it for longer. It's strange to me, given how much I've thought about it, that people still take it for granted to such an extreme extent, even though once you poke at them, it all comes unravelling out of them and they have so many So thoughts and feelings about you refer to Erica Fretwell, who is another brilliant literary scholar working in sensory studies, although she's kind of more cross modal, I suppose, than we are, although I think you're definitely moving in the direction of kind of synesthetic approaches to literature. But one of the things that she suggests is that literature could be a kind of kit akin to those that perfumers train with. We know that smell is really trainable, actually, now.
Ally Louks:In one of Jonas Olofsen's psychological studies, he made people do these smell games with tea, and it took them about forty days to get as good as professional wine tasters. I thought, that's pretty remarkable. And so we know that the nose is really trainable, it's just that most of us don't really bother going to the trouble of doing it. And I wonder whether you have any ideas about how literature might train us in a certain way with regards to smell, terms of our sensibilities or maybe our imaginations or even the way that we interact with others?
Hsuan Hsu:Yeah, thank you for that. Yeah, I've been really inspired by Erika Fretwell's riff on Bruno Latour. So Latour in a famous essay, tries this olfactory training, kit for perfumers, goes through that process, and uses that experience to kind of theorize this process of becoming more sensitive to distinctions and to connections. In part, my thinking about this is overlaps with Fretwell's. This is in her book, Sensory Experiments.
Hsuan Hsu:So I'd also argue that literature can sensitize us differently to smell. Think it can train us to slow down and notice smells just as literature and culture have already contributed to a lot of ways of making us insensitive to most smells. I mean, we're just talking about the way that, like, that childhood interest in smells gets kind of trained out of us. And part of that is through literature and stories and ideas that get circulated about how like characters and proper humans are supposed to be. So I think literature, art, and other forms of olfactory training can attune people not only to their own reaction to a smell, but to where that response might be coming from and how else other smellers, not just humans, might experience the smell, what others might bring to it or take away from it.
Hsuan Hsu:And I should pause here and say that I learned a lot about attuning to nonhuman olfaction from reading your work on the olfactory experience of dogs. Other olfactory writing too can also help readers think about the context in which a smell appears. So how has a smell been made present or available in a specific place and time? That's especially relevant when a smell is not from the place where it smelled or where it's produced through conditions of violence and extraction, like so many of our everyday smells, coffee or rubber, asphalt, gasoline, or non native plants, for example. Thinking about context and how other beings might respond to a smell also raises the important question of what kinds of relationships and actions might emerge from any given olfactory encounter, as when a smell elicits memory and shifts someone's sense of self and collectivity, or when a smell moves someone to follow it, seek out its source, and put their body in a different place and in a different relational context.
Hsuan Hsu:So maybe literature helps us to be open to such experiences ourselves, but I think it's just as important to acknowledge and value such experiences as the possibility that smells can activate for other, not just human, breathers.
Ally Louks:Yeah, and I love that that is absolutely baked into olfactory world making from the very beginning, because you begin with the work of an artist and writer, Warren Carroux, I don't know, can't do a French accent, I'm so sorry. He uses bitumen to make his kind of artworks and creates these landscapes that look toxic because they are representative of these intoxicated environments. When I was looking at the kind of visuals in the book of these landscapes, I thought that they did a really good job because they were so kind of hazy and everything kind of merges into each other sky and sea and buildings. They did a really good job of referencing the fact that smelling is not something that only happens in the air. I remember going to the Uncommon Senses conference in 2023 that you, I think, keynoted at and going to an amazing talk from someone who was working on this specific kind of salmon and how this salmon is losing their sense of smell, which is a real problem for salmon because they have to use their sense of smell to navigate their way back to where they were born in order to breed.
Ally Louks:So they're essentially going extinct because they can't smell anymore. I left that conference with a real sense that the way that smell studies needs to shift is towards understanding smell not just from the human perspective, but from the more than human perspective. So I really liked that you started your book with that particular example, and I wondered what we could do to kind of attune ourselves to olfactory world making, whether we can kind of make our own worlds through olfaction, and whether there's anything that you do in your kind of daily life that involves smell that kind of contributes to your olfactory world making.
Hsuan Hsu:That's a great question. I've started smelling all the time, like smelling things and noticing smell all the time since I started researching smells, but I don't really have a formal olfactory practice, right? I have asthma, so I don't really do well with scented materials, candles, incense, and things like that. And, you know, sometimes when I smell things, I, you know, immediately want to get away from them. But I do like when it's kind of possible to sit with smells and to reflect on them.
Hsuan Hsu:And that's a practice that, the literary scholar, I think you know her at, at Brown, Chanel Dupri, so I'm not good at pronouncing French, calls, slow smelling, which is a kind of sensory version of close reading in literary studies. Slow smelling draws on techniques of close reading, like slowing down, interpreting on multiple levels, noticing how you're responding in both expected and in weird ways, and thinking about why you notice and respond the way you do. And it applies those techniques and that careful attention to understanding the complexities of olfactory encounters. I find it challenging to do because I'm not very skilled when it comes to identifying olfactory components or notes. I probably need to do that like perfuming training that Bruno Latour writes about, But it can be illuminating to just take the time to slow down, recognize sensations, and notice how I'm responding to them on different levels, thoughts, associations, moods, emotions, physical feelings, etcetera, as well as like what I do and or don't know about those smells.
