I thought that Leonard Cohen had been brilliant to come up with images that I recognized and welcomed but that never would have crossed my feeble mind on it's own. I thought that he was brighter than you and me (especially you.) Now I'm not so sure.

Friday night my options and uncertain plans to possibly see Orillia Folk Society's Erin Benjanin concert were thwarted by radio announcements that highway 400 was closed because of police actions - whatever that meant. Instead I visited two bookstores and listened to Sheila Fung and friends sing with her guitar seriously out of tune at the Newmarket Corner Coffee House. In one of the bookstores I bought Ira B. Nadel's various Positions, A Life of Leonard Cohen.

The beautifully hardcovered book was deeply discounted, maybe remaindered. I'm not sure if defective books are technically remaindered books. Most of Canada will be remaindered soon. The major combatant in Canada's book-wars may have shot himself in the testicles, so to speak. After demanding a 50% discount on book to fill a bunch of big bookstores that he build with stock investors' money, he is returning millions upon millions of dollars worth of books to Canadian publishers.

I read about this in McLean's Magazine between Sheila's sets and then went to one of his Chapter's bookstores and bought a cheap copy of the Cohen book. (Jim had a few magazines at the back of the coffee shop behind the coffee bar.) The clear plastic wrap on the book that I quickly threw in the garbage was folded backwards so the bookstore had marked down the price.

To me, Cohen's bird on the wire was always one of those brilliant images. I don't know about you but I've seen birds on wires. I though nothing much of them. Cohen hit me with that image.

Reading the book, it turns out that Cohen wrote, first for a set number of hours each day, then for a minimum of three pages per day. When it flowed, he wrote many more pages. He bought a house on the Greek Island of Hydra before the island had electricity. When the Greeks put up poles and wires, he noticed that the birds quickly came to the wires.

Although it's still a wonderful image, I think that if you or I had the resolve to write at least three pages a day and someone put up poles and wire while we were staring out the window instead of staring at the blank page, we too might have come up with something interesting. If we just wrote three pages a day wouldn't we come up with wonderful images. Not Cohen's images but interesting ones of our own. I'm a procrastinator though. I just haven't got around to admitting it on that other thread. How about you?

The second image in the song was about drunks leaving the Hydra bars late at night singing harmony. If we'd heard them sing and had better work habits, what would we have written? Something brilliant?

A later section talked about his teeny poem:

Marita Please find me I am almost 30

Another brilliant piece that kept me in awe of Cohen's brain until the book explained. Marita was an attractive brunette from Manitoba who once dismissed Cohen's advances with, "Go on your way young man and come back when you're thirty. "

Many beautiful women have rejected me. If only I'd had the presence of mind to keep notes. Like, there was the time I asked a tall beautiful woman to dance at a tavern on Yonge Street. Being short, bordering on dwarf if you believe that liar Little Hawk, I've been attracted to tall women who might make me feel warm protected. The tall beautiful woman in the tavern laughed in my face and said, "No but I'll dance with your friend." It didn't help that one of my friend's favourite expressions was, "I don't like the one that you're getting." Another time… hey, I better grab a notebook.