Remembering Leonard

Today is the tenth anniversary of the death of Leonard Cohen, and there have been many events in Montreal during the past few weeks to commemorate the man and his music. 

Mont Royal Cemetery

At The Segal Centre I saw The Secret Chord, a piece that combined quotes from writing and interviews with performances of his most well-know songs. It was a delightfully exuberant production in the little theatre located in one of Montreal's Jewish neighbourhoods, quite close to my home. The performers from took turns at interpreting the songs in unusual ways. Some worked better than others, but the band was always excellent. Dance Me to the End of Love was particularly well done, played like a Klezmer folk song with the tempo increasing and increasing - the clarinet playing by Jacob Gorzhaltsan was incredible. The song was inspired by tales of the Jewish musicians pressed into playing in the Holocaust's death camps to comfort the other victims. A chill passed through the audience, dispelled by us all singing Hallelujah together. It was a heart-warming evening.

At Théâtre St-Denis it was Leonard's son Adam who headlined a show he called Everybody Knows. The song arrangements were simple: himself on vocals and acoustic guitar, his son Cassius on bass, a violinist, and two backing singers. Adam Cohen's voice is remarkably similar to his father's - as it was in the 1980s - and the result was an intimate and moving show. He played all the favourites: So Long, Marianne (with the audience singing the chorus) and If It Be Your Will were among the many highlights. For an encore, he reminded us that Leonard had declared a moratorium on anyone singing Hallelujah except Rufus Wainwright. That was the cue for the arrival of Rufus on stage and his performance was glorious. At the end Adam Cohen asked for requests and someone in the front row asked for The Partisan. When he couldn't remember the words beyond a couple of the French verses he asked the man in the front row to come up on stage. It was an elderly gentleman named Dominic. From Dublin! He sang the English verses, a wobbly but pleasing tenor, and got a rapturous reception from the packed theatre. That was the evening completed for me.

Leonard still feels very present in Montreal.

Rue Crescent mural from Mount Royal

In all the posts and articles about him today, I was delighted to see him being interviewed in French on Radio-Canada, a brief recording of a moment in 1985. A native Montrealer, he spoke both English and French but I'd never heard him in French before.

Eliminating AI from my writing workflow

As a writer, I want nothing to do with AI. As a balding bloke who worked in tech for thirty-five years, I'm pretty clued-in as to how AI works and in how to eliminate it from all my writing tools. But it's been a journey, and it's far from over.

I don't use AI in any part of my writing: not in brainstorming or idea generation, not in research, not in the actual word-smithing, and not in editing. The reason is that I wish to be the sole author of my work. If I were to use AI in any of these tasks then I would effectively have a co-author. 

My objection to other writers using AI has nothing to do with their choice and everything to do with their deception when they deny it. If a writer uses AI for any of these tasks, then I believe they should simply acknowledge the fact. Not to do so is fraudulent behaviour, equivalent to using banned performance-enhancement drugs in athletics.

Tech companies are pushing AI tools on to us whether we want them or not. That's not surprising: they've invested billions of dollars in this technology and are desperate to generate revenue from it. So AI keeps cropping up in our software tools, and getting rid of it is like a game of whack-a-mole. 

Here are the whack-a-mole moves I've gone through in the software I use.

Step 1: Turn AI off (where possible)

There's a toggle switch in Microsoft Office to turn off Copilot. Turn it off in any Office product (e.g. Word) and it's also turned off in all others (Outlook, Excel, etc.) However, be warned that I've observed it turn itself back on after a software update - a bug, apparently.

However there's no global off-switch in most other products (Google Drive, Google Search etc.). And AI is increasingly embedded in the operating systems Windows and MacOS.

Step 2: Replace the browser and search engine

AI is now an intrinsic part of Google search and browsers like Chrome and Edge. The only way to avoid it when researching is not to use these products. Happily that's quite straightforward and I use the following:

Vivaldi, as my web browser

Startpage.com as my search engine (and as my default search in Vivaldi)

Both of these are built in Europe.

Step 3: Save my writing faraway from prying AI eyes

I love the convenience of Microsoft's OneDrive, but I don't trust it anymore. Microsoft is all-in on AI, so how can I be sure - despite its denials - that it's not using my writing on OneDrive to train Copilot? Also, as a US company it must grant backdoor access to all OneDrive files to facilitate the US government's demands and that creates a huge security risk of an AI-assisted hack.

So I've moved all my writing off OneDrive to Sync.com, a Canadian online storage provider who guarantees zero access of any files there by anyone but me. Sync works just as seamlessly as OneDrive. 