Hsuan Hsu:Usually I can identify it, but if I do have like thoughts about where it might be coming from, those questions I mentioned earlier about like how did it become available to me to smell, what are the kinds of labor that might be involved in that process of transport and becoming available of the material? So I started doing slow smelling when I was writing about olfactory artwork starting maybe ten, a little more than ten years ago, just trying to describe scents and my responses to them on my own terms. And now it's a practice that I'll just do when I smell something interesting while out for a walk or cooking a meal. So I guess that's an example of how olfactory art and literature has changed and resensitized how I smell in everyday life. I'm not sure that like that extends totally into world making, but I do like to think that like those moments of like slowing down and noticing can at least attune one to like the possibilities of like, you know, changes in your sense of your place in the world.
Hsuan Hsu:Yeah, and maybe I can ask here if you have any olfactory practices or if your work on smell, like if and how it has changed your relationship to smelling?
Ally Louks:I would love to answer those questions. I'll start with the second one. I think the reason that I continue to work on smell in literature and it really I come back to it again and again, even though I, like you, really value interdisciplinarity, is that I think especially prose stories allow us to critically engage with something that is in real life usually involuntary. We don't really have any say in the matter about whether we smell something and which affects us sometimes very forcefully and sometimes without our conscious awareness. It kind of gives us a space to reckon with this thing that we don't typically tend to think very consciously or critically about, and in doing so it kind of reshapes the way that we think and feel about smell.
Ally Louks:There are certainly books that have shifted the way that I think about smell significantly, or perhaps just have cut through all of the noise surrounding smell and made me aware of the kind of mythologising that tends to go on with smell. I thankfully am not asthmatic, and I really value my sense of smell because I lost it for eighteen months after contracting COVID in 2020. And I remember from the smell of risk that you had partial anosmia as well from being exposed to paint, right?
Hsuan Hsu:Yes. I spent a night in a freshly painted apartment thinking that it would be fine, and I lost my sense of smell for a while, and then, you know, it gradually came back, but I actually just don't because of the gap, it's hard to know whether it's fully back.
Ally Louks:Yeah. It's one of the most amazing things about our sense of smell, that it can regenerate. You know, you can't regrow a finger, but you can regrow your sense of smell, which is quite amazing. I have so many different olfactory practice. I'm just looking at my desk, and before me I have scented candles, I have a pot of tea, I have little tiny perfume samples and room sprays and even like a scented face mist.
Ally Louks:Everything in my life revolves around smell, it's like absolutely integral to the way that I care for myself through these just little rituals that I kind of engage in throughout the day at various points. I really use them as a kind of mood enhancer, I guess, and it doesn't necessarily just mean like to make me happy straightforwardly, but the various kind of items that I have are all connected with certain ways that I think and feel about myself. And so I use them depending on how I want to feel. If I want to feel confident, I'll go for some super smoky patchouli thing. And if I want to feel happy then maybe I'll go with something citrusy.
Ally Louks:I try really hard to incorporate different olfactory practices into my day and to listen to my nose. Even just going out for a walk, I'm the kind of weird person who will stick my face in the flower to smell it, even when everyone else is just happy to look at it. It's kind of hard sometimes to talk about smell studies broadly because it's so interdisciplinary. You know, you have scientists who are still trying to understand how smell works physiologically. We're so behind in this regard in comparison to other senses, and that is partly because it's incredibly complicated.
Ally Louks:It's not just that it has been massively undervalued for so long and we're just getting caught up. And then you have social scientists testing out these different propositions about how smell affects us. And a lot of the studies that currently exist are really interesting and point in really surprising directions, but haven't yet been replicated. There's still so much going on there. And then you have people working throughout the humanities on various kinds of texts, trying to understand smell historically and understand its relevance today.
Ally Louks:Although it's a small community, there is this huge breadth of research going on within it. There's still a way to go within academia in allowing interdisciplinarity, especially as kind of younger academic. I think, you know, once you're established, you kind of have pretty much free rein to do what you want. But I was definitely encouraged during the PhD to kind of rein myself in a little bit. So it's nice to be able to kind of spread my wings a little bit.
Ally Louks:I don't know how I see myself anymore. I mean, when when I'm engaging in my kind of public scholarship and I'm explaining smell studies concepts and ideas within smell studies to a kind of public audience, I'm really wearing lots of hats. I think that's the right phrase. I was going to say wearing lots of boots, but I'm not a caterpillar. Yeah, wearing many hats and that's because, you know, we all go to the same conferences, we are all interested in smell in different ways, and just because I work on literature primarily doesn't mean that I'm not familiar with the smell science, And I think the best way to really interest people is often to take that kind of interdisciplinary approach, because we don't tend to think in a bounded way about smell.
