Notes on Media: The Partisan by Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen is something of a ghost to me. Long before he died in 2016, his lyrical style had a habit of haunting me, already reverberating in the well of my mind upon waking or as I recount melodies while walking across my college campus. Cohen has always been one of the few songwriters who can consistently move me to tears, regardless of the song’s content, through the strength of the narrative and instrumentation. Even as I often have contradictory opinions about his authorial expression, find myself enveloped by deep, at times overwhelming, feeling.

It puts me in…I think I will just say it is a contemplative place.

There is a kind of mythic quality to Cohen’s storytelling—at times autobiography, at times history, at times pure allegory, all seemingly grander and more expansive than one human body could contain. His style invites other artists to take up his arrangements and add their own subjectivity, sometimes producing covers that completely blow my mind. I think that is what keeps me coming back to Cohen; while rooted in a shadowy but understandable perspective, his work invites you to engage him, challenge him, and even best him if you can.

It is no wonder I have been listening to Leonard Cohen lately. Especially ‘The Partisan,’ from 1969’s Songs from a Room, a cover of a 1943 song by Anna Marly with lyrics by French Resistance leader Emmanuel d'Astier de la Vigerie. Cohen covers the English adaptation of the song as translated by Hy Zaret. Songs from a Room was one of the few albums I owned a physical copy of for many years. I purchased the CD well over a decade ago and spent much of my 20s with it in the disk drive of my computer. Hours spent with headphones covering my ears until they hurt, listening to the ‘Story of Isaac,’ ‘You Know Who I Am,’ and ‘The Partisan.’

The lyrics made their way into my early writing just as they made their way into my brain as if tattooed there inside its walls in snatches of old love affairs and wartime. ‘The Partisan’ is my New Year’s song, as strange as it sounds, as it is the song that I always return to during that strange, quiet, and liquid time between December 24th and January 1st.

I again found myself recounting the lyrics of ‘The Partisan’ on December 31st without prompting. The holidays are always a dour time for me, but this was especially true in 2020. I do not have to belabor the reasons why, obviously. I think of death more often these days, and I think about fascism. And, inevitably, I think about liberation.

Ideologically speaking, I am a communist, so it is not much of a surprise to find my thoughts drawn to such things. I cannot help but think about liberation as I watch the gears of empire grind and tear those trapped within its machinations. At the time of writing this, it has been a week since armed fascists stormed the Capitol in Washington D.C., carrying our current president’s banner. I do not have to belabor that, either. And so, I find myself listening to ‘The Partisan,’ a song about the French Resistance taking up arms and disappearing into the forest to fight Nazis during the German occupation.

War is a theme Cohen often returned to in his later work and an important preoccupation into the ‘80s and ‘90s. Yet, his cover of this World War II resistance anthem is my favorite of his many war songs. Its stark guitar and melancholy vocals follow a freedom fighter’s account of the rebellion. The speaker’s comrades are hunted down, and his accomplices are shot for harboring him. His family is dead, and he will soon join them. Yet freedom will come, he insists. Cohen repeats the refrain with steady if muted conviction—the resistance will prevail as men come from the shadows to fight.

Through the graves, the wind is blowing, but freedom soon will come.

The police. The pandemic. The decrepit millionaires who squabble over means-testing food stands and sending relief checks to the families of the dead. The soldiers have long since poured over the border and we are already occupied. But I find myself comforted by the idea of vanishing into the woods to fight because I must be.

I must be if I am going to get through whatever the next few years have in store for us.

Notes on an Essay: The Future of Writing About Games by Jacob Gellar

This section of my newsletter is meant to highlight articles, essays, and videos on various topics. Since this is my first newsletter of the new year and the first to use the new format I settled on, I wanted to use this space to highlight my favorite video essay of 2020. Jacob Geller is required viewing in my household, and his essay on writing about video games is absolutely invigorating. 

Please do yourself a favor and watch it if you have not already.

Notes on Storytelling: Author Branding

I am terrible at this writing newsletter business. Sorry if that comes as a shock to you. I do not have much to say about pitching to agents or writing query letters. My chosen path generally bypasses such tried and true topics. Overall, I tend to take a much more holistic approach to writing about writing, author branding, publishing, and all of that. It is a bit of a down and dirty approach, too, if I am completely frank, because my interests lie elsewhere, and I only have so many hours in a day to get to work.

