Author: wlm3

The Con: You Can Fool a Whole Lot of People a Lot of the Time

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snake-oil

Last Tuesday, lots of low information voters stood in the relatively short lines where white people vote and cast their ballots for Donald Trump because they’re sick of Washington DC and wanted to take a sledge-hammer to the status quo.

These people are unaware that not much got done in Washington under Obama (except for saving the economy and adding 20 million to the ranks of the insured) because the Republican Congress thwarted his every move. Mitch McConnell infamously announced right from the get-go, i.e. right after Obama’s first inauguration, that his goal was to make sure that Obama would be a one-term president.

Well, these low info whites are going to get their way now because things are about to get done in Washington – the Affordable Care Act will be repealed, massive tax cuts signed into law, environmental protections gutted, banks deregulated – sis-boom-bah!

Perhaps because Trump’s gruff plain speech echoed their thoughts and expressed their prejudices, they figured he would give a shit about them and get those factories humming again, but, of course, all Donald Trump cares about is Donald Trump, and certainly his polices aren’t going to help those disaffected Michiganders and Ohioans; indeed, they’ll make their lives even less lavish. No doubt, these pissed off citizens don’t know that Trump literally defecates in gold-plated toilets. They couldn’t see that he’s the great-great grandson of the charlatan who sold their great-great grandfathers that snake oil.

Trey Lott and the lobbyists, on the other hand, will do right well as deficits rise like volcanoes, necessitating drastic cuts in non-military spending in subsequent years. The real irony, though, is that after the election, it’s not Republican Party that is, to quote Matthew Yglesias, “a smoldering heap,” but the Democratic Party instead.

Although Abe Lincoln’s famous statement, “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time,” might very well be true, it’s also true that you can “fool a whole lot of people a lot of the time — over and over again.”

Who’s It Gonna Be, America: Ted Nugent or Bruce Springsteen?

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** FILE ** In this Nov. 5, 2008 file photo, Bruce Springsteen plays his guitar in New York. On Wednesday, Feb. 4 , 2009 Springsteen said he was furious with Ticketmaster calling its selling practices a “conflict of interest” after complaints that the vendor was redirecting fans to a more expensive ticket seller owned by the company. (AP Photo/Stuart Ramson, file) NY128

As I write this at 8:07 EST on Election Day of 2016, I feel obligated to throw out a couple of clichés, for we couldn’t really exist without clichés.  Without clichés, we’d have to be always original, which would exhaust us, and I’m pretty much always exhausted anyway.

Cliché #1: “This is the most important election in our lifetime.”

You hear this cliché every election, even during the 2012 presidential election, which featured two very rational Christians with opposing economic views, who, by the way, had both ushered through a program to provide healthcare to their constituencies.

This election, on the other hand, pits two very different people against one another, one, a rationalist, the other, a megalomaniacal Exposed Nerve of Spasmodic Resentment.

So this time around, the cliché is valid: this is the most important election in our lifetimes.

For whatever reason, many people tend to despise Hillary Clinton.  Part of this antipathy, I think, is the product of a long history of [cliché alert] hatchet jobs perpetrated by the Far Right, which dredged up the White Water non-scandal, accused her of murdering Vince Foster, and now of being funded by the same people who bankroll ISIS. If you keep hearing over and over accusations of misconduct, you eventually come to believe that a person accused of so many misdeeds must be dishonest.

Plus, her being an uppity woman doesn’t help

Of course, it’s not as if Clinton doesn’t possess flaws.  She’s calculating (viz. the Iran war vote) and can pay fast and loose with the facts, as we’ve seen with the private email server; however, when it comes to mendacity, ain’t no politician I’ve ever encountered can [cliché alert] hold a candle to Donald J Trump.  Here’s a handy link in case you doubt it.

What terrifies me most about Trump is his disdain for democratic institutions.  According to the New York Times, he’s contemplating creating a Super Pac to fund entities dedicated to avenge people who opposed him during this election. In other words, he’s assembling an enemies’ list. If he were to be in charge of the executive branch, and Republicans controlled both houses of Congress, he would be in position to actually make his radical ideas reality by building a wall, deporting millions, establishing a religious test for immigrants.  I can see him embracing rogue agents of the FBI and colluding with Putin, emulating him by ruling our Republic as if he were a mafia don, in other words, turning the US into a thugrocacy.

