beautiful_losers epitome of incomprehensibility The book is better than the title. I haven't finished reading it yet. Maybe I haven't finished reading the title? Even with a smarmy emo-like title - one prone to conjure slangy anachronisms in the mind of the reviewer - the book sparkles. It does. 130904 ... e_o_i ...So I started, expecting mild incomprehensibility, quirky flights of imagination, and lots of random sex; but lurking in the lurid weirdness of the story is often-tragic history. Mostly the way Canada treated its native people, but not only history: I mean, in the opening pages, we hear a woman has killed herself by climbing inside an elevator shaft. Lots of flashbacks. Or non-depressing history, as follows, with a real place and surreal scene: ... We walked along Sherbrooke Street, west, toward the English section of the city. We felt the tension immediately. At the corner of Parc Lafontaine Park we heard the shouted slogans of a demonstration. —Québec Libre! —Québec Oui, Ottawa Non! —Merde à la reine d'angleterre! —Elizabeth Go Home! The newspapers had just announced the intention of Queen Elizabeth to visit Canada, a state visit planned for October. —This is an ugly crowd, F. Let's walk faster. —No, it is a beautiful crowd. —Why? —Because they think they are Negroes, and that is the best feeling a man can have in this century. Arm in arm, F. pulled me into the scene of commotion. Many of the demonstrators wore sweatshirts inscribed with QUEBEC LIBRE. I noticed that everyone had a hard-on, including the women. From the base of a monument, a well-known young film maker addressed the cheering assembly. He wore the scholarly thin beard and violent leather jacket so commonly seen in the corridors of L'Office National du Film. His voice rang out clearly. F.'s judo pressure cautioned me to listen carefully. —History! the young man called over our heads. What have we to do with History? ... Parc Lafontaine Park indeed! Leonard Cohen, you're my man. And if it's the same visit by the queen, back in the 1964, my mother saw her from a distance; the queen was younger, Mom was a child, the world was still sometimes in black and white... 130914 ... e_o_i "A love triangle" between the narrator, his friend/lover F. and his wife Edith - that's how the back of the book describes it - but what about Kateri Tekakwitha? She's Edith too, sort of, but she was also a real person. And LC did get his wish - now officially a Catholic saint, wasn't in the 1960s. The thought of priestly authorities reading this book amuses me, though the fact that it amuses me makes me feel like a hypocrite, and I don't know quite why. I'd seen one passage before, the part that starts "God is alive. Magic is afoot" in the section of F.'s letter. The ending makes no sense. It reminds me of Une vie inutile. Maybe because I was reading the endings of both books as I walked to the library. I should get hit by a car, it would serve me right. I don't mean that. Let me rephrase: the ending makes no sense, and I mean that in a good way. 130917 ... e_o_i is silly again And I mean that Kateri Tekakwitha is a Catholic saint, not Leonard Cohen. Leonard Cohen is a Jewish Buddhist saint. His name is also inscribed in the Great Sourcecode of the Masonic Order of Tech Support, but I shouldn't give too much away. We're supposed to be a secret society, goshdarnit. 130917 what's it to you? who go blather from