After all, I only write what interests me, and I only talk about what interests me, as well. This brings me to the topic at hand:

What the hell is author branding, and how do you do it? That is a great question I am wholly antagonistic toward. I find that the process of putting out a book for the first time in about five years has made me even more antagonistic. In my highly subjective experience, I believe in being ruthlessly honest. Honest with myself, my story, and my audience.

Yes, the highly curatorial nature of digital spaces lends itself to extreme levels of pretense, and I certainly do not treat my social media accounts like a diary. (At least, I try not to, for all our sakes.) I use these spaces like a highlight reel of my (slightly better) thoughts, observations, and jokes. It is heightened because my style of speaking and constructing arguments is prone to hyperbole and a bit of mythologizing, but what I say is real.

How I think, type, speak, and express thought is real because that is how my brain functions. The only affectation I put on is my own. That can rub people the wrong way in the hyper sanitized world of IP marketing and artist branding, where everything is positive, neutral, and inviting. I have various monikers I go by with their own ongoing shitpost-as-performance and years of lore behind them. (Nobody calls themselves The Daddy Appropriator and The Witch King of Monster Fuck Mountain without a good story, as you know.) That is very strange to people who come along for writing blogs and query tips, but those probably are not the people who want anything to do with me, in any case.

Yes, it is a performance at the most basic level, but it is the performance I construct to entertain myself. If you want to read stories about characters that are as loud and mouthy as I am, you have come to the right place. If not, the exit is through the gift shop. Thank you for stopping by.

Because so much of my online presence is dedicated to characters, both the ones that I play and those I write. I want you to see my characters in the wild and know who wrote them and vice versa. I want you to know exactly who and what I write about without ever reading a single story I have written.

Remember Hurricane Dorian in 2019? Do you know how many people sent me jokes and memes about Dorian Villeneuve, as if I had somehow arranged for the storm to be named after him? As if Dorian could manifest as a literal, physical storm through the sheer strength of his personality and my shitposting game? It immediately stopped being funny when the hurricane abandoned its march toward my home on the Florida coast and ravaged the Bahamas instead. Still, those harrowing hours waiting to see if the storm would come were made just a little better by the jokes people sent me.

That may seem strange, too, but my primary focus as an author is character-driven stories with layers of theming worked in. I may not be a prose stylist, but I will make you love my characters, or I will die trying. I feel this strongly because I often find myself scrolling through social media and happening across writers who cannot tell me what they write or why. Obviously, everyone can post whatever they want on their own Twitter or Facebook. Still, if you cannot make writing—the thing you do—part of your public life, I do not find myself all that invested in what you have to say. I feel that you are simply telling me that you do write, not the how, what, when, or why.

What drives you, what interests you, what you enjoy, what keeps you coming back when the work is hard. Because the work is hard. Writing can be long, frustrating, and lonely work. So, why do it at all? Why write books you expect me to read if you cannot tell me why you are here at all?

I am always interested in making art from the artist's perspective, and I am desperately tired of hearing about it from the audience-consumer. I want to know why you care so much and what you get out of your work. You know Dorian and Cash because I never shut up about them. You know the jokes and memes and the rambling reasons behind them, even if you have read my book yet. Writing is hard work, but it is also engaging, enlightening work that I want to involve people in when and how I can. And I cannot do that unless I talk about my characters and my work as enthusiastically as I would another creator’s.

I believe in leaving it all on the floor at the end of the day: the good, the bad, the ridiculous, and the uncomfortable. People know the world I have built, the characters who occupy it, the in-jokes, and the ideology behind it. They know what I stand for and where I stand on many things, some of which are uncouth to speak about in public.

I understand that this is daunting. It takes vulnerability to put yourself, your work, your agenda, and your values out there. It is much easier to be a neutral entity, someone to project onto and hope readers connect with through a loose association of aesthetics and comp pitches. But if I did not leave it all on the floor, I would not feel right about it. Otherwise, what the hell am I selling you?

Other Notes

We are about a month away from the launch of my book, Leather and Lace: Book One of the Southern Gothic Series. It is a very stressful slash scary slash exciting time. You can pre-order it. You can also enter a Goodreads giveaway. I am giving away 100 copies on Kindle next month because I care about you and want you to have nice books to read.

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