May 21 – July 4, 2022

To mark the appearance of Leonard Cohen’s “Begin Again” in our Summer issue, we’re publishing a series of short reflections on his life and work.

If apocalypse were at hand, would you choose to light a seventy-dollar Bois Cire scented candle by your bed and leaf through a Penguin Classics copy of George Herbert’s The Temple as the air conditioner ran on high, “Who By Fire” playing softly on your phone, the world slowly sifting itself down to ash? Some of us might. Some of us would. Leonard Cohen embraced the spiritual and the carnal, and his aching insistence on chasing pleasure at the edges of oblivion has made his voice ever more seductive—comforting, troubling—since his death in 2016. 

That we are now at the edge of several oblivions needs no elaboration. The question of pleasure remains—what we might do with it, since we are all but numb to spectacular shock, and whether it can or should be comforting. I first heard Jeff Buckley’s version of “Hallelujah” as a teenager, before I heard Cohen’s original. At the time I preferred the cover; its beauty was immediate, seamless, intoxicating. But over time I’ve come to love Cohen’s churchly lounge act for the opposite reasons. There’s something uncanny in the synthetic sheen and gravel of Cohen’s track—a self-negating camp performance of spiritual grandeur that erases the line between rapture and sleaze.

And on the other side of pleasure—a luxury candle, poetry, air-conditioning—there is often both rapture and sleaze: tender depravity. How much of it are we willing to accept? A lot, maybe. While there’s a time for the sensuous charms of “Suzanne” and “So Long, Marianne,” I’ve always been drawn to the songs in which Cohen allowed himself to sound unhinged. In “Diamonds in the Mine” he is an unlikely vector of proto-punk rage, particularly at the end, as he genuinely screams his way through the final refrain—“And there are no letters in the mailbox / And there are no grapes upon the vine”—in an atonal vocal shred, his unfazed backup singers hoisting up the chorus’s sunny melody behind him, a spring breeze blowing through a nuclear meltdown. Amid the decadent, Oedipal party music of “Don’t Go Home With Your Hard-On,” he snarls, “It will only drive you insane / You can’t shake it or break it with your Motown / You can’t melt it down in the rain”—a meltdown of a different order.

“It’s good they told me what / the moon was when I was a child,” reads a line from a poem by Marilyn Monroe. “It’s better they told me as a child what it was / for I could not understand it now.” The untitled poem, narrating a nighttime taxi ride in Manhattan, flits between the cityscape, a view of the East River, and, across it, the neon Pepsi-Cola sign, though, she tells us, “I am not looking at these things. / I am looking for my lover.” The very real moon comes to symbolize the confusion of adult experience. I quote these lines back to myself when I feel acutely that I understand less, not more, than I used to.

The poet Marilyn was the first Marilyn I encountered. Like her when she was young, I lived in a strict Pentecostal environment that forbade much of pop culture, but unlike her, I didn’t gorge myself on movies after escaping the prohibition. Although I had heard of “Marilyn Monroe,” I hadn’t yet happened to see any of her films when I came across Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters by Marilyn Monroe in a bookstore. I, like so many, fell for the allure—still, to me, a forbidden one—of her image: Marilyn on a sofa seemingly caught looking up and away from the black notebook in her lap. Her expression suggests she hasn’t yet decided whether the distraction is a source of apprehension or delight. Wearing coral lipstick and a black turtleneck, she is beautiful and bookish. The apparently candid photo is actually from a 1953 series for Life by the photojournalist Alfred Eisenstaedt. Then twenty-six, Marilyn was famous, and only becoming more so: she’d started dating the baseball star Joe DiMaggio. The revelation that years before she’d posed nude for a calendar (and wasn’t ashamed) had recently scandalized McCarthyite America. Life’s portraits of a sex symbol among books play to an audience’s wish to condescend to the object of their desire, to laugh at the “dumb blond” who thinks she can read. (Desire, after all, is an involuntary subjection often trailed by resentment.) As always, Marilyn insisted on approving the images; the contact sheets show her red pen. And in this photo, whatever anyone else intended, I also see her considered self-creation. 

Marilyn’s poems are, as the book’s title indicates, mostly fragmentary. Rarely (if ever) did a first draft become a second, but themes and motifs recur as though being reworked. They were written in notebooks and on scrap paper alongside lines of dialogue from her films, song titles, lists, outpourings of anxiety, and accounts of both real events and dreams. Sometimes lines that read like poems actually aren’t, as with some of the notes made during her years spent in psychoanalysis and in classes with Lee Strasberg, a controversial proponent of the “Method,” a technique that demands actors dig deep into their emotions and memories in order to fully inhabit their roles. Some of Marilyn’s pages are tidily penned, starting precisely at the red vertical margin, but often the poems and notes range across or even around the page, with words crossed out and sentences connected by arrows. Because the lines often end where the paper does, it’s not always obvious where they break, or whether they should break at all. According to Norman Rosten, a poet who became better known for being a friend of hers, “She had the instinct and reflexes of the poet, but she lacked the control.”

Marilyn left high school when she married her first husband and, aside from a continuing-education course in literature at UCLA, never had further formal education. But she was a committed if haphazard autodidact, going to a now-defunct bookstore in Los Angeles to leaf through and buy whatever books interested her (Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, for instance). Although the playwright Arthur Miller, her third husband, claimed she never finished anything “with the possible exception of Colette’s Chéri and a few short stories,” others contradict this. She professed a love for The Brothers Karamazov and a wish to play its central female character, Grushenka. Her library contained more than four hundred books, including verse collections by D. H. Lawrence, Emily Dickinson, and Yuan Mei, and an anthology of African American poetry.

What’s this, a new Ramble?! Damn right - join Marcus, Vish and Pete as we sail those calm, off-season waters.

We’ve got some transfer business to tend to, as Sadio Mané puts his feet up and Pep takes Kalvin Phillips under his wing. Elsewhere, Gareth Bale heads stateside to cement a six-month legacy, while Kevin Keegan’s hosting a charity event in Sunderland. What could possibly go wrong?

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The hedonistic thrill of America's Fire Island

How a taboo-busting duet became a hit and broke new ground

May 13 – June 25, 2022

We're back with another of our favourite episodes from last season over on Football Ramble Presents. Today, it's the turn of our weekly women's football show, Upfront!

Back in December, our hosts Flo Lloyd-Hughes, Rachel O'Sullivan and Chloe Morgan sat down for a conversation about sexuality, openness and acceptance within women's football. They also speak to Arsenal's Katie McCabe and Aston Villa's Ruesha Littlejohn, one of the game's most celebrated couples, about unapologetic openness and using their platform for good.

Tweet us @FootballRamble and email us here: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

***Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your pods. It means a great deal to the show and will make it easier for other potential listeners to find us. Thanks!***

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How does the portrayal of 'The King' in Baz Luhrmann's film compare to reality?

Charles Watts has questioned Marseille’s ability to find the funds needed to convince Arsenal to sell William Saliba, as much as they wish to re-sign him.

The 21 year-old enjoyed a thoroughly impressive season on loan with the Olympiens, helping them to secure a place in the Champions League with a second-placed finish in Ligue 1, picking up the Young Player of the Year award in the process.

While they are claimed to be keen on bringing him back from north London ahead of the new season, Arsenal appear to have made their intention to include him in their first-team squad for the upcoming campaign clear, yet they do not seem ready to give up on his return just yet.

Watts insists that it would take an offer outside of Marseille’s budget to strike a deal with the Gunners however.

“It’d be it’d be big money, he’s still got two years left has contract, he stated on his YouTube channel. “He’s a fully fledged international now, he is Ligue 1 Young Player of the Year.