10 Essentials: Ben Gorham

It's safe to say that Ben Gorham is the only guy to go from pro basketball to cooking up fragrances. After a quick stint in the Italian league, Gorham attended art school and, in 2006, launched Byredo, a Stockholm-based line that specializes in scents crafted out of stripped-down, earthy ingredients like juniper, caraway, and leather. Each scent recreates a specific memory—like the smells of mom's hometown in India and the fragrance his father used to wear—some surprisingly sensitive stuff coming from a 6'5" tall guy with inked arms. On the verge of releasing his newest spritz called Mr. Marvelous, we chatted up the renaissance dude about all the things he swears by.

1. The Food Stalls in Bademiya, India

"These foods stalls are legendary! They're located on a tiny street behind the Taj Mahal Hotel and have some of the best grilled foods I've ever eaten. They sell tandoori and tikkas—all traditional Indian stuff. The area has the most amazing scents, both good and bad—all extremes. And if you're lucky, you might even run into a Bollywood star."

2. Dark Double-Breasted Tailored Suit from Bauer & Co.

"I have all my suits tailor-made from Bauer & Co. in Stockholm. They've been around for more than 150 years and they're the only real bespoke tailor left in Scandinavia. The latest addition to my collection is a dark double-breasted summer suit. It's made from a 1950s dead stock fresco fabric that I found at a Scottish mill."

3. Silk Socks from New & Lingwood

"The ultimate dressy sock for a formal event. They work really great with patent leather slippers, the equivalent of male ballerina shoes. It's a little weird when you first put them on, like you're wearing women's stockings, but it all makes sense when you get in the shoes."

4. White Short-Sleeved Shirt by Dries Van Noten

"A super-crisp white short-sleeved shirt made with super-thin cotton—it's the perfect summer garment. Without the jacket, it becomes quite casual with the short sleeves and my tattoos. Still, there are times where I leave it on, because the tattoos scare some people."

5. Generic Boy Jeans by Acne

"Acne's actually bringing these jeans back now. When I heard they were going to discontinue them, I bought three identical ones. I've literally been calling the office requesting them for years to bring them back, so I'd like to take credit for at least part of their return."

6. Moustache Comb from G. Lorenzi in Milan

"Only for serious moustache growers. This beautiful shop located at Monte Napoleone sells you the best hand crafted shaving equipment, combs, and knives. I didn't even know moustache combs existed until I went there. It's in the shape of a manta ray, and using it becomes some type of fixation, like smoking. It's kind of like an afro pick—same idea—except you never leave it in there."

7. Aman Sveti Stefan Resort, Montenegro

"Iconic Montenegro destination in combination with one of the best luxurious get-aways. It has an unbelievably historic feel and impeccable service. They take care of anything you need, whether it's calling concierge for swimming trunks at 4 a.m. or having your eggs boiled a certain way. The island reminds me of the Adriatic side of Italy and the water here is incredibly clear because of the rocks at the bottom. The icing on the cake: they serve great, locally-caught seafood, too."

8. Fish and Chips from Room Service at the Connaught

"I love indulging in simple British food in a luxurious setting after a long day of meetings. Here's the best version of that."

9. Tea Trolley by Alvar Aalto for Artek

"I love the drink trolley designed by Alvar Aalto for Artek in 1936. He's my favorite Scandinavian designer and one who was all about function. Plus, it's just fun to wheel the trolley around and around whenever you're entertaining guests."

Presidential Library: Ronald Reagan

Presidential Library:
Ronald Reagan

"Reagan, however, appears to have undergone a profound shift when he was given a copy of Whittaker Chambers's Witness (1952). Indeed, the work of a former communist spy convinced Reagan that liberalism was even more of an enemy of the West than communism itself."

—from Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History by John Patrick Diggins

Presidential Library: Barack Obama

Presidential Library:
Barack Obama

"See, the book's [Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness] not really about Africa. Or black people. It's about the man who wrote it. The European. The American...So I read the book to help me understand just what it is that makes white people so afraid. Their demons. The way ideas get twisted around. It helps me understand how people learn to hate."

—from Obama's memoir, Dreams from My Father

Presidential Library: Bill Clinton

Presidential Library:
Bill Clinton

"Once, instead of paying attention to the class, I read Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. At the end of the hour, [the professor] asked me what was so much more interesting than his lecture. I held up the book and told him it was the greatest novel written in any language since William Faulkner died. I still think so."

—from his 2004 autobiography, My Life

David Simon Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) by James Agee with photographs by Walker Evans

David Simon

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941)
by James Agee with photographs by Walker Evans

A suburban boy's father marks up his English essays, explaining both the wit and weaknesses of leading sentences with gerunds. He tells stories of fierce heroes, word warriors: Broun, who loved the street parade, and Pegler, who sat next to him all those years, despising the common man; Bigart, selfless and understated, or Mencken, who believed in only Mencken. But all of them so gifted, so deft, so able to trick a phrase. Here, says the father, read this transition. Here, look what he does with the second graf...

The father takes the son to a Front Page revival at a D.C. theater. The boy is oversold. He will be a newspaperman, a journalist.

Years later, he is on the metro desk at an old gray rag, Mencken's old paper, the youngest and last-hired scribbler. He prides himself on needing only minutes to bring fifteen clean column inches on anything, to be fast on rewrite when they put him there, to always talk a desk sergeant out of whatever handful of facts are required. It is all easy and good.

Until an older reporter hands him a book. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

So, thinks the young man, something about celebrity.

He begins to read, bored at first, then confused, then with growing alarm at the delicacy of the reporting, the self-awareness of a thinking journalist as he approaches and attempts to represent the love, fear, and sadness of real lives. My God, Agee is feeling this. Feeling what he is seeing. Feeling what he is writing.

And these people, these poor and unguarded sharecroppers, have opened their lives to the monstrous hegemony of reporting. But the journalist—thank God—he's utterly aware of the stakes involved, the dignity at risk. He gathers it all with caution and nuance. Page after fucking page of unmistakable proof of the true human condition.

"If I could do it," Agee declares, "I'd do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement. Booksellers would consider it quite a novelty; critics would murmur, yes, but is it art; and I could trust a majority of you to use it as you would a parlor game... As it is though, I'll do what little I can in writing."

After reading Agee, I knew how callow a young reporter's ambitions can be, how small my sense of craft, my dry professionalism was. Famous Men is the book that made me ashamed and proud to be a journalist—all in the same instant. Reading it made me grow up. Or at least, it demanded that I begin to grow up.

Whatever honor can be found in using the lives of others to tell tales is there, in the pages of that improbable book. Along with one final lesson as well: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is now, in retrospect, a classic work, an exercise in pure, declarative humanism. It will read true forever.

And yet, at the time of publication, it sold 600 copies.

But Agee knew. He had to know.
David Simon is the creator of The Wire and Treme.

Patton Oswalt A Boy and His Dog (1969) by Harlan Ellison

Patton Oswalt

A Boy and His Dog (1969)
by Harlan Ellison

I was being my typical asshole self one day in the seventh grade and got sent to detention. I had a copy of They Came from Outer Space: 12 Classic Science Fiction Tales That Became Major Motion Pictures, a collection of stories that were the basis for films like 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Thing from Another World. One of these stories was Harlan Ellison's "A Boy and His Dog."

I loved science fiction and, up to that point in my life, was happy to read about spaceships and aliens, robots and ray guns.

Ellison didn't write science fiction in a way I'd read it before. His stories had sex and confusion and no clear-cut heroes. There was violence, but not the violence I'd seen in movies. It was sloppy and sudden, like I'd seen on playgrounds. And there was a vertiginous sense that science fiction wasn't some gleaming antigravity future I'd never be a part of. It was two steps away and might come roaring down on us if someone pressed the wrong button.

"A Boy and His Dog" is about a dystopian future where human scavengers sift through a post-WWIII wasteland, and intelligent telepathic dogs, bred for warfare, use the remaining humans and their opposable thumbs to help find food, open doors and cans, and pull triggers on guns. It was Lord of the Flies, postpubescent and pissed off.

