Jeremayakovka

Now And Zen Cohen

I have abdicated the throne
both the temporal and the spiritual
-- Leonard Cohen, Book of Longing

[Welcome, readers referred by online muses, Fausta's Blog and Atlas Shrugs and Alarming News.]

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Yesterday I read the bestselling collection of latter-day Leonard Cohen poetry and drawings, Book of Longing. Read it start-to-finish and in silence, the way it's intended, I sense. For one thing, the bulk of it was written inside a Zen monastery.... A daintier presenter will give readers leave to "pick and choose" through this 229-page volume, but Jeremayakovka does not advise that.

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Leonard's longing is longer than any of the Book of Longing's 100-something individual compositions and 40-something drawings. The little works smolder in the ear and/or eye, bolder than quips or limericks yet shy of odes or elegies. Taken individually in short-footed, almost sing-song cadence, their form contradicts the pretended gravity of Leonard's notoriously heat- (and wet-) seeking flesh. Some of the Book of Longing's freshest moments are stringent admissions of his own, often priapic, aporias. Out of context they would rateas just an old man's dirty dunceries. Here they ring in deadpan, almost comic relief:

still looking / at the girls / but there are / no girls / none at all / there is only / (this'll kill ya) / inner peace / & harmony (p. 207)

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Leonard is neither gone nor forgotten of course, but either state can turn inert. Neither guarantees a just appreciation. For "appreciation" without estimation is flattery; if not, it might render one vulnerable to flattery. One thing Leonard reminds by the Book of Longing is that he's always longed for order. Not an angelic order (his order being baser), but something closer to that of Rilke who elegized Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel / Ordnungen? Who, if I cried out, would hear me out of the orders of the angels?

Still, the Canadian Jew is not as transcendent as his German predecessor. Leonard's verses (as Rilke's) do not scream so much as murmur, murmuring of the heart while filtering through feminine flesh. This order is, as it must be, of Leonard's own devising. The trick (and this is every artist's acid bath) is that it also be a calling, and that the calling, if it doesn't do the devising, then revises it.

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Whatever may be Crooner Leonard's proven power, Poet Cohen writes at times in the baffled habit of the ex-monk. The habit fits too close for confidence as well as for comfort. Wrestling not with an angel, the ex-monk eats the embarrassment of having stumbled out of that order. His witness  is always to a kind of beauty. It's just that the witness is sometimes lowly and at most just short of holy. Or holy only inadvertently (see p. 207, above):

taxes / children / lost pussy / war / constipation // the living poet / in his harness / of beauty // offers the day / back to g-d (p. 175);

Anyone who says / I'm not a Jew / is not a Jew / I'm very sorry / but this decision / is final "Not a Jew" (p. 158)

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--Hypocrite Leonard,--mon semblable,--mon frère!
--Mon vieux,--mon pauvre,--mon debonaire!
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the road is too long / the sky is too vast / the wandering heart / is homeless at last (p. 215)
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(p. 167)

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For you, Gentle Reader. Verses I jotted, and worked, since opening the Book of Longing:
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Fanfare

My genius is an anchor
Grappling o'er the waves.
Hauled 'weigh by steaming Rancor
The calm seabed it craves.

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This Birthmark On My Skin

Thinking about my father
Gets in the way of thinking
About the men I admire.
Which is how he thinks
About his father.

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California Hotel #1

Having me put out of mind
Once inscribed I on your heart,
     Your inmost rind
     Is where they'll find
Your torrents bloodying my mark.
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California Hotel #2

Come! Nibble at my rotted heart.
Speed your tongue along wormworn trails.
Pay no heed when the thing falls apart.
     Feed then, Liebe. Bitte,
     Feed on the frittered entrails.

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Tenderloin Hotel #1

You know it is no casting chore
     to lick you by the bushel.
Just nod a knee to bid me more
     or sigh my first initial.
How tyrant Time tricks every whore.
     Dare you defy the benevolent official?
Go, then! Anoint your imperious store
     whose lounging supple diadem
     wrings reign o'er brittle thistle.
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Contemplation

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Totalitarian tyranny is built not on the virtues of totalitarians
but on the vices of liberals.
-- Albert Camus

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The drawing I did back in 1993. (The model was written up most justly in the book The Undressed Art.) The quote is from Camus at Combat: Writing 1944-1947, "Why Spain?" (p. 301), reviewed by Erika Dreifus.

Billary, Grotesque Valentine

Left-liberals occasionally hit the right note when critiquing their own.

While best known for his political cartoons, and while his sculptures disgust me with their lumpy, leaden forms and gunmetal sheens that belie artery-hardened (and -hardening), leftover socialist realism, Paul Conrad pulls off a good, almost very good, caricature with this Janus-faced bust 0f Bill and Ms. Rodham Clinton.