Ally Louks:We want to understand what's going on when we smell things in our brains, and we also want to understand the kind of memory aspect from an experiential point of view. I don't really know how I would position myself anymore, and I think I'm quite happy with that situation at the moment. You know, I'm a literary scholar through and through, but I'm sort of doing other things on the side.
Hsuan Hsu:Do you have any favourite scientific experiments that help to communicate aspects of smell and smell studies?
Ally Louks:Yes, so my favourite experiment is one that I perform with jelly beans, although it will work with basically any kind of flavoured, chewy, sweet. I've done it with Danish wine gums before and it went down a treat. The function of the experiment is to show how bound up smell and taste are. So it's one of these things that we tend to think about ourselves is that we have these two separate senses, you know, taste happens in our mouth, smell happens in our nose. And the jelly bean experiment shows us that that is absolutely not the case.
Ally Louks:So if you want to do this at home, listeners, grab yourself some jelly beans or I suppose any other kind of sweet. You can even do it with cubes of fruit, but you have to be able to tell that you can't, you shouldn't be able to tell from looking at them what they are because that defeats the object. So you need two different kinds of flavours of jelly beans. You're going to put one in your mouth. You shouldn't know which colour it is, so you shouldn't have a sense of which flavour it is before.
Ally Louks:You put it in your mouth, you pinch your nose close so no air can go through it and you start chewing. At that point, you shouldn't be able to tell what flavour the jelly bean is. It should be sweet because we have taste buds that can detect the flavour of sweetness. But you shouldn't know whether it's strawberry or banana or spearmint or if you've got one of those jokey jelly beans like sick or something. And then when you unpinch your nose before you've finished chewing, you should have this kind of rush of flavour.
Ally Louks:Suddenly you should be able to tell what flavour the jelly bean is. And what we know from scientific studies is that about 80 to 95% of what we think of as flavour or taste is actually due to the sense of smell. So when people when I ask my students very often, I like to survey them which sense they would most like to give up or I suppose wouldn't mind giving up in comparison to the others, and they almost always pick smell, I say, are any of you foodies? Because if you like your food, then you definitely need your sense of smell. You can trust me because I lost it and everything tasted like chalk.
Ally Louks:That's my favourite little experiment, I think. It throws into question these kind of accepted facts that we think about our bodies. But it's not the case that smell and taste are separate, then what else do we take for granted about our bodies?
Hsuan Hsu:That's great. I actually just, I have not done it with my students, but I just recommended it to them in that same exercise of ranking their senses, you know, to just kind of throw things on their heads. I don't know if that's the right metaphor. Yeah.
Ally Louks:There are so many examples where they've kind of done this on a broad scale, right? And the results are slightly appalling to me. People will give up their sense of smell for their pinky toe. It's like, well, do you really need your pinky toe? Or they'll or I remember like they did one twenty years ago and about 50% of people said that they they would rather give up their sense of smell than their Facebook account.
Ally Louks:I mean, really, how many of those people still use Facebook? And they'd be pretty unhappy, I think, if they gave up their sense of smell in reality.
Hsuan Hsu:But I think the point about like intersensorial connections and kind of like, you know, what sometimes gets called synesthesia, right? Or synesthetic connections between the senses, that's just something else that that experiment illustrates really powerfully, right? And I love the way you kind of speculatively open it up into like what other kinds of interactions between smell and other senses or other just kind of embodied ways of being might be just really essential and things that we don't, you know, just that we take for granted and go unnoticed, but really kind of like hold us or situate us in the world. I mean, one of my favorite experiments that I don't do with students, because I think the ethics are kind of questionable, it's a famous one from, I think, 1899, where this lecturer, it's on like olfactory hallucinations, right? So he goes up in front of the classroom and opens up a little vial of distilled water.
Hsuan Hsu:And then he warns them, you know, this is a really strong and intense smell, opens it up, and then he asks them, you know, to start raising their hands when they start smelling it because he wants to kind of get a sense of how quickly the smell moves through the air. And the students start, you know, in the front row start raising their hands after a little while, and then suddenly it becomes kind of like contagious and everyone starts raising their hands. And it said that he had to cut the experiment short because students started to leave the room, they were so overpowered by this hallucinated smell. And I think it's this I mean, especially for, you know, those of us who work on literature and language, I think it's this really, really helpful for framing the ways in which like narrative performance, the observed responses of others and the mimicry of those responses, how all of that like really powerfully, not only conditions olfactory response and even olfactory perception, but also does so in this kind of like feedback loop, right, where things just get more and more intense.
Ally Louks:We're so open to suggestion. I don't know whether it is especially intense around smell. I mean, I've spent the last six months or so reading all of the psychological studies and different examples from the media about, you know, moments where the sense of smell has set people off. So, for instance, there was, I think a couple of years ago, an instance where everybody really panicked and started smashing the windows on a tube in London because they could smell burning. And it was just, you know, they discovered that afterwards it was just some dust or something that got caught in the wheels and got heated up.
