a footnote from the Atlas

* More than forty years on, I could tell you the brand of cigarette that my intellectual heroes smoked: Clement Greenberg, unfiltered Camels; Harold Rosenberg, Pall Malls, Lowell, the short-lived Trues. It's hard to recall now, as cigarettes are being phased out of American life--some brands no longer exist--and smoking is often seen as a marker of mental illness, that in those days almost everyone smoked.

This tangent reminds me of my family lore, that my mother's father died from "smoking unfiltered Camels and eating red meat late at night." Certainly it's true, I've taught entire sections of college English in which there is hardly a smoker in the room, yet the habit may remain more pervasive than we realize. Although the N + 1 and Jacobin intellectuals may have traded in their daily pack for exercise machines, there are still plenty of smokers around. We find them outside of campus buildings and bars, or in designated smoking areas. Go abroad, and you can see the habit remains much more pervasive, or at least, there are fewer restrictions as to where one might partake. At current prices in the U.S., it's amazing to think how much smokers could save if they could quit. Anyway, if you're interested in 20th-century literature and the biographies of writers, I highly recommend James Atlas's book.