Bij de dood van Paul Auster. Dat hij overleden is aan longkanker verbaast mij dan weer niks. Hij schreef tenslotte het scenario van de rook film pur sang Smoke. Met Harvey Keitel als sigarenhandelaar Auggie Wren.
Auggie Wren: The boys and me were just having a philosophical discussion about women and cigars.
Paul Benjamin: Well I suppose that all goes back to Queen Elizabeth.
Auggie Wren: The Queen of England?
Paul Benjamin: Not Elizabeth the Second, Elizabeth the First. Did you ever hear of Sir Walter Raleigh?
OTB Man no1, Tommy: Sure. He’s the guy who threw his cloak down over the puddle.
OTB Man no2, Jerry: I used to smoke Raleigh cigarettes. They came with a free gift coupon in every pack.
Paul Benjamin: That’s the man. Well, Raleigh was the person who introduced tobacco in England, and since he was a favorite of the Queen’s – Queen Bess, he used to call her – smoking caught on as a fashion at court. I’m sure Old Bess must have shared a stogie or two with Sir Walter. Once, he made a bet with her that he could measure the weight of smoke.
OTB Man no3, Dennis: You mean, weigh smoke?
Paul Benjamin: Exactly. Weigh smoke.
OTB Man no1, Tommy: You can’t do that. It’s like weighing air.
Paul Benjamin: I admit it’s strange. Almost like weighing someone’s soul. But Sir Walter was a clever guy. First, he took an unsmoked cigar and put it on a balance and weighed it. Then he lit up and smoked the cigar, carefully tapping the ashes into the balance pan. When he was finished, he put the butt into the pan along with the ashes and weighed what was there. Then he subtracted that number from the original weight of the unsmoked cigar. The difference was the weight of the smoke.
OTB Man no1, Tommy: Not bad. That’s the kind of guy we need to take over the Mets.
Paul Benjamin: Oh, he was smart, all right. But not so smart that he didn’t wind up having his head chopped off twenty years later. But that’s another story.
En dat was waar Paul Auster goed in was, verhalen. Zijn romans waren niet altijd evenwichtig maar er zaten wel altijd goeie verhalen, anekdotes in. Ik las de meeste van zijn romans, en enkele meerdere keren. Zijn laatste roman verscheen vorig jaar, die moet ik nog lezen.
Op Smoke kwam nog een vervolg, Blue In The Face, wederom afspelend in de sigarenzaak van Auggie, maar die heb ik nooit gezien, ondanks de sterrenkast met onder andere Lou Reed (als Man with strange glasses), Madonna (als zingend telegram), Michael J. Fox en Jim Jarmusch.
Downtown Train van Tom Waits is te horen in de soundtrack van Smoke.