Ally Louks:So they and so but people just sent themselves into a frenzy. And we tend to think of ourselves as these kind of rational agents. Right. And smell throws that into question again and again.
Hsuan Hsu:Yeah. And I mean, I guess I think too that the suggestiveness and the kind of like, I think contagious isn't quite the right word, but the catchiness of olfactory response, right? The way it just becomes social and spreads and transmits. Like, it's related to Theresa Brennan's idea of the transmission of affect, right? I think that, I mean, there are a lot of examples of it being this kind of harmful or at least misleading or misguided hallucination, but I guess I also think just with the examples in the book that it has a kind of aspect of building social bonds, right?
Hsuan Hsu:And like spreading relationships, making an affect kind of atmospheric and shared. And I think that that doesn't, it doesn't have to be a kind of like negative phenomenon, and it can actually be deployed or employed or experienced in generative terms.
Ally Louks:That's a really good point. And I wondered whether you might want to touch a little on your understanding in this book of distributed memory, because it's something that the listeners might not perhaps be very familiar with. You're using memory in a in a slightly different way than perhaps they would usually use memory. So I wondered whether you could talk a little bit about how you understand smell relating to distributed memory.
Hsuan Hsu:Yeah, sure. So I kind of come up with the term distributed memory in relation to, I'm sorry about this, two other terms. So one of them is smellscape, right, which the geographer J. Douglas Porteous coined to really emphasize deep connections between smell and experience of place. And then the other term is distributed cognition, right?
Hsuan Hsu:So this kind of like turn in cognitive science and other fields that's really like emphasizing the way that the mind is not just in the brain, but is, you know, like cognitive processes and affective ones, I'd add, or I'm sure others have added, that those are distributed across the world, right, and all of the kind of objects, atmospheres, media that we interact with. The ready example of this would be people who refer to like their iPhone as their externalized mind, right, or their externalized memory. But distributed memory then, I used to kind of think about the smellscape in somewhat different terms, right? So it's not just like what smells good or bad or what has a certain kind of cultural significance often in like So a lot of smellscape work has influenced tourism studies, right? So thinking about like what would make this particular place like brandable in a certain way.
Hsuan Hsu:But I think of smellscapes as a medium of distributed memory. They contain and unevenly distribute the capacities to trigger or access different kinds of memories. Those might be intergenerational if we combine that with what I mentioned earlier, the perfumer and writer Tanayyse's idea of vasanas. Or they may be personal, but often these memories are collective, right? But I guess the other point I would want to make is that they're not universal memories.
Hsuan Hsu:So that to go back to that example of Proust Madeline, the Madeline is culturally and in terms of like class terms, historically, it's a very specific mnemonic, right, that is only going to call forth memories for some people. It also happens to be tied to the history of baked goods that are kind of that proliferated to try to kind of make use of Caribbean, like sugar, grown on plantations by enslaved labor. So there's like a lot of particularity to that example that often gets used to make a universal point about memory. And I contrast it with things like mustard oil, which has in the past been banned and is still kind of like regulated in a lot of Western countries. Here it's available, but it will always have, you know, in fine print, not for culinary use, right?
Hsuan Hsu:So it's supposed to be used as a massage oil, or I don't know what other non culinary uses there are. But that's something that, you know, different migrant writers, I think I take Jhumpa Lahiri as one example, have written really evocatively about both its presence and its absence, right, for migrants, like what is it like to kind of cook without it, that is tied to comfort foods and the different kinds of memories and cultural connectedness that that evokes. I think it has implications for, you know, things like mental health, mood, well-being, but also like a sense of like cultural identity and that, yeah, so distributed memory is meant to kind of like emphasize the uneven distribution of memory and to kind of make memory also a site of like thinking about atmospheric justice, right, which we tend to think of often in the really important terms of like, you know, chemical exposures and pollutants, but there's also this uneven access to just like the availability of collective memory.
Ally Louks:I think that's a really important thread throughout olfactory world making, and I can see precisely how your thinking has moved since the smell of risk and kind of expanded in new directions, which is really exciting. Another aspect of something that makes attending to smell tricky, especially when, you know, as literary scholars we're used to analysing particular texts, They don't necessarily need to be literary, but they kind of need to exist in some way. Something about attending to smell that can be slightly difficult is the absences in the archive when it comes to smell. Often people don't think to record smells, whether it be in language or literally, you know, archiving smells. That's something that Odoropa was obviously interested in, this kind of big project that had a whole team of smell researchers behind trying to think through what it means to have a kind of olfactory heritage.
Ally Louks:And something that Tanayis makes use of really interestingly in their memoir in Sensorium is that idea of Sadiya Hartman's method of critical fabulation, which is like kind of imaginatively plugging holes in the archive to imagine new worlds. So I, after reading Incensorium, sent them a message on Instagram because I was so interested in this particular moment where they suggested that slaves during the Transatlantic slave trade would perfume their skin with beine oil, And I wondered where they had come across this idea. And we had this really interesting exchange about the kind of process that they went on in writing the work. And I wondered whether you see any kind of alignment in the technique of critical fabulation with the project of olfactory world making.
