Life Is Like Canadian Football and Other Authentic Folk Songs Page 6
77 The “rouge” is a single point, which can be scored by kicking the ball through the opponent’s end zone, or by your opponent’s giving up a touchback within their own end zone. There are no rouges in the American variation of the game of football. There are also no Wikipedia entries on the rouge.
78 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1986).
79 There were precedents. As is well known, John and Alan Lomax in 1933 took their 300-pound Dictaphone on the road throughout the Deep South, stopping at work camps and prisons in order to collect American folk songs. The Lomaxes thought such sites could serve as de facto reservoirs of authentic folk-musical culture, in part because of the strict boundaries essentially imposed by those organizations. Benjamin Filene, Romancing the Folk (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Mary Beth Hamilton, In Search of the Blues: Black Voices, White Visions (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1998); Karl Hagstrom Miller, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
80 However, Boccioni’s masterpiece pales in comparison, if I may be so bold, to the aesthetic shimmer of a tight end pulverizing a defensive back on the sweep.
81 One of the consequences of these differences is that the Canadian game involves higher levels of movement, action, tension, and excitement than the American variation, despite the lower levels of capital, size, and spectacular commodification. On the historical development of the rules, conventions, and cultural significance of Canadian football, see John Nauright and Phil White, “Mediated Nostalgia, Community and Nation: The Canadian Football League in Crisis and the Demise of the Ottawa Rough Riders, 1986–1996,” Sport History Review 33, no. 2 (2002): 121–137; Bob Sproule, “Canadian Football: Past to Present,” The Coffin Corner 13, no. 1 (1991): 1–5; and Fred Wiseman, A Frosty Game: The Glacial but Profound Changes in Canadian Football in the Twentieth Century (Fredericton, NB: Goose Lane Editions, 1990).
82 Claude Elwood Shannon, “Communication in the Presence of Noise,” Proceedings of the IRE 37, no. 1 (1949): 10-21.
83 See Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (1992): 3–7.
84 These exact words (“Would you rather be sober and tired or drunk and bankrupt?”) were also spoken by Staunton R. Livingston himself in the attention-getting introduction of his final address to the Canadian Folkloristics Association, though we certainly cannot know if he had yet recorded “Song Written Upon Getting Cut By the Argos,” or if he had even begun the CFL Sessions project. Peter Skellgord, “What I Can Remember,” Globe and Mail, Dec 26, 1992, A4. Of course, it is possible that Livingston had heard but not yet recorded the song. There are other possibilities as well.
85 In 2008, as long as you were a graduate student in Ontario, it was still possible to acquire a complimentary pass to the University of Toronto library system. The same pass now costs $50, which is unfortunate given the drastic increases in average rent across the Greater Toronto Area, despite meagre gains in real wage growth in the region. See Sally Borden, The Art of Economics and the Economics of Art: Making Work in Canada in the Twenty-First Century (Montreal, QC: Black Rose Books, 2014).
86 Niles J. Paul Stanley, “Vagabondage,” in The Encyclopedia of Canadian Folkloristics, ed. Denise LaFleur (Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier Press, 1985), 761.
87 See also, for example, Richard Dorson, Folklore and Fakelore (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976).
88 Staunton R. Livingston quoted in Rachel Alloway, The Yorkville Scene and Environs (Nepean, ON: Borealis Press, 2001), 139.
89 Rachel Alloway, The Yorkville Scene and Environs (Nepean, ON: Borealis Press, 2001), 132.
90 There is some discrepancy on this point. See Peter Skellgord, “What I Can Remember,” Globe and Mail, Dec 26, 1992, A4; and Paul Butterfield, “Infamous and Forgotten Windsorites,” Maclean’s, Dec 24, 2001, 37.
91 Dane Spounge, The Origins of Canadian Beat and Spoken Word Poetry (Regina, SK: University of Regina Press, 1998); Blake Altman, Losing Letters: The Anti-Chirographic Turn in Canadian Bohemia (Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press, 2002).
