[september 5, 2004 - america, you head's too big because america, your belly's too big. and i love you i just wish you'd stay where you is]i'm back from olomouc. it was great. i have made quite a number of notes and i'll post them the next days. but right now i'm enjoying a lazy indian summer sunday evening with x. so here are - as a visual teaser - a couple of images from our trip! you can see: bernd (my colleague); tom (the tom waits of anglo-american history studies); aneta (from greece); bob (from olomouc: organizer of the conference); jana (bernd's friend from olomouc); me
[click on the images to see the larger picture]
| the road to the university. in the background the tops of olomouc cathedral: | the conference room where the lectures took place: | bernd lost in thoughts: two beers or not two beers? | bernd and tom: |
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| aneta and me: | bob: | tom during his talk: | jana: |
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| bernd in his famous t-shirt: | aneta during her talk: | bob organizing: | no comment: |
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| bernd and bob: | on the last evening: | me at 6 in the morning shortly before the taxi took us to the train station: | |
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[september 6, 2004 -okay, here are the "entries" from last week that i wrote in olomouc:
[august 28, 2004 – you're name's in the news, everything's first class...]hi there, this is directly from olomouc! we've arrived at 9:30 pm and the rooms are fine and the journey was pleasant. bernd and i flew from cologne to praha (the flight was okay. it was the second time only that i've been flying in my life :o)) and then we went to praha central station where we stored our luggage and then went to the city center to do some 45 minutes sightseeing (we walked over the charles-bridge which was crowded with tourists) and then headed back to the station again to meet aneta from greece and tom from kassel who were going to olomouc as well. the four of us went on a train and we had a three and a half hour trip to olomouc. which was nice because both aneta and tom are really nice and down to earth persons and we had a pleasant conversation.
now it's 9:30 and we're going out now to have dinner and some beer :o). i've stored six joni mitchell mp3s on the ibook to have something familiar around me. also x. gave me her lucky stone this morning. unfortunately i don't have any internet connection so i can only upload this when i'm back home in cologne. boy – i'm really hungry now!
we're accommodated in two small apartments: each of us has a single room and two of us share a bad. bernd and tom are in one apartment, aneta and i in the other.
[later]it's 2:30. we've just come back from the pub. had a pizza and then some czech beer which was very tasty. bernd got pretty drunk :o) we met bob, the organizer of the conference who basically is a sort of weird graduate student who's very nice but, well, durchgeknallt eben. he is responsible for the organization, but contentwise he is not interested in the conference at all: "that's all fucking academic stuff, man, that's fucking boring, man!" at the pub they first played the entire radiohead ok computer and then some of cohen's the future and ten new songs, which was nice. wish i could call x. now. missing her.
[august 29, 2004 – i dreamed of 747s over geometric farms...]it was a rather disquiet night. there was a dorm party somewhere and they played nena-songs until five in the morning. it's 11 in the morning now, the weather is beautiful and we're going to have breakfast now and then we can basically just use the day for hanging out and sightseeing. there will be a reception tonight and tomorrow morning the talks will start.
later: maybe i should tell you a little bit about the conference. it's a colloquium on american studies held in olomouc, a czech town in the middle of nowhere. the conference is rather small: there are only twelve speakers, most of them are here regularly and everybody knows everybody. the town itself is beautiful: restored, old houses, cobblestone streets, everything seems to come right out of the 18th century (or even before that time). there's no much going on right now, though: it's the semester holidays and all the students have left and now the town is basically empty. i wish x. was here. my heart is heavy with the thought of her.
later: it's 1:30, aneta and i have just returned from the city center, the others are still going on having beer and drinking schnaps. but then i was just too tired and also i was drunk enough already. more beer would simply have been too much. the reception was sort of formal and uncomfortable: everybody was standing around, holding a glass of white wine and trying to be nice and polite. there were even two people from the american embassy. and there was this one guy from poland whom i didn't like on first sight. everybody else was sort of friendly and nice and warm-hearted and uncompetitive except in drinking. we went to a pub after the reception ;o) i cannot tell you how much i'm missing x. and i wish there was a way to tell her now. we'll have to get up tomorrow at 8 so i rather go to bed now. sleep well!