Hsuan Hsu:Yeah, thanks. I mean, I think a lot of the works that I focus on, because they tend to be speculative or magical realist, or kind of thinking, like Ta Nehis thinking, with the archive but also against it and beyond it. I think that they all resonate a lot with Hartmann's approach, right, and this method of critical fabulation that's like really, thinking about the limits and the violence of the archive and grasping for or working through, like, methods that might respond to it, move beyond those archival gaps and limitations. It's fascinating to think of critical fabulation as a material practice, which is something that Ta Neist does when they write about how they make perfumes from, and also for, the embodied conditions of historically marginalized spellers, and also how perfumes might activate memories suppressed by projects of colonial unknowing. I think that's a term that I think is very much related to the violence of the archive.
Hsuan Hsu:I draw it from a really influential essay by Manu Vimalasari, Julianna Hu Peggis, and Alyosha Goldstein. So Toneys, I mean, one example would be their perfume Lover's Rock, in which they really feature Manila, and it's based on their memories of a former lover, and they think of it as in part a commemoration or acknowledgment of the labor of vanilla plantation workers in Madagascar, but largely also as a refusal of the whitening and kind of, like, making palatable of the scent of vanilla, right? So they talk about how vanilla has come to mean, like, innocence and whiteness and be associated I I don't know if they talk about this, but it's true that it's men associated with teenage perfumes and this kind of, like, feminine innocence. They think of the scent in terms of a really material and, like, fleshly eroticism, and I think that that's and they also talk about the scent as dark. Even lover's rock is this reference to Black diasporic music and dance kind of party tradition.
Hsuan Hsu:I guess I'd also just add that along with Hartman, I've really been influenced by Lisa Lowe's connected work in her Intimacies of Four Continents. I think scholars and practitioners who work with smell have a lot to learn from her method, from Lisa Lowe's method of studying history in what she calls the past conditional mode, so focusing on experiences and encounters that could have been but have been overshadowed by an emphasis on facts established and recorded by colonial archives. Both of these methods of critical fabulation and the idea of the past conditional go against the grain of more positivist approaches to smell studies and the recuperation of smells, for example, that focus on reconstructing what a specific kind of historical scent might have smelled like, or that try to gather data on the behavioral effects that specific scents have for consumers. So there's a lot of olfactory research in marketing, Or also olfactory research on how smell affects workers, right? How do you optimize labor or medical applications?
Hsuan Hsu:I mean, some of that is important, right? Think of the medical applications in particular, but there's a need to kind of move beyond this extractive and instrumental approach to working on smell. And I think Hartman and Lowe and kind of like these speculative olfactory projects that I'm looking at help us to ask what else smell might enable and what other kinds of relations and worlds it might kind of help to open up if we attune to it differently.
Ally Louks:I think that's perfectly captured in the second chapter of olfactory world making, which is about conjuring black microclimates, and you're referring to these practices that are very historically embedded within, especially the African American community, it's my understanding, of conjure and hoodoo. And these are somewhat mystical practices, perhaps, that I suppose have largely been left behind by modern science, but are very much still worth attending to. And I wonder what you might say to someone who doesn't really understand the value of continuing to think about these practices, given that, you know, we tend not to burn, for instance, herbs anymore to dispel ailments.
Hsuan Hsu:Yeah, so I mean, I wouldn't rule out the actual or mystical efficacy of practices like Conjur or Hudu at all. I'd kind of bracket that question largely in the chapter and focus on how these practices offer alternative kind of modes of care, healing, collective memory, spiritual authority, and community building, among other things. And I mean, I'd say that like religion, those are like also just like really important things that religions kind of contribute aside from like their metaphysical truth value. So the performance scholar Roshanik Keshti has a wonderful article in Senses in Society that's called, I think it's called We See with the Skin, and it's on Zora Neale Hurston's work, and especially it's a close reading of a story about conjure and synesthesia. So it's not specifically about smell, but Keshte shows how conjure offers Black women an alternative to the white supremacist state's limited and anti Black pathways to seeking justice, right?
Hsuan Hsu:So it's this other mode of justice seeking and of ethical authority, and it does this through sensorial interventions that are not just kind of like on an individual level, but she really, I think, powerfully theorizes synesthesia as sensing with, so not just interactions between senses, but sensory dispositions that can spread kind of along the lines that I was talking about earlier with the olfactory hallucination experiment and how this could have positive or transformative potentialities. One practice I came across when researching hoodoo was dusting the courtroom, which I've been trying to learn more about, but it's not that present in the archives for the reasons we're just talking about. So that's like spreading a powder through the courtroom to try to ensure a beneficial judgment, and it's an example of very direct sensory intervention in the atmosphere of law. I suggest that these kinds of interventions can convey empowerment, cultural continuance, community connections, and mental and physical health effects through embodied and transcorporeal relations of smell. A sense of connection with grounded ancestral roots and sensations would have been especially important in the context of the Great Migration that's featured in works like Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, where Black diasporic people who had already been dislocated across the Atlantic were again displaced to sensorially alienated northern cities.