(As a Canadian, having my data secured in Canada and not in a country which likes to threaten Canadian sovereign is a big advantage of Sync. There are European solutions too, of course.)

Step 4: Stop using Word

I've used Word for three decades now (though WordPerfect was my first love). There are lots of other word processors that are just as good, some better, but the tight integration with OneDrive was perfect for my writing workflow. But now that I've left OneDrive there's no reason not to leave Word and its damn Copilot AI.

I now use the LibreOffice suite. It's free, built by good folks around the world, and moving to it was painless. If you're familiar with Word you can use LibreOffice Writer immediately. It can read and write in Word's file format too, so no problem for submitting writing to publications who require that.

Step 5: Leave Windows

Windows has been getting more bloated and clunky over the years. I've dabbled with Linux before (Ubuntu on desktop) and was impressed, but I was tied to MS Office. No more. I've used MacOS in the past too (on a MacBook Pro) and was pretty happy with it, but Apple and Microsoft are both integrating AI right into the OS. So Linux is on my agenda again as it's easy to install an AI-free version.

I haven't taken this step yet as I'm still verifying that LibreOffice and Sync will meet all my needs (they both run on Linux). But I'm pretty sure that I'll be on Linux by the end of 2026. I'll post an update to this post then.

Sunset, Martinique

Just got back from a week in Martinique where the sand bugs are vicious at sunset. Still, it was worth a few bites for this photo.

A stained glass window in our chalet

We've a door in our chalet where we thought about installing some frosted glass, but then thought it would be an ideal place for some stained glass. We had a family brainstorming on how we could represent our mixture of Irish and Quebecois heritage, and came up with the idea of an image incorporating a fleur de lys and a Celtic harp.  

The design was finalised and executed by Célyne Laliberté at La Liberté in Vitrail. It's worked out really well.

Sommarboken

I began reading Sommarboken (The Summer Book) by Tove Jansson in the original Swedish on my Kobo but found it quite hard going, and missed some of the enchantment that I could feel was present in the language. So I got an English copy, the translation by Thomas Teal, and reading the two versions together was a wonderful experience. It's become an annual ritual for many Swedes (and Swedish-speaking Finns) to read the book at the beginning of every summer, and I can see myself doing that too. 

The story of Sophia and her grandmother (farmor) is simple but wise. Point-of-view is beautifully handled, as we see things through a child’s eyes and then an adult’s; sometimes Sophia is the child and sometimes the Grandmother is. Summers pass by on their little island in the Finnish archipelago. The themes are the passing and return of the seasons, aging, endings and beginnings, memory, what is left at the end, the fragility of nature, the fragility of people... all the important things.

Ali Smith – whose recommendation in The Guardian set me off – has a blurb on the back cover of Teal’s translation that captures it perfectly:

[Jansson’s] writing is all magical deception, her sentences simple and loaded; the novel reads like looking through clear water and seeing, suddenly, the depth.

The character of Sophia is based on Jansson's niece of the same name, and I found a video of the real Sophia talking about the 50th anniversary edition. I love the accent of Swedish-speaking Finns. My old Stockholmare friend Fredrik used to admit that Swedish-Finns spoke the nicest Swedish and listening to this I think I'll have to get an audiobook version of Sommarboken.

Billy Bragg in Montreal: activism reactivated!

Louis and I went to see the bould Billy Bragg at Club Soda. A new experience for Louis, this was my third time to see the Bard of Barking. There was Dallas in 1993'ish where the audience interaction was a bit challenging (some good ol boys didn't appreciate being lectured to about Vietnam); then Dublin in 2004'ish which was a joyous meeting of minds.

On this summer evening in Montreal Billy was in great form with his original stripped-down sound: just himself with his guitars with a keyboardist. The old songs sounded so good. A Lover Sings was a highlight, and so too The Milkman of Human Kindness - I sang along at the top of my voice and couldn't believe that there were others in Montreal who knew the words!

I told Louis it would be political with a capital P, but I think he was surprised when we all had our fists in the air singing There's Power in a Union! But he was fully onboard for A New England. 

What a great night!

De Profundis

When I was in Paris in April I took a guided tour of Père-Lachaise cemetery, so of course I visited the imposing resting place of Oscar Wilde.

Our tour guide quoted Oscar, "je n'ai rien d'autre à déclarer que mon génie", which baffled some people on the tour who only came for Jim Morrison.

I hadn't thought about Wilde for many a year, though I'm very familiar with most of his work: Salomé, An Ideal Husband, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and especially The Importance of Being Earnest which I studied for my Leaving Cert and can still quote at length. The one work I'd never engaged with was De Profundis, the long letter he wrote in prison.