Cliché #2:  Today’s election is the only poll that matters/turnout will determine the outcome.

Well, duh.

So here are the choices.

  1. Stay home reading the collected poems of Ezra Pound.
  1. Embrace self-sanctity and vote for Jill Stein. As you watch the Dow plummet with Trump’s election and your retirement savings [cliché alert] go up in smoke, at least you can go to sleep at night knowing you were true to your ideology.
  1. Vote for Gary Johnson. Ditto the Dow and your retirement savings.  So what if he thinks Aleppo is subgenre of Jamaican ska,  wants to abolish the fed, favors banning student loans and allowing people on no-fly lists to keep their assault weapons!
  1. Emulate Ted Nugent and vote for Donald J Trump.
  1. Emulate Bruce Springsteen and vote for Hillary R Clinton.
  1. Emigrate to Costa Rica, Ireland, Portugal, etc.

One last cliché:  The choice, fellow Americans, is yours.

In Addition to a Wall, He’ll Also Build Gulags

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poster-edges-benito-trump
I’ve resigned myself to a Trump victory and the subsequent dismantling of our democracy, have been relentlessly seeking a corrupt apothecary willing to sell me some suicide pills to swallow after the conclusion of my show trial and subsequent sentencing.

After the inauguration, I suspect that one of Trump’s first acts will be an executive order calling for the construction of hundreds of gulags, and he’ll award the contracts to Trump Inc. (creating thousands of jobs!).

Lefty bloggers like I-and-I will be forced to don baggy gray prisoner garb and compelled to spend our days performing backbreaking manual labor. We’re talking deep dystopia, fellow doomsters, a shitshow world that will make Orwell’s Eurasia look like a Club Med resort in Capri.

So while the getting’s still good, I thought I’d take advantage of my First Amendment right of freedom of speech and for one last time mock Trump and his minions.

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[cue Pete Seeger] Where Has All the Irony Gone?

In the Age of Irony, how is it possible for Trump to have triumphed?  In a land where every late night host is as sardonic as Jonathan Swift, the nation has turned to a despot whose sense of irony robust as Lenin’s corpse.

It’s mind boggling.

Dig this: Just yesterday, in her thick immigrant accent [cough, cough], mechanically looking back and forth from teleprompter to teleprompter as if she were watching a ping pong match in super slo-mo, Melania Trump spoke out against cyber bullying – CYBER BULLYING!

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/240462265680289792?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

And also yesterday, the Emperor of Orange announced

“I think I have the best temperament or certainly one of the best temperaments of anybody that’s ever run for the office of president. Ever. Because I have a winning temperament. I know how to win.”

And here’s Kellyanne Faustina Conway, who swapped her soul for book royalties.  Certainly, if she were to write a truthful account of the inner workings of the Trump campaign, she would find herself alongside Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell in one of those above-mentioned gulags.

No sense of irony here:

And then the Trump supporters themselves, impervious to irony:  Hillary’s dishonest; you can’t trust her.

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Seth Meyers.

 

Hey, Seth.  I know this corrupt apothecary you might want to contact

trump4cur55

A Life of Quiet Desperation vs. a Life of Not-So-Quiet Desperation

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Last Sunday evening, right before sunset, after taking a little something for my nerves, I left the island to run an errand. It was a beautiful autumnal day, the sun hanging above the expanse of marsh bordering the Atlantic.

On the way home, as I took a left from Secessionville Road onto Folly, someone in a Wonder Woman costume, her cape flapping behind her, scampered across the six lanes of the highway in a foolish superheroinic[1] feat of derring-do.

She had just left a roadside bar called the Barrel, which no doubt had some pre-Halloween shenanigans going down. Encountering Wonder Woman was sort of a surreal sight, and I thought to myself I could see me doing that when I was young, running across a six-lane highway like a fool.

I then refocused on that suspended but sinking sun and decided to try not to think.

That didn’t last long, a deep breath or two. I was going against traffic, tooling past the long line of vehicles inching home from the beach. I considered the occupants in their little bubbles of being, feeling, no doubt, a little down, their weekends just about kaput.

How melancholy, I thought, that most of us squander our precious moments jumping from idea to idea, like Johnny Weissmuller swinging from vine to vine, thrashing through the years like jungle trees in a Tarzan movie. It brought to mind Thoreau’s smug observation that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” and I reckoned it was true – at least here in Late Empire America in the Age of Polarization.

