Tribute to Eurithe Purdy on reaching 101! (and a poem by Al - read by Leonard Cohen)

NOVEMBER 9, 2025   Dear A-framers:   Tomorrow, November 10, 2025 is Eurithe Purdy's 101st birthday. Please join us in wishing this remarkable woman a joyous day. Necropsy of love   If it came about you died it might be said I loved you: love is as absolute as death is, and neither bears false witness to the other-- But you remain alive.   No, I do not love you                         hate the word, that private tyranny inside a public sound, your freedom's yours and not my own: but hold my separate madness like a sword, and plunge it in your body all night long.   If death shall strip our bones of all but bones, then here's the flesh and flesh that's drunken-sweet as wine cups in deceptive lunar light: reach up your hand and turn the moonlight off, and maybe it was never there at all, so never promise anything to me: but reach across the darkness with your hand, reach across the distance of tonight, and touch the moving moment once again                            before you fall asleep--   Al Purdy, 1965 You can listen to Leonard Cohen reading the poem here: https://borealisrecords.bandcamp.com/track/necropsy-of-love     Please help us get that new basement finished. https://www.alpurdy.ca/donate/

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Joni Mitchell: Survivor, Thriver, Jiver Detector (book review)

I landed in Canada at the age of 24, very disassociated after living in a hippie commune and travelling around Europe for over three years*. The most played singer on the radio was Joni Mitchell. Both Sides Now, You’re a Radio, Carrie, Big Yellow Taxi and Woodstock. Psychedelia and hippiedom were coming to an end, and Joni’s songs were all bittersweet swan songs to that part of my youth and life.

Then I mostly forgot about the hippie songstress unless Woodstock or one of her 70s hits came on a pop station. Browsing the Marmora Library a couple of weeks ago I made a closing time grab of her biography, Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell by David Yaffe. 

What a read, what a ride for over 400 pages! Joni has been turning out albums ever since, constantly changing and evolving more than David Bowie. More lovers, husbands and anecdotes of the music world elite than I can remember. 

Yaffe,a musician himself, held countless interviews with Joni and her cohorts. Joni doesn’t hold much back, and if you want to know what Leonard Cohen was really like (an early and influential lover), well, he taught her about Nietzsche and poetry but he couldn’t tune his guitar and his singing was a drone. Joni doesn’t filter anything.  

Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Jon Mitchell

David Yaffe, HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., 2017

420 pages  

*Eel Pie Island Dharma: a hippie memoir/haibun

Unfinished Monument Press 1990/Hidden Brook Press 2012