The Times Companion to 2017: The best writing from The Times

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Leonard Norman Cohen was born in Montreal in 1934 into a prosperous and middle-class Jewish family. His father was already approaching 50 when his son was born, and died when Cohen was nine years old, leaving him with a small trust fund income. His mother, Masha, was the daughter of a rabbi and brought him up steeped in Talmudic lore and the stories of the Old Testament. He later recalled a “Messianic” childhood.

In an era before rock’n’roll he was drawn to the folk and country music he heard on the radio. He learnt to play the guitar as a teenager “to impress girls” and formed a group called the Buckskin Boys. Women also loomed large in his adolescent life. After reading a book about hypnosis, he tried out the technique and persuaded the family’s maid to disrobe. He was 13 at the time.

At the age of 15 he stumbled on a volume by the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca in a second-hand bookshop in Montreal. Inspired by Lorca’s erotic themes, he decided to become a writer and adopted his lifelong credo that his creative muse was best served via the entanglement of heart and limbs.

At McGill University he chaired the debating society and won a prize for creative writing. His first book of verse, Let Us Compare Mythologies, appeared in 1956. A second volume, The Spice-Box of Earth, was published five years later and put him on the literary map. By then wanderlust had set in and he travelled widely, spending time in Castro’s Cuba before buying a small house without electricity or running water on the Greek island of Hydra. There he wrote further books of verse and the novels The Favourite Game and Beautiful Losers, as well as conducting a decade-long romantic relationship with Ihlen.

His books were critically acclaimed and one enthusiastic reviewer gushingly likened Beautiful Losers to James Joyce. But good reviews don’t put food on even Greek tables and his books initially sold fewer than 3,000 copies. In need of cash, he returned to north America in 1966, planning to try his luck as a singer and songwriter in Nashville.

“In retrospect, writing books seems the height of folly, but I liked the life,” he recalled. “It’s good to hit that desk every day. There’s a lot of order to it that is very different from the life of a rock’n’roller. I turned to professional singing as a remedy for an economic collapse.”

He never got as far as Nashville. After landing in New York, he was “ambushed” by the new music he heard all around him. “In Greece I’d been listening to Armed Forces Radio, which was mostly country music,” he said. “But then I heard Dylan and Baez and Judy Collins, and I thought something was opening up, so I borrowed some money and moved into the Chelsea Hotel.”

Collins became the first to record one of his songs and invited him to sing with her on stage. His first live performance caused him to flee with stage fright, but his shyness appealed to the audience who encouraged him back and set him on his new career as a troubadour. Already in his thirties, he was described by one critic as having “the stoop of an aged crop-picker and the face of a curious little boy”.

His singing, too, provoked mixed reactions but John Hammond, the legendary Columbia A&R man who had already signed Bob Dylan to the label, was not one to be put off by an unconventional voice. “He took me to lunch and then we went back to the Chelsea,” Cohen remembered. “I played a few songs and he gave me a contract.”

He spent two years living in the Chelsea Hotel, fell in with Andy Warhol’s set, became infatuated with the Velvet Underground’s German chanteuse Nico and released his debut album. Sales in America were initially modest but the record found a cult following in Europe and Britain, where he was dubbed “the bard of the bedsits”.

Among his most memorable concerts from this time was his appearance at the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970. Unpromisingly he had to go on after an electrifying performance by Jimi Hendrix, yet instead of bringing down the mood he managed to win over the pumped-up, 600,000-strong crowd by telling them gentle self-deprecating anecdotes in a hushed voice, in between his equally low-key numbers.

Although his early records sounded austere, centred around little more than his voice and a softly strummed guitar, in later years he expanded his musical palette, adding a full band and chorus of backing singers. Initially he appeared to be a literary aesthete, aloof from the hurly-burly of rock’n’roll, but by the mid-1970s his life was unravelling in a midlife crisis in which LSD experimentation featured. “I got into drugs and drinking and women and travel and feeling that I was part of a motorcycle gang or something,” he admitted 20 years later.

His confusion led him to record with Phil Spector, whose production banished the simplicity of his earlier recordings in favour of melodramatic rock arrangements. One grotesque track, Don’t Go Home With Your Hard On, featured a drunken chorus of Cohen, Dylan and Allen Ginsberg repeating the title line over and over again.

Working with the volatile Spector was a fraught process. “I was flipped out at the time and he certainly was flipped out,” Cohen recalled. “For me, the expression was withdrawal and melancholy, and for him, megalomania and insanity and a devotion to armaments that was really intolerable.”