It occurred to me that when I was young, I lived a life of not-so-quiet desperation. I was, to quote the James Dickey poem “Cherrylog Road,” wild to be wreckage forever. I got in trouble in high school and later college, risked my and others’ lives driving recklessly for laughs, offered loudly unsolicited provocative opinions, mocked those I considered uncool, blasted music in the wee hours. Yet, despite my Marxian mania (think Harpo, Groucho, not Karl), I was essentially unhappy, if not depressed, profoundly pessimistic, a lost soul.

Despite my hitchhiking, death rudely did not stop for me,. I survived, married a good woman, mellowed somewhat – or maybe more than somewhat – and am finding the wreckage I sought through the wear and tear of time’s decay.

So, on my way home, I was going the state-proscribed 35 miles and hour, slowing to 30 as I rolled onto Center Street, Folly’s main drag, no place for old men, the young in one another’s arms – strike that – the young staring down at their devices hooking up via Tinder.

On Hudson, I drove even slower, taking in the jumble of eclectic houses – the shacks, that two- story brick Italian-looking place with balconies, that tilted green-shingled house that juts at an angle so close to the road, those tiny twin remodeled rental cottages, the collection of cars crowding the shoulder, the last boy in the skateboard park putting off as long as he dared going home where his unpacked bookbag lay just where he had flung it Friday.

I thought of my wife upstairs in the house now coming into view. Forty tears ago this week we kissed for the first time on the night Carter defeated Ford. Perhaps she was preparing our supper, clanging cutlery, her head covered by a scarf or perhaps nakedly bald, or perhaps she was sitting on the sofa with her computer in her lap in the right now that is the only time anyone ever has.

 

[1] Okay, OED scholars, this is superheroinic’s debut in our language. Def: possessing the qualities of a superheroine, not some strong ass opiate.

 

What to Avoid

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Gas Station Sushi

DCIM100GOPRO

Mixing Bleach with Ammonia

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The Collected Poems of Joyce Kilmer

Excerpted example:

Monsignore,

I have never before troubled you with a request.

The saints whose ears I chiefly worry with my pleas

are the most exquisite and maternal Brigid,

Gallant Saint Stephen, who puts fire in my blood,

And your brother bishop, my patron,

The generous and jovial Saint Nicholas of Bari.

 

Using the nominative case correctly in dialogue

 ‘It is I, Bugsy Malone, whom you shall never nab, dirty copper.”

Ranting about how the police need to be defunded at a family reunion in Pickens, SC.

redneck-pickens

 

Purple Jesus

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Barry Manilow cover bands

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Barry Manilow

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Polka Hawaiian Jazz Fusion

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Russian Trustafarians

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Handfeeding Wobbly Foxes

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Hitchhiking In Compton wearing a Confederate flag emblazoned tee shirt

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Waste of time blog posts on beautiful October afternoons

What’s in a Name? – Letters, Sounds, and Associations

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You know Juliet’s famous question and answer:

What’s in a name? that which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet.

True, it would, but on the other hand, if a rose went by the name ort[1], it might not seem to smell as sweet – you purchase a dozen red orts for your love; life is certainly no bed of orts; may I introduce you to my fiancée, Ortmarie?

Because I’m so attuned to the auditory essences of words, it sometimes surprises the combination of sounds parents choose when naming their newborns.

Take the name Michaela Loeb Krawcheck, for example.

Although Michaela’s a lovely name and Michaela Krawcheck’s okay, the first and last names don’t meld well the the spondaic middle name Loeb. It’s too much of a mouthful. Plus, your tongue has to go on a rollercoaster ride up and down the palate to spit it out.

No doubt Loeb is a family name, and homage is being paid.  Here’s an alternative: Lila Loeb Krawcheck.  Or ditch the Loeb and go Americana with Michaela Lou Krawcheck, or if that’s too low rent for your taste, Michaela Louise Krawcheck.  If my last name were Krawcheck, I might go all out with Michaela Loquacia Krawcheck, copping a rhyme with the twin trisyllabic first and second names.

Now, you’re talking.

However, most people are more visual than auditory, and of course, most names have origins, which people may be interested in karmically copping, e.g., Lucas = light-giving, as in lucent (or Lucifer).

adam-naming-the-aimals

Here’s a small sampling of newborn names that are trending in 2016.  First, let’s check out female names cited by the website baby center.

