Hallelujah - Leonard Cohen 1934 - 2016 # Leonard Cohenbegan composing Hallelujah in 1979, and finally recorded it in 1984 to mixed reviews. Sony refused to release it. It then it took another 15 years for it to become accepted as a work of genius. How fragile and elusive success is. Where does conceptual artwork come from? When asked where his magic came from, Cohen replied: Ï don’t know; if I knew, I’d go there more often". ...
So Long Marianne, Leonard Cohen # In the early 1960’s, Leonard Cohen left Canada for London to advance his writing career. Finding the climate dull, grey, cold and dismal, he escaped to the Greek Island of Hydra. Marianne Ihlen, married to writer Axel Jensen of Norway, had also sailed to the Greek island of Hydra, a bohemian colony of writers and hedonistic sailing celebrities. George Johnston and Charmaine Clift lived and wrote novels on Hydra from 1954 to 1963 before moving to London and eventually Sydney. ...
Suzanne - 1966 # Suzanne is the first track on Leonard Cohen’s 1967 debut album: Songs of Leonard Cohen. It was first published as a poem in Cohen’s 1966 collection “Parasites of Heaven”. Suzanne Verdal, a platonic friend of Cohen’s is the inspiration for Cohen’s most idyllic song, ‘Suzanne’ in Montreal in the 1966’s. She was a single mother, a dancer, much younger than he, with an apartment overlooking the St. ...
Famous Lovers # Courtly love is a literary phenomenon of the early middle ages where a love secretly pines after a noble woman relentlessly. More @: https://nebo-lit.com/love/courtly-love.html Love and hate are close relations. Clytaemestra’s feelings for Agamemnon are characterized as ‘philos-aphilos’. As Richmond Lattimore defined it thus, “the hate gains intensity from the strength of the original love when that love has been stopped or rejected.” Clytaemestra’s love for Agamemnon has been quashed by his sacrifice of Iphigeneia and his return with Cassandra as a concubine. ...
Joan Baez # From “Am I Pretty When I Fly?” by Joan Baez. Copyright 2023 by the author and used with permission of Godine, reviewed by Amanda Petrusich May 14, 2023, The New Yorker Since 1959—when she first appeared, at age eighteen, at the Newport Folk Festival, singing alongside the banjo player and guitarist Bob Gibson—Joan Baez has been electrifying eager crowds with her elegance and ferocity. Baez was central to both the folk revival and the civil-rights movement of the nineteen-sixties; her protest songs, delivered in a vivid, warbly soprano, felt both defiant and gently maternal. ...