The Blog Is Back (The Cigarette Smoking Never Stopped)

You might have figured it out on your own from the way new content started appearing all of a sudden, but here’s fair warning: The Cigarette Smoking Blog is back. You can expect to see a lot of aggressively newsy posts, opinions that would embarrass my employer, cooking and home-ec tips, and of course, a sailing-memoir’s-worth of imaginative profanity.

Hang on a minute. Those are the things you won’t find at CSB 2.0. Topics in the queue right now include the monks of Mt. Athos, Louis Auchincloss, the hats of the British Raj, and hobos (two posts) — which is my way of saying that this will not be a venue for punditry. More like a Twitter account, except that after years of telling myself to put down the Internet and read a proper book, I’ve actually gotten into the habit, which makes me the doddering and slightly deaf grandmother of the Twitter clan: I just can’t keep pace with the conversation. So I’m doing this instead.

A great deal has happened around here since my last post.

• I read many, many books — few of which I remember clearly, without the discipline of blogging about them.
• I was subjected to a nasty and very public mess at the hands of a bitter ex — if you have one of your own, perhaps you can sympathize. Do you want to know the truth, the gritty details behind the C-SPAN rant? Well, are you able to transmit bourbon through an Internet connection? Develop that technology, or bring me a bottle, and I’ll tell you (off the record) the tragi-comic version of that tale to go along with his melodramatic one. Otherwise, keep watching CSB and decide for yourself if I really am the second coming of Stalin, or a slug that has taken human form, or whatever else it was he called me.
• I turned 24 and, more recently, 25.
• And . . . the director I consider the cinematic voice of my generation, Rian Johnson (Brick), made a new movie, The Brothers Bloom, which I saw more than twice?

Perhaps I exaggerated when I said a great deal had happened in my life. In any event, summer vacation at the “new and abusive school of criticism” is over, so smoke ’em if you got ’em. Just don’t expect high volume; I’ve still got a day job.