'Smudging The Air' published

The book is available for order on Amazon UK, US and Europe. If anyone reads it, I'd love a comment on here or a review on Amazon. The UK link is https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1541167007/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1482338326&sr=8-1&keywords=smudging+the+air

Smudging the Air

My book - 'Smudging the Air'  about the Cohen lyrics will be available on Amazon by the end of 2016. The culmination of all the work. It will be the most comprehensive analysis of the lyrics which has ever been published.

Review of Leonard Cohen's 'You want it darker'

As an analyst of the lyrics of Leonard Cohen, I was sceptical that the new album would really live up to its gloomy title. After all, I have spent the last few years closely examining the work of the ‘godfather of gloom’. I know that his lyrics contain miserable lines like ‘your love is some dust in an old man’s cough’ and ‘they chained you to your fingernails’. But I also know that there are lots of jokes, like ‘you’ve been faithful’ but there were ‘people you just had to meet without your clothes’ and ‘all my bad reviews’. Although Cohen has been described as one of the ‘top ten great singers who can’t sing’, and admits that the four notes he can sing have got lower with time, he still refers to himself (with a giggle at live concerts) as having been ‘born with the gift of the golden voice’.

When I listened to the album, I was shocked by the unremitting pessimism of the new lyrics. It is only two years since Cohen declared in ‘You got me singing’ that ‘I’d like to carry on’ but now he says he is traveling(sic) light and leaving the table.

The album is typical of Cohen in that he sings about personal relationships, spirituality and politics, with references to music and ageing.  He continues his recent trend of writing more lyrics about spirituality. On this album, half of the lyrics are mainly about spiritual issues, with half about personal relationships, whilst over his career as a whole, around 80% of his lyrics have been mainly about relationships and only 12% about spirituality, although many more lyrics have contained spiritual references.

The spiritual lyrics contain none of the simple faith of ‘let it be your will’, but appear to be describing the end of the narrator’s faith with lines such as ‘if you are the dealer I am out of the game’ and it ‘sounded like the truth but it’s not the truth today’. ‘Steer your heart past the truth you believed in yesterday’ is followed by ‘the Mea Culpa which you’ve gradually forgot’. ‘Only one of us was real – and that was me’ is echoed in the defiant ‘tho’ there be a God or not’, describing a loss of faith in God, especially as the relationship is described in the past tense. ‘Its much too late to turn the other cheek’ sounds like a rejection of a basic tenet of Christianity, followed by a similar comment on both Christian and Jewish symbols in ‘the ruins of the altar’ and ‘the fables of Creation and the Fall’.

It is more typical for Cohen to be rejecting symbols of commerce, science and of earthly power, and on this album we have ‘the Mall’, the Palaces’ and ‘the Cosmic model’, as well as humanity who ‘die to make things cheap’. In ‘Treaty’, we hear a typical Cohen conflation of spirituality and politics. He wants to sign a treaty with you who ‘changed the water into wine’ but then he switches to the politico-military sphere with ‘I do not care who takes this bloody hill’.

The only convincing note of spiritual acceptance on the album is in the repeated ‘Hineni. I am ready, my Lord’, although ‘Lift this glass of blood, try to say the grace’ also suggests that the narrator is making a last attempt at faith.

Three of the four relationship lyrics describe the narrator either leaving a relationship or refusing to enter into it in the first place. In ‘On the Level’ the narrator walks away from an unwanted encounter, although we are not told why this is the case. ‘I’m old and I’ve had to settle for a different point of view’ can be interpreted as a reference to age and a decline in sexual desire and ability but Cohen has been making continual reference to his advancing years since 1967, when he described meeting Marianne ‘deep in the green lilac park’ – a notable metaphor for inexperienced youth. This lyric also contains contrasts – ‘I was dying to get back home and you were starting out’, ‘I said I best be moving on you said, we have all day’ - which reminded me of the conflicts in ‘Different Sides’ and ‘Slow’. It has two rare humorous lines in ‘My don’t was saying do’ and ‘a man like me don’t like to see temptation caving in’. ‘Now I’m living in this temple where they tell you what to do’ is reminiscent of the powerless narrator of ‘Tower of Song’ but has none of the humour contained there in ‘Hank Williams hasn’t answered yet’.

In ‘I’m leaving the table’ the narrator is walking away from his lover. Cohen has also  been doing this since 1967 when he released the ultimate ‘its not you, its me’ putdown in ‘Hey, that’s no way to say goodbye’. In this case, he blames his advancing years with ‘I don’t need a lover, the wretched best is tame’.

