Happy Birthday Leonard Cohen!

Seventy years producing 70 factoids.

This essay elaborating the Po-Mo in Cohen links Lenny to Martin, via the former's poem Waiting for Marianne, from Flowers for Hitler:

If there is a moment in Flowers that most perfectly encapsulates or enunciates the postmodern attitude toward media and technology, toward the interpenetration of technology and the body that McLuhan forecast and that we now call "cyberpunk," it is probably the opening lines to "Waiting for Marianne": "I have lost a telephone / with your smell in it." The lines are, as is a lot of Cohen in this book, faintly carnal and at the same time sentimental in the trashiest Harlequin romance sense. But they also announce a full break with the modernist fear of media and technology (a fear which, to be sure, is mostly to be found in the high modernism of Eliot, Pound, and Klein). That fear, as Roy Miki has shown in his stunning reading of Klein's "Portrait of the Poet as Landscape" (74-75), was tied up with a Heideggerian desire to determine somehow a real Being-in-the-World. As far as Cohen's poem is concerned, Being is now as curly as a telephone cord and all of its Sadean metonyms, or at least as marginal as the "crumbs of your breath," which lugubrious synaesthesia articulates what we call the materiality of language. Being has escaped the false unity of the human body and in turn layered the telecommunicational furniture:

Did you take the telephone
knowing I'd sniff it immoderately
maybe heat up the plastic
to get all the crumbs of your breath

The absent lover being addressed here has left her material trace in the crevices of the technological instrument, an instrument that then is treated as a metonym for the Other's body.

Or, perhaps, it is just an over determined desire for Sex-on-the-Phone.  ¶ 8:35 AM