Romance is on the rise:  Amelia, Olivia, Gabriella, Ariana, and Camila are hot names for newborn girls in ’16.  Very Shakespearean.

What I call soap opera names, gender-neutral surnames, remain popular. Among them Addison, Brooklyn, Peyton, and Sydney.  These names suggest old money, whether there’s any or not.

One last trend features rather old-fashioned names like Sadie, Ruby, and Hazel, which is interesting because my grandmother was named Hazel, and she had two sisters, Ruby and Pearl.  No Sapphires, however. I certainly hope girls who receive these names are blessed with beauty.  A homely Hazel or sadsack Sadie might be better off as an Addison or a Brroklyn.

Okay.  What’s happening on the Y-chromosome side of the ledger.

Switching to the mom 365 website, we find they actually have the boys’ names ranked according to popularity.  Here’s the top ten: Noah, Liam, Mason, Michael, Elijah, Jacob, Ethan, James, Aiden, Benjamin.

What in the world are Michael, Jacob, James, and Benjamin doing in there?  I know some Mikes, Jims, Jakes, and Bens, though I suspect that none of these names will be shortened if the school where I teach is any indicator.  Michaels are not rare there, but you’ll never encounter a Mike under 30.

Of all the names I ran across in my cursory research, the hot trending name that most caught my eye was Jagger.  It sounds cool.  It conjures cavorting Mick.  But, like I say, make sure it goes well with the other names.  John Jagger Jones sounds a lot better than Jagger Tate Garbowski.

Oh yeah, here are a few names not trending in 2016:

Jezebel

Lucretia

Ellie Mae

Hulga

Adolph

Ebenezer

Esau

Onan

nvbqtf

[1] Actually, ort is the Anglo-Saxon word for table scrap.

Doddering Hippies, Tattooed Millennials, and New Born Babes

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shark-close-up

Five years ago when I was a younger whippersnapper in my late fifties, for Fall Break, Judy Birdsong and I rented a house in Saluda, North Carolina. That was the weekend when the brilliant South Carolina running back Marcus Lattimore blew out his LCS, a seeming disaster that had me rending my garments and sending bootless cries to deaf heaven. Given the travails we’ve faced in the last two years, the sorrow I suffered over Lattimore’s not–anywhere-close-to-life-threatening injury seems a colossal waste of my precious time and a lesson in the importance of perspective.

The very next weekend, our hometown, the City of Folly Beach, celebrated Follypalooza, one of the frequent offseason festivals when the authorities close off vehicular traffic on Center Street. Follypalooza provides an opportunity for local businesses in the offseason to replenish their depleted coffers as daytrippers promenade up and down the boulevard drinking beer, purchasing sidewalk prepared food, and listening to various bands playing jazz or rock from strategically placed makeshift stages.

band-full

In the week between the visit to Saluda and the celebration of Follypalooza 2011, I had written this rather unkind comparison of the two resort communities:

Saluda’s affect – if you can use that word to describe a town – is the complete opposite of Folly’s tawdrylite.  Saluda is your great aunt Christina, once a formidable beauty, now a graceful matron, whereas Folly is your second cousin Brandi who sports a giant Minnie Mouse tat on her shoulder and way-too-short cutoff jeans that slice into her thighs.

However, we wouldn’t want it any other way. As my late mother used to say, “It takes all kinds to make the world/Variety is the spice of life.”  So during halftime of the South Carolina UMass game yesterday, a glorious, crisp, sun-splashed Day of Saturn, my spiritual advisor James T Crow and I walked the six blocks from our homes to Center Street to check out the festivities.

headed up Huron to Center Street

headed up Huron to Center Street

One unfortunate change from the Follypalooza of five years ago is that to imbibe on the street, you have to purchase a wristband ($2), which means standing in yet another line. The nice, chatty first grade teacher in charge joked about not feeling compelled to have me extract my wallet to provide proof that my date of birth was sometime before 22 October 1995.

waiting in line

waiting in line

As I stood in line, Jim rustled up some barbecue, and we met at the Jack of Cups where we had a front row seat for the bucking shark ride.

outside the Jack of Cups

outside the Jack of Cups

Yes, there were a few young kids, a sprinkling of teens, a fair share of tattooed millennials; however, the vast majority of sybarites were old enough to have AARP cards in their wallets, and I witnessed – and what a sad sight it was – doddering hippies, you know men with shoulder length white hair, dressed in tie-dyed t-shirts, wobbling along at a slug’s pace.

old-hippies

My mind wandered off to the nursing home of my future, and I pictured myself among wizened hippies trading stories about how in college they drove halfway across the continent to Mardi Gras while tripping on windowpane acid. “Don’t trust anyone over thirty” was once their dearest slogan, but as Ulysses once said to Achilles, “Time hath, me Lord, a wallet at his back wherein he puts alms to oblivion.”