The head conveys much truth about America's preeminent, not just symbiotic but Siamese, power couple. They think as one, indivisible, with Bill the major, more stalwart partner. The penile Pinocchio (like a thumb, no?) peers hard into the past, whereas she of steely smile and more poised coif beams eagerly ahead, buttressed -- always -- by Bill.

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btw, Gentle Reader, my instinctive, lip-curling aversion to Conrad is not unlike the one I bear toward George Segal -- particularly his Willy Loman-esque Holocaust forms. Exposition of that, however, will have to be for another time...

Happy Romantic New Year

I am a bridge from the unidentified past into the future.
--Ayn Rand

Time For Some Jewish Resistance - "The Partisan," Performed By Leonard Cohen

To be victorious in the long run you need a tradition of fighting, you need myths and martyrs' haloes -- otherwise national character will fall into decay.
-- Edward Kuznetsov

Leonard Cohen, the most famous renderer of "The Partisan," performs live this originally Russian-French ballad of survival behind Nazi lines. He sings in English and French, with the video offering Spanish subtitles. Many songs of anti-Nazi resistance songs have been sung -- in Yiddish and in Russian, especially. This one's a treat for lovers of Romance languages everywhere.

That might be John Bilezikjian on the oud (I'm pretty sure that's an oud), I'm not sure. (He's one of the outstanding personnel on Field Commander Cohen).

"The Partisan": words by Emmanuel D'Astier de la Vigerie [link in French only], music by Anna Marly. Described in her obituary as "the troubadour of the French Resistance," Marly was the daughter of deposed Russian aristocrats (pictured below).

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For French & Yiddish songs, try Sarah Gorby's The Unforgettable Songs of the Ghetto [Gorby link in Russian only].

English version of the original "Chant des Partisans":

My friend, do you hear the dark flight of the crows over our plains?
My friend, do you hear the dulled cries of our countries in chains?

Oh, friends, do you hear, workers, farmers, in your ears alarm bells ringing?
Tonight all our tears will be turned to tongues of flame in our blood singing!

Climb up the from mine, out from hiding the pines, all you comrades,
Take out from the hay all your guns, your munitions and your grenades;

Hey you, assassins, with your bullets and your knives, kill tonight!
Hey you, saboteurs, be careful with your burden, dynamite!

We are the ones who break the jail bars in two for our brothers,
hunger drives, hate pursues, misery binds us to one another.

There are countries where people sleep without a care and lie dreaming.
But here, do you see, we march on, we kill on, we die screaming.

But here, each one knows what he wants, what he does with his choice;
My friend, if you fall, from the shadows on the wall, another steps into your place.

Tomorrow, black blood shall dry out in the sunlight on the streets.
But sing, companions, freedom hears us in the night still so sweet.

My friend, do you hear the dark flight of the crows over our plains?
My friend, do you hear the dulled cries of our countries in chains?

Berkeley Suffocated

Per Berkeley Breathed's own web site, this Opus comic strip mocking Islamic chic (not sheik) is set to be withheld from print publication, including in the Washington Post.

Writes BB: Note to Opus readers: The Opus strips for August 26 and September 2 have been withheld from publication by a large number of client newspapers across the country, including Opus' host paper The Washington Post. The strips may be viewed in a large format on their respective dates at Salon.com.
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Cowards.

It's not that it's "a harmless expression of free speech" or some such. It is harmful -- or rather, contentious -- in terms of its content (going after self-hating Americans) and its publication (the possibility of CAIR-generated Islamic lawsuits or Islamic violence).

Cowards.

What other newspapers have thus far decided not to run it?

Send your letter of discontent to the WaPo editor here and in the meantime do your part to make the cartoon viral.

(H/T My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy)

Sacha Newley, Painter

Once in a while I run across art or an artist that makes me stop and go, Wow.

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Born in New York City in 1965, Sacha Newley first began to paint seriously at the age of 18.

After a period of study under classical realist painter, Lance Richlin, during which he honed his life drawing skills and made numerous copies from the Old Masters, notably Velasquez and Van Dyck, he broke away from academic teaching to develop his own unique style....

Focus and Think

Why do Muslims go exceedingly into medicine and engineering rather than, say, photography? Isaac Schrödinger brings out colorful cultural contrasts between liberal Western and Muslim societies in "Capturing the Islamic World":

Imagine if a student could put a camera to record the events of a classroom. Nothing can showcase better that Islam is a Religion of Peace than Muslim teachers who repeatedly slap, punch, kick and hit the young and helpless students throughout the day.

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If only Susan Sontag were here to answer Issac. Or if only John Berger would.

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Previous: "Blogger Wins Asylum Case"

"Nude With Fish"

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by Jeffrey Kurland, an old teacher of mine. (Click the image to enlarge.)