"loser"-ness. He asserts himself by throwing himself into the Charles Axis bodybuilding course advertised in a comic book (a parody of the Charles Atlas advertisements well known to contemporary comic-book readers). He asserts his culture by becoming a leader in the Quebec separatist movement. Background Cohen had published a number of books of poetry since the 1956 appearance of Let Us Compare Mythologies, and one novel, The Favourite Game (1963). He had been living on the Greek island of Hydra in the early to mid-1960s, and had composed The Favourite Game and a book of poetry, Flowers for Hitler, there. On Hydra, English was spoken, and there was an artists' colony there. Cohen wanted to write a "liturgy, a big confessional oration, very crazy, but using all the techniques of the modern novel ... pornographic suspense, humor and conventional plotting". Cohen wrote most of the novel during two concentrated eight-month periods in 1964 and 1965. He wrote using a typewriter in a house in Hydra while listening to a portable record player, on which he listened to his favourite Ray Charles record, The Genius Sings the Blues. At first he managed only three pages a day, and sometimes wrote only one hour a day. When the novel began to take shape, he worked up to fifteen hours a day, with the help of amphetamines. He later claimed that amphetamine use was a mistake "for depressed people", as coming down was particularly hard. He said it took "ten years to fully recover". The first period of writing was interrupted when Cohen returned to Canada in October 1964 to receive the Prix littéraire du Québec for The Favourite Game, followed by a reading tour. One result of the tour was the film Ladies and Gentlemen... Mr. Leonard Cohen, released in 1965 from the National Film Board of Canada. The tour embittered Cohen, though, as he complained about money and the lack of exposure for his first novel. He found himself torn on the issue of Quebec separation that had arisen as the Quiet Revolution heated up. Montreal's francophone community was asserting itself against the anglophone elite. The Front de Libération du Québec had begun targeting anglophones with bombs in 1963, and a statue of Queen Victoria on Sherbrooke Street was destroyed with a bomb on 12 July. This political turmoil found its way into Cohen's work when he returned to Hydra. Cohen