So off I went and picked up a book, Beautiful Losers, "...A religio-sexual epic of incomparable beauty," according to the back cover. Actually, it was on my bookcase with a marker in it. And since the marker was a bank statement of mine from 2005, I guess I already tried to read it, forgot, and now must begin again.
Not sure I understand much more of it than I did at 17... in fact I'm probably slightly more offended by it. Drug-addled ravings of someone clearly so in love with hating himself that he got famous from it. There's barely a plot. It seems like three books, which accidentally got shuffled together with a few odd diary pages and ramblings. It's not a real story! Ok, I'm sure it was 'groundbreaking' style back in the 60s. It should have stayed there.
Sorry Cohen fans... perhaps that's a bit harsh. I mean, how many books have I written? Yeah, none. So I can't talk really! And perhaps it's just this one book. Or even just the first half of it. I did feel like throwing it from a car window. But he does have a way with words, and so I persevere. After all, I read The Silmarillion. No way is a mere 239 pages of self-appreciating emo wank going to stop me.
And this passage in particular caught my eye. Because in reading it, just about every emotion I've ever had reading a book, came out. I hated the metaphors used in it. But I loved the idea that is expressed by them. I thought it was both true and false. It repulsed me. It made me laugh. It repulsed me that it made me laugh. It made me roll my eyes - Oh come on! It made me hate something that I normally love. It made me think he was even more in love with his own cleverness, but equally, maybe he deserved to be. And now, I'm not really sure what to think. About anything. But I do quite like his flair for making the ordinary sound so dramatic. How many people have said advertising is a bad influence on children? How many have said it like this?
From Beautiful Losers (1966) by Leonard Cohen.
Help!
Four men followed Edith. Damn every one of them. I can't blame them. The village was behind them, filled with families and business. These men had watched her for years. French Canadian schoolbooks do not encourage respect for the Indians. Some part of the Canadian Catholic mind is not certain of the Church's victory over the Medicine Man. No wonder the forests of Quebec are mutilated and sold to America. Magic trees sawed with a crucifix. Murder the saplings. Bittersweet is the cunt of a thirteen-year-old. O Tongue of the Nation! Why don't you speak for yourself. Can't you see what is behind all this teen-age advertising? Is it only money? What does 'wooing the teen-age market' really mean? Eh? Look at all the thirteen-year-old legs on the floor spread in front of the tv screen. Its it only to sell them cereals and cosmetics? Madison Avenue is thronged with hummingbirds who want to drink from those barely haired crevices. Woo them, woo them, suited writers of commercial poems. Dying America wants a thirteen-year-old Absihag to warm its bed. Men who shave want little girls to ravish but sell them high heels instead. The sexual Hit Parade is written by fathers who shave. O suffering child-lust offices of the business world, I feel your blue-balled pain everywhere! There is a thirteen-year-old blonde lying on the back seat of a parked car, one nyloned toe playing with the armrest ashtray, the other foot on the rich interior carpet, dimples on her cheeks and only a hint of innocent acne, and her garter belt is correctly uncomfortable: far away roam the moon and a few police flashlights: her Beethoven panties are damp from the Prom. She alone of all the world believes that fucking is holy, dirty, and beautiful. And who is this making his way through the bushes? It is her Chemistry Teacher, who smiled all night as she danced with the football star because it is the foam rubber of his car that she lies dreaming upon. Charity begins alone, F. used to say. Many long nights have taught me that the Chemistry Teacher is not merely a sneak. He loves youth truly. Advertising courts lovely things. Nobody wants to make life hell. In the hardest hard sell exists a thirsty love-torn hummingbird.
No comments:
Post a Comment