Yet as Jim and I were preparing to leave, with these melancholy thoughts darkening my day, I bumped into a former student and her mother, a former colleague, pushing in a stroller their son/grandson “Prince Henry.”

prince-henry

Prince Henry

Ah yes! Let’s focus on the positive, not the negative. Let’s quit wasting our precious time lamenting the rightful inevitabilities of existence and enjoy the bright sun, the crisp autumn day, the deep blue sky.

Go Gamecocks.

Blitzkrieg Report Card Comment Seminar

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taamann_jacob_when_teachers_back_is_turned

One of my least favorite activities as a teacher is writing report card comments. It used to be worse, though. In my former incarnation as Department Chair, I actually had to read every comment each Upper School teacher wrote to ensure that some slip of the finger, unwanted auto correction, or careless cutting and pasting didn’t send the wrong message:

Harold’s prose feces[1] strong verb selection, but he needs to vary sentence structure. Looking ahead, in preparation for the research papers due November 1st, she should make sure to update her working biography as she adds new sources.

Remember how in the lower grades, you’d pack your book reports with unnecessary prepositional phrases to jack up the word count? Well, some teachers lard their comments with detailed synopses of the course curriculum. Sure, it fills up space but fails to provide any insight into how adept young Anastasia is in synthesizing the various components that led to the Russian Revolution. As a parent, I found these descriptions of the courses’ content boring and skipped down to see how sons Ned and Harrison were handling the material, which reminds me of my favorite report card comment ever.

In the 6th grade, my younger son Ned had taken Jesus for his Spanish name. His end of the year report card started with this not very promising topic sentence: “I’m so disappointed in Jesus.” [2]

Anyhow, here’s my method. First, I break down their averages into components:

Daily 58 Essays 84 Tests 60 Independent Reading 90[3]

A parent should infer from this information that young Livingston hasn’t been doing his homework. Ideally, the parent would understand the correlation of Livingston’s not doing his homework with his paltry test average. On the other hand, he’s not a bad writer.

Here’s what I might write below the averages on Livingston’s report card:

Livingston needs to make sure that he reads each of his homework assignments slowly and carefully. He should consider, not only the content of the pieces, but also the authors’ techniques.

Livingston’s writing is solid, though he relies too heavily on linking verbs and occasionally mistakes phrases and subordinate clauses for sentences. I encourage him to proofread his essays backwards, i.e., the last sentence first, the second to last sentence second, etc. This method slows students down and helps them to focus on each individual sentence.

Although the administration would probably prefer that I end the comment with something positive like “Livingston is very bright, and I encourage him to cultivate his native talents,” I generally don’t.  I’m a busy man.  I’ve demonstrated I’m very familiar with their son’s work (or lack thereof) and provided  practical suggestions (which of course I’ve already mentioned to Livingston in person several times).

Donald Trump was up this morning at 3 a.m. tweeting. Maybe I could farm out some comments to him.

Lazy Livingston can’t be bothered to read his assignments. He keeps this up and he’ll be flunking out of mediocre UMass next year. That is, if he  gets in. Pathetic!

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[1] A very unfortunate auto correction of the intended “features.”

[2] Which brings to mind a stanza from the Ezra Pound poem “Ballad of the Goodly Frere”:

When they came wi’ a host to take Our Man

His smile was good to see,

“First let these go!” quo’ our Goodly Fere,

“Or I’ll see ye damned,” says he. (my emphasis)

[3] Which would result in a 75 for the quarter.

The Pea Brains of the South

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51kdl6fwrhl-_sx326_bo1204203200_Ladies, gentlemen, bulldogs, and babies, I’d like to introduce you to Henry Heppleworth, a product of the brilliant comic imagination of my expat pal, Charlie Geer, author of Outbound: The Curious Secession of Latter-Day Charleston.  Do yourself a favor and cop a copy here.

