Life Is Like Canadian Football and Other Authentic Folk Songs

by Henry Adam Svec

  We did not talk about the fact that she was now leaving her husband and moving to Toronto. Nor did we dwell on the development that I had accepted a part-time job teaching in Fredericton and was moving that September, up and out of the basement, at last. We had already heard about these developments by word of mouth. I am not sure that we talked about anything. Or perhaps I cannot remember the content of our conversation, but strictly the medium: the way she laughed on that festive afternoon, from the belly and from the mouth, wide open, incredulous, grateful for the joy of being in the world with others. In fact, I do remember realizing Corinna’s was the laugh of the folk.278

  As the bands changed over, Neil Young on the stereo as intermission, one of Corinna’s Winnipeg friends—vintage floral dress and partly shaven head—came to sit with us. “You guys want to do shrooms?” And we walked to a van parked on a side street and scooped, with a few other strangers, spoonfuls of psilocybin from a giant Ziploc bag, then wandered back to the festival, the sun shining on us like an American anthem.279

  My memory of the next six hours or so is less foggy than goopy. We all went to a show— sparkly and anticipatory—at the pool hall, Dooly’s. There was an excellent, ironical lounge act with gothic makeup under blacklights, faces twisting ever so slightly. By their set’s end the audience’s scrutiny was uncomfortably shifting away from the stage and, I suspected, toward me. Outside for air, I ran into an old classmate from undergrad, now a successful comedian, and struggled to focus on this most rudimentary exchange. “Good,” I said. “I am… brood.” It might have been five o’clock.

  Then I lost Corinna and her rockabilly-punk cronies. I went along to Mel’s Tea Room with strangers—were they teenagers?—ordering a burger out of obligation, or solidarity, one of the teens—Leon?—taunting me with his perplexingly expanding feline grin. Perhaps these children were the younger siblings of someone I knew; perhaps they wanted to be folk song collectors. I looked around Mel’s to see all manner of style and accoutrement: metalheads, vintage cowboys, twee nerds, hard townies. Was this diner the green room? Were these my fellow performers? The folk? Is there no anchor point to one’s location within time or history? I thought of Gannat and of Pavel, and of Politran’s costumes and cigarettes, the cold black stream of miscommunication, and of Päivi, my unrequited Finnish love, all of whom sounded, as they echoed inside my cranium, related to my current dislocation. All thresholds were giving way: between head and heart, inside and outside, footnote and endnote. I gave Leon a twenty-dollar bill, unable to face the proprietor behind the counter, and escaped back to Bridge Street.

  As I wandered slowly to the centre of the crowd in the mainstage tent, a beloved singer-songwriter was now performing her set, peering out from under shaggy black bangs, enchanting not only with songs and lyrics, but with testimony betwixt and between. It was like a love affair. “This is a song about a difficult time in my life,” and then came the song, and overflowing powerful feelings. I looked around to see couples holding hands and children sitting on shoulders, and thought that Staunton R. Livingston should be here, too, to inscribe this data onto his capacious magnetic tapes. Conceivably, he was here, or had been, and we were indeed on such tapes—onto which the iconoclastic folk song collector had been recording and rerecording for all of time. Could anyone prove otherwise? Perhaps the intersubjective connective tissue binding human beings together was just a long, spooling tangle of magnetic tape, wrapped also around and through my head, tying together the senses. In which case, what is the point of this stage, this proscenium? I wanted to remove from my mind and from my flesh the tape, on which additionally had been written everything I had ever read, every authority in my field; I wanted to burn it, to protect my precious mind from encroachments and crackbacks.

  I pleaded with my fellow audience members in the vicinity to help me dismantle the architecture of the concert environment, but they did not understand. They shushed me.

  Mercifully, then again: Corinna. “How are you doing?” she asked. I explained what was happening, and she guided me away from the crowds and from the noise, across boardwalks and pastoral ponds and low-cloudy skies, up toward the university campus and football field. On the fifty-five-yard line, Corinna took off her small shoes, instructing me to do the same, so that we could lie on the lush, even grass. But I said no, not wanting us to be ambushed or killed. So, we went back to her dorm-room rental and she held me, and we cried again, and we loved each other one last time.

  When we returned to Sappyfest around eleven, the surprise headliners had just taken the stage. They had been billed on the festival’s promotional materials as Shark Attack! but had turned out to be a famous and I believe Grammy award-winning rock collective who were opening for U2 in Moncton that same weekend. Their appearance in Sackville was thus a secretive act, a deception.280 The band blasted their broody, buoyant hits out across the swan pond and waterfowl park, and I would guess out across the Bay of Fundy too, out with the tide. There seemed to be dozens of people on stage with guitars or ramshackle percussive objects; a stringy-haired thrift-store battalion of sound, sweat, and fury.

  How would Staunton R. Livingston have evaluated this act of communication? Where would he have placed his microphone?

  Believe it or not, I managed to set aside all such methodological questions, undertaking to forget, for the remainder of the night, most secondary and tertiary sources as well. I managed to slough off all my researches.