 ‘Traveling light’ is another description of the end of a relationship, the narrator describing ‘somebody who has given up on the me and you’. This narrator is in control of his destiny in a way which is unusual for Cohen, as most of his narrators are at the mercy of events and in only a handful of lyrics is he able to take charge. He makes a typical to reference to music, this time combined with a reference to his age with ‘I used to play one mean guitar’. He does eventually suggest the possibility of the road leading ‘back to you’.

‘If I didn’t have your love’ is a love song but the focus is not on the love but on the desolation of losing that love. ‘If the sun would lose its light and we lived an endless night’ is as bleak as the classic 1971 lyrics ‘Diamonds in the Mine’, ‘Avalanche’ and ‘Last Year’s Man’.

Taking the album as a whole, this is an unfamiliar Cohen who appears to have lost not only his sense of humour but his faith in humanity, in redemption and in God.

There is, of course, one other explanation for this bleakness. That Cohen is providing his own reply to the accusations of gloom and despair. Could he be mocking us with the title? ‘You want to see what really dark is like? I can show you that. So far I have been writing comedy.’ And compared with this album, that is very true. My own hope is that this is not Cohen signing out and that we have yet to experience at least one more album with the optimism of ‘You got me singing’, in which he assures us he’d ‘like to carry on’.

The book is finished!! 'Smudging the Air'. 70,000 words about the collection of work that is Leonard Cohen's lyrics. All I need now is a publisher. I really want his fans to have the opportunity to read this.

Metaphor

I'm writing the chapter on metaphor, which is quite challenging. Cohen's metaphors are obscure and I can't pick and choose because I've done the logical thing of 'every nth line' to produce 100 lines to work with. But a huge number of them contain metaphor. 'Between the sundial and the chain'?? 'Avalanche' is a lyric with no further reference to avalanches but I think I've worked that one out. 'To a teacher' is bothering me at the moment. I've really settled back after a busy Easter (all the cakes turned out well and were in demand) and I'm making progress.

We also had a day out at Beamish with Dinosaur, who refused to sleep all day because of the excitement of all the activity - vintage cars, trams, steam tractors and a small farm. At least we delivered him back safe and exhausted - like we were.

I mentioned a while ago that I'd moved on from my Old Faithful hairdresser. The new salon has a lot of different stylists who keep leaving, so I've had four so far. Today I had the salon owner (New Star) at a reduced price because someone left suddenly. He was brilliant - I haven't had my hair cut so attentively since the 70s, when I was young and vain. OK, so now I'm old and vain. We didn't talk about holidays. Just hair and layers and maintenance for a whole hour. And I've got the sort of sharp(ish) cut I didn't think my hair was capable of. I suppose the real test is tomorrow when I attempt it myself.

Music

I'm getting on with the Cohen book now. I'm working on the chapter about musical references in the lyrics. Around a quarter of the lyrics have some reference to music, song or dance and I'm describing them all and arranging them in groups. The word count is slowly building.

Still loving the new kitchen - its brilliant to have new appliances. The old ones were definitely showing their age.
We've had a couple of nights out recently - High Kings at the Lowry for St Patrick's night and La Traviata at a local cinema (ENO broadcast) - excellent and so cheap and convenient.

63 chasing 80

I did some real writing of the book today. And then I looked at Facebook. And Leonard Cohen is about to release a new album. Just when I've incorporated Popular Problems. I can't cope with any more!! He's 80 and I'm only 63 and I can't keep up.

New direction

I gave up on trying to write a paper for a journal. Their referencing scheme is different from the one I used in my MA and they require extra detail, like page numbers. And the university library has now, understandably, taken away my online access. So that's it. Sometimes its the final hoop when you realise 'this is not that important and I don't want to do it'.

It reminds me of when I was at work. I really enjoyed Information Security, which is an extremely challenging area. But a lot of the work around it did not interest me and I never understand why it was not done by people who were interested. I'm talking about budgets and targets and management strategy (which was always overturned by people higher up in the organisation). I think specialists should be just left to work on their core expertise. That's how the organisation gets the most out of them.

But I've done a bit more on the book - at least I can write that the way I want to write it. Distractions around the house are overwhelming me at the moment and I have written nothing today.