A few days later I visited the Pantheon, just out of general interest as I'd never been. There was an exhibition there about the life of Robert Badinter, the French politician who removed the death penalty from the French penal code and decriminalised homosexuality. I learned that Badinter was a fan of Wilde, and that he wrote a play based on De Profundis, decrying the injustice of Wilde's imprisonment. 

Back home, I caught up with my favourite literary podcast Backlisted, re-running one of their old episodes. Stephen Fry joined Andy Miller and John Mitchinson to discuss...De Profundis. It was a brilliant discussion. Fry can sometimes get on my wick with his incessant hamming up, but here he was erudite and even humble as he discussed Wilde, his literary hero.

It was clear what I had to do next. Andy recommended the audio book of De Profundis, read by Simon Russell Beale, and I thoroughly enjoyed it and wondered at its insightfulness. Like this:

People whose desire is solely for self-realisation never know where they are going.  They can’t know.  In one sense of the word it is of course necessary, as the Greek oracle said, to know oneself: that is the first achievement of knowledge.  But to recognise that the soul of a man is unknowable, is the ultimate achievement of wisdom.  The final mystery is oneself.  When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself.  Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?  

Sadly, Wilde's insights didn't lead him to any kind of salvation, but his pathetic destitution in Paris doesn't take anything away from the truths he told through his art.

When I was in Dublin a few weeks later I paid my respects at his statue in Merrion Square, a few footsteps from the house where he was born.

Writers of Montparnasse

Martine and I spent a lovely afternoon in Montparnasse cemetery a few weeks ago, visiting the graves of writers.

Short stories
Tall grave

Guy de Maupassant was a renowned short story writer . I first came across him thanks to George Saunders, who did a close reading and breakdown of the story Boule de Suif in his story club, and concluded that learning from Maupassant is a must for any short story writer. His grave is imposing and covered with flowering shrubs.

One of these names has faded...

Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre are buried together, in a grave that is covered anew every day in tributes...to Simone. Sartre's name has faded on the headstone. When they were both alive it was he who was more celebrated, but she and her work have aged better.

Self-effacing Sam

The grave of Samuel Beckett and Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil is modest and low to the ground, and the inscriptions are already fading after less than forty years. This all seems rather appropriate for Beckett's personality. I picked up a new copy of Waiting for Godot at Shakespeare & Company and was reminded how vibrant and full of life his writing still is.

Never forget...

Alfred Dreyfus wasn't a writer, but he inspired Émile Zola to write his famous letter J'accuse. I made a brief visit to Montmartre cemetery and saw Zola's grave but didn't take a photo. However, I did place a pebble on Dreyfus' grave in Montparnasse and was happy to see that many others had done the same. 

2025 Readings

In 2025 I read twenty-two books of fiction, six of creative non-fiction, and three new-to-me poetry collections. I read many other things too, in literary magazines and on SubStack for example, but I committed a significant amount of time to each of these thirty-one books.

Fiction

Asimov, Isaac: I, Robot

Barbeau-Lavalette, Anaïs: La femme qui fuit (en français)

Bradbury, Ray: Fahrenheit 451

Carson, Jan: Quickly, While They Still Have Horses

Cusk, Rachel: Coventry (my 2nd reading)

Cusk, Rachel: Parade

DeLillo, Don: The Silence

Egan, Jennifer: A Visit from the Goon Squad

Erskine, Wendy: The Benefactors

Flanagan, Richard: Question 7

Gallant, Mavis: Montreal Stories

Harding, Paul: Tinkers

Holloway, Patrick: The Language of Remembering

Lalami, Laila: The Dream Hotel

McCormack, Mike: Getting it in the Head

Ní Chuinn, Liadan: Every One Still Here

O’Neill, Heather: Valentine in Montreal

O’Neill, Joseph: Godwin

Ryan, Donal: heart, be at peace

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft: Frankenstein

Thien, Madeleine: The Book of Records

Tolstoy, Leo: The Death of Ivan Ilyich

Non-fiction

Arendt, Hannah: Eichmann in Jerusalem

Bouchard, Serge: Caribou Hunter / Récits de Mathieu Mestokosho, chasseur innu (In English et en français)

Cron, Lisa: Wired for Story

Gallant, Mavis: Montreal Standard Time

O’Connor, Sinéad: Rememberings

Stonebridge, Lyndsey: We are Free to Change the World

Poetry Collections

Collins, Billy: Aimless Love

MacNeice, Louis: Autumn Journal

Muldoon, Paul: Selected Poems

There are a few connecting threads: Hannah Arendt's life and work for example (the books by Thien, Stonebridge, and Arendt herself), my interest in evolving views of AI and consciousness (Asimov, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein), and my exploration of the possibilities of the short story (Carson, Gallant, and Ní Chuinn).