  And as I stood among the mass of swaying and smiling listeners, behind Corinna, I felt like a newborn dove.281 I wanted to receive everything in my novel nakedness. Looking out across the floating sea of bobbing heads and faces, a swelling network of jubilation and community, I lacked understanding of the degree to which I might ever again feel myself to be part of any renegade folk machine. (Does any collector ever achieve satisfaction?) I knew only that—like all nights, days, festivals, and folk songs—there would be an ending. And that was all that I needed to know.

  * * *

  Take It Easy But Take It to the Limit282

  by LIVINGSTON™

  Okay, I am trying to unload the goods.

  I mean seven women.

  Four people who want to have me,

  Two people who want to make me angry,

  Some people say that she is my girlfriend.

  Relax and relax.

  Don’t be confused by the sound of your own wheel.283

  As long as you can still illuminate,

  Don’t even try to understand.

  Find a place to stand up and relax.

  Okay, I am standing in a corner of Winslow, Arizona.

  Such a beautiful sight.

  I am a girl, my master, in a flat lay Ford bed.

  Look at me slowly.

  Come on, dear, maybe don’t say.

  I need to know if it is safe to make sweet love to me.

  We can lose, we will win, even if we never…

  So I am open, I climbed in, so let go.

  There’s a lot of room to move around.

  Okay, I am running on the road, trying to release the goods.

  I mean the world of problems.

  He is looking for a lover who has not swept my cover—

  It is difficult to find.

  Relax and relax.

  Don’t go crazy because of the sound of the wheel.

  Come on, dear, I need to know if your sugary love can

  save me.

  There’s a lot of room to move around.

  Oh, we got it.

  We should relax.

  * * *

  A Great Big Sea

  The myriad and intricately interrelated arguments embedded in the present text, which I have tactical reasons for not summarizing in any conclusion, were originally generated as a requirement of my doctoral degree, the final labours of which in Canada generally involve the oral defense of a written dissertation. These arguments were pr
oduced by synthesizing and thus transcending numerous sources and influences. Suffice it to say, I am a doctor.284

  Of course, my research has since required several rounds of subsequent revision, given the purposes of the present text. For, with regards to the art of rhetoric, there is a marked difference between the conventional gauntlet of the academic viva and the chaotic challenges of the marketplace of literary commodities; in the former, the supplicant novice begs the authorities, using their concepts and jargon, and citing their publications, for passage through the gates, while in the latter, the intrepid, nomadic warrior combats competitors on shelves and digital interfaces alike, seeking only independence and autonomy.285 Whether or not the future folk song collectors in Canada (or anywhere, really) will find themselves converted by my work certainly remains to be seen. Can any quarterback count on their receivers? Nevertheless, I have essayed in the writing of this book, excreting no small amount of my own perspiration in the process, to make my benefactions palatable for laypeople without unduly diluting the discoveries. Because anyone can become an authentic folk song collector. It only takes—at the right time, and in the right place—the right treasure to fall onto one’s head.

  Today, as my editor and I tidy the prose and accompanying songs, polish the footnotes and bibliography, and as I anxiously await the hour at which these pages will finally be sent to the printer, I find inspiration again in Napoléon, particularly in the Emperor’s affective connection to folk song. He read and reread, and read again, Ossian’s ancient relics that were excavated by my folkloristic forebear, James Macpherson. Napoleon surely fondled his tear-stained volume in refuge from the horrors of the monstrous world he had conquered, and thereby transformed, even into exile on Saint Helena and, feasibly, also as he finally returned, through death, to dust.286 Is it possible that the hole in his heart, which could be filled neither by concubines nor global conquest, was at least temporarily stopped by folk song? The possibility that the present collection of folk songs, and history, might one day similarly touch a soul—any soul—brings the present author unquantifiable comfort and energy.

  Even greater in magnitude, however, is the consolation I derive from the possibility that you, dear reader of this volume, might one day carry the ball.287 As you will have noticed, there is no shortage of treasure to be collected, although incompetence unfortunately abounds, and, as my story demonstrates, success is by no means guaranteed.288 One must get in the middle—but not in the way. One must keep one’s legs pumping. We must then be strong together as we hold hands and huddle and dig and stand, listening together in the always and evermore abundant fields of folk song.

  * * *

  Notes

  197 See Karin Sparring Björkstén, Peter Bjerregaard, and Daniel F. Kripke, “Suicides in the Midnight Sun—A Study of Seasonality in Suicides in West Greenland,” Psychiatry Research 133, no. 2-3 (2005): 205–213.

  198 See, for instance, Robert Service, Songs of a Sourdough (Toronto: William Briggs, 1909). However, “literary” should be understood in the broadest sense, including the labours also of economists, sculptors, programmers, and even cover band musicians.

  199 “[T]he purpose of myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming contradictions (an impossible achievement if, as it happens, the contradiction is real).” Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth,” The Journal of American Folklore 68, no. 270 (1955): 443.

