THE END
After Word
ARCTIC SMOKE could only have been set in the 1990s. For one, it was probably the last decade in which characters could self-identify as anti-establishment while refusing to virtue-signal in ways that became common after 2007, when social media and the mobile device crashed together and began to accelerate nascent cultural trends. More importantly, it was the decade in which the Seattle Scene actualized the final death of punk. At the risk of offending those who hated British cultural critic Mark Fisher (“K-punk”)—indeed, CELEBRATED his suicide—I have to acknowledge his strong influence on this book. Fisher, in a vivid analysis of Kurt Cobain’s “dreadful lassitude and objectless rage,” argued that grunge gave voice to a youth culture of total frustration, in which rebellion was no longer a real option. And then grunge itself committed suicide.
Nineties rebellion was no longer that brief hot connection to alternative community, the way it was in the sixties, the seventies, and episodically in the eighties. Pre-nineties, the habits and symbols of punk had a grace period where they truly were disturbing and oppositional. Those habits and symbols were always soon-to-be captured by the machine, of course, and sold back to the posers, latecomers, and hangers-on. But there would always be a little lead-time for the true believers to flee and start the next fire. Sadly, by the nineties rebellion was prefigured by the machine. Punk could only exist as a weird spectre without any legible history: it was anticipated, produced, marketed and sold by the machine as a precondition of its own existence. And so, at the close of the millennium, we had gone from the MC5 to Blink-182. Could a true punk feel anything other than despair?
I was never a true punk. I wanted to be. Some freak friends I knew in the nineties asked me what I thought would happen to the scene if it were transported out of its historical context, that of densely populated, culturally exhausted cityscapes. One friend enthusiastically proposed a thought experiment: “Like, what if a punk band had to tour the Arctic?” What a great premise, I thought, and immediately stole it. Years later, as I began to write, the doubts tumbled out. What was the Arctic for my friends, symbolically? Did it function as a repository for fetishes and projections, the way the “Orient” and “Africa” and “The New World” did in so many works of British Imperialism? I had already been to the High Arctic—a boyhood fantasy realized—but the question was just as urgent when directed at myself. After all, my adventures on that Arctic trip were downright hallucinogenic, and probably romanticized in both my immediate experience and retrospective memory.
So I began to consider the projections of “northerness” so common to generic fantasy. In maps of Narnia and Middle Earth, south is generally the geography of the swarthy and diminished human. East, in Narnia, is the geography of exploration and the unrevealed or redeemed. West, in Middle Earth, serves much the same function. But north—north is consistently the embodiment of wonder, mythological power, and romanticized “wildness” (is there Galadriel fetish porn? Probably).
Northerness—especially its ethnocentricity and “medievalism”—has seeped out of its literary precincts into a variety of subcultures, some more toxic than others. One florid example is Scandinavian Black Metal, a scene that has often borrowed from Tolkien’s lore and iconography. Some Black Metal, especially the traditional Norwegian variety, shares a racist and xenophobic bent with neo-nazi strains of punk. Other forms of punk—anarchist, straight edge, vegan—are perpetually at odds with both their racist kin and the “Viking” melodrama of northern Black Metal. Some forms of punk share with some forms of Black Metal the stage antics of cutting and self-mutilation. It’s complicated. The turf wars over what even counts as authentic “punk” or “black metal” will likely never end. But what almost all punk and black metal scenes share is an excruciating drive to burn down what are perceived as asphyxiating cultural norms. Churches of Norway, anyone?
Speaking of churches, I went to a one at least three times a week growing up just north of Montana, in the small city of Lethbridge. Some American tourists dropped by our church one Sunday, and described Lethbridge as “Twin Peaks North.” I couldn’t have agreed more. What a perfect setting for a surreal story. The town is sliced down the middle by a phantasmagorical river valley filled with cottonwoods, cactus, and rattlesnakes. It’s the type of valley that suddenly, surprisingly, plunges down out of the otherwise flat landscape. It was the site of the last great “inter-tribal” battle in Canada—the Battle of the Belly River—between the Iron Confederacy and the Blackfoot Confederacy.
Lethbridge was a famous brothel town in the early nineteenth century, as referenced by Timothy Findley in his novel The Wars. The high-level train bridge that spans the valley is the largest of its kind in the world. Many have plunged to their deaths attempting to climb it. Supposedly, one of my childhood friends was tied to the tracks in a drug-deal gone bad, crushed to bits by the train. Chinook winds howl out of the west to drive everyone crazy, sometimes raising the topsoil and creating the infamous and so-called “black blizzards.” It’s crazy dry. Many are infected with Chinook madness: the rates of suicide and divorce are supposedly high.
Lethbridge isn’t all bleakness and weirdness. It counts many Japanese Canadians among its population, the descendants of racist internment and evacuation policies during WWII. They’ve enriched the culture tremendously. Smack in the middle of this prairie town we have a wondrous Japanese garden, where one can attend a tea ceremony unlike anything at the local saloon or coffee shop. There are many Buddhist temples; I first learned to meditate in one of them. I was lucky enough to grow up with the Tamayoses next door, the Shimozawas around one corner, the Okamuras around the other, and the Kanashiros down the street. Some of them are great guitar players.