92 Peter Lorre, “This Year’s Assumption Graduates,” The Windsor Star, June 20, 1954, A5. And yet, it is unclear whether or not Livingston ever competed in organized sports, including Canadian football.
93 Thomas Toogood, “Regarding the ‘New Noise’ in Folk Music Study,” The Blenheim News Tribune, Dec 13, 1979, A2.
94 Fran Laney, From Away: The Canadians Who Have Struggled South of the Border (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990).
95 Polk Halkman, The Influence of Folk Tales and Ghost Stories of Newfoundland and Labrador (Kentville, NS: Gaspereau Press, 1997).
96 There is only brief reference to one such talk in Grant Kennedy, Folklore Scholarship as Folk Process (Ottawa, ON: University of Ottawa Press, 1981). Livingston’s three-point procedure, however, becomes very apparent as one listens to the hours upon hours of original tape that constitutes the CFL Sessions.
97 I am not the first to have experienced the sublime and even theological qualities of this classic offensive play, in which the quarterback drops, drawing the defensive line toward him, as though a decoy, only to sneak a short pass through to a nearby receiver with a fleet of blockers ready to go. See Mark Galli, “And God Created Football: Intimations of the Divine in a Well-Executed Screen Pass,” ChristianityToday.com 28 (2010).
98 Staunton R. Livingston quoted in Dave Simpson, “Concert Review: A Tiresome Night for Folk Music,” The London Free Press, June 23, 1969, A7.
99 Due to the modest average salary in the league, professional football players in Canada have often needed to secure additional employment in the off-season. This was especially true in the 1970s. Sandra Yokum, “For the Love of the Game: Exploitation in Canadian Sport,” Canadian Journal of Labour 120, no. 3 (1993): 230–243.
100 An online branded football lesson, of all things, indicates the semiotic richness and functionality of a well-disciplined stance: “To set up in a good three-point stance, start with your feet shoulder-width apart, in line underneath your armpits. Get in an athletic stance by sinking your tail and bending your knees. From there, if you are on the right-hand side of the offensive line, put your right foot back to roughly a heel-to-toe relationship, so that your feet are staggered. Then, lean forward and put your right hand down to the ground. Keep your head up and back flat. If there is too much weight on your hands, you could fall face first. […] When you become confident and comfortable in your three-point stance, not only will you have personal success but you’ll also create success for your team.” Dick’s Pro Tips, Dick’s Sporting Goods, January 2, 2021.
101 In Canadian football, as in American football, the linebacker is positioned behind the line of scrimmage; they generally are required to read or interpret the offensive play, whether run or pass, and to adjust their position accordingly: on running plays they move forward, whereas on passing plays they drop backwards, covering receivers according to either zone or man-to-man schemas. However, it is also the linebacker who is often responsible for blitzing—in which case they do not need to interpret the offensive play at all, just to launch themselves through a particular gap. When successful, this tactic is very pleasurable for an audience to behold. Nick Trujillo, “Machines, Missiles, and Men: Images of the Male Body on ABC’s Monday Night Football,” Sociology of Sport Journal 12, no. 4 (1995): 403–423.
102 I have often been asked which CFL players wrote and sang which songs, but, given Livingston’s sonographic approach to fieldwork, this knowledge is lost. I claim that to wonder is to miss the point profoundly. However, authorship of “Madonna with No Divinity” has been verified because upon public release of The CFL Sessions, former trainer Jeseka Hickey wrote me an email, the details of which have subsequently undergone verification. I include her
name at her insistence, if not her version of the title.
103 Not necessarily profane, however, as one cannot help but be reminded of the “Epicurean matrix of matter without form, of tiny molecules stringing and swilling with love and danger and time,” of which Livingston spoke at great lengths in his first slam poetry performance. Staunton R. Livingston quoted in Darleen Pageant, “Local Poets Mix It Up—and Mash,” Toronto Star, July 1967, A12.
