We’re pretty certain this is a joke
A very lame one, but a joke nonetheless.
It’s three in the morning, I’m in my study, and I’m going to address, yet again, the smoking issue. Let’s cut all the crap about the cigarette as movie icon - how it dangled from Humphrey Bogart’s lips, stuck out of the side of John Wayne’s mouth, the magic moment when Bette Davis in Now, Voyager … and so on. Also forget the bit about how most of your favourite writers - George Orwell, Italo Svevo, Robert Musil, TS Eliot, Jane Austen - were all heavy smokers, and concentrate on the strictly practical and personal issue: why it is very, very important to you, personally and practically, to give up smoking.
We’ll chalk it up to early-morning punchiness. Jane knows we’ve been there.
Thanks to Alert Janeite Lisa for the link!
July 11th, 2007 at 7:46 am
This may not have been a joke, but rather an unlucky association. The text mentions Robert Musil, who was indeed an inveterate smoker. Now, there are three pages in chapter 99 of his novel The Man Without Qualities, where he describes an aging piano teacher he calls “Tante (= aunt) Jane” — a rather strange person who lives exclusively on black coffee, tea, and broth, wears long black gowns, and smokes long thin Virginia cigars … her voice sounding like it’s “powdered with fine white flour” because of her smoking habits. It’s a very impressive description, and perhaps the person who wrote that article has been mislead into making the connection by the term of “Aunt Jane”.
(Sorry for commenting so late. I had to look this up in Musil’s novel.)