In previous years it's been difficult to pick a single favourite read of the year, but I have no such problems this year. Richard Flanagan's Question 7 is far and away the best thing I've read in a long time. It's an extraordinary book, a combination of fiction, biography, and non-fiction, that delves deep into Flanagan's family history while sweeping across the arc of the 20th century. I loved his Booker-winning novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Flanagan has explained how his father's experience as a prisoner-of-war of the Japanese was one of its inspirations for that. In Question 7 his father's experience is once again a starting point, as his father was released when Japan surrendered, an event that could conceivably have its origins in the love affair between Rebecca West and H. G. Wells...

Without Rebecca West’s kiss H. G. Wells would not have run off to Switzerland to write a book in which everything burns, and without H. G. Wells’s book Leo Szilard would never have conceived of a nuclear chain reaction and without conceiving of a nuclear chain reaction he would never have grown terrified and without growing terrified Leo Szilard would never have persuaded Einstein to lobby Roosevelt and without Einstein lobbying Roosevelt there would have been no Manhattan Project and without the Manhattan project there is no lever at 8.15am on 6 August 1945 for Thomas Ferebee to release 31,000 feet over Hiroshima, there is no bomb on Hiroshima and no bomb on Nagasaki and 100,000 people or 160,000 people or 200,000 people live and my father dies. Poetry may make nothing happen, but a novel destroyed Hiroshima and without Hiroshima there is no me and these words erase themselves and me with them.

I'd rate Question 7 as highly as the best work by W. G. Sebald, which is the highest praise I can offer. This review in The Guardian came to the same conclusion.

• 2024 Readings
• 2023 Readings
• 2022 Readings

The Sunlight on the Garden

Ten years ago I challenged myself to learn some poems off by heart. Some of them have faded a bit in my mind, but not "The Sunlight on the Garden" by Louis MacNeice. Every autumn I think of it again, how it captures the mood of dusk closing in so perfectly, the wistfulness of summer memories too, and of course that dark premonition of the "evil iron, siren". MacNeice wrote it in the late 1930s and reading it now we know exactly what it was that he saw on the horizon. In late 2025 the horizon also looks ominous, but exactly how dark only future generations will know. 

Back in that post in 2015 I mentioned how I first heard this poem in an interview with Clive James, and how I was pleased that he seemed to be recovering from his most recent health problem. He died in 2019. This poem will always remind me of him. I discovered many great writers through him, in his interviews, and also in his wonderful book of essays Cultural Amnesia.

The Sunlight on the Garden at All Poetry.

Virginia Woolf en Français

The Quebecoise director Lorraine Pintal is on a mission: raise the profile of Virginia Woolf in the francophone community. Last December I saw a piece she directed that was loosely based on Orlando, though I didn't really click with it. A few weeks ago I saw another play that she directed, Indomptable Virginia Woolf, presented in the festival Les Correspondances d'Eastman. I had some troubles with this one too, but for different reasons.

The play, written by Robert Lalonde (who also played the character of Leonard Woolf), is based on Virginia Woolf's diaries, with extracts from several of her works (Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando). It works pretty well. This performance felt a little under-rehearsed and underdeveloped, something that Pintal freely admitted was the case as it was put together in a rush in order to be included in the festival, but that wasn't the problem. No, the problem was all mine: my French.

Firstly, Robert Lalonde doesn't enunciate very clearly. I had to concentrate hard to get 50% of what he said, and when I mentioned to my francophone wife that he was hard to follow she confirmed that he was a mumbler. But what flipped me over the edge was the scene where Virginia indulges in some fancy wordplay. I'm sure the original English text was witty but translated and adapted into French it went completely over my head. I had an extremely frustrating five or six minutes that seemed like an hour, everyone around me laughing heartily while I was baffled. That coloured my enjoyment of the rest of the piece.

My principal takeaway is that I need to watch more movies in French or perhaps listen to some audiobooks. My day-to-day comprehension is good, but I still do struggle a bit at the theatre. 

To finish on a positive note, the performance by Bénedicte Décary was excellent. She played three characters: Vanessa Bell, Vita Sackville-West, and the Woolf's domestic servant, and she was delightfully convincing in each role. And she enunciated perfectly too, fair play to her.