Ellison didn't change my life so much as he changed my reading habits, revealing a dozen branching paths and side alleys where before there seemed to be an orderly road to adulthood. He brought rawness and confusion and awe and real terror, and I'm forever indebted.

Patton Oswalt is the author of Zombie Spaceship Wasteland

Anthony Bourdain Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971) by Hunter S. Thompson

Anthony Bourdain

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971)
by Hunter S. Thompson

I vividly remember my introduction to Hunter Thompson's masterpiece in its original serial form in the pages of Rolling Stone. I was absurdly young (maybe 15?) and in no way prepared for the angry, hallucinatory, and searingly funny prose that seemed to leap off the page and burn its way into my skull. Thompson's savagely descriptive sentences deeply affected my own, leading to a lifelong love for hyperbole. And as a young man just coming of age as it became clear there would be no revolution, no peace in Vietnam, and four more years of Richard Nixon, I responded to Thompson's rage. But it was the sentiment underlying Thompson's story—the heartbreak and disappointment that would peek through between images like that of his dead grandmother crawling up his leg with a knife in her teeth—that affected me most. I became determined not just to write like Thompson but to live like Thompson, too. Probably not the ideal role model for a 15-year-old. But there it is.

Anthony Bourdain's latest book is Medium Raw.

Tobias Wolff The Fire Next Time (1963) by James Baldwin

Tobias Wolff

The Fire Next Time (1963)
by James Baldwin

I became a reader through the books of Albert Payson Terhune, who wrote almost exclusively about collies. At any given time, he owned as many as twenty of these dogs, "the tawny swarm," as he described them, and identified so strongly with his favorites—Lad, Bruce, Gray Dawn—that he was compelled to describe the world from their point of view. These collies were marvels of courage, compassion, and intelligence, infinitely superior to the humans they encountered, but especially humans of foreign provenance, of Levantine aspect or name and "swarthy" hue. He was in fact a terrible bigot, and all unknowing I breathed in his bigotry with his love of dogs.

In fact, bigotry was always in the air around me and in the language I heard and thoughtlessly used, growing up in the South, in Salt Lake City and the mountains of Washington State, and in an eastern boarding school with one black student. The greatest challenge to that reflexive assumption of superiority came in the form of James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, published when I was 17. With relentless logic and an unsentimental view of our history, Baldwin held up to his readers the possibility of seeing ourselves as we really were, caught in an officially sanctioned cycle of blindness and fear, giving rise to emotional and physical violence as destructive to the unjust as to those suffering the injustice. "Whoever debases others," Baldwin wrote, "is debasing himself." I came to recognize myself in those words; they stung.

Yet racism was not the only problem that Baldwin explored in this great book. He was concerned with our talent for hiding unpleasant truths from ourselves, particularly truths that would implicate us in the evils of the world and contradict our happy picture of ourselves as innocents—though the evidence of history and of our own lives, our own thoughts, all suggested otherwise.

Baldwin's argument: To live in and profit even passively by an unjust social arrangement must inevitably create a sense of self-disgust unless we invent a consoling counternarrative. And if we are to make ourselves comfortable while others are mistreated and deprived of the rights that we enjoy, only one explanation will suffice—that they are less human than ourselves. To be comfortable, we must build our lives on that lie, spend our souls reinforcing it, and die strangers to the truth and to ourselves.

Baldwin did not wish that fate on us. For all its measured ferocity, The Fire Next Time was written as an act of love, to hold up the mirror and give us the chance to change what we do not like to see. "The most important thing that one human being can do for another," Baldwin wrote, is to "bar the door" to his "spiritual and social ease." He did that for me. And if I am not all I should be, I am at least uneasy.

Tobias Wolff's latest collection, Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories, won the Story Prize in 2009.