[august 30, 2004 – heart and humor and humility will lighten up your heavy load]monday morning – yaaawn! whish i could get more sleep! we won't even be having some kind of breakfast, we will hurry right into the sessions now. it's 8:30 and the weather is beautiful: sunny and warm, occasional clouds, ligh wind, cricktes clicking in the ferns. bernd offered me a sample of his axe anti hang over shower gel which i used this morning. does it work? well, we'll see.
most people seems really nice yesterday night. some are strange, but nice. except for this one guy from poland. i think the technical term that martin would use for him is 'pretentious dickweed'. i'm really, really missing x. today we will have two talks: one on cooper's indians and the other on – i've forgotten... and after that there will be a guided tour through the city.
[august 31, 2004 – i heard of a saint who had loved you, so i studied all night in his school]6:52. it's done. the talk went well: the laptop worked, i was nervous but not too nervous to talk, the discussion was lively and friendly. even tough i was scarred out of my pants all day long. i felt a sense of gratification when i stepped away from the podium. although there's a difference in giving a talk and doing a gig where people are standing in front of the stage, singing along to the songs because they know the lyrics by heart and then are shouting for an encore.
but now it's done and we're going to have something to eat. i wish i could talk to x. now. i'm missing her voice. and her smell. and the tickling sensation of her hair on my face. her lucky stone helped!
bernd had his talk about "the great gatsby and curt cobain" this morning and it went well, too. he had to give a keynote address: one hour long. it was pretty good! you could sense the thomas influence! he started rather innocently and then he was slowly working facts into arguments, using puns and rhetorical/theoretical concepts, relating the lost generation to generation x to the figure of the chiasm, to the lacanian lack etc. really good! tom has not really finished his keynote yet :o) he's been working on it the last couple of nights even. he's on on thursday morning and aneta in the afternoon.
it's good to be forced to talk in english. i'm still very insecure actually speaking english, but i feel that it is gradually improving.
boy, i'm glad it's over!
[september 2, 2004 – i'll bind some poems to my shoes so that when i look down while walking i think of you and beauty and perfection and derangement]
jesus
christ! i'm sitting in a talk that doesn't seem to end. the guy is going
on and on and on!!!! bernd is sitting next to me and he's almost falling
asleep. tom and aneta had their talks today. tom talked about the american
artist remington and aneta was giving a paper on post 9/11 patriotic hollywood
movies. both talks went very well and now we're sweating through the last
two talks of the conference. tomorrow's off and on saturday morning we're
leaving for home. bernd has really lost his heart in olomouc. he's been
at the conference 6 or 7 times i guess and spent several of his holidays
here. he even plans to buy a small house in the czech republic. that's
one of the reasons why he has started to learn the language. but also for
nostalgic reasons, i guess. because a lot of children's tv series that
were shown on television when he was young (yes, they already had television
sets back then!) were produced in the czech republic and a very famous
cartoon character from the german series "die sendung mit der maus" is
czech: the little mole. here in his home country the character is called
"krtek". which is nice, because it sounds like the czech version of "critic"
and bernd has the plan to get a t-shirt done for him that states: "no 1
literary krtek!"
later. next talk. the final one. tom is such a "coole sau"! the speaker opened his talk with a rhetorical question: "who has read a good newspaper article on political decision making recently?" and tom raised his hand and said: "i have" which of course screwed up the opening of the guy's talk. anyway, this is really a unique conference. when tom was giving his lecture this morning he had the lyrics to the folk song "home on the range" projected onto the wall and somebody from the audience asked what the melody to it was like. and suddenly the whole audience started to sing the song. so the atmosphere is really relaxed and friendly.
when we arrived, bernd, aneta and i walked down the main street when a large, bald man crossed the sidewalk so i said "finzsch" since he looked like prof. f. from cologne, and since then we're doing a kind of finzsch count. which is so surprisingly high that bernd suggested to rename the country in the finzsch republic.