Isabelle Faust and Beethoven's Violin Concerto

I've written about this violinist and this concerto before—when making my Beethoven Pancakes—but last night I saw Isabelle Faust perform it live with the OSM conducted by Bernard Labadie. 

How good was last night's performance? Well, this morning it was still on my mind and I thought about playing her recording of it in order to relive the show, but instead I bought a ticket for the 10am performance and went to see her again. I choked up at the end of the first and second movements and exploded with joy at the end of the third—both times.

The concerto is phenomenally good, I knew that. Faust is a technically brilliant violinist with an exquisite tone, I knew that too.  What I didn't know was how charismatic she is on stage. In both performances she moved expressively with the music, her face bright with the joy of playing. She engaged with the conductor, with the cellists, the violinists, in a palpable collaboration. There was a real sense of her inviting the audience into the music that went far beyond simply performing for us. 

In short, these were probably the best classical music concerts I've ever been to.

Isabelle Faust & Bernard Labadie
Oct. 9th, 2025, La Maison Symphonique

 

What is Laurence Lumsden reading?

In July I had a story published in The New Quarterly (yay me!) and the marketing team asked me to write a few posts for their "Online Exclusives" blog. So, here's one I wrote about some of my recent readings: What is Laurence Lumsden reading?

The Pogues!

Yesterday was a wild and raucous Friday evening at MTELUS. The Pogues were at full throttle on stage, the fans in the standing area at full throttle too (beer launching, pogoing, crowd surfing) and Louis and I had a great time - safe in our comfortable seats on the balcony. 

The occasion was the 40th anniversary of the release of Rum, Sodomy & the Lash, an album which I only came to enjoy in retrospect. At the time it was released I was a bit of a sniffy purist about Irish trad and didn't really appreciate where the Pogues were coming from. But now, as a long-term emigrant myself with sons who have grown up in Montreal but are culturally Irish, well the Pogue's songs of the Irish diaspora hit home.

But the Pogues in concert are not really about listening to the songs. They create such a din that it's hard to hear words or individual instruments, but they also create a powerful energy that grabs hold of everyone. So, while we couldn't really hear the lyrics to The Irish Rover, or Sally MacLennane, we belted them out at the tops of our voices and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.

Spider Stacy was on front man duties and was quite brilliant, and a lot more coherent than the late-lamented Shane McGowan would have been. Stacy added smatterings of French to his anecdotes, even launching an incendiary "Vive le Québec libre!" at one point in classic republican fashion, then indulging in a few bars of La Marseillaise. Several Irish tricolours appeared in the crowd at the end, but thankfully there were no calls of Up the RA or anything hateful.

Lisa O'Neill was the most impressive singer. She has a sharp voice that can cut through any noise which was handy for the night that was in it. She also recounted visiting Leonard Cohen's grave earlier in the day, which I shamefully have to admit that I've never done (though I pass his childhood home all the time on my evening walks around the block).

Daragh Lynch from Lankum was also a Pogue for the night, sang a few songs and joined in with the crowd's Olé'ing at the end. I'll be seeing him again soon when Lankum comes to town in a few weeks. September 2025 is turning into a month of Irish music in Montreal. 

The Waterboys in Montreal

Mike Scott brought his latest version of The Waterboys to Montreal last night and I thought it was about time that I saw him again. It's been almost forty years (since 1986 in Dublin's Croke Park) but I've kept up to date with his music, having a particular fondness for his album of Yeats' poems set to music. 

It was an excellent gig and, in a good way, quite the loudest I've been to for a while. This incarnation of the Waterboys is a powerful and tight band, Mike Scott charismatic and witty as always. 

Mike Scott. Picture from my phone

The audience was a real mix, men and women of all ages, most of them familiar with the old songs and ready to listen to the new ones. Fisherman's Blues came up early for a singalong to get everyone going; This is the Sea had some updated and hard-hitting lyrics for the times we live in and was a highlight. Prince's Purple Rain was a surprising and brilliantly performed encore that went down well with the crowd. The last song of the evening, of course, was The Whole of the Moon, and Scott encouraged the crowd as we roared out the lyrics. This song would be in my personal top 10 favourite songs of all time: musically it's joyous, lyrically it's poetry, and I tear up almost every time I hear it. In particular the lyrics in the bridge part just get me every time:

I spoke about wings,
You just flew.
I wondered, I guessed, and I tried.
You just knew.
I sighed,
But you swooned.
I saw the crescent,
You saw the whole of the moon.

 Twas indeed a lovely September evening in Montreal.