Monocles, Bullets, and Cigarettes

Like the world at large, I have completely forgotten about the book I wrote about cigarette lighters. But yesterday I was watching Erich von Stroheim's version of THE MERRY WIDOW, that's right, a silent operetta, what could be more fun? Lots of things. And let's say Erich von Stroheim doesn't exactly have the Lubitsch touch, as I wittily texted to Megan Abbott, and oh how she must have chuckled at my waggish observation. For example, it takes Stroheim an hour and a half to get to the point where Lubitsch's movie STARTS! To be fair, the stories are pretty different. But why should I be fair? Who is reading this? You? You don't exist! Anyhow, I guess you, if you did exist, would be wondering what this has to do with my cigarette lighter book. Fine! I'll tell you. In THE MERRY WIDOW, as undertaken by Stroheim, there are a man and woman with cigarettes in their mouths, and they are standing so that the tips of their cigarettes touch. It might be that one is giving a light to the other, a process described in my book, in which I thoroughly explore the obscene slang term for such an action. I tried to search the "blog" to see if I had mentioned it here before, but I don't see how I could have, except by such euphemistic means as I have employed above. If you want to read dirty talk like that, you'll just have to buy the book! Anyway, so these two are standing there with the tips of their cigarettes touching and the bad guy, who is across the room, and in a hilarious mood, takes out his little gun and shoots off the ends of both of their cigarettes with a single bullet. Then he shoots the eyes out of a statue, which has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. He is, however, wearing a monocle, and monocles figure heavily in my cigarette lighter book for reasons I would tell you if we weren't both asleep by now. But! The relationship of guns to cigarettes and lighters is another theme of the book, so you can see clearly that when you tabulate all the various themes and subthemes and so on of my book you've never heard of and will have forgotten by the end of this "post," I am obliged to add THE MERRY WIDOW (1925) to my appendix of stuff that really should have gone into my cigarette lighter book but didn't. You know what else has a lot of monocle action? NIGHTWOOD! What pie and ice cream were to Kerouac, monocles are to Djuna Barnes. There's one chapter where a guy fiddles with his monocle in every conceivable way. You should take a drink every time Djuna Barnes uses the word "monocle"! (The surgeon general advises against it.) In a movie, the actor playing Felix, the guy with the monocle, would be like one of the pipe-smokers I have observed in at at least three movies "letting the pipe do most of the acting," except with a monocle instead of a pipe. And in an earlier chapter, Felix's monocle pops out, I believe, the way your monocle is always popping out when you're shocked. You may recall that I also found a person whose monocle pops out emotionally in Fitzgerald's TENDER IS THE NIGHT. You know what else had lots of monocles? That Erich von Stroheim bio we read in the Million Dollar Book Club! (Did you know Anita Loos affectionately called him "Von"?)