Back on the job

The kitchen is finished (except for the roller blind) and its everything we hoped. It is light and bright and we love the handleless cabinets everyone said we would regret. The fitters were pleasant and all the work is excellent. TSH had another moment when he decided to sand the ceiling and there was dust everywhere and he was not Popular. But that is now all in the past.

I'm back at work on the lyrics of Cohen. I have a workplan, with time-table. The first job is to prepare a paper which I am hoping to submit to 'Journal of Popular Music'. The first problem is Popular . (sorry about the puns - Cohen's latest album is called Popular Problems). So all the numerical data from the dissertation is now outdated. I have started reworking it all and although all the numbers have changed, the conclusions are not affected as far as I can tell at the moment. Phew!!

Reasons

I have written a little more of the part of the book concerned with the power balance in the lyrics. Basically, it is hardly ever with the narrator, who perceives himself to be at the beck and call of lovers, rivals and political and military opponents.

I've also started modifying the dissertation to produce a suitable article for submitting to a journal.

But today ....... Apart from having to carry all the washing up upstairs to deal with it in the bathroom. And carrying drinking water downstairs all the time. We have always had an open dustbin in the kitchen. Sounds dreadful but it means it has large capacity and its totally hands free. And we empty it often, so no smells from the rubbish and no smells from the lid or other parts of the closed bin. But TSH thought (note past tense) that we should have a smart stainless steel bin to match the new kitchen. I said then that I wanted no part in the inevitable cleaning out when bits ended up in the bin or on its lid. It worked for the first week. But today I discovered that most of the rubbish was in the bin rather than the bin bag. So I had to scoop it out into the bag - wearing rubber gloves, of course. And in the process, the bin came apart and we had breadcrumbs and worse on the dining room floor. So I carried the bin upstairs to wash it under the shower but en route it came apart further so there was a trail of crumbs everywhere. And there were bits of ham trimmings in the bath. TSH hoovered the bits. And we are having a new open bin. From Ikea.

After the fitter left for the day, TSH continued his sterling task of trying to paint the new ceiling before the kitchen is finished. When he started this a few days ago, he was working by torchlight because there were no ceiling lights. But now there are ceiling lights so it boded well. Meanwhile, I said I would prepare dinner in the dining room using the microwave as an oven. Never really done this before. And then lights went off and TSH (and me too) was plunged into darkness. This happened a few times until I realised that the circuit in the dining room wasn't adequate for a cooker. So the food all had to be done in microwave mode, which was not what was intended.

Did Shakespeare and Wordsworth have these issues? I have a 'room  of my own' but no kitchen and sometimes no electricity. Come to think of it, they didn't have electricity either. I'm in the footsteps of the great!!!

I'm back

I didn't manage 5,000 words but I got up to 4,500 so not bad for a holiday!!

I haven't been here for a while because I have not been able to progress the book at all. When we returned from the Amazon cruise, it was straight into 'prepare for Christmas' and our visitors and then 'clear up after Christmas'. And then it was time to make final preparations for the new kitchen installation. Right now, we have no kitchen. There's a microwave and a kettle in the dining room and we wash up in the bathroom. Its tough but we'll get used to it.

I'm hoping this is not just some kind of displacement activity to stop me making the effort. I think not because I'm still really interested and I have done a lot of work already. And I'm determined not to 'fill my day' like old retired women are supposed to. I was a student and now I'm a writer and I will finish this book. Restarted today - keeps my mind off the kitchen without a ceiling.

Nails done. Clothes ready. Holiday to be blogged here http://fromthesilversea.blogspot.co.uk/ starting in a couple of days.

I haven't written anything all week but its all on my trusty USB and I intend to try for 5,000 words on 'Power in the lyrics of LC' before I return in three weeks time.

Metaphor

In the euphoria about getting the MA, I still managed to start some work on Cohen's use of metaphor. It's difficult to do this one methodically. I started by taking every 50th line of the lyrics, which gave me 90 lines. Almost one third of them contain creative metaphor, which seems high but I have not compared it with anything else - I could use the comparison corpus from the other popular songs.
TSH was out today and I constructed our new shoe storage unit. Millions of pieces and no instructions. But I mostly managed it - good job I'm a Chartered Engineer (in IT, so it didn't really help much) - but was nine connecting pieces short. When TSH came home, he said I had connected it wrongly and he's going to redo it. Don't you just hate it when that happens?