[september 9, 2004 - i've pulled my self clean inside, i've pulled myself clean outside]it's 23:18, i'm dead tired. spent all day in the office, working on you know what. finished ondaatje and scobie. tomorrow's hutcheon's turn. yeah, right: whatever! x. is out with a friend so i have had a quiet evening. watched "manhattan" when i got home. what a great film. princess superstar is in france with her prince, thomas is still in l.a., achim and nina are writing on their final thesis. got a glass of ice cold diet coke in front of me (can't beat the feeling!) and pj harvey's "horses" on repeat. the other day i discovered a song on a compilation that cedric had given me a year ago. wolfgang muthspiel's "emotions on a lazy day". great melody. listened to it all day long in the office. you know, most of the songs that cedric gives me have a kind of delay built in. hearing them for the first time they don't seem to click. and then, months later, i suddenly realize how awesome the tracks are.
i got in a terrible rage about our secretary this week because, well, because she's simply incompetent. first of all she's never there, she comes and leaves as she pleases. the last month she simply vanished from one day to the next, took four weeks of holidays without telling anybody that she'd be gone or where we could contact her. she simply left a note on her door that she'd be gone for four weeks. and since thomas is in l.a., somebody has to take care of the mail and the forms that have to be signed and deadlines of the exam-office that have to be met. but she didn't care or told anybody of the department which tasks would have to be done during her absence. and now that she's back she's messing up the accounts and the money we have for hiring students and for ordering books. it's all a mess. how she could ever become a secretary is beyond my understanding or imagination. she does not even know how to open attachments of emails!!!
anyway, i have to get some sleep now. it'll be another long day tomorrow. sigh.
[september 13, 2004 - another day will make it clear / why your stars should guide us here]quiet evening, almost nine o'clock and it's already completely dark outside. actually x. wanted to come over tonight, but she did some workout in her fitness club today and now she can't move anymore. it's a pity because i had bought milka noisette chocolate for her only. seems like i have to eat it on my own now. spent all day in the office. did not really manage to write very much, only three or four paragraphs, summarizing articles on cohen. it's frightening: in the bibliography of every article i find there are two more essays that i do not know yet. when i first started i thought that research on cohen was very limited but now it seems as if there's just tons of stuff out there.
achim sent me parts of his final thesis and he asked me about my opinion, so i spent yesterday reading his thoughts on automata/robots and androids in american literature: and i liked it very much! he'll send more chapters on gibson the coming days. he has to hand in the paper on friday morning and he hasn't finished writing yet. what else? the princess mailed from france: she's enjoying herself. bernd and i will have a date with a professor who is associated with the dfg, the german funding group who might (if we are lucky) give us some money for the materialities network. which i haven't really told you about, have i?
next semester i'm doing a seminar called "the wonderful world of literary theory" - and i have got two people who have registered already. just to give you some context: other colleagues already have 20 or 25 students registered. so i think it will be a very intense course. it's on wednesdays, 5 to 7 pm - which nobody really likes - and then of course everybody thinks that the topic sucks...
[later]going to bed now. during the past weeks i really felt like: "yeah! let's do this book on cohen!" unfortunately it needs so much time. i'm so slow thinking and reading and writing. complaints complaints complaints. hope i will finish the passage on hutcheon tomorrow! keep your fingers crossed!
[september 14, 2004]it's ten to five. sitting in the office. i'm hungry and tired. roamed through the library today, wrote a little on hutcheon. i wish i could do the paper only by enumerating quotations. they say so much. they are just perfect. no need to say more.