Hsuan Hsu:So Conjur offered this way, often through mail order actually, to re access at least some aspects of atmospheres and sensoria and maybe distributed memory. So even aside from the question of whether these practices work on metaphysical level, I think of their material and atmospheric interventions as techniques for making what Christina Sharpe calls black microclimates or like microclimates within the anti black weather, that's another of her terms, that are supportive of black breath and black life?
Ally Louks:Yeah, I was thinking about similar questions in relation to this content series that I became an avid watcher of during Black History Month, which was this channel called Wicked Confections, who was researching and making Black American recipes that for whatever reason, had been kind of left behind, left to history, often because they were shaped by necessity rather than pleasure. So she was making things like vinegar pie, which doesn't sound particularly appetising anymore, given that it was supposed to be a kind of sweet pie. And I was thinking about the value of still making these recipes, and and all of these ideas kind of came to me that were present in olfactory world making. And also there's maybe something slightly more, I don't know, historicist in the sense that it reminds us of how incredibly creative people were with what they had, which was often not very much. And I think both of those, both of these kind of areas in food and smell, again, and smell coming together as always, it's impossible really to separate them, kind of remind us of these of these ideas that sometimes things don't have to be completely rational in order to have value.
Hsuan Hsu:Yeah. Your point about, like, how creative people were with what they had, for me, it really resonates with Sylvia Wynter's idea of the plot, this kind of plot of land that enslaved people were often allotted. So they were allowed this to support themselves basically without the, you know, slaveholders having to have as much responsibility for social reproduction. But then she talks about how the plot enabled connection with the land and these kinds of creative and deeply, like, sensorial generative interactions, material and embedded creativity that feeds into some of these African diasporic traditions, right, whether it's conjure recipes. In a way, the taste offers the kind of sensory, maybe not like complete direct access, because I don't think, of course, that like sensory experiences can be like picked up and transported completely across time.
Hsuan Hsu:But I think it's at least a kind of embodied occasion to reflect on these modes of creativity that were often done by Black women.
Ally Louks:And there are some authors who are very attentive to that, like Toni Morrison. I know we've been talking for quite a while, and I would really love to ask a question or two about your final chapter, because I have a kind of personal investment in this chapter. Because the first time that I saw you speak, I was, you know, extremely taken with your work and excited to find another scholar working on contemporary literature because there are actually quite few working on smelling contemporary literature still. And I sent you an email and asked you what else you're working on And you said, Oh, well, I'm actually writing this thing, not sure what it's going to be yet, that's about olfactory queerness. And it was the thing that got me thinking about olfactory queerness, and that became a kind of tangent in my PhD thesis.
Ally Louks:And you said that you were working on Octavia Butler's 'Fledgling' and Larissa Lye's 'Saltfish Girl'. So I immediately immediately ordered them and read them. And I remember you being very generous and saying, oh, I could send you the thing that I'm working on. I'd love to hear your thoughts. And as a new PhD student, I thought, he's just being nice.
Ally Louks:He definitely doesn't want to hear my thoughts. But I know now that you probably would have, because that was back in 2020. So I'd love to hear how you went from what you were working on then to this kind of brilliant, much more fleshed out chapter.
Hsuan Hsu:Thanks. I mean, I think that from Fledgling and Saltfish Girl, the main changes were kind of like thinking of a kind of broader through line. So there's definitely a kind of interest in queer kinship and the way that like smells activate or, say, evoke queer kinship connections in those novels. And that was something I was writing about then. I mean, at part, it just took me a long time to think it all through, but some connections I made were with Anika Yee's In Love With the World, which I think was exhibited a little bit after, or at least I learned about it after I was already writing Unfledgling and Saltfish Girl.
Hsuan Hsu:For me, that was really exciting because it was one of those moments where it seemed be kind of like also really interested in posthuman. I guess I should backtrack and say that the olfactory kinship networks in those works are both queer and really importantly posthuman, right? So in fledgling, they have to do with the Inna, which are this Octavia Butler ish vampire species that symbiotically lives with and through connections with humans and Salt Fish Girl. There's a really fascinating interspecies threesome at the beginning of the novel involving a durian, and then that leads to a girl who smells like durian, right? And it's all, again, kind of catalyzed by smell.
Hsuan Hsu:But Anika Yee's In Love With the World, you know, it has these like bio bots that are like animal like in shape, right? So well, one looks kind of amoeba like to me, but the other kind of bio bot looks like a jellyfish. So she's kind of thinking like animalistically about artificial intelligence. And there's a kind of scenario for that exhibition that like these sort of like evolving and like sensorially, just like atmospherically oriented, bio bots are kind of like changing and evolving their behaviors in connection with what they're smelling and what they're sensing in the air. So for me, that was just like a really fascinating extension of the ideas from Salt Fish Grill and fledgling.
