Teaser // Leonard Cohen: THE FAVOURITE GAME — Side A

0:00Jokerman podcast is brought to you by Distro Kid and their new Direct to Fan tool, allowing any artist to sell merch, Distro Kid Direct allows artists to create a merch store in minutes without any up-run costs or any technical skills or know-how. They'll take care of all the logistics and the nitty-gritty, and as with distribution, through Distro Kid, they never take a cut of the proceeds. You, the artist, keep 100% of your earnings. Once again, that's Distro Kid Direct. Open a store today at distro-kid.com-slash-direct. Welcome back everyone to Jokerman, your source for the Leonard Cohen podcast. Hmm, I'm Evan. I'm Ian. And today we've got the book. It's a book in the way that you might be more familiar with. It's not of that poetry. Pros. Pros.

1:00Pros podcasts that form we all know and love. It's Leonard Cohen's The Favorite Game. Favorite Game. The Favorite? Favorite. Well, this route... Mine doesn't have the O. Mine doesn't have the O. Mine doesn't have the O. This guy. He doesn't even think that's an O on the cover of his book. No, no, I mean the U. The Favorite. Favorite. It's... Favorite, I guess. So you're just an American edition, presumably. Yeah. This is the American version. I like the illustration on here. It's like... It's a very reddulent of a certain era of a book cover, a paperback cover. It's like really romantic, gauzy illustration of a very distinguished Cohen-esque man's face and then a woman back turned half-boob showing... Hmm. We love half-boob. Let me see. Put it up. You can't see. You can't see? No. Okay. Oh. Hmm.

2:00Yeah. It looks kind of like the covers of a lot of those like Herman has books like from the... I guess the early 70s. Mid 70s? Mine doesn't really... Mine does have a kind of like the cover design of mine. Mine's from New Canadian Library. It's like this sort of strange like gray orange black. Oh. It's like an abstract. It's like an abstract thing. Exactly. It looks kind of like a black hole. A little bit. There's like an oraburo in it. It's a little unclear. It seems to be bodies of some sort and they're like kind of contained in what might be like an eyeball but also might be like a globe. I know there's a vaguely sexual connotation but it's got this great... Wow. I love this drawing of him on the back. They've really emphasized his nose. His nose isn't even that hooked. That distinctive Roman nose of Leonard Cohen. No religious connotations whatsoever to the size and prominence of his nose.

3:05Mine is much more tasteful. This guy kind of looks more like Leonard Nimoy. Yeah. He does kind of like Leonard Nimoy doesn't he? Yeah. Not Leonard Cohen but the illustration of him on your book. One thing I'm realizing as we talk about this, you know, we... We thought this is one of our favorite sections of the podcast. When we talk about an album, let's talk about the album art at the beginning. Books have so many different covers and so many different pieces of corresponding art versus the album. You know, occasionally there's a different album art for a re-release or something. That Beach Boys live album that has like six covers. The Beach Boys, Weird One, exactly Beach Boys live party concert. Yeah, or whatever. Think of Saved, for instance, which of course has the great painting that we used to hate but now love of the hands touching on the initial cover and then there's that weird like process to be like... The leg of pastel looking, yeah, of like Bob blowing on the heart but it looks like water color.

4:05They tried to pretend that it wasn't a Christian album like five years after it came out. But those situations are few and far between. You know, typically when you get the album art, it is the album art. That is it. There's just the one cover. Books, not so much. There's a, you know, there's any number of covers that go along with the books. I can't. I'm sure there's a reason for that but he'll find out. Well, what is your version of the books, say, on the back? Does it have a blurb? Does it have a description? Uh, yes. Does it have an ingredients? It does have a little, a little statement here. The favorite game is a lyric where everyone is seen in their condition of highest beauty. Says Michael O'Neill. Oh, he's a good writer. In his recent NCL monograph on the Ncon, I've heard about this actually. I read about it in the biography. I kind of want to seek this out. Maybe we'll talk about that at some point. We should try to have him on. He's a great writer. He's still around. I think so. Okay. If he isn't, we can commune with him through the Ouija board. In this brilliant and unorthodox book with its use of vivid, almost filmic techniques,

5:10we follow the odyssey of a young man in the process of discovering both the world and himself and finally discarding family, friends, and mistresses to move on alone. The book's humor, irony, and tenderness is heightened by the poet's shrewd appraisal of what goes to make the human comedy. And the favorite game is love. I don't know about that one, but I don't know about that one either. That's really not what the favorite game turns out to be. No. That gives a very inaccurate, I mean, in a way that's the case, but it's a pretty bad way to put it. I'll say, I do think that it's also kind of spoils the book on the back. Well, but there's not really a, but this is the type of book that like, you know, I'm kind of, I got to be honest, kind of against the whole concept of spoilers. Like if you're watching Star Wars Episode 5 for the first time, sure, that's one thing,

6:10you know, Luke, I am your father, whatever. But like in normal, like adult stories, whether it's a television show, a movie, a book, a narrative, like I think you can enjoy the work and appreciate what it's doing and get everything you need to out of it, even if you know what happens at the end. And in fact, if the quality of your work, if your enjoyment of a given work is based on not knowing some little twist at the end, a spoiler or whatever, like that might in fact be an indication that it's not such a great piece of work to begin with.