104 Livingston’s recording of “‘E’ for End Zone” is one of the few on which his method seems to disappear or falter. Before the music begins, one can hear a chair scratch across the floor and then the performer, I believe, taps the microphone before stating, “This song is called ‘“E” for End Zone.’” Therefore, this is the only song in the CFL Sessions whose title is certain. The other titles having been hypothesized by the present author.
105 Due to his imposing size, one cannot help but wonder about the nature of Livingston’s relationship to brutality and sadism. One additionally wonders whether, during this famously informal period in CFL history, Livingston ever got to see the field himself, even the practice field. On the fluidity of the identity of the average team roster in the CFL in the 1970s, see, for example, Stan Plempton, Once We Were Kings: My Life in Football in Canada (Toronto, ON: Cormorant Books, 1987).
Part Two: Songs of the Field
Troubled In Mind
What is the meaning of communication? Countless competing answers have been offered since the game-changing moment—whenever this game-changing moment might have occurred—at which human beings first began to reflect upon and articulate ideas about the species-wide propensity to divulge or convey information.106
According to the cyberneticist luminaries Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, whose 1949 collaborative book has proven astonishingly durable, communication is both “the procedures by which one mind may affect another” and “the procedures by means of which one mechanism (say automatic equipment to track an airplane, and to compute its probable future positions) affects another mechanism (say, a guided missile chasing this airplane).”107 To put this another way, the act of communication is a straight shot—akin to a bomb or tailback headed straight up the middle—the fundamental problem of which is that all possible channels carry alongside their messages, necessarily, a certain amount of noise.108
And how to distinguish signal (i.e., payload) from noise (i.e., disturbance)? How can anyone, in any situation, be sure the message sent ever exactly arrives? That the encoded symbols signify that which they were intended to signify? These are ancient problems plaguing numerous domains, from military coordination to long-distance romantic relationships to, yes, folk song collection. Luckily for Shannon and Weaver, however, and luckily too for the behemoth telecom corporations continuing to exploit their pioneering research, not to mention the reader of the present text, the issue of noise turns out to be solvable via mathematical theorems that utilize the principle of redundancy.109
Be that as it may, there have been numerous attempts to revise or outright reject the Shannon-Weaver model with respect to human communication. For example, James Carey has explored the colonialist roots of transmission-oriented inflections of the concept, suggesting we reconsider the term’s originary community-building and social—one might even add folkloristic—connotations.110 Shannon and Weaver are implied but not named in this critique. Similarly, Stuart Hall has identified in the case of television broadcasting a myriad of possible “decoding” positions.111 Recall that for Shannon and Weaver, the receiver was only a sitting duck, waiting to be blasted by a belligerence of messages, possessing neither weapons nor armour of its own. But in Hall’s theory, receivers are active agents able to reassemble the contents of any communicational event vis-à-vis the intentions, so often nefarious, of sovereign transmitters. Neither sitting ducks nor dupes, receivers are instead guerilla warriors in Hall’s agile model.112
I was thinking about these debates and, of course, about Staunton R. Livingston, as September transitioned to October and the leaves turned bright crimson and orange—I was back in London, my Forest City. Was it possible that Livingston could find a posthumous shelter in the discipline of communication studies, despite having already been hostilely rejected within the field of folklore?113 If so, was communication for Livingston an act of transmission or an act of ritual? Or was it something else entirely? I pondered these and other questions, marching in the morning along the river to my cubbyhole office on the ninth floor of the library, crawling and backstroking during noontime lane swim, and finally returning to my underground home led by the light of the stars, finishing the day with a steaming bowl of beans and rice, or some other modest yet nourishing substance that was also not too difficult to chew.
