skygiants | (no subject)

You know how sometimes a friend is telling you about a book they're reading, and you say politely, "oh, that sounds interesting," and they say "OH I'LL LEND IT TO YOU" and next thing you know you have a book in your hands?

So that's how I ended up reading I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen, even though I have heard maybe three of Leonard Cohen's songs, total. Maybe four.

-- okay that's not quite true, actually, I've probably heard quite a lot of Leonard Cohen's songs, but very few of them actually sung by Leonard Cohen, because other people do tend to do it better ...

(Fun true fact about Leonard Cohen that I now know, because of reading his biography: he was having money troubles in his career as a poet, which is why he decided to fix his career by becoming a FOLK SINGER, that time-honored means to earning a quick buck. I mean, we laugh, but it did work!)

No, I mean, it was definitely a fascinating read, though I think I liked my mental image of Leonard Cohen better when I knew less about him. I am not impressed by escapades like bopping off to the Bay of Pigs as a hipster revolutionary tourist. Still, as a document of moments and developments in music history, it's a fascinating biography.

I gotta say, though, the thing that kept striking me as I read was this idea of the muse. Leonard Cohen was one of those guys who has a string of women acting as an ~*~inspiration~*~, until they are no longer inspiring and it's time for a new muse. Lots of people seem quite happy to buy into the rule that if you're an artist, this is totally okay. But scattered through the story of Leonard Cohen's are these other stories, really depressing stories, about young women trying to make it as artists, singers, authors -- young women who then meet a famous and talented man, and become his muse, and that's it, that's officially what they're famous for. Sometimes that man is married, and so instead of hanging out in the artistic circles that they wanted to join in the first place, they have to go live in a separate house and keep themselves on the DL so that his wife doesn't find out, which is ... just an extra dose of wonderful.

And, I mean, this book also contains Judy Collins and Joni Mitchell and all kinds of other female artists who have gotten lots of recognition for their work -- so it's not like every women's story in this book is one of spinning in orbit around The Man, The Musician, The Artist Leonard Cohen. But too many of them are. I don't like the idea of a muse.

Crossposts: http://bookelfe.livejournal.com/391117.html

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From:

nextian

Yeah, and it's not like even Joni Mitchell came out unscathed. I reblog "The Gallery" talismanically to save me whenever I run into a would-be Leonard Cohen.

It sounds pretty interesting. Maybe I'll pick it up sometime when I'm really braced to be mad at him.

From:

skygiants

Yeah, absolutely. Man, I'd forgotten about "The Gallery," but it does say it all, doesn't it?

I wish the biographer had felt she had leave to be as annoyed with him as I frequently was. :(

From:

sovay

he was having money troubles in his career as a poet, which is why he decided to fix his career by becoming a FOLK SINGER, that time-honored means to earning a quick buck.

I heard of him first as a poet; we had a copy of The Spice-Box of Earth (1961) in the house when I was growing up.

-- so it's not like every women's story in this book is one of spinning in orbit around The Man, The Musician, The Artist Leonard Cohen. But too many of them are. I don't like the idea of a muse.

I like muses, but not when the formulation is (a) gendered (b) reductive. The thing where people are mutually inspiring is pretty awesome. The thing where sometimes people inspire art while not working in the same field/being artists themselves—and are all right with it—is fine. If a woman's whole purpose is To Inspire a Man, Ha Ha the Very Idea That She Might Be an Artist in Her Own Right, Now Run Along and Be a Good Little Groupie or an Angel in the House If It's That Century, I have no time for it. And the historic tendency to assume that any woman involved in an artistic circle was there just to fuck/inspire the guys? KILL IT WITH FIRE. See also: go on, try tracking down any information about the women of the Beat Generation at all.

From:

skygiants

Before reading this bio, my main mental association with him has historically been pretty much just the obvious "Hallelujah" and a disembodied gravely voice. (Also, embarrassingly, I sometimes accidentally get him mixed up with Leonard Bernstein in my head and have to consciously disentangle them even though they have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING IN COMMON.)

Yeah, people inspire art all the time, and that's cool, that's great! (Well, sometimes it's great.) But the idea of that being someone's dedicated role makes me twitchy at a visceral level -- it's so reductive!

From:

sovay

Before reading this bio, my main mental association with him has historically been pretty much just the obvious "Hallelujah" and a disembodied gravely voice.

We had his records around the house; I knew what he sounded like from an early age, but I knew most of his songs through covers, too. I remain fond of the actual song "I'm Your Man" because it's used for a great montage in Secretary (2002), a movie which despite its third-act problems was the first kinky romance I ever saw—with someone with whom I was having a kinky romance—so it stays with me.

Also, embarrassingly, I sometimes accidentally get him mixed up with Leonard Bernstein in my head and have to consciously disentangle them even though they have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING IN COMMON.)

I think that happens to everybody. It's probably not fair to Bernstein.

But the idea of that being someone's dedicated role makes me twitchy at a visceral level -- it's so reductive!

One of the few times I've seen it done from a subject position is Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle (1948), in which the narrator's stepmother is a professional muse. She and the narrator's father separate briefly after ten years of his writer's block: he's not creating art, she's evidently not doing her job right and moves on.

From:

skygiants

I've not heard "I'm Your Man," but I do have his voice attached irrevocably to "Democracy," which gave me a vastly more political sense of him than it turns out he actually had.

Bernstein is actually distantly related to me and no one of my acquaintance has anything particularly good to say about him; that said, whatever his sins are, I have the sense they are of a completely different genre than Leonard Cohen's.

I love I Capture the Castle! I love the stepmother, too, though I have forgotten her name; a lot of her charm is in the agency of her subjectivity.

From:

sovay

Bernstein is actually distantly related to me

I had no idea. Neat.

and no one of my acquaintance has anything particularly good to say about him; that said, whatever his sins are, I have the sense they are of a completely different genre than Leonard Cohen's.

I don't think of him as doing the serial muse thing, although it might just be that I don't know enough about his life. Also, I like more of his music.

I love the stepmother, too, though I have forgotten her name; a lot of her charm is in the agency of her subjectivity.

Topaz. She rocks.

From:

evewithanapple

This discussion of muses is deeply entertaining to me (as someone who enjoys Leonard Cohen's lyrics but is less than impressed by his voice and thinks that they should probably make a Brel-esque musical based on his discography sometime) because the book I'm reading right now, Elizabeth Hand's Mortal Love is about a muse who picks up a guy, drains him, and then skips merrily off to the next tortured artist. Inversion!

From:

antisoppist

In Libby Purves' Casting Off the heroine (who has had a mid-life crisis row with her husband, left him on the quayside and sailed back out to sea) re-encounters a figure from her past, the bearded poet who ran through whole cohorts of young female muse figures at Oxford before moving on to the next, leaving a trail of broken hearts (and worse) in his wake. She also ends up rescuing a runaway escort girl from a luxury yacht who, when the poet starts his "come to Ireland with me and live in a cabin by the sea and be my love" spiel, says yeah OK because I think I like this sea and sky stuff and I'd like to try that for a bit and if you provide the cottage, I'll give you a shag now and then because I get that blokes need a shag every so often, and the poet is all taken aback and horrified.

From:

skygiants

There's an episode of Deep Space Nine I recently watched in which that happens too! Since the tortured artist in question is the captain's teenaged son who starts out the show as Token Kid on the Bridge, we found it ... confusing and sort of uncomfortable ...