Stinkhorn

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 as smelling of decaying flesh, dung, rotting cheese, garbage, and even semen. It also happens to look like a phallus, bursting out of a subterranean egg to poke above the ground, where it lures insects towards its slimy, fetid cap. In Stinkhorn, artist, musician, and writer Siôn Parkinson asks: What can the pervasive stench of this mushroom and the droning noise of the flies compelled toward it reveal about how sounds and smells are combined in the imagination?

In this heady mix of natural history, science writing, musicology, philosophy of the senses, and illness memoir, Parkinson uses examples of so-called "bad" smells to argue for a theory of Stink as a kind of "smelling sound." Alongside images and insights from the author's search for stinkhorn fungi in nature, the book expands upon the philosophical idea of sound to consider the role of the nose and the "nasal imaginary" in our perceptions of auditory stimuli.

In this treatise on mushrooms and malodors and how they can transform the conditions for listening, Parkinson considers John Cage's fungal forays, Brian Eno's perfumes, the "eggy" odor of space, the humming sound of bells, 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.