"The obsession with bodily apertures and sexual organs in the work of Cohen [...] leads to recurring images of eating, drinking, defecating, and various forms of sexual encounters..." (Hutcheon, 31)beautiful light: the afternoon sun is shining through the office windows and the shadow of the shades paint strange geometrical patterns onto the floor. i think autumn is my favorite season. wish you were here now. wish i could sing. time to go on working..."It eats. It shits. It fucks" (D&G, 3)
"Print is a minor form of invisibility. I think that if you really get good, then you do disappear..." (Cohen, 1966)"The aim, the finality of writing? Still way beyond a woman-becoming, a Negro-becoming, an animal-becoming, etc., beyond a minority-becoming, there is the final enterprise of the becoming-imperceptible." (Deleuze, 1977)
[september 15, 2004 - you're wet around the edges / you're tired of swimming up stream]when i came home from the office this evening i took the mp3 player, uploaded the songs from "sophia" - a band i absolutely don't know anything about. bernd gave the cd to me - and i went long distance running in the park. well, actually it's more like not-so-long-distance running. or probably even more like short distance running. oh well, dear reader, let's not get carried away by mere semantic details! so, i've got this round that's about 15 to 20 minutes long. but hey, it gets me sweating. so i crossed the street and entered the park that starts across the street from where i live and i switched on the music and it was like slowly letting myself glide into a bathtub full of warm, scented water. a loop of sampled drums starts (and i will be cured crosswise if these ain't the opening drums of cohen's "my secret life") and then the most beautiful mix of acoustic guitar, quiet bass and low keyboard starts. beautiful chord pattern: simple but effective, you can hear every move of the fingers on the frets. and in this very short moment i realize that i don't want to run, i don't want to rest, i don't want to write or teach or lecture: all i want to do is write stupid, simple, predictable folk-pop songs. now: more terrific backing voices and violins.
helge schneider's cat is dead. the one he wrote "katzeklo" for. it fell out of a window. it was over 13 years old. "life will go on" helge commented.
[september 18, 2004 - the moment i wake up before i put on my make up i say a little prayer for you]
it's
a beautiful indian summer saturday. rather quiet, all the kids that are
living in the house are playing on the street. the sun is hanging unusually
low and bright in the sky. we woke up in x.' apartment this morning because
we were at a party of friends of her who live nearby yesterday night. unfortunately
x. has to work today, so she left the house at ten and i got up as well
and did the dishes and wiped the corridor, then i drove home and wiped
the corridor in my house and then cleaned the windows and the bathroom
and did some shopping and gathered the thrash and - you know - just spent
the day doing typical saturday work. then i went jogging and now i'm going
to fix myself something to eat. tonight we will meet with princess superstar
who has returned from her vacation this week. we'll meet at a new place
nearby which is quite nice: it's cool but not too hip. you know, in cologne
you sometimes have this places that are so hip that they're full of 'fatzkes'
(sorry, there's no equivalent word in english). maybe i'll take a couple
of photos and share them with you.
achim has finished and handed in his exam paper. finally! he really had trouble with it right until the end. not because there was actually be something wrong with i but because he thought that it was all just bullshit, which of course, is stupid. i tried to help him, however, by proofreading the manuscript and suggesting a few changes.
on wednesday bernd and i met a woman from the university's administration who is the one in charge of filing applications to get funding from the dfg. so we asked her about those network-projects and what kind of application we would need and how we should write it and - hell! - we knew more about it than she! all she could tell us was that we would have to put up an exact financial plan. basically the network project is an association of various scientists who meet and organize a conference or two that addresses a certain topic. the dfg will give you the money to pay for the trips and for the organization of the conferences. so bernd and i are planning to do a network on 'materialities'. we already have gathered 14 scientists from germany, the states, greece and slovenia and if we're lucky and the application gets accepted we will start organizing conferences and publishing a book.
