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Author: Francis Mus
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780776629926
Category : Canadian poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 247
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Book Description
"Who speaks in Leonard Cohen's oeuvre? By identifying the many guises in which Cohen presents himself to his audience, Francis Mus seeks to formulate an answer to this question. The countless roles assumed by Cohen's persona are not some innocent game, but strategies in response to the sometimes conflicting demands of a 'life in art': they serve as masks that represent the performer's face and state of mind in a heightened yet detached way. In and around the artistic work, they are embodied in different guises or 'demons': image (the poser), artistry (the writer and singer), alienation (the stranger and the confidant), religion (the worshipper, prophet, or priest), and power (the powerful or powerless). Ultimately, Cohen's artistic practice can be read as an attempt at forging interpersonal contact. The wide international circulation of Cohen's work has resulted in a partial severing with the context of its creation. Much of it has filtered through the public image forged by the artist and his critics in concerts, interviews and reflective texts. Consequently, this monograph is less a biography than a reception study, supplemented with extensive archival research, unpublished documents, and interviews with colleagues and privileged witnesses. At the same time, this book sheds new light on the dynamic of a comprehensive oeuvre spanning a period of sixty years."--
Author: Francis Mus
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780776629926
Category : Canadian poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 247
Get Book Here
Book Description
"Who speaks in Leonard Cohen's oeuvre? By identifying the many guises in which Cohen presents himself to his audience, Francis Mus seeks to formulate an answer to this question. The countless roles assumed by Cohen's persona are not some innocent game, but strategies in response to the sometimes conflicting demands of a 'life in art': they serve as masks that represent the performer's face and state of mind in a heightened yet detached way. In and around the artistic work, they are embodied in different guises or 'demons': image (the poser), artistry (the writer and singer), alienation (the stranger and the confidant), religion (the worshipper, prophet, or priest), and power (the powerful or powerless). Ultimately, Cohen's artistic practice can be read as an attempt at forging interpersonal contact. The wide international circulation of Cohen's work has resulted in a partial severing with the context of its creation. Much of it has filtered through the public image forged by the artist and his critics in concerts, interviews and reflective texts. Consequently, this monograph is less a biography than a reception study, supplemented with extensive archival research, unpublished documents, and interviews with colleagues and privileged witnesses. At the same time, this book sheds new light on the dynamic of a comprehensive oeuvre spanning a period of sixty years."--
Author: Francis Mus
Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
ISBN: 0776631225
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 299
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Book Description
"With my jingle in your brain, Allow the Bridge to arch again" How are we to understand Leonard Cohen’s plea? Who speaks to whom in this oeuvre spanning six decades? In search of an answer to this question this study considers the different guises or “demons” that the Canadian singer-songwriter adopts. The countless roles assumed by Cohen’s personas are not some innocent game, but strategies in response to the sometimes conflicting demands of a “life in art”: they serve as masks that represent the performer’s face and state of mind in a heightened yet detached way. In and around the artistic work they are embodied by different guises and demons: image (the poser), artistry (the writer and singer), alienation (the stranger and the confidant), religion (the worshipper, prophet, and priest), and power (the powerful and powerless). Ultimately, Cohen’s artistic practice can be read as an attempt at forging interpersonal contact. The wide international circulation of Cohen’s work has resulted in a partial severing with the context of its creation. Much of it has filtered through the public image forged by the artist and his critics in concerts, interviews, and reflective texts. Less a biography than a reception study—supplemented with extensive archival research, unpublished documents, and interviews with colleagues and privileged witnesses—it sheds new light on the dynamic of a comprehensive body of work spanning a period of sixty years. Published in English.
Author: Michael Posner
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 1982152621
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 496
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Book Description
The extraordinary life of one of the world’s greatest music and literary icons, in the words of those who knew him best. Poet, novelist, singer-songwriter, artist, prophet, icon—there has never been a figure like Leonard Cohen. He was a true giant in contemporary western culture, entertaining and inspiring people everywhere with his work. From his groundbreaking and bestselling novels, The Favourite Game and Beautiful Losers, to timeless songs such as “Suzanne,” “Dance Me to the End of Love,” and “Hallelujah,” Cohen is a cherished artist. His death in 2016 was felt around the world by the many fans and followers who would miss his warmth, humour, intellect, and piercing insights. Leonard Cohen, Untold Stories chronicles the full breadth of his extraordinary life. The first of three volumes—The Early Years—follows him from his boyhood in Montreal to university, and his burgeoning literary career to the world of music, culminating with his first international tour in 1970. Through the voices of those who knew him best—family and friends, colleagues and contemporaries, rivals, business partners, and his many lovers—the book probes deeply into both Cohen’s public and private life. It also paints a portrait of an era, the social, cultural, and political revolutions that shook the 1960s. In this revealing and entertaining first volume, bestselling author and biographer Michael Posner draws on hundreds of interviews to reach beyond the Cohen of myth and reveal the unique, complex, and compelling figure of the real man.