  200 Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Methuen, 1982).

  201 On the fixity of print, I draw here on Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962). On the modularity of digital media, I draw on Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Maurizio Lazzarato, Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2014); Pierre Lévy, Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1998); Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001).

  202 John Bonnett, “The Flux of Communication: Innis, Wiener, and the Perils of Positive Feedback,” Canadian Journal of Communication 42, no. 3 (2017): 431–448.

  203 Staunton R. Livingston quoted by Eli Walchuck quoted in Lynne Wood, “Canada in the 1960s,” Local Histories 3, no. 4 (2000): 12–17.

  204 An obvious allusion to Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s classic, “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground,” which is included on Harry Smith’s highly influential Anthology of American Folk Music (New York, NY: Folkways, 1952).

  205 I have refrained from excising, from the small sample of songs presented in this book, LIVINGSTON™’s so-called glitches. I am sure that this will not persuade many of my professional folklorist readers, among whom the technical sheen of LIVINGSTON™ is practically a poison, but it is worth pointing to the school of media artists out there, for whom glitches are not simply errors or noises, but for whom glitches constitute the raw materials of artistic production—like paints or pencils in their own right—which is a properly Livingstonian philosophy of art. Caleb Kelly, Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009).

  206 University of Western Ontario Communication Studies Department, “PhD Program Graduate Student Handbook, 2008–2009,” 2008.

  207 Richard Dyer, “A Star is Born and the Construction of Authenticity,” in Stardom: Industry of Desire, ed. Christine Gledhill (New York, NY: Routledge, 2003), 155–163. Dyer examines the subtle cues by which Judy Garland evokes images of sincerity and authenticity across her films and star texts.

  208 Erica Brady, A Spiral Way: How the Phonograph Changed Ethnography (Jackson, MS: Jackson University Press, 1999); Edward M. Bruner, “Abraham Lincoln as Authentic Reproduction: A Critique of Postmodernism,” American Anthropologist 96, no. 2 (1994): 397–415; Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1983); and James Lastra, Sound Technology and the American Cinema: Perception, Representation, Modernity (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2000).

  209 J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1975).

  210 This despite the fact that I have taken great pains to obscure the identities of the people to which my book refers, in addition to insisting to my publisher that the text be categorized as “fiction” as a precautionary legal measure.

  211 The title mischievously alluded to a classic collection by Edith Fulton Fowke. Edith Fulton Fowke, Folk Songs of Canada (Waterloo, ON: Waterloo Music Co., 1954). For the online version of my collection, see Henry Adam Svec, Folk Songs of Canada Now, http://www.folk songsofcanadanow.com.

  212 Robert Everett-Green, “Disc of the Week: Rebooting Canada’s Folk Songbook, Globe and Mail, October 14, 2011.

  213 See, for example, Rex Murphy and Henry Adam Svec (guest), “Does Folk Song Matter Today?” Cross-Country Checkup, CBC Radio 1, February 2012.

  214 “Staunton R. Livingston only accidentally captured the songs of CFL players. What he essentially captured is communication as revolution—the act of moving air for the purpose of plugging into humanity, which is really just another way of saying ‘folk song.’ Music in the Livingstonian sense is technically beyond data or information as we conventionally understand these terms; it is beyond character or narrative or motivation; it is noise as signal.” Henry Adam Svec, “On Livingston’s Method,” Rhubarb Festival (public lecture, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Toronto, 2011).

  215 See Sandra Harding, Science and Social Inequality: Feminist and Postcolonial Issues (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006).

  216 See Patricia Cormack, “True Stories of Canada: Tim Hortons and the Branding of National Identity,” Cultural Sociology 2, no. 3 (2008): 369–384.

  217 See Sean Griffin, ed., Hetero: Queering Representations of Straightness (Albany, NY: Suny Press, 2009).

  218 See, for example, Roland Barthes,
The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1975).

  219 Detroit was thus appropriately a key focus for the expansion of the proletarian folk song movement of the 1930s and 1940s in the United States, beyond New York City. Serge Denisoff, Great Day Coming: Folk Music and the American Left (Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1973). On broader shifts in the relationship between subjectivity and alienation, see also Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).

  220 The title suggested by LIVINGSTON™ for this song was actually “I Am A Weary Immaterial Labourer in a Post-Industrial Informational Wasteland,” which I agree is far superior. However, that option elicited an unfortunate amount of laughter from early test audiences back in Ontario, and so a more traditional title was sutured to the text in order to preserve the sanctity of LIVINGSTON™’s soulful composition.

  221 For example, the thumbs-up icon, or the blue ghoulish scream icon. On the nature of iconicity versus indexicality and signification, see Charles Sanders Pierce, “The Sign: Icon, Index, and Symbol,” in Images: A Reader, eds. Sunil Manghani, Jon Simons, Arthur Piper, (New York, NY: Sage Publications, 2006), 107–109.

  222 Which emerges in the eighteenth century, in part, and this is significant, due to the proliferation of printed materials. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991).