when i switched on the tv this afternoon i saw blaine's ex-boyfriend on the screen. he is a make-up artist and he was hosting a before/after show and it made me think about somebody and i was wondering whether cedric and tara still have contact with her and i was wondering whether i really wanted to know this at all. and then i thought about how happy i am concerning the development of that part of my life that one usually labels 'matters of the heart' and i thought about all the things that have happened since then, all the big - and i do mean BIG changes! - moving to cologne, my change of style, my change of life even, all those 200 lurkers songs, my new relationship, the 'material' paradigm shift that thomas introduced, the starting of my serious work on the dissertation. and how much i was missing x. and how i would love to listen to "trial 2 / prison" from glass' einstein on the beach with her.
my birthday is approaching. i thought about what to do, or more specifically: to party or not to party? unfortunately the date is the week-end before the semester starts, so actually i should be preparing the seminar instead of preparing a party. hm, i don't know yet. thought about my birthday in the coming year. i think for a present people will attend a concert. i will rent a small pub and play a 1 hour set of 200 lurkers song and the present will be, that all my friends will have to come and listen. and clap obediently. that would be rather nice, really!
[september 19, 2004 - I could while away the hours / Conferrin' with the flowers / Consultin' with the rain / And my head, I'd be scratchin' / While my thoughts were busy hatchin' / If I only had a brain...]
it's
sunday afternoon, two o'clock, and i'm sitting in the office. x. has to
work and at home i would only be glued to the tv so i decided to spent
the afternoon in the office, doing something useful - exactly what this
would be i still have to figure out. you know, there is this great website
with leonard cohen tv and radio interviews that i still need to put on
cd. also, i found a recording of cohen reading from beautiful losers which
i also have to burn. so maybe i'll just do this. unfortunately my chapter
on 'cohen research' has reACHED A KIND OF DEAD END: 8sorry, i hit
the capitals key by mistake...) i finished the parts about the monographs
and now i have to figure out how to proceed. what kind of order and structure
i will follow. which is not easy because i have reviews, conference proceedings,
mentionings in thematic studies, articles from various volumes and articles
from journals, biographies, films and sources on the internet.
dreamt weird stuff but can't remember what exactly. i think i'm going to drive home again. my back hurts, i'm all verspannt, tensed. the holidays have really been too short - i didn't manage to do all the stuff i wanted to. in the meantime four people have put their names on the list for "the wonderful world of literary theory" so i think there's no possibility anymore to cancel the seminar because there are not enough students.
[september 25, 2004 - pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!]
it's
saturday, 16:22 and i'm sitting in the office. did some bibliographical
research for the last two hours for an .-article that thomas has been sending:
a 33 pages long review of zizek's book on deleuze. it's all quiet in the
university: not a soul's around. there's not much to report. i've been
working pretty much from monday to today, from morning to evening. and
yet i'm only on page 16 :o( i don't know. seems like it'll take a loooong
time to complete the study. good news: achim has got a straight a in his
exam paper. i've asked thomas to order something from the tekakwitha web-page:
a medal which will make a great key fob.
anyway, just to give you an impression of what i'm currently doing, here's the bibliography as it is so far. it's not complete yet, but this is the plan for the chapter on the research on cohen: as a general introduction i will point to the mass of books in which cohen is mentioned as a part of the canadian literary canon, then i'll start with the monographs, say something about the thematic studies, followed by an overview over articles in books and journals. then i'll mention the most important reviews and then the three volumes of proceedings. this is followed by a short paragraph on the biographies and films. right now i'm working on the passage about dennis lee's "savage fields". it's a critifictional essay which deals with the dichotomy of the natural and the cultural and comes very close to the initial question of materiality in cohen's texts that i want to ask as well.
Monographs:
Ondaatje, Michael. Leonard Cohen. Canadian Writers No. 5. Toronto:
McClelland and Stewart, 1970.
Scobie, Stephen. Leonard Cohen. Studies in Canadian Literature. Vancouver:
Douglas and McIntyre, 1978.
