Stinkhorn

How Nature's Most Foul-Smelling Mushroom Can Change the Way We ListenBy Sion Parkinson "Stinkhorn is an esoterically erudite speculation on the potential of a malodorous medium as a listening device. The book’s images and insights offer a philosophically playful and linguistically enticing treatise on smell and sound in nature—and the human brain—while focusing with near devotional (and perhaps devious) delight on the figure of the phallic stinkhorn fungus, including the “osmic humming of its intolerable, almost indescribable stench.” The book’s unnervingly detailed, wonder-droned defense of what we all consider offensive and disgusting includes passages on the vibration of bells, hallucination of smells, fermented shark flesh, Freud’s Rat Man, rotting saints, blowflies and miasmic mists—amid a whole menagerie of other dissonances “from the edges of things.” Stinkhorn is clearly a passion project and will surely not foul your shelves.“–Herbert Pföstl The stinkhorn mushroom is one of th