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On the Passing of Michael Crichton

Like many of you, I imagine, I was very saddened by today’s announcement of Michael Crichton’s passing away of cancer at age 66. I first encountered Crichton’s books when I was in junior high, and my English teacher told me about Jurassic Park (this would have been in 1993, well before the movie). I found a copy of the book later that evening on my Dad’s bookshelf, which was itself enough to make me intrigued—he wasn’t the biggest reader, at least not of fiction. So I started reading before bed that night, and by three a.m. that morning, I was hooked…and not just for the night.

I’d always been a recreational reader, but that experience—at about twelve-years old—was the first time my heart actually pounded as a result of reading a book. I was amazed at the imagination, the tension, and the clarity. The science was fascinating, but not as much as the sense that an entirely new and vivid world had been created, yet was still akin to our own. Over the next six months, I read Sphere, The Andromeda Strain, The Terminal Man, Travels, The Great Train Robbery, and Five Patients. My first major writing project—a full length play adaptation of The Terminal Man that was probably 80% plagiarized dialog from the book—was completed about a year later, and although I literally never showed it to anyone but my mom I remember being too excited to eat dinner one night because I just so close to being finished. Over the course of that year, I discovered the joy not only of reading but of writing.

As often happens, one writer gave way to another. Crichton begat Stephen King, who begat Dean Koontz, and these gave way to English class love affairs with John Steinbeck, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Aldous Huxley, Ernest Hemingway, and Kurt Vonnegut. Six years after that first secretive three a.m. reading binge (the first of many, over the years) I enrolled as a Writing major my freshman year of college, and followed that all the way to graduate school and my current job as a college instructor. I haven’t read Crichton’s most recent books (I stopped after The Lost World) but I’m still understandably sentimental about those early, exciting times. In fact, though my areas of study and my material as a writer have come a long way in the intervening fifteen years, you can still trace the trajectory of my life as a writer directly back to that initial experience.

On my shelf at home, near Harry Crews and Anton Chekov, is that old copy of Jurassic Park I pilfered from my Dad’s library. It’s missing its cover, it’s pages have yellowed, and there are more creases on its spine than on any other book I own, but I’ve never been able to bring myself to get rid of it. And I’m very glad for that… because it just got a lot more precious to me.

My condolences to Crichton’s family. May he rest in peace.

Posted by Alan Ackmann - Wednesday November 5, 2008.
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Smell Dictionary

Greetings, everyone! This is one of the website’s more distinctive features: a dictionary of smells that serves as one of my ongoing projects.

What is it?

The nutshell context is that my wife was born without a sense of smell, and so she misses out on the scent of everything from pumpkin pie to lemon Pledge to Yellowstone tar-pits. Sad, no? Well, about four years ago, in an effort to make up for her lack of sense (Ha!), I wrote a dictionary of smells in which I tried to describe various scents as clearly as possible without ever actually saying what something literally smells like. Challenging, yes, but my wife tells me that a combination of characterization and synesthesia actually works quite well. The problem, however, is that smells (and their interpretations) are subjective, so what I think something smells like might not resemble what somebody else thinks it smells like—a fact that has made my wife curious.

Write one yourself!

In order to correct this limitation, I thought it might be fun to open the project to a larger audience, and invite anybody who is interested to submit a brief description of their favorite (or least favorite) smells. I’ve provided some sample entries to get you started, and if you’d like to contribute just follow the instructions. Ideally, this enhancement will result in different descriptions of the same smell, as well as wider variety. Particularly distinctive entries will be posted on this page of the website, and will also be included in the next volume of the dictionary—which for the record doesn’t have a distribution any larger than my wife’s bookshelf.

For the curious, lacking a sense of smell does alter my wife’s sense of taste, reducing it by about thirty percent. For the even more curious, I am actually colorblind. We therefore run the risk of any offspring operating at sixty percent sensory capacity, making your own contributions even more vital. So fire away!

SAMPLE ENTRIES:

LEMON

If Lemon had to pick one verb to subsist on for the rest of its days, that verb would be “tickle.” It is a younger scent, probably about three or four years old, if one could place it, and it would enjoy giggling. It comes out of nowhere to tackle you, and once you get over the initial shock it can be quite pleasant, even joyful. For a lot of people, though, Lemon doesn’t know when to quite. It’s not malicious, but like a small child who doesn’t understand when the game of tickling isn’t fun anymore, it just keeps coming. But you can’t deny it its enthusiasm. Also, by virtue of its sheer relentlessness, Lemon is often used in cleaners. It goes after other smells aggressively. When Lemon overtakes another smell, however, I don’t picture that smell submitting; I picture it running away. Level of Intensity: 10

ROOT BEER

This is a biased one for me, because I have always loathed the taste – and therefore the smell – of root beer, which reminds me of thick, loamy branches, moist with mildew and rot. Other people, I am told, find the smell quite pleasant, and respond to the brownblack thickness, but I can’t move past the soot like texture of the smell, which has always seemed ponderous and sluggish. The smell strikes me as short, and fat, and stupid. And try as I might, I can’t perceive it any other way. Level of Intensity: 10

INSTRUCTIONS FOR SMELL SUBMISSIONS:

Click on the “Add a Smell Entry of Your Own” link below and fill out the form. If you’d like to learn more about her disability, visit her new website at neversmell.com.

Posted by Alan Ackmann - Friday October 31, 2008.


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