Charlie and his wife Concha, who live in Andalusia, Spain, visited Judy and me last summer during an extended stay in Charleston, and I passed along to Charlie a copy of WJ Cash’s The Mind of the South, a fascinating, intuitive study of that section of our great nation that Winston Churchill called “a minstrel show wrapped in an episode of Hee Haw inside of a Euripidean tragedy.”

Yesterday Charlie sent me a link featuring Henry with this message:

[The clip is] Heavily inspired by The Mind of the South, for which I thank you dearly. The clip started out as satire, but is starting to feel like tragedy [. . .] The original script was much more nuanced, but alas, there’s not much room for nuance on YouTube. Hopefully future installments will redeem Henry in some way, once he understands he’s been used and abused by the people he votes for.

So without further ado, dig it:

 

mind-of-the-south

Leonard Cohen’s Saunter into ‘That Good Night’

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I first heard Leonard Cohen in David Williams’s black pick-up truck, and it was the very first time I had seen a cassette deck. As far as I knew, 8-tracks were still the only way to listen to recorded music in a moving vehicle. I think Robin Kellam was with us. I think we were driving north on Highway 61. But one thing I do remember for sure: it was the song “So Long, Marianne” that snatched my attention.

 

 

The female back-up singer in the chorus struck me as deliciously retro bordering on clunky, and then there was that gypsy vibe, those exotic Middle Eastern instruments[1] and the lush religious imagery. In the David Remnick profile that appears in this week’s New Yorker, Cohen describes the audience he sought to reach: “inner directed adolescents, lovers in all degrees of anguish, disappointed Platonists, pornography peepers, hair-handed monks and Popists.”

In other words, Keatsian/Yeatsian romantics like I-and-I.

I lit a thin green candle

to make you jealous of me,

but the room just filled up with mosquitos.

They heard my body was free.

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Yes, I was a romantic back in those days but thankfully not of incurable variety. By the time I was out of college, Cohen had begun to bore me a little (and still does). Even his former lover Joni Mitchell dismisses his as “a boudoir poet.”

Bores me except for the occasional killer composition like “Tower of Song” and “First We Take Manhattan,” which I heard Warren Zevon cover explosively at the old Music Farm on East Bay Street.

They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom

For trying to change the system from within

I’m coming now, I’m coming to reward them

First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin

However, what do I know? Here’s Remnick quoting Dylan:

I asked Dylan whether he preferred Cohen’s later work, so colored with intimations of the end. “I like all of Leonard’s songs, early or late,” he said. “” ‘Going Home,’ ‘Show Me the Place,’ ‘The Darkness.’ These are all great songs, deep and truthful as ever and multidimensional, surprisingly melodic, and they make you think and feel. I like some of his later songs even better than his early ones. Yet, there’s a simplicity to his early ones that I like, too.”

Speaking of the end, when Cohen learned his former lover and muse Marianne Ihlen, the Marianne of the song, was dying, he sent her this email:

Well Marianne it’s come to this time when we are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon. Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine.

I’ve always loved you for your beauty and your wisdom, but I don’t need to say anything more because you know all that… Goodbye old friend. Endless love, see you down the road.”

Leonard Cohen at home, Los Angeles, September, 2016. PHOTOGRAPH BY GRAEME MITCHELL FOR THE NEW YORKER

Leonard Cohen at home, Los Angeles, September, 2016.
PHOTOGRAPH BY GRAEME MITCHELL FOR THE NEW YORKER

One night you’re barreling up Highway 61, and the next thing you know you’re an old man getting your house in order.

It’s clear from Remnick’s article that Cohen wasn’t joking in his email to Marianne. He’s “not long for this world.”

Again Remnick quoting Cohen:

“I’ve got some work to do.  Take care of business.  I am ready to die.  I hope it’s not too uncomfortable.  That’s about it for me.”

Let’s cue up some Yeats, one of Cohen’s boyhood heroes:

The death of friends, or death
Of every brilliant eye
That made a catch in the breath—
Seem but the clouds of the sky
When the horizon fades,
Or a bird’s sleepy cry
Among the deepening shades.

Whatever else you can say about Cohen, you cannot deny this: he is, in the phrase of my dear friend Jim Klein, “a cat.”

[1] Played, by the way, by David Lindley