Hutcheon, Linda. Leonard Cohen and His Works. Toronto: ECW Press, 1990.
Thematic Studies:
Fiedler, Leslie A. The Return of the Vanishing American. New York:
Stein and Day, 1968.
Jones, D.G. Butterfly on Rock: A Study of Themes and Images in Canadian
Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970.
Frye, Northrop. The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination.
Toronto: Anansi, 1971.
Atwood, Margaret. Survival: A Thematic Guide To Canadian Literature.
Toronto: Anansi, 1972.
Morley, Patricia A. The Immoral Moralists: Hugh MacLennan and Leonard
Cohen. Toronto: Clarke, Irwin & Company, 1972.
Davey, Frank. From Here to There: A Guide to English-Canadian Literature
since 1960. Erin, Porcepic, 1974.
Lee, Dennis. Savage Fields: An Essay in Literature and Cosmology. Toronto:
Anansi, 1977.
Mandel, Eli. Another Time. Three Solitudes: Contemporary Literary Criticism
in Canada. Erin: Press Porcepic, 1977.
Hutcheon, Linda. Narcissitic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox.
1980. London: Methuen, 1985.
Riedel, Walter E. Das literarische Kanadabild: Eine Studie zur Rezeption
kanadischer Literatur in deutscher Übersetzung. Bonn: Bouvier, 1980.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century
Art Forms. London, New York: Methuen, 1985.
Hutcheon, Linda. The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary English-Canadian
Fiction. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Hutcheon, Linda. Splitting Images: Contemporary Canadian Ironies. Toronto:
Oxford University Press, 1991.
Söderlind, Sylvia. Margin/Alias: Language and Colonization in
Canadian and Quebecois Fiction. Toronto: Univeristy of Toronto Press, 1991.
Deer, Glenn. Postmodern Canadian Fiction and the Rhetoric of Authority.
Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1994.
Siemerling, Winfried. Discoveries of the Other: Alterity in the Work
of Leonard Cohen, Hubert Aquin, Michael Ondaatje, and Nicole Brossard.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994.
Nonnekes, Paul. Three Moments of Love in Leonard Cohen and Bruce Cockburn.
Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2001.
Articles:
Smith, Rowland J. Introduction. The Favourite Game. By Leonard Cohen.
Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1970. np.
Geddes, Gary and Phyllis Bruce, eds. "Leonard Cohen." 15 Canadian Poets.
Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1970. 272-274.
Venster, Dagmar de. "Leoanrd Cohen's Women." Mother Was Not a Person.
Ed. Margret Andersen. Montreal: Black Rose, 1972. 96-97.
Macri, F.M. "Beautiful Losers and the Canadian Experience." The Journal
of Commonwealth Literature7.1 (1973): 88-96.
Wayman, Tom. "Cohen's Women." Canadian Literature / Litterature Canadienne60
(1974): 89-93.
Hutcheon, Linda. "Beautiful Losers: All the Polarities." Canadian Literature59
(1974): 42-56.
Monkman, Leslie. "Beautiful Losers: Mohawk Myth and Jesuit Legend."Journal
of Canadian Fiction3.3 (1974): 57-59.
Chaffin, Tom. "Conversations from a Room." Canadian Forum 63.731 (1983):
7-11.
Powe, B.W. "Leonard Cohen: The Endless Confessions of a Lady's Man."
A Climate Charged: Essays on Canadian Writers. Oakville: Mosaic Press,
1984. 117-129.
Noris, Ken. "'Healing Itself the Moment it is Condemned': Cohen's Death
of a Lady's Man." Canadian Poetry 20 (1987): 51-60.
Scobie, Stephen. "Leonard Cohen, Phyllis Webb, and the End(s) of Modernism."
Canadian Canons: Essays in Literary Value. Ed. Robert Lecker. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1991.
Siemerling, Winfried. "Historical Alterity and the Revenge of Names
in Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers." Historiographic Metafiction in Modern
American and Canadian Literature. Eds. Bernd Engler and Kurt Müller.