Author: Anthony Reynolds
Publisher: Omnibus Press
ISBN: 0857127845
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 502
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Book Description
Anthony Reynolds’ fascinating and detailed biography draws on scores of new interviews conducted with Cohen’s band members past and present, his business associates, editors, friends, fans, producers, colleagues, enemies and peers. As well as their revealing accounts, the author has gained access to hours of previously unpublished interviews with Cohen as well as video archive recordings from several decades. The book also includes an authoritative summary of every Cohen album, with insights and recollections supplied from the musicians who appeared on the recordings. Gradually, despite Cohen’s own good-natured evasiveness over the past 40 years, a surprisingly frank portrait begins to emerge of the legendary figure who commands unparalleled loyalty from his fans and followers, young and old. From the distant days of his penniless beginnings as a much-praised poet in Montreal, through the travels, affairs and religious crisis to his latest tours, Cohen’s extraordinary life and body of work is examined as never before. The book includes many previously unpublished photographs.
Author: Leonard Cohen
Publisher: Canongate Books
ISBN: 1838852948
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 237
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Book Description
An unprecedented glimpse into the formation of the legendary talent of Leonard Cohen. Before the celebrated late-career world tours, before the Grammy awards, before the chart-topping albums, before 'Hallelujah' and 'So Long, Marianne' and 'Famous Blue Raincoat', the young Leonard Cohen wrote poetry and fiction and yearned for literary stardom. In A Ballet of Lepers, readers will discover that the magic that animated Cohen’s unforgettable body of work was present from the very beginning. Written between 1956 in Montreal, just as Cohen was publishing his first poetry collection, and 1961, when he’d settled on Greece’s Hydra island, the pieces in this collection offer startling insight into Cohen’s imagination and creative process, and explore themes that would permeate his later work, from shame and unworthiness to sexual desire to longing, whether for love, family, freedom or transcendence. The titular novel, A Ballet of Lepers – one he later remarked was 'probably a better novel' than his celebrated book The Favourite Game – is a haunting examination of these elements, while the fifteen stories, as well as the playscript, probe the inner demons of his characters, many of whom could function as stand-ins for the author himself. Meditative, surprising, playful and provocative, A Ballet of Lepers is vivid in its detail, unsparing in its gaze, and reveals the great artist and visceral genius like never before.
Author: Christophe Lebold
Publisher: ECW Press
ISBN: 177852270X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 513
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Book Description
Leonard Cohen has aimed high: to be all Jewish heroes at once. Like Jacob, he struggled with angels. Like David, he sang psalms and seduced women. But he never ceased doing what he did best: going from city to city and reviving our hearts. Leonard Cohen: The Man Who Saw the Angels Fall follows the singer’s cosmopolitan life from Montreal and New York to the Greek island of Hydra and examines his perpetual dialogues with himself, God, and avalanches. We see how six decades of radiant pessimism and a few thousand nights in hotel rooms transformed a young Jewish poet who longed to be a saint into an existentialist troubadour in love with women and a gravelly-voiced crooner who taught a thousand ways of dissolving into love. After more than two decades of research and travels, Christophe Lebold, who befriended the poet and spent time with him in Los Angeles, delivers a stimulating analysis of Cohen’s life and art. Gracefully blending biography and essay, he interrogates the mission Cohen set out for himself: to show us that darkness is just the flip side of light.
Author: Kait Pinder
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
ISBN: 1771125624
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 311
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Book Description
The Contemporary Leonard Cohen is an exciting new study that offers an original explanation of Leonard Cohen’s staying power and his various positions in music, literature, and art. The death of Leonard Cohen received media attention across the globe, and this international star remains dear to the hearts of many fans. This book examines the diversity of Cohen’s art in the wake of his death, positioning him as a contemporary, multi-media artist whose career was framed by the twentieth-century and neoliberal contexts of its production. The authors borrow the idea of “the contemporary” especially from philosophy and art history, applying it to Cohen for the first time—not only to the drawings that he included in some of his books but also to his songs, poems, and novels. This idea helps us to understand Cohen’s techniques after his postmodern experiments with poems and novels in the 1960s and 1970s. It also helps us to see how his most recent songs, poems, and drawings developed out of that earlier material, including earlier connections to other writers and musicians. Philosophically, “the contemporary” also sounds out the deep feelings that Cohen’s work still generates in readers and listeners. Whether these feelings are spiritual or secular, sincere or ironic, we get them partly from the sense of timeliness and the sense of timelessness in Cohen’s lyrics and images, which speak to our own lives and times, our own struggles and survival. From a set of international collaborators, The Contemporary Leonard Cohen delivers an appreciative but critical examination of one of our dark luminaries.
