Just looking back on what mnkyface wrote a page ago: "I was idle" (no d) would make idle an adjective, no? I was idle with my soul, I was idle with going to the gym, I was idle with my housecleaning because I spend all my time on YouTube. :lol: "I was idle with" makes sense in th...

This point was made previously by Jim Devlin, in In Every Style of Passion.
I wish my great mind had been thinking like his, but I believe he gave me the idea
first. I simply forgot where it came from. Mea culpa!

In any case, thanks are due to Jim Devlin, as they so often are.

I seem fated to try (unsuccessfully) to re-open old threads... Everybody seems to be taking a view on the "giving head" line. Cohen clearly feels that he has betrayed a trust, but I'm not sure that oral sex is the main sticking-point. I hope I'm not trivialising the point of privacy in say...

My present wild unsuppported guess is that Heart with no Companion was actually played, but was left in the right-hand column through an oversight. A Singer Must Die was actually played, but either it was in any case a half-expected option, or it was removed from the right-hand column because it was...

The liner-notes for the album are obviously directly prepared by Leonard & Co. They give, next to the lyrics, a dictionary quotation defining "report" in the sense "report for duty". My unreliable memory says that it was identified specifically as a military usage, but that c...

OK, call me stupid. I don't understand the set-list!
Apologies if this is all familiar stuff to long-term
forum members. What is the significance of the
(parentheses), and of the items listed in small type
on the right?

"Baffled" sounds like Leonard Cohen when he's writing. Other stanzas (especially those which appeared later) don't follow this pattern, but here the effortless Hallelujah is the "broken" one, and the "holy" Hallelujah is a great strain. David was hardly "baffled&qu...

Currently I'm returning obsessively to The Gypsy's Wife . I don't mind being conventional! This obsession been very robust, despite powerful recent distractions, also c/o L. Cohen. I finally picked up The Book of Longing on Saturday. I'm amused to find myself typing "finally" there, even t...

Another virtual dead tree from me. I'm amused by the phrase "an official poetry device". Where is Peter Cook when we need him? I suppose what was meant was "is there a name for this figure of speech?". Yes, there is: it's "antithesis". There are sub-flavours, but that's...

Short version: where exactly do the sheet-music versions (always PVG scores, when I've noticed) of Leonard Cohen's songs come from? And who is responsible for editing his lyrics for publication, when published separately? I do not assume that the story is the same in all cases. Surely the starting-p...

"Magazine" (for bullets) is not in the original: it's "el libro muerto". The thought that it might be taken to be a bullet-holder took me so much by surprise I took a while convincing myself that it couldn't really have been meant by Cohen either. The magazine as bee, dying in fu...