John Jeremiah Sullivan No One Here Gets Out Alive (1980) by Danny Sugerman and Jerry Hopkins

John Jeremiah Sullivan

No One Here Gets Out Alive (1980)
by Danny Sugerman and Jerry Hopkins

You can't ask writers to name the most important books of their youth. They cannot hear the question—it passes through a region in the left temporal lobe that changes it into a different question: What would you like us to think were the most important books of your youth? How many authors have racked 300 words recounting the Jove-like descent of Hemingway's Michigan stories into their adolescent world, when what they should have said is Choose Your Own Adventure 91: You Are a Superstar.

I undertook, as an experiment, to suppress that part of the brain responsible for this distortion, and yesterday began to receive the first stray images. Flame-bright reds and oranges. A Jesus-like man, standing: his lithe and shirtless torso draped down the cover. His left areola—flat, dark, and hard, like an old Spanish coin—seems somehow disturbingly prominent.

Rows of tall black capital letters appear: NO ONE HERE GETS OUT ALIVE. Little white ones: The Biography of Jim Morrison. I don't need to see the authors' names. Hail, Hopkins and Sugerman, unacknowledged legislators.

In my memory there's a group of us, the world's most unintentionally humorous gang, who carried this book through the hallways in the eighth grade, always with cover out, like a badge. Signifying what? That we were skaters and people in bands. The strange tale of James Douglas Morrison, a Florida-born military brat who wanted with every cell in his body to be a great English poet but had been so culturally malformed by post-World War II America that he emerged a drug-gobbling sex shaman, canting such verses as

Ride the snake
Ride the snake
To the lake
The ancient lake, baby
The snake is long
Seven miles
Ride the snake

There was an album, An American Prayer: Jim reads his poems over riffs laid down by the other three Doors. A thing positively glorious in its awfulness. I popped it into my mom's car tape deck, when she picked me up from the strip-mall record store. "Her cunt gripped him like a warm friendly hand..." My mother's finger shot out toward the eject button. "I would have been ashamed to play something like that in front of my parents," she said. Exactly, Mother!

No One Here Gets Out Alive does include this one sentence, in which the co-authors address Jim's artistic "lineage," which is apparently vast, comprising "Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Poe, Blake, Artaud, Cocteau, Nijinsky, Byron, Coleridge, Dylan Thomas," and others. The list led me to read some of those writers, at first as a way to know Jim. Inevitably, they were better at their worst than the Lizard King at his best. Not that I won't go to my grave defending "Break on Through," but poetry-wise, there's no recovering from

Lament for my cock
Sore and crucified
I seek to know you
Acquiring soulful
wisdom

Therein lay the beauty of Jim as a literary figure. His almost unimaginable suckiness made him approachable, and through him you discovered actual writers, eventually shedding him, much as a snake does its skin. A snake does not despise or dishonor his old skin; he just moves on. He's old, and his skin is cold. Ride the snake.

John Jeremiah Sullivan's Pulphead comes out in November.

Roy Blount Jr. The Benchley Roundup (1954) by Robert Benchley

Roy Blount Jr.

The Benchley Roundup (1954)
by Robert Benchley

By the tenth grade, since it is hard to build true greatness on, for instance, a three-inch vertical leap, the prospects of my becoming a three-sport immortal had dimmed. But what else could I do when I grew up that wouldn't demand much maturity? Fortunately, my English teacher, Ann Lewis, liked the essays I wrote for her class. One of these anticipated Marshall McLuhan's insight that the medium is the message: Instead of taking on the assigned topic, I wrote about my pencil. Miss Lewis urged me to write for the school paper, and also to read Robert Benchley.

Benchley had my initials. He had maintained a room in New York's Royalton Hotel—my middle name is Alton. Okay, he drank himself to death, but people really liked him. And The Benchley Roundup included an essay entitled "My Face." It began, "Merely as an observer of natural phenomena, I am fascinated by my own personal appearance. This does not mean that I am pleased with it...I simply have a morbid interest in it." I was a teenager, with pimples. You could earn a living making fun of your own self-consciousness? That got me through high school, and to quote Benchley, "It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous." Or in my case, I had a mortgage and a two-inch vertical leap.

Roy Blount Jr.'s new book, Alphabetter Juice, or The Joy of Text, came out May 10.