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The smoking book

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Item details
Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Request in advance	PR9619.3.S796 S64 1999	Off-site

Description

ix, 238 pages; 21 cm

Summary

"The Smoking Book is a dreamlike structure built on the solid foundation of two questions: how does it feel to smoke, and what does smoking mean? Lesley Stern, in an innovative, hybrid form of writing, muses on these questions through interesting stories and essays that connect, expand, and contract like smoke rings floating through the air."--BOOK JACKET.
"Stern writes of addictions and passionate attachments, of the body and bodily pleasure, of autobiography and cultural history. Stern has written a book, at once intensely personal and kaleidoscopically international, that weaves the intimate act of a solitary person smoking a cigarette into a broad cultural picture of desire, exchange, fulfillment, and the acts that bind people together, either in lasting ways or through ephemeral encounters."--BOOK JACKET.

Subjects

Bibliography (note)

Contents

Smoke Circles -- Burnout -- Suspended Forever -- A Fishy Smell -- Not Wanting -- Burial -- Like a Precious Gem -- Yakandanda -- The Body Has a Mind of Its Own -- White Man -- Translation (a gift of opium) -- No Substitute -- Seasickness -- Screaming -- To Bubble and Rumble (like an elephant) -- Memory Missiles -- A Smoky Edifice (implosion) -- Babies or Booze (metonymy) -- Bombs or Bums (metaphor) -- Traced by (a slight sense of) Bitterness -- Instead of a Lobotomy (a cigarette) -- To Remember (to find yourself in fragments) -- To Forget -- Chaos -- Smoko -- Black Hole Spinning (the physics of writing) -- Healthy -- Strange Attractors -- A Lycanthropic Age (the writing cure) -- A Boil About to Burst (the talking cure) -- Voicing -- Mouthing -- Appetite -- Lions Don't Smoke -- Poison -- Fog Drinking -- Kettle Logic (the art of separation) -- I Done a Lotta Bad Things -- The Smoking Room -- Kindness (or, the werewolf comes home) --
Those Places in the Body That Have No Language Either -- Anticipation (a crevice opening up) -- Habit -- Panic -- A Sleeping Problem -- Open Arms -- Fire Escape -- Lighting Up -- Unspooling -- Demons -- Possessed -- Smoking Landscape -- Life-Giving Mist -- In Transit.

ISBN

0226773302 (alk. paper)

LCCN

99026219

OCLC

ocm41090774

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries