Abstract
It’s eight o’clock on a Saturday night. Two attractive people, both in their late twenties, are sitting across from each other at an elegantly set table in a trendy restaurant/night club, located in the downtown area of a North American city. For convenience, let’s call the duo Cheryl and Ted. Other couples are seated at table s in other parts of there staurant. The lights are turned down low. The atmosphere is unmistakably romantic, susta ine d by t he soft, mellifluous sound s of a three-piece jazzband. Cheryl and Ted are sipping drinks, making small talk, looking coyly into each other’s eyes, and smoking cigarettes in a secluded part of the restaurant, set aside for smokers. Smoking is a tradition that this particular restaurant has decided to preserve, despite great opposition to it from city legislators, not to mention society. The scene is distinctly reminiscent of a classic Hollywood setting for the enactment of romance.
A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
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Notes
Jason Hughes, Learning to Smoke: Tobacco Use in the West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 19.
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Richard Klein, Cigarettes Are Sublime (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993).
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Tara Parker-Pope, Cigarettes: Anatomy of an Industry from Seed to Smoke (New York: New Press, 2001), p. 168.
Charles Peirce’s main semiotic ideas can be found scattered in C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss, eds., Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Vols. 1–8 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1931–58).
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John Deely, Four Ages of Understanding: The First Postmodern Survey of Philosophy from Ancient Times to the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001).
Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976).
Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1978), p. 7.
Jacalyn Duffin, Disease Concepts in History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005).
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© 2008 Marcel Danesi
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Danesi, M. (2008). Cigarettes and High Heels. In: Of Cigarettes, High Heels, and Other Interesting Things. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-61278-5_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-61278-5_1
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