At one point during the sessions, Spector locked Cohen out of the studio, put an armed guard on the door and would not let him listen to the mixes. When Cohen protested, Spector threatened him with a gun and a cross-bow.

The resulting album, Death of a Ladies’ Man in 1977, was a career nadir that horrified his fan base, and he swiftly returned to something closer to his old style. When five years passed between the release of albums it appeared that his inspiration had dried up, a blockage that he later attributed to having become addicted to amphetamines. Various Positions in 1984 was a triumph and included Hallelujah. It sparked a revival both creatively and commercially as Cohen adopted the mode of a fashionable boulevardier.

With an increasingly sardonic humour he surveyed the wreckage of the modern world in songs such as First We Take Manhattan, Democracy and Everybody Knows and painted an apocalyptic picture of the world. It was a vision that struck a hellish chord with the film director Oliver Stone who included three of Cohen’s songs from the period in his horrifyingly violent, dystopian movie Natural Born Killers. Shortly after the film’s release, Cohen retreated to his Zen Buddhist monastery.

When he returned to recording and live performance after a decade-long break, he was treated more like a guru than a peddler of popular songs. Seated on a stool, guitar in hand, or cupping a microphone (“as Hamlet held Yorick’s skull”, one critic suggested), his concerts became acts of communion, with reverential audiences treating his every utterance as if it were holy writ.

Age seemed to suit him, uniquely emphasising his sagacity, while the advancing years simply made other fading rock stars appear irrelevant. Eschewing make-up, surgery and denial, he embraced getting old as “the only game in town”. That he was still writing compelling songs and releasing records into his eighties was “the ash” that showed his life was still “burning well”.

Despite continuing his recording career until his final months, Cohen stopped touring in 2013 and hinted at his preparedness for the end in the summer of 2016. After the death of Marianne (obituary, August 27), a letter from Cohen was released in which he said goodbye to his muse and former lover. “Our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon,” he wrote.“Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine.”

Leonard Cohen, poet and songwriter, was born on September 21, 1934. His death, aged 82, was announced on November 10, 2016

LET’S STOP BEING SO PARANOID ABOUT ANDROIDS (#ulink_bd90ce62-30f6-5bc0-8f4e-567c3f3186de)

Matt Ridley (#ulink_bd90ce62-30f6-5bc0-8f4e-567c3f3186de)

NOVEMBER 21 2016

THE TECH INDUSTRY, headquartered in Silicon Valley, is populated largely by enthusiastic optimists who want to change the world and believe they can. Yet there is one strand of pessimism that you hear a lot there: the robots are going to take all our jobs. With artificial intelligence looming, human beings are facing redundancy and obsolescence. However, I think this neo-Luddite worry is as wrong now as it was in Ned Ludd’s day.

“Any job that is on some level routine is likely to be automated, and if we are to see a future of prosperity rather than catastrophe we must act now,” warns Martin Ford, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, in his book The Rise of the Robots.

“With the technology advances that are presently on the horizon, not only low-skilled jobs are at risk; so are the jobs of knowledge workers. Too much is happening too fast,” says a Silicon Valley guru, Vivek Wadhwa.

“Think of it as a kind of digital social Darwinism, with clear winners and losers: those with the talent and skills to work seamlessly with technology and compete in the global marketplace are increasingly rewarded, while those whose jobs can just as easily be done by foreigners, robots or a few thousand lines of code suffer accordingly,” says Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University, Virginia, in his book Average is Over.

Yet we have been automating work for two centuries and so far the effect has been to create more jobs, not fewer. Farming once employed more than 90 per cent of people, and without them we would have starved. Today, it’s just a few per cent. Followers of the mysterious “Captain Swing” who destroyed threshing machines in 1830 were convinced that machines stole work. Instead of which, farm labourers became factory workers; factory workers later became call-centre workers. In both transitions, pay rose and work became safer, less physically demanding and less exposed to the elements.

In 1949 the cybernetics pioneer Norbert Wiener warned that computers in factories could usher in “an industrial revolution of unmitigated cruelty”. In 1964 a panel of the great and the good, including the Nobel prizewinners Linus Pauling and Gunnar Myrdal, warned that automation would mean “potentially unlimited output … by systems of machines which will require little co-operation from human beings”. This hoary old myth just keeps coming round again and again.