~Makera
Let's talk about A Life of Errands
.hello : ) well my cat's ears felt warm this weekend....lizzytysh wrote:Dear jpx ~When I saw your avatar, I thought, "That looks like a "real" [your, as opposed to selected from a page of avatars] cat. Then, when I read your post, I decided I might as well ask. Is that a picture of your own beloved cat?
yeppers, that's a real cat, the real mccoy. the cutest kitten i have personally gotten to know. : ) aww... she makes me glow inside just thinking about here. and there are plenty of pictures which you can find with a link that i put in my profile.
my cat's name is marianne ... : ) although i didn't sit down and try and name her after a leonard cohen song. i was looking for a name and i asked my friend what would be a good name for a grey tabby cat, and she said marianne ... and of course marianne is the perfect name ... she even looks like a marianne, i think, as much as a cat can. anyways. yes. she is my baby.
and i want to say too that it's nice to be finding a bit of a voice on this board here. i am a regular on another messageboard which is going through its death throes right now.... if you ever want to see "i missed you since this place got wrecked by the winds of change and the weeds of sex" exemplified, that's the message board you can visit... it's interesting actually, a bit of a social experiment gone nuts. it's tough to find an online place to call home! but this board seems pretty nice, and i hope we'll see more of each other in the future.
leonard cohen. i think he once said that a person either could write pop tunes and fodder for one-hit wonders, or they could write songs that women sing down by the river doing the washing. i love techno like i love leonard cohen's music.... but recently i was fiddling with a guitar and i found a can remember all the leonard cohen songs i used to fingerpick so many years ago. and if the world were to be plunged into blackness, there would be no techno nor radio and no pop charts and no auto-tuners to correct the pitch of 'singers' like brittney speares... but i would still be able to sing leonard cohen. so that's made me listen to all his songs and records again and it's strange that i can get so many different things out of them at this point in my life, different than when i was younger.
anyways ... good to meet all of you : ) and talk to you again soon ....
Thanks, jpx......After I asked my question, Vesuvius-Cat informed us of your link. I went to visit it and got started, but the big ones were taking a huge amount of time. I'll revisit from work, where everything is faster. Wonderful photos, what I've seen so far .
What a delightful surprize for you to find that you could still play them
! Excellent point on Leonard's songs. With the 3-chord phenomena, I guess I should pick up a guitar myself, on the same basis. In today's world, who's to say what could happen 
. What fun to learn to play and sing my favourites, rather than simply singing along.
I'm glad you like it here. We've been talking about cats while you were gone . Come back often 
.
Love,
Lizzy
.What a delightful surprize for you to find that you could still play them
! Excellent point on Leonard's songs. With the 3-chord phenomena, I guess I should pick up a guitar myself, on the same basis. In today's world, who's to say what could happen . What fun to learn to play and sing my favourites, rather than simply singing along.I'm glad you like it here. We've been talking about cats while you were gone
. Come back often .Love,
Lizzy
Hi Lizzytysh,
My only thoughts on the poem are that it is a light-hearted one. Perhaps even tongue in cheek! It doesn't seem gloomy. I am not sure about the sunglasses and what they mean. I think it was a real incident in his life. I wonder how our Leonard would have ended the poem if he had not "found" the sunglasses in the lost and found. And why did he say: "No sir, I am not lying" ??? Would the poem change in meaning if he had written: "Yes sir, I am telling the truth" 
My only thoughts on the poem are that it is a light-hearted one.
Perhaps even tongue in cheek! It doesn't seem gloomy. I am not sure about the sunglasses and what they mean. I think it was a real incident in his life. I wonder how our Leonard would have ended the poem if he had not "found" the sunglasses in the lost and found. And why did he say: "No sir, I am not lying" ??? Would the poem change in meaning if he had written: "Yes sir, I am telling the truth" the last lines stick out for me too.Coco wrote:I am not sure about the sunglasses and what they mean. I think it was a real incident in his life. I wonder how our Leonard would have ended the poem if he had not "found" the sunglasses in the lost and found.
certainly the meaning of the poem would change if the last line changed from "No sir," to "Yes sir". the poem would lose it's nice symmetry, firstly : "yes sir, these are the very gold-rimmed pair... no sir, i am not lying." and the poem has a particular feel, ending the way that it does. the truthfulness of the speaker was called into question -- he is responding to someone who questioned his ability to remember, who insinuated that old people lose it slightly as they age. "i'm telling the truth" wouldn't give that feel : i insist all the time that i'm telling the truth ... to my boss, to friends when i telling them about things i know "because it's on the internet"... when i am writing in messageboard threads
... but i insist on my truthfulness without them having called my mental faculties into question. it's different for my brainpower to be questionned and for me to have to defend myself. my dad was without a job for a few days a number of years back, lost in corporate limbo as his job was downsized and as the ingrate company he worked for tried to find him a new position. he went downtown during the days, went shopping and tried to fill his time. i clearly remember him saying : holy cow, i never realized how differently people treat you if you are not wearing a suit. servers in restaurants, security guards, clerks ... people treat an executive in a suit and tie with palpably more respect than they treat some 40-something nobody in a sweatshirt and runners, he said. and i think if my dad ever had to defend himself to the world, it was probably when he was suitless, jobless, shaken in his self-worth and feeling more cast off than when he was uniformed and powerful. that's the meaning of the final lines of the poem for me : to grow old, to lose your youthful ability to command respect, to suddenly be questionned in a world where you no longer make a splash.
Thanks for sharing your touching and real-life, anecdotal information that lends support to your own interpretation of Leonard's lines, jpx. It sounds like it was [duly] pretty shocking for your Dad to suddenly and unexpectedly glean this other perspective, that so many of us have to look forward to. Should we perhaps be holding on to that still-fitting suit, to wear when we go out to conduct business, or merely for pleasure, so we'll get the respect we truly deserve?
Love,
Lizzy
Love,
Lizzy
Yes, this is very interesting-- how you are treated when you are perceived to be without much status. Several years ago my dear friend lost his job as a college professor and took a temporary job as a cake delivery boy,delivering enormous, thousand-dollar French wedding cakes for society weddings. Since he slammed them around in the back of a van, the icing often got cracked and so I went along to carry the spatula we used to patch them. On our pleasant drives around the countryside to country clubs, and in the city to even posher clubs, we of course went in the service entrances, as directed by the aristocratic butlers. It was very instructive. We were totally invisible to the people swishing around getting ready for the ceremony. The plus side was a very matey atmosphere in the back halls and kitchens and, best of all, tips, which you don’t get for teaching, no matter how lovely your lesson. However, I think the best result of this experience was realizing none of it mattered. You are who you are regardless of what others think, and you find nice people in every walk of life. And if the wedding cake gets banged up a bit, well, that’s why you have your spatula! There is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in. My friend is now professoring again but he often talks nostalgically about our days in the cake delivery business.
"I didn't go to the funeral of poetry. I stayed home and watched it on television." Karl Shapiro