Of course, my own methodological dilemma—how to piece together historical information when textual records were so obviously lacking—would first need to be solved since, again, Staunton R. Livingston had not maintained any chirographic documentary practice. This problem did not discourage me, however. I envisioned myself as a lead blocker or horseman, clearing the path for Livingston’s delicate, invisible motions, motivated as I was by the universality of entropy and the inherent corruptibility of all things.114
* * *
Down By Your Shady Harbour
from Okie Langlois115
Recorded in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia
That night was cool, when you left for school;
I could tell the year would be long
With you so far, across, away,
And me with just your song,
Me with just your song.
You read books over there, and learn over there,
As I walk about the shoreline.
The last place you touched here means so much, dear,116
Your sacred place till the morning,
Our sacred place till the morning.
Your thick dark hair, it seems just there
Hovering o’er the horizon.
I breathe you in, I think of sins
And go back to work in the morning.
I go back to work in the morning.
Girls here mock me, they don’t stop;
They mock, they mock me daily.
They say you won’t be faithful to me,
But I don’t pay them mind, dear.
I wait down by the harbour,
Down by your shady harbour.
* * *
Am I Born to Die?
It was late November when I first mentioned Staunton R. Livingston to Dr. Bronnley at the wine bar in downtown London. We met before his train trip that evening back to Toronto, the most immediate purpose of which was that his signature was required on that semester’s progress report. Was I making “excellent” progress, “good” progress, or merely “satisfactory” progress? These bureaucratic rituals are the products of madness, but Bronnley had marked “excellent” each term thus far, additionally imprinting strongly enthusiastic if brief comments into the text boxes. This was important because funding in the doctoral program was contingent on these otherwise meaningless documents.117 “Promising work in development!” he had last written. “Excellent!!” he scribbled this time, redundantly.
Our chat that night was both productive and stressful, as was by now customary. Dr. Bronnley was generous with his time, generally wanting to meet every two weeks or so, yet he often made me wary of my self, especially the degree to which I had yet listened to or read things that I should have, by now, already listened to or read. “Really, you don’t know Spandau Ballet?” he once asked, brows high and furrowed. “The word ‘few’ is only used in reference to countable nouns,” he also instructed with a sigh. Hot shame engulfed me in these moments, impelling note taking and follow-up questioning. So, by our second round that night, I had sketched a list of items to procure from the library, this time on the topics of civility, reverberation, and the Renaissance carnival in addition to the top two al
l-time films involving disco.118
Of course, it was not always obvious how Bronnley’s suggestions related to my dissertation topic, but this was apparently part of the contest. A map of trials and tribulations was bestowed, ancient and modern recipes of potential potions or spells lent, and the student charged with connecting the gifts and assembling therewith new, useful knowledge. The hero’s quest, in essence—and thus graduate school earning its place as merely another genre of folk song.119
While we waited in the barrel-lined cellar for the cheque, Dr. Bronnley offered congratulations regarding the accumulating press for the The CFL Sessions, a volume of which I had recently released online. The Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, and CBC Radio had run features in the past month; these were noted in a departmental bulletin.120 He thought that I should be sure to list these media appearances on my CV: “This will be good for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council scholarship application,” he said, scribbling his signature and glancing over, one last time, at our waitress’s bottom while she sauntered back to the bar. Since the topic had naturally arisen, this appeared to be an opportune moment to introduce the topic of Staunton R. Livingston, which would need to be done tactfully, knowing what I did about human psychology in the field of communication.121
Certain details of the pitch remain foggy. “You would not believe the backstory here, Dr. Bronnley,” I likely began. I may have blubbered about Livingston’s position on the margins of academia and his sexy biography, beginning in Windsor and ending with his mysterious death in Quebec. There is a good chance that I additionally divulged Livingston’s understanding of sound as overflowing, immanent plenitude, as revolutionary substance in and of itself, my theory of which had already begun to percolate. For this was obviously the core of the project. “Sound has a magical, you could say de-territorializing, like, potency, for Staunton R. Livingston,” I might have said.122