Paderborn: Schöningh, 1994. 411-433.
Volkmann, Laurenz. "'Flowers for Hitler': Leonard Cohen's Holocaust
Poetry in the Context of Jewish and Jewish-Canadian Literature." Refractions
of Germany in Canadian Literature and Culture. Eds. Heinz Antor, Sylvia
Brown, John Considine and Klaus Stierstorfer. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2003.
Reviews:
Gnarowski, Michael. Leonard Cohen: The Artist and His Critics. Critical
Views on Canadian Writers. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1976.
"First Instalment." Rev. of The Favourite Gameby Leonard Cohen.Times
Literary Supplement18 Sept. 1970.
"Automatively Erotic." Rev. of Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen. Times
Literary Supplement23 Apr. 1970. 445.
Proceedings:
Dyck, E.F., ed. The Proceedings of the Leonard Cohen Conference. Spec.
issue ofCanadian Poetry33 (1993).
Fournier, Michael and Ken Norris. Take this Waltz: A Celebration of
Leonard Cohen. Ste. Anne de Bellevue, Quebec: The Muses' Company, 1994.
Scobie, Stephen, ed. Leonard Cohen Issue. Spec. issue of Essays on
Canadian Writing 69 (1999).
Biographies:
Dorman, Loranne and Clive Rawlins. Leonard Cohen: Prophet of the Heart.
London: Omnibus Press 1990.
Nadel, Ira Bruce. Leonard Cohen: A Life in Art. ECW Press, 1994.
Nadel, Ira Bruce. Various Positions: a Life of Leonard Cohen. New York:
Pantheon Books, 1996.
Films:
Ladies and Gentlemen...Mr. Leonard Cohen. Directed by Donald Brittain
and Don Owen. 1965. DVD. National Film Board of Canada, 2000.
"Poen." Words by Leonard Cohen from Beautiful Losers. Directed and
edited by Josef Reeve. National Film Board of Canada, 1967. OnLadies and
Gentlemen... Mr. Leonard Cohen.
"Angel." Directed and written by Derek May. Produced by Guy Glover.
National Film Board of Canada, 1966. On Ladies and Gentlemen... Mr. Leonard
Cohen.
Various Mentionings:
New, W.H. A History of Canadian Literature. London: Macmillan, 1989.
Keith, W.J. Canadian Literature in English. London: Longman, 1985.
Klinck, Carl F., (ed). Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature
in English. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965.
Sutherland, Ronald. Second Image: Comparative Studies in Quebec/Canadian
Literature. Toronto: New Press, 1971.
Waterston, Elizabeth. Survey: A Short History of Canadian Literature.
Toronto: Methuen, 1973.
Kamboureli, Smaron. Scandalous Bodies. Diasporic Literature in English
Canada. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Reid, Malcolm. The Shouting Signpainters: A Literary and Political
Account of Quebec Revolutionary Nationalism. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart,
1972.
Sutherland, Ronald. The New Hero: Essays in Comparative Quebec/Canadian
Literature. Toronto: Macmillan, 1977.
MacLulich, T.D. Between Europe & America: The Canadian Tradition
in Fiction. Toronto: ECW Press, 1988.
Vautier, Marie. New World Myth. Postmodernism and Postcolonialism in
Canadian Fiction. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1998.
Cluett, Robert. Canadian Literary Prose.: A Preliminary Stylistic Atlas.
Toronto: ECW Press, 1990.
Duffy, Dennis. Sounding the Iceberg: An Essay on Canadian Historical
Novels.Toronto: ECW Press, 1986.
