More Luca

I originally read about Luca Turin about 10 years ago in Chandler Burr’s book The Emperor of Scent [link]. In trying to find a copy for one of my daughters, I picked up a book of Turin’s columns from a Swiss magazine called NZZ Folio.

The first columns are (mainly) about perfume, but the editors of the magazine seemed to realize that Turin’s cleverness should not be restricted to the sense of scent, and he is entirely unleashed in the later columns. The columns are very short, wildly allusive, and quite stimulating. Here are some more excerpts:

Even if you try not to pay attention to it, a messy place is a nagging worry, a moral stain, which I assume is why ‘scruple’ originally meant a small stone in your shoe.

This leads me to propose the Law of Optimum Waste: only too much is barely good enough. Great things in teaching, in science, in the arts often happen when exceptional people are forced to look for jobs below their station. A revolution is currently taking place in science because defense budgets are cut, physicists cannot get the job they wanted, and are forced to slum it in biology. The great Italian design boom of the sixties was largely the result of a surfeit of architects who wanted to design skyscrapers and ended up doing ashtrays. Note that in literature—Shakespeare’s villains are a good example—and in life, much evil comes from those who are ambitious beyond their means. Conversely, it seems that enormous good comes from those who are modest beyond their rights. This is not a moral principle, but a practical one. Greed repels, generosity inspires.

You learn a lot about a country’s public space by driving, a wordless game for high stakes that you play with complete strangers. Roads and cars are the same the world over, and local color shows up nicely against an asphalt grey background. Most countries play a game of cops and drivers. In the US, the cops are fierce and the drivers dopey. In France both cops and drivers are fierce. In Italy they are both petulant. In Greece there are no cops.

Very entertaining, and currently available as a Kindle Unlimited book (though with an oddly uninspiring cover): Luca Turin, Folio Columns 2003-2014 (2015) [link].

Recommended.