Cohen Socialism

"Il gioco preferito", pubblicato originariamente nel 1963, è un esuberante romanzo di formazione - paragonato dalla critica al Ritratto dell'artista da giovane di Joyce - che narra la giovinezza di Lawrence Breavman, figlio unico di una ricca famiglia ebrea di Montreal e alter ego dell'autore, dalla reazione alla morte del padre al controverso rapporto con la religione e la cultura ebraica; dalle scorribande notturne con l'amico Krantz alle ambizioni letterarie, le avventure sessuali e infine la scoperta dell'amore. "Beautiful losers", scritto in Grecia nell'estate del 1965, quando Cohen attraversava il tormentato periodo di crisi spirituale che si sarebbe concluso di lì a poco con l'inizio della sua trionfale carriera di cantautore, ruota attorno a tre personaggi - il narratore, la moglie defunta e un amico - coinvolti in un triangolo amoroso e ossessionati dalla figura di una santa pellerossa vissuta nel Canada del Seicento..

Charles Gounod, the composer with 170 melodies, is best known for his pages after French poets. Yet almost a third of them is composed on English poems! This appeal to the language of Shakespeare arises during the 4 years that the composer spent in London.

One of cinema's greatest provocateurs, Jean-Luc Godard, presents another barbed but thoughtful meditation on culture, politics and cinema in this experimental drama. Shot using high definition video equipment and a consumer-grade cell phone, with the crisp images of the former playing off the grain and distortion of the latter, Film Socialisme is divided into three segments. The first takes place on a luxury liner cruising the Mediterranean, as tourists from different lands attempt to communicate in their different languages. In the second, a French family calls a private tribunal, as the children challenge their parents on the issues of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity while the media watches from outside. And finally, Godard and his crew visit six different places – Barcelona, Egypt, Naples Odessa, Palestine and "Hellas" (the latter could be Greece or France) as he confronts issues of truth versus myth and where the global community is headed….

This present book contains Eastman's principal conclusions, or the principal things he has learned politically, since making that decision. The step is shorter from hard-headed class-struggle socialism to a firm defense of the free-market economy than to the old wishful notion of a highminded slide into utopia.