Hsuan Hsu:And then I think also I came up with the kind of like broader theoretical apparatus for the chapter when I realized that like the sweaty t shirt experiment, right, that Klaus Wedikken did, I want to say in the 70s, I might have that wrong, but it's been around for a while, yeah, where I mean just really, I don't know if I'll count it totally right, but he asked various men to wear t shirts for a while, get them sweaty, and then asked a slate of women which ones were the most kind of attractive by smell, and found that the women were attracted to the t shirts that smelled like the smells of t shirts, where the men who wore them had like immune system genes that were like the most different from their own, Right. So I think that easily feeds into this kind of like heteronormative narrative of like, it's all about like, you know, heterosexual reproduction. But I really like this idea of an olfactory attraction towards difference. And also, just like the unconscious, almost compulsory or irresistible nature in which that sweaty t shirt experiment and a lot of pheromone discourses at the time inspired Butler and Larissa Lai, right, to kind of imagine these scenarios where smell is just like creating these really unruly and indeterminate kinds of networks between humans and fish and fruits and vampires.
Hsuan Hsu:And yeah, like making it like queer and interspecies in, I think, really generative ways.
Ally Louks:Yeah, I was so delighted in reading this chapter, both in kind of the weird and wonderful texts, but also the unexpected way in which you rethink some of these ideas and experiments that get kind of wheeled out all the time to bolster these kind of really outdated notions of sexuality. And here you are, you say, well, actually we can interpret this in a completely different queer way. And I just thought that that was really fantastic and also just kind of strikes at the heart of what queer theory so often allows us to do, which is to think in new ways, to think about think things that haven't actually been thought yet. I just love them. I love this series of examples.
Ally Louks:I think they're absolutely brilliant. And something that I've been thinking about is the kind of fundamental queerness of representing smell. Smell is so other, so different to how we tend to go about expressing ourselves, that almost any representation of smell ends up being a little queer, so long as it's centred. And obviously these are very queer, very smell centred texts, which, I mean, I don't know how many people in the world it would delight more than me. I wondered whether you have any thoughts about that idea, whether there's something inherently queer about centering smell.
Hsuan Hsu:There's a great William Carlos Williams poem about this. It's called Smell! Exclamation Point, and I've had it in a file of things I wanna get back to and work on for, like, a very long time now. But it's addressed to his deviant and unruly nose, which is indiscriminately drawn to all kinds of improper objects. The speaker directly asks his nose, what girl will care for us if he and his nose continue trying to taste and have a part in everything?
Hsuan Hsu:So the last line of the poem is Must we have a part in everything? I'm not sure if I'd say that smell is always inherently queer, but it does have qualities that draw us away from proper normative objects of desire. Vision plays such a huge role in constructing and naturalizing the kinds of bodies and relationships that we're supposed to value and desire, and seeing frames desire as a matter of autonomous choice, like accessing bodies from a safe distance. But smell elicits desires on a more visceral and involuntary unconscious level, and it penetrates and occupies the body in a way that refuses the idea of individual choice. There's also a queer dimension of time that smell connects with, which the philosopher Byung Chul Han discusses in his book, The Scent of Time.
Hsuan Hsu:Smell viscerally evokes the past and infuses the present in ways that refuse what my late colleague Beth Freeman theorized as chrononormativity, or the linear forward progressing organization of time in the service of things like productivity and heteronormative reproduction. I think if smell is queer, it's probably on these levels where it refuses ideas of bodily separation, autonomous reason, and heteronormative time. But I'm curious where your work on smell and queerness has been taking you.
Ally Louks:Oh, it's led me down the very unexpected rabbit hole of omegaverse fan fiction, which I still am slightly struggled to describe. It's basically a form of fan fiction which is heavily inspired by hierarchies and practices of dogs, although I'm not sure how true to reality it really is. It's more like inspired by the way that we think about the hierarchies and practices of dogs, which are perhaps not exactly what really happens. Smell obviously plays a huge role, as does the concept of pheromones. And something really intriguing about much of this work, and it's something that you absolutely touch on in your chapter, is this kind of relinquishing of control that is necessary if you accept the role of pheromones, which side note, we shouldn't in humans because there is like basically no evidence that we can detect and respond to pheromones as humans, despite them being very important to other animals.
Ally Louks:So it's always a kind of imaginative exercise, and it has actually produced so much interesting fiction over the course of the past. I suppose it's been since the sixties. So the past like sixty ish years. Some of it has been slightly horrifying. There's a short story that I refer to in my thesis by Roald Dahl.
Ally Louks:I mean, lot of people don't read Roald Dahl's adult fiction and perhaps for good reason. The story is called Bitch, and it's inspired by all of this research going on about pheromones and it is deeply, deeply misogynistic. It's interesting that I'm really fascinated by how these ideas can be taken up in very different ways to think about the way that we work humans work as kind of sexual beings in very different ways. So, yeah, that's what I'm thinking through at the moment. And then I always kind of have in the back of my mind this idea about olfactory perversity as well.
