this week on the avant guardian \/\/ warm car paint and wintergreen
“And so, it was at Puerto Rico that I first made contact with the United
States; for the first time I breathed in the smell of warm car paint and
wintergreen, those two olfactory poles between which stretches the whole
range of American comfort, from cars to lavatories, by way of radio sets,
sweets and toothpaste; and I tried to guess what the girls in the drugstores
with their lilac dresses and mahogany hair were thinking about beneath their
mask-like makeup.”
-Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques
RIP Claude Levi-Strauss, 1909-2009
