Subject: Re: Smoking !
From: Paul Kennedy (kennedyp@toronto.cbc.ca)
Date: Mon Dec 11 2000 - 11:33:32 GMT
Dear Fishes,
As someone who has NEVER smoked (except on stage, as a young amateur actor,
when required to do so by the role); and as someone who's attitude to the
evil (as opposed to any other, ahem...) weed is closer to Tim's than to
Will's, I probably have no right to say ANYTHING in this thread.
But it's hard to resist the deduction that Scottie once wrote not novels,
but soap operas.... THAT was an amazing little tour de farce, really. Bravo!
Nor would I feel at all honest if I didn't confess that Will's explication
of 'objective corelatives' (or whatever) had me leaping mindlessly through
the smokerings in my mind. What was THAT all about? (But THANKS for
Seymour's last poem....)
And DAMN the Yankees! (I'm sorry everyone--especially Salinger fans in San
Francisco--but I really had to get that off my chest.)
People in North America DID smoke A LOT more back in the days when
Salinger's stories and novels are set, which is precisely why I believe that
it's potentially VERY interesting and instructive to consider how his
characters smoke. In the vain belief that I could somehow paint Canada a
pure and smoke-free place withing the canon (smoking cannon.... Hmmmmmm,
interesting....), I just now turned to DD-SBP (oops!--I seem to remember
that certain linguistic barracudas in the fishbowl declared , not long ago,
that people who use such abbreviations deserve to be shot at dawn, which
gives me something like 21 hours to formulate what I want to say....)
The first cigarette appears on page 141 of my 75-cent Bantam paperback.
This is VERY strange, because the character is question has MANY previous
opportunities to puff. In fact, for a smoker, some of the earlier scenes
(NYC hotels, Montreal train platforms) would have virtually mandated
smoking. Instead, though (unless I missed it while quickly skimming through
the text) here's how Jerome describes De Daumier-Smith's first cigarette
(with prose that conjures up blue slipstreams of smoke--perhaps THIS was his
true blue period):
I got out of bed, put on my slippers, and went over in the dark and
sat down on one of the floor cushions. I sat cross-legged for a
couple of hours and smoked cigarettes, squashing them out on the
instep of my slipper, and putting the stubs in the breast pocket of
my pyjamas.
Does anybody else notice posture that invokes an almost cliche eastern
meditative position? But YUCK! And for anyone--like Tim, for example--who
finds the very concept of an ashtray to be physically repulsive, how about
that final touch of putting it SO CLOSE to D D-S's heart? Double YUCK!
It might be fun to hear from Fishes in Asia (where's Sonny when we need
him?), where smoking is still as prevalent as it used to be in North
America--largely BECAUSE those clever North American tobacco companies long
ago figured out that they could afford to lose Louisiana (and maybe even
cough up, if you'll excuse the pun, a few million dollars to cover class
action cancer litigation) so long as 1.2 billion potential Chinese smokers
were eagerly waiting in the wings. But I digress.... Do fisherfolk from
places where smoking still isn't frowned upon find such imagery as repulsive
as the rest of us find it? To what extent are we all only creatures of our
socio-historical context?
Can reading make us free?
Cheers,
Paul
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