Stinkhorn - How Nature’s Most Foul Smelling Mushroom Can Change the Way We Listen

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. A heady mix of natural history, science writing, musicology, philosophy of the senses, and illness memoir, Siôn Parkinson uses examples of so-called bad smells to argue for a theory of Stink as a kind of “smelling sound.” 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.