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This morning I listened to CBC's Writers & Company -- an interview with British author Samantha Harvey, whose newest novel, Dear Thief, sprouted from Leonard Cohen's song "Famous Blue Raincoat." I went back and forth beween interest and annoyance that Harvey had changed the genders -- made the protagonist and the rival female, the beloved male. There's nothing objectively wrong with this; subjectively, it moves the story out of my zone of preoccupation into someone else's territory.

(Puts Jennifer Warnes' cover of FBR on)

FBR seems emblematic of that preoccupation in Cohen's earlier writing with not only the beloved but also the rival -- the admired, superior, even also beloved and desired rival (see Beautiful Losers). Maybe it's born in the family romance; wanting both to love the father and to defeat him. [ETA] In Cohen this love seems to be a kind of submission, a desire to be subsumed, to merge with the more powerful rival.

It doesn't seem to come in to Cohen's work lately, does it? There's a beloved but no rival -- and the love has a different quality -- more abstract, absolute -- less ego-driven. Rivalry implies ego, I guess. Maybe his rivals are all dead.

Anyway, the novel sounds interesting in its own right -- written in the form of a letter, deliberately ambiguous. I'd read it if I could finally get through Moby Dick. I'm bogged down in the whale's skeleton.

From there I thought about interviews and discrepancies and accidental self-revelations and short stories in the form of transcripts, and made some notes; however, it's now time to mark and prep.

Oh, and maybe shower. The world might thank me for that.

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