Staines, David (ed). The Canadian Imagination: Dimensions of a Literary
Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977.
that's the plan. as i've said: i'm page 16. and to be quite honest: i have no fucking idea how to write the entire book in a year's time. also, there are more depressing news. well, not really depressing , but tiresome. the publication of the hollow earth book is more complicated than assumed. fortunately the princess and nina are working on it now, but they are pretty desperate because there are various, contradictory style sheets they have to deal with. also nina found out that cd-roms are no scientific publications before the law, which means that actually we have to get the permission to reprint every single image on the cd. which is impossible both in terms of organization and in terms of money. then i still have to convince bernd that we just cannot apply for organizing one of the network conferences in harvard, as he would like to. i don't see that the dfg will ever give the ok for this. which might endanger the entire project. unfortunately i suggested: let's ask thomas what he thinks. and thomas said: try harvard. which is neither a smart thing to do nor a very diplomatic thing to do. still have to discuss this with bernd.
though about celebrating my birthday. it's so soon! i don't feel like giving a big party (because it's shortly before the semester will start and i don't really feel like having any spare time on my hands anyway) so maybe it'll be just a couple of people.
[september 28, 2004 - if you walk out on me i'm walking after you!]
hi
there. it's tuesday night. busy day. extracted over six pages of quotes
from dennis lee's savage fields. it's brilliant: he's sort of describing
the exact state of post-structuralist quarrel with the material and the
real in his own terms because he is totally ignorant, unaware and uninformed
by critical theory. which is not really surprising, because he wrote the
essay in 1977 and at that time french theory was probably not really a
popular thing at canadian campuses or in literary circles. mind you: lee
is a poet himself. anyway, his essay is a great point of departure and
one can knit deleuze perfectly at the loose ends of his book. my feet hurt.
i went jogging on sunday and yesterday and today and actually i need new
running shoes. i also need new t-shirts. and underwear. and a pullover.
and a jeans. or two. and new winter boots. and this is why i'm going shopping
with the princess tomorrow. which will probably end in fights over a pair
of pants that cost 120 euros (which i am not willing to pay for ANY pair
of pants under any circumstances -- even if they were suzanne vega's!!!!)
the bad thing is that i don't really have the financial cushion to go shopping
with a clear conscience. so here's another desperate plea: SEND MONEY!!!!
the network turns out to be a nightmare project. we're getting different information from different official places and it seems like it'll all be much more complicated than planned. we have to compose a detailed financial plan, and in the course of that there are more and more logistical problems piling up. fuck! today blaine gave me the new kd lang cd on which she's covering two joni mitchell songs and two tracks by leonard cohen. all four versions are, well, unspectacular. the cohen songs are "hallelujah" and "bird on a wire". AH, and YES! important news :o) achim has shaved off his beard. he lost a bet with his girlfriend concerning the grade of his final exam thesis. thomas keeps sending conflicting information about style sheets and bibliographical references (in the meantime the hollow earth has been renamed by the princess and nina into the horror earth). i have to compile a bibliography for an article that thomas is in the process of writing about zizek's organs without bodies. so he has sent me the article and inserted little fun tasks for me to do like finding out the publisher of a book by n. katherine hayles. however he doesn't really tell me which of her 173 books he means.
[september 29, 2004 - does the body rule the mind or does the mind rule the body? i don't know...]woke up, checked my mail: zizek returned. had to find out references for a quote by deleuze on page 118. that was basically it. didn't have any idea from which book the quote was. sigh. went shopping with the princess. and we were pretty successful. i have two new jeans now, two t-shirts, one long shirt, underwear and socks. and it wasn't even as expensive as when the two of us bought clothes for me last year. but - as last year - she first dragged me into shops in which a pair of pants was 180 euros.
went to the office then and read an article which brought me down: beautiful losers discussed in deleuzian terms. okay, it's only making references to some obvious connections (such as desiring machines etc) and not to the theme of materiality, but still. it brought me down. i had the illusion that applying deleuze would be something new and exclusive. i'm a little disappointed now. and tired. because it's 20:39 already. x. will come by ever moment straight from work. tara can't come to the little birthday get together next week :o(
i seriously need three weeks of holidays.