Ally Louks:That is somehow intention with olfactory queerness in my way of reasoning. They're separate things, but very often get misconstrued, or at least olfactory queerness sometimes gets misconstrued as olfactory perversity.
Hsuan Hsu:Yeah, I came near the omegaverse rabbit hole. I wasn't finding work that really engaged with histories of colonialism and racial capitalism. I read part of a book by Melina Popova on Omegaverse fan fiction and sexual consent, and I thought that that was, like, really fascinating. And that got at, like, these questions about what erotics might look like in illiberal conditions, right? So illiberal is a term I'm borrowing from Candice Chew in her book, The Difference Aesthetics Makes, where she's thinking about, like, the sensory as a way to access and think through illiberal modes of personhood and social relation.
Hsuan Hsu:But yeah. So if you can't take for granted independent autonomous actors or just for shorthand, what I was referring to is this, like, visual fantasy, right, where, like, people are just kind of scoping each other out from a distance in relationships, then I think one has to think about romance eroticism very differently. Not only Omegaverse stories, but like fledgling, like by Octavia Butler. And I mean, Xenogenesis, they have like really troubling moments. Right?
Hsuan Hsu:I don't think she works through the like thorny problems of eroticism under conditions where, like, there's not super qualified consent. And I would just, say too really quickly, I'm also just thinking about, like, the role that smell plays in fan fiction more generally, because I think of fan fiction as, like, needing a sort of, like, portal to a world within the world of the text that it's fan ficcing. And smell just seems like a really like great portal, right? So an instance of a portal, because it's something that's so often like devalued and unnoticed. And if like world making can happen through smell, then like there could be I don't read enough fan fiction to know, but you know, I'd like for there to be a kind of subgenre of fan fiction where the portal is smell.
Ally Louks:Yeah, I think a lot of people who are diehard Omegaverse readers, which is not really me, but I'm aware of them because they comment on my posts about Omegaverse fan fiction. I think they would say that that is the place where they really they go to reckon with these ideas, and one of the criticisms that I've heard of more, I suppose in inverted commas, mainstream omegaverse fiction, such as Ali Hazelwood's recent novels, which are vampire werewolf novels about all sort of inspired by the omegaverse, but don't quite follow all of the principles that they would need to in order to be considered omegaverse. One of the criticisms that I've heard of these novels is that they don't do anything interesting political, they kind of suppress, I suppose, all of these interesting problems about consent and gender by making these narratives heterosexual and augmenting situations such that there isn't anything problematic or anything to chew on. And part of part of the reason that I think a lot of people love omegaverse fan fiction, which is, you know, has its roots in the queer community and in queer readings of various texts like Star Trek and Supernatural, is that they aren't afraid to think through these perhaps quite controversial relationship dynamics.
Ally Louks:Smell in fan fiction is a it's definitely there. It's very much there in in omegaverse fan fiction. It has been, in some ways, claimed a little bit by the queer community. Have you encountered heated rivalry?
Hsuan Hsu:You know, I have not. I know about heated rivalry. Yeah. I actually just taught a class on hot literature. And, you know, as a joke suggested that my students could write about heated rivalry.
Hsuan Hsu:I mean, maybe they could have, I don't know, but they didn't, they just kind of like lost it. So, which made me think either it's perfect or maybe not, I'm not sure.
Ally Louks:So something that I noticed because I posted about watching Heated Rivalry, because obviously everybody knows me as the smell lady slash doctor, depending on how they feel about me, they were like, oh, well, there must be some really interesting smell references in Heated Rivalry, right? And I was obviously attentive to it as I was watching, as I am with everything, I sniff out smell references like a sniffer dog. There aren't. There aren't really many interesting references to smell and heated rivalry, either the books or the TV show, which is a departure from a lot of more recent queer media, which has actually really centred smell in at least the representation of the intimacy between the protagonists. And there's like a whole list of popular queer media that has done this recently, it's kind of become a technique, I think probably because, you know, smell is already kind of queer.
Ally Louks:And so it becomes a really good way of representing queer intimacy. The absence of smell in heated rivalry and I saw so many comments saying, Ilya should have sniffed Shane's pants or whatever. And it's like, wait, we want it. The queer community want the smell intimacy. It's like we've claimed it somehow.
Ally Louks:I just think there's something wonderful about that.
Hsuan Hsu:Yeah, it's like we're seeing a genre being deodorized before our eyes, right? Which is fascinating.
Ally Louks:Yeah, I hope not. We'll see. Maybe next season.
Hsuan Hsu:Yeah. So Ally, thank you so much conversation and for taking the time to just read and think about my book so deeply. I feel just really happy and I've learned a lot. Can't wait to cross paths with you again and to read your upcoming books.
Ally Louks:Thank you so much. This has been an enormous pleasure.
Narrator:This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The book Olfactory Worldmaking by Hsuan Hsu is available from University of Minnesota Press in its Forerunners series and also has an open access edition on manifold.umn.edu. Thank you for listening.