Word: kleine
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...themselves into a few hours without a cigarette, now realized they might light up if only they were in the right seats. A frantic bidding war arose for those seats, stoking a commotion that the captain finally quelled by rescinding his order and declaring this a nonsmoking flight. If Klein had been captain, you could've smoked 'em if you had 'em. He calls the airlines' no-smoking rule "a sign of the dangerous lengths to which antismoking impulses will go to deny others the freedom to enjoy the consolation and mastery cigarettes provide in moments of stress or fear...
...intent of this column is not missionary but analytical. Using two main texts - Richard Klein's wonderfully suggestive book-length essay "Cigarettes Are Sublime," and Ross McElwee's documentary film "Bright Leaves" - I want to take a calm look at smoking, and its place in the culture, from the inside - from the smoker's hot mouth, wheezing heart, sooty lung and vivid, endlessly rationalizing brain...
...What pleasures does smoking provide? We turn to Klein, who may be trusted because, after writing his witty defense of smoking, he gave it up. Cigarettes, he says, "present benefits, universally acknowledged by society. These benefits are connected with the release and consolation that cigarettes provide, with the the mechanism they offer for regulating anxiety and for mediating social interaction. They serve as well to spur concentration" - all smoking writers know this - "and, consequently, to permit the efficient production of many different kinds of work...
...Smoking, Klein argues, nudges the user into a state that is not so much narcotic as contemplative. "The moment of taking a cigarette allows one to open a parenthesis in the time of ordinary experience, a space and time of heightened attention that give rise to a feeling of transcendence, evoked through the ritual of fire, smoke, cinder connecting hands, lungs, breath, and mouth. It procures a little rush of infinity that alters perspectives, however slightly, and permits, albeit briefly, an ecstatic standing outside of oneself...
...seems both unfair and nonsensical for Klein to lambaste Democrats--Wesley Clark in particular--for not swallowing hook, line and sinker the Bush Administration's request for $87 billion. Klein himself suggests that the reasons for the invasion of Iraq were, "at the very least, oversold" and that "the post-Saddam period has been marked by ... arrogance and incompetence." JEFFREY LOHN New York City...