Bake Off

Last week, I produced around 2,000 words. If they are all good and I keep up the pace, I will be finished in a year. But no work on Sunday because of Christmas cake and Bakewell tart baking. Having watched Great British Bake Off, I am becoming very conscious of not producing a professional finish. My food always tastes good but Paul would be horrified at the appearance.

A few hundred words about the meaning of the lyrics on Monday. My nail varnish is still good after almost two weeks.

Some progress

I managed to write a few hundred words yesterday - focus on the way Cohen uses pronouns so its not clear who everybody is. Have listened to the new album again - still  love it.

Our Tai Chi class has been closed, which is concerning because its important for our health. And we have friends we only ever see there, so we'll never see them again. It was inevitable this would happen because numbers were dwindling but we never expected at the end of a class to be told there would be no more classes. So do we join another one? Or just give up, as I have not enjoyed the classes for years and found them more and more stressful. But TSH wants to go. And its a health thing.

We'll be glad when we get a new kitchen, as the dishwasher is giving more and more problems.

Baking Christmas cake this weekend.

First Ink

I have started to write the chapter on 'who is everybody?' and have written a few hundred words about the narrator. Whilst I don't think the writing will be too difficult as I have lots of material, the discipline involved (without the deadlines associated with a course) will be tremendous. Even at 1,000 words EVERY week, it will take almost two years to get to book length.

Yesterday I went to a reunion of the women from my year at Bury Convent Grammar School (now Holy Cross College). Everybody is still lively and getting a lot out of life.

Today British Gas are in residence, fitting our new boiler. They are mostly in the kitchen but also need access to all radiators, the tank in the loft and the airing cupboard. They seem very nice, polite and considerate.

Big day today - new Cohen album - listened to it once - a triumph!!

Regrouping

Studentat60  isn't a student anymore, so for the first time since retirement 10 years ago, there is no schedule. Time has been used setting up a new mobile phone contract (it really is that complicated for me. I now have an O2 PAYG bundle, arranged by a charming man in the Retentions department at O2). We are also planning a new kitchen, which is even more complicated. Cupboards, appliances, worktops, tiles, taps, radiators, lights ........... All to be selected.

I still work but now as a writer rather than a student. So this blog will now cover the transition. The first set of analysis on all the Cohen lyrics is complete and the plan is to start putting ink on paper tomorrow. Today I am booked in for a manicure.

The examiner's meeting is on October 17th. So soon  after that I will find out if studentat60 is an MA.

Some progress

I have started to develop spreadsheets for the lyrics in 'Songs from a Room' - Cohen's second album, from 1969. I suppose that seems like ancient history to some people. I am looking at the pronouns - who is speaking? who is he speaking to? who is he speaking about? Cohen often mixes up these roles - he speaks as if about a third party and then it becomes apparent he means himself.

Yesterday we went to a party at Dinosaur's other grand-parents. He was very well behaved and charmed everybody. And I got sunburnt. On a cool day in Yorkshire. Probably no-one else present had this issue - I really do have very sensitive skin. So today its Aftersun every few hours.

Two triumphs

The dissertation is nearly finished. This is the closest its been and I feel a tremendous sense of relief.  In theory, it could be handed in because all the relevant parts are now there. But I've sent the discussion chapter to S, so gloom may follow.

And I've passed Level 185 of Farm Heroes Saga. This is the most difficult level ever and I've been doing it for about a month. Unprecedented for me. And I did it today with 3 stars!! I have a sneaking suspicion that 'they' realised the level was impossible and have changed the way it works during the time I have been playing it. If you are as addicted as I am, you get a 'feel' for how a level 'plays' and I think it changed a few days ago. I wonder if that happens?

And my leg is almost back to normal.

Great day!! Prosecco on the terrace with TSH tonight, as the weather is warm and sunny.

Getting there

I have revised large parts of the dissertation and put the Table and Figure headings in, which starts to make it look very organised. I am currently working on sorting out the references, which aren't that many. I have kept reasonable records but there are still things that need checking.

I have lost all connection between what I'm doing and analysing Cohen's language. A lot of the joy has gone because I am useless at writing it up in the right style. And I always used to be praised for my business reports. And I'm a linguistics student! What has happened to me?

I am feeling very old because of my leg. I can do stairs one step at a time and I now have a limp. I can't have my daily walk, which is really important for fitness and I am dubious about ever going back to Tai Chi because it puts a strain on the knees if not done perfectly. And I'm far from perfect!

But tonight I'm having glitter on my feet because we are going to a party on Saturday and I might wear my silver sandals. Still haven't chosen the outfit.