Until the nineties, anyway, Lethbridge culture was a cheek-by-jowl concoction of rednecks, farmers, fundamentalist Christians, Mormons, Buddhists, bikers, old hippies, young goths, immigrants, Hutterites, Káínawa folk and their confederates, the Piikani and Siksika (whose traditional territories Lethbridge occupies), and the perpetually hopeful and disappointed “university types.” The mix could be visually striking on a bustling Thursday afternoon. A family friend immigrated to Canada from Iran, and, after his flight, caught a bus from Calgary. As it rolled into the Lethbridge station, downtown, he looked out the window and burst into tears. He thought he was in the wrong country.
So it all went into the mix—punk, Lethbridge, fantasy, nineties, northerness. I tried as best I could to write a formulaic novel in the genre tradition of urban fantasy. How’d that work out for me? In the documentary Gimme Danger, James Williamson, guitarist for the Stooges, said of the Raw Power era: “it was our best effort to make hit records ... but the thing about us is, we’re so delusional about what is popular, because all we really care about is what we like.” Enough said.
Without the Stooges, could there ever have been the Ramones? Without the Ramones, could there ever have been a Nirvana? Trick questions. When writers and musicians note that they “could not have done it alone,” they are not simply being gracious or indulging false modesty, but expressing an indelible truth of interdependence. We may experience ourselves as the main characters in our own stories—with our discrete motives, clear desires, and choices that spring from our inner “selves”—but life’s not really like that. They don’t call fiction “fiction” for nothing. I didn’t cook up, ex nihilo, an idiom that nestles the sagacious with the jejune. Bugs Bunny taught me that. An old girlfriend accidentally offered me the name Dawn Cherry. The Right Honourable Stephen Harper loaned me his speeches without even knowing it. On and on go the imprints and influences, forever rippling.
So a big Lethbridge thank-you to NeWest, the small press with big designs. Matt, Claire, Michel, and the rest of that gang are producing consistently wonderful and beautiful books. To my original readers: Rosemary Nixon for a magpie’s eye; Candas Jane Dorsey for a raven’s brain; Timothy J. Anderson for a crow’s nose. Speaking of birds, special thanks to Kit
Dobson, who agreed to be my final editor despite what must have been his better judgment. While I’m at it, thanks to Bill Bunn, Mike Thorn, and all my friends at Calgary’s S.A.W. Workshop for hot tea, warm wishes, and cool advice. And to Calgary’s IFWA, surely the least hard-drinking writer’s association in history. These folks are accomplished writers. They sure ain’t punks.
While writing, I read a lot. It would be shifty and shiftless of me not to acknowledge my humongous debt to other writers. First, to the books that deeply inspired me: Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love, Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale, and Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus. All three are built of language that is so supersaturated it becomes palpably hallucinogenic. Second, to secretive old Thomas Pynchon himself. In Gravity’s Rainbow and The Crying of Lot 49, he shows how one can take conventional story craft and push it so hard that it comes apart at the seams: too much causality, chronology, agency—all the familiar elements of story can, with enough overdrive, actually zip themselves inside-out to create a bewilderment much better than plain old chaos ever could. Third, to the incomparable Flannery O’Connor. In her collection Mystery and Manners, she celebrates a kind of fiction that frustrates our hardwired urge to connect with character and groove on plot. I aspire to that.
A cheerful shout-out to the Bible, surely the wildest anthology of weird tales ever collected. That’s because New Weird is actually very old. It’s part of many story traditions in many cultures.
Nothing could be less punk than scholarship. I have to do some for my day job; I don’t have to like it. But I have to admit that sometimes a rare beast—scintillating, vibrant academic work—sneaks up and bites me in the ass. In a good way. So my enduring thanks to the narratologist H. Porter Abbott, who has investigated the interface between storytelling and human evolution in a fabulous book called Real Mysteries. Abbott gives a great evolutionary explanation for the compulsive human desire for story. But he also supplies compelling research that serves as license to engage in storytelling misbehaviour. Certain kinds of stories can jam our evolutionary repertoire of reading strategies; such tales create a haunting and humbling resonance, where the human mind is suddenly aware of itself, caught in the very act of failing to impose standardized narrative order and clarity. Abbott demonstrates how such weird tales can gift the reader with a spooky perception of what lies outside of language and story.
Speaking of the outside of language, thank you and apologies to all the drummers I have stolen from in the attempt to enliven my prose, including “Pretty” Purdy, Steve Ferrone, John Bonham, Ian Mosley, and “Death Metal” Dave Mills. The delicious ways in which they hear time have found their way into this book. Stories dry up, and words lose their sense, and meaning withers. But rhythm remains.
Lethbridge
June 2019
Randy Nikkel Schroeder grew up Mennonite in Alberta’s deep south. As a young man he fled for the High Arctic and, psychologically, never came back. He currently lives with his family in Calgary, where he snowshoes in the woods, watches birds, and plays guitar and mandolin for his band, Uncle Zugg. In his spare time, he is Professor of English, Cultures, and Languages at Mount Royal University. To learn more about Schroeder’s work, visit www.randynikkelschroeder.com
Arctic Smoke Page 32