Author: Harry Freedman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472987268
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 297
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Book Description
'Leonard Cohen taught us that even in the midst of darkness there is light, in the midst of hatred there is love, with our dying breath we can still sing Hallelujah.' - The late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks 'Among the finest volumes on Cohen's life and lyrics ... An exploration which would have intrigued and engaged Leonard himself.' - John McKenna, writer and friend of Leonard Cohen Harry Freedman uncovers the spiritual traditions that lie behind Leonard Cohen's profound and unmistakable lyrics. The singer and poet Leonard Cohen was deeply learned in Judaism and Christianity, the spiritual traditions that underpinned his self-identity and the way he made sense of the world. In this book Harry Freedman, a leading author of cultural and religious history, explores the mystical and spiritual sources Cohen drew upon, discusses their original context and the stories and ideas behind them. Cohen's music is studded with allusions to Jewish and Christian tradition, to stories and ideas drawn from the Bible, Talmud and Kabbalah. From his 1967 classic 'Suzanne', through masterpieces like 'Hallelujah' and 'Who by Fire', to his final challenge to the divinity, 'You Want It Darker' he drew on spirituality for inspiration and as a tool to create understanding, clarity and beauty. Born into a prominent and scholarly Jewish family in Montreal, Canada, Cohen originally aspired to become a poet, before turning to song writing and eventually recording his own compositions. Later, he became immersed in Zen Buddhism, moving in 1990 to a Zen monastery on Mount Baldy, California where he remained for some years. He died, with immaculate timing, on the day before Donald Trump was elected in 2016, leaving behind him a legacy that will be felt for generations to come. Leonard Cohen: The Mystical Roots of Genius looks deeply into the imagination of one of the greatest singers and lyricists of our time, providing a window on the landscape of his soul. Departing from traditional biographical approaches, Freedman explores song by song how Cohen reworked myths and prayers, legends and allegories with an index of songs at the end of the book for readers to search by their favourites. By the end the reader will be left with a powerful understanding of Cohen's story, together with a far broader insight into the mystical origins of his inimitable work.
Author: Marc Hendrickx
Publisher: Bookline & Thinker Ltd
ISBN: 1916410367
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 107
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Book Description
Revered then virtually forgotten, Leonard Cohen has proved a lasting phenomenon. One of the most influential songwriters of our time, reconciling literature and poetry with popular music. In the 1990s Leonard Cohen’s music career appeared to have died. Cohen was in his seventies by then and no one expected new songs, never mind a worldwide tour that broke records for attendance. While many discovered his work during this resurgence, long-standing fans had never deserted him. His combination of poetry and soulful song had reached into their hearts when they were young and his connection with them never weakened. As a teenager author, Marc Hendrickx, wrote to Cohen and later the singer turned up on Marc’s doorstep. This is Marc’s journey through the work of Cohen. There are no conclusions, simply perspective and reflections.
Author: Matthew R. Anderson
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0228018668
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 121
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Book Description
Leonard Cohen and the Apostle Paul might be imagined as brothers with wildly different characters but a strong family resemblance. Paul, the elder sibling, was awkward, abrasive, and zealous. Leonard, the successful younger brother, was a smooth-talking romantic, prone to addiction and depression. Paul died a martyr, not knowing his words would have any effect on the world. Leonard could see his canonization within his lifetime. Yet each became a prophet in his own time, and a poet for the ages. In Prophets of Love Matthew Anderson traces surprising connections between two Jewish thinkers separated by millennia. He explores Leonard's and Paul’s mysticism, their Judaism, their fascination with Jesus, their countercultural perspectives on sex, their ideas about love, and how they each embodied being men. Anderson considers their ambiguous relationships with women, on whom they depended and from whom they often profited, as well as how their legacies continue to evolve and be re-interpreted. This book emphasizes that Paul was first and foremost a Jew, and never rejected his Judaism. At the same time, it sheds new light on the biblical worldviews and language underlying and inspiring every line of Cohen’s poetry. Prophets of Love alters our views of both Leonard Cohen and the Apostle Paul, re-introducing us to two poetic prophets of divine and human love.
