TYH says that smoking is cool and blogging is cool? Fantastic!

Nicki already pointed you towards the Yale Herald piece about the Yale blogosphere, but, as a master of virtual self-promotion (apparently), I should throw a link in that direction, too. It seems from the first paragraph that I have been responsible for at least one student not paying attention in seminar. I am very pleased to hear it.

Much more interesting in this week's Herald, though, is this article on smoking. The author proves herself smarter than the av-er-age anti-smoking polemicist when she admits that smoking a cigarette obviously isn't about pleasure but about "sublimity, that shining prong of aesthetic experience which reserves itself for the dark, the flirting-with-death, the dangerous, the disreputable, the nihilistic—in short, all the craggy backwaters of the human condition without which we would surely be less human." However, there's more than one way to be comfortable with death, as Claudio Lomnitz points out in Death and the Idea of Mexico (take special notice of how he talks about the Russians):

The Shinto-Buddhist acceptance of the brevity of life and its sublimation of fearlessness before death, best represented in the figure of the kamikaze, were intimately tied to militarism and to Japan's imperial pretensions. Mexico's nationalization of the proximity to and familiarity with death and the dead diverges from this model because stoicism in Mexico is not inextricably tied to militarism or to a sense of national destiny, and an ironic, jocular connection between the living and the dead is much more developed.

Neither can we argue for a close parallel between Mexico's nationalization of death and Russia's (or Poland's) attempt to corner the international market on suffering. Whereas Russia's sublimation of suffering involves a romantic sense of tragedy, of a collective that is crushed by telluric or heavenly forces beyond its control, Mexico's nationalization of death has a more nihilistic, lighthearted component. It is a modern refurbishment of a medieval theme: death comes to all and makes a mockery of all...

When Mexicans speak of their peculiar connection to death, they generally refer not to the sacrifices of their dead heroes but to a relation of flirtation and seduction with death itself, to a relationship that is full of betrayal and seducation on both sides.

The author of the Herald article seems to think that smoking is motivated by something like the Russian "romantic sense of tragedy," when it's much more like the Mexican model ("an ironic, jocular connection...full of betrayal and seduction on both sides").