Asylum

“[...] On August 28, the Army [Leonard Cohen's entourage and band] drove up to the Henderson Hospital, just south of London; 'it was all talking therapy,' a former nurse at the hospital told Cohen biographer Sylvie Simmons, 'no medication, no "zombies.”' Cohen was led up to the institution’s imposing and narrow tower, where his impromptu performance would take place.
     'Oh boy,' he told Johnston as they made their way in, 'I hope they like "So Long, Marianne.”' Most of those in attendance were young, and many were Leonard Cohen fans. The band quickly set up, and Cohen took his place at the front of the makeshift stage, underneath one of the 'tall, narrow windows that gave the room the feel of a chapel.' He looked at the audience. 'There was a fellow I spoke to last night,' he said, 'a doctor. I told him I was coming out here. He said, "They are a tough bunch of young nuts.”' There was some applause, and Cohen started playing 'Bird on the Wire.' But then he stopped. 'I feel like talking,' he said. 'Someone warned me downstairs that all you do here is talk. That’s psychotic, it’s contagious.'
     During 80 minutes, he played only 11 songs. The rest of the time, he told the audience about his relationship with Marianne and how it had dissipated, about how 'You Know Who I Am' was written after taking 300 acid trips and 'One of Us Cannot Be Wrong' was composed while coming down from amphetamine, about the Chelsea Hotel and life in New York and making love and sharing lovers and feeling inconsolably sad. Each time he finished a song or a speech, the audience applauded rapturously.
     And then it was time to leave. 'I really wanted to say that this is the audience that we’ve been looking for,' Cohen said as the Army was packing up to go. 'I’ve never felt so good playing before people.'
— Adapted from A Broken Hallelujah: Rock n Roll, Redemption and the Life of Leonard Cohen by Liel Leibovitz
via Salon
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Resistance Movement

"In Canadian publishing, all eyes are on Quebec. That's because the province is debating whether to fix the price of books. The argument for fixing prices, many say, is to ensure that the city's [Quebec City?] independent bookstores will still be standing at the end of the decade.
    A book industry coalition has been campaigning for a year now, hoping to implement a fixed book price policy for new releases that would disallow any reseller from slashing prices for at least a nine month period. During that initial nine months, resellers would be allowed to extend a maximum 10% discount to readers.

     The book industry was finally heard from, officially, on Monday, in Quebec's Parliament Hill, as several proponents stipulated their views at the Fixed Book Price Hearings. […]
     The French-language niche market in Quebec province, whose entire population is the size of New York City, is suddenly making big waves as it considers not only fixed pricing for books but as it reconsiders the entire model of book selling."
— Luca Palladino, Publishers Weekly
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Buy books by Gabrielle Roy and Leonard Cohen here...

Homeric

"By 1967, it had already been 11 years since Leonard Cohen published his first volume of poetry. He had also written two novels, and was famous enough back in his hometown of Montreal for the Canadian National Film Board to produce a biography of him called Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen. But when he appeared with Judy Collins at a concert in New York’s Central Park that summer, few in the audience knew much about him. Some knew that he wrote 'Suzanne,' a stunning song Collins introduced to the world on her 1966 album In My Life. What almost no one knew was what Cohen himself actually sounded like, since he had yet to release an album.
     […] As a record label head put it, 'You finish listening to a song of Leonard’s and you know [...] he didn’t let that song go until he’s finished with it.' Not so surprising, perhaps, in one who had been publishing poetry for a decade before he recorded music. And, with considerable success: his Selected Poems 1956–1968 sold 200,000 copies, [Sylvie] Simmons reports. But still, virtually no one makes a living from their poetry, so Cohen, then living intermittently on the Greek island of Hydra, plucked a string from the lyre of the oldest Greek poet of them all, Homer, and added music to the act."
— Tom Gallagher, Los Angeles Review of Books
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Buy this book, and all of Mr. Cohen's books here...

Canadian Giants of the Twentieth Century (1) Leonard Cohen

From: The Musical Box

"A Canadian poet, Cohen became one of pop’s most unlikely heroes during the heart of the late ‘60s psychedelic movement. But his music wasn’t at all psychedelic. It was understated, fanciful, modestly stylish and somewhat distant. Cohen was (and still is) a bohemian Bob Dylan - a wordsmith that conveys an epic emotive sweep with his lyrics even though he has been bestowed with a singing voice of seemingly limited technical range. Yet like Dylan’s now-haggard wail, Cohen’s now-raspy baritone only enhances the conversational intimacies and drama of his songs." — Walter Tunis, The Musical Box
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His Novels:

This edition, published by Bantam Books, New York (1967)

Again, this edition published by Bantam Books, New York (1971)











"Cohen's writing process, as he told an interviewer in 1998, is '...like a bear stumbling into a beehive or a honey cache: I'm stumbling right into it and getting stuck, and it's delicious and it's horrible and I'm in it and it's not very graceful and it's very awkward and it's very painful and yet there's something inevitable about it.'" — Wikipedia
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Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you
She tied you to a kitchen chair
She broke your throne, and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah

From: "Hallelujah" (on Various Positions, Leonard Cohen's seventh studio album, [1984])
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