Life Is Like Canadian Football and Other Authentic Folk Songs Page 9

  Thinking of communication in this way is a Canadian tradition, too, of which the economist Harold Adams Innis is often cited as progenitor. He made his name in the 1930s through the production of complex analyses of the fur and cod industries, in which he argued that colonialist desires had imprinted themselves on the geopolitical formation of Canada.178 But in the final stages of his career, and much to the consternation of his colleagues at the University of Toronto, Innis courageously broke beyond his home discipline’s entrenched boundaries. He sought to examine the roles of specific media within the coming-to-be and falling apart of the great world-historical civilizations, from Sumer and Egypt to Greece and Britain, often consulting secondary rather than primary sources out of necessity. Out of necessity because he was dying.179 What happens, Innis asked, when new channels or codes arise, such as alphabetic writing or moveable-type printing? How do new media rework past ways of transmitting or sharing information, and thus also past ways of doing and being? The answers, Innis discovered, had to do with nothing more and nothing less than the fundamental yet mutable conceptions of space and time.180

  Innis got the ball rolling before he tragically succumbed to prostate cancer in 1952. What happened next? Who would keep the ball of Canadian communication theory moving? On one hand, there was indeed the celebrity and CBC darling Marshall McLuhan, also a professor at the University of Toronto, who, it must be admitted, made Innis’s insights more easily digestible for mass audiences. In particular, McLuhan benched the method of materialist dialectics in favour of the formalist close-reading techniques that had been soldered to him as a graduate student at Cambridge: “Any hot medium allows of less participation than a cool one, as a lecture makes for less participation than a seminar, and a book for less than dialogue,” he wrote, for example.181 A master of the soundbite in a golden age of soundbites, McLuhan’s pop-rhetorical style resonated with the countercultural teenyboppers of the 1960s, none of whom, sadly, had likely read a single sentence of The Fur Trade in Canada.182“The medium is not more important than the message. The medium is the message!” McLuhan is believed to have exclaimed while being harassed by his idiotic students after class, if the sensationalist CBC short film is to be believed.183

  On the other hand, there was Staunton R. Livingston. It is insignificant whether Livingston influenced Marshall McLuhan or vice versa over the course of their brief student-teacher relationship; it is also insignificant whether or not Livingston had read Harold Adams Innis. The point is that from the traces remaining of Livingston’s speeches and lectures, and from his masterpiece in the CFL Sessions, one can extract a Canadian communication theory that slingshots out into uncharted territories, offering new maps and models of the late-modern communicative condition. Like a spiritualist seance facilitator or alchemical spinner of gold, Livingston produced recordings of folk songs with his magnetic tape machine at the same time that he erased himself, not as a creative being, but rather as an individual proprietor of creativity, from the equation.184

  Why has the work of this visionary folk song collector been so obscured across Canadian arts and letters, not to mention the nepotistic institutions that constitute Canadian folklore? Where is Livingston’s Heritage Minute episode? Where is Livingston’s dedicated broadcast of Radio One’s Ideas?

  To conclude, in this dissertation it will be demonstrated that, by suturing communistic folk song collection with Canadian media theory, Staunton R. Livingston kicked off an explosive and radical framework that requires faithful reception and delivery. Because, in Livingston’s tapes and across the quotations of his speeches, we can find the collection of folk songs reformatted as the giving of gifts. Furthermore, it is possible that this axiom can be applied to the collection of anything. One such gift, it will furthermore be seen, is the determinate and transformative power of communication technology into which Livingston invites us to combine and assemble and merge. Ergo, in this dissertation it will be claimed, with Livingston, that the phonographer (to cite merely one possible case study) is no mere note-taker; the opposite is true.185 We will see that the phonographer is a shaman, witch, wizard, and revolutionary. Any and all counter-arguments will be anticipated, entertained, and obliterated.

  * * *

  The Bold and Undaunted Youth

  I refined the plan for my dissertation proposal performance upon my return from Banff and transmitted it to my committee members one warm September afternoon on a bellyful of coffee and pastries. As the careful and sequential reader of the present text will have noticed, I had a clear set of strong hypotheses and, although a clear methodology was not identified, the research itself obviously required investigation of methodological procedures as such: Why have the contributions of Staunton R. Livingston been excluded from the discursive traditions of the field of folklore? What does Staunton R. Livingston have to offer the field of communication studies—and humanity? According to the criteria propounded by virtually every guidebook for writers of dissertations I have consulted—including those lent to me by Dr. Bronnley—this was promising work and should have been given, alongside general constructive criticism, a green light.186

  Let it also be known that the dissertation proposal was not exactly a famous hurdle in the general trajectory of the average PhD student in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Western Ontario. Aside from plagiarism or general delinquency, it is true that a couple of trials in the program had proven it possible to flunk out, the comprehensive examinations being the most common. At least, a horror story or two circulated over pints at the Grad Club of petty professors having gone sour on their formerly promising proteges, dropping the blade in the form of a ritualized and ressentiment-soaked onslaught in the examination room.187 But I was not writing my comps or even defending my dissertation; this was a minor checkbox, merely a formal opportunity to solicit feedback from the professoriate before proceeding with the project. There were no horror stories yet in circulation about botched dissertation proposal defenses.

  I must additionally flag that, up until this point, my general performance in graduate school was no less than consistently stellar. I had already published two peer-reviewed academic articles, with a third forthcoming, and passed my written comprehensive exam with flying colours, with one professor even whispering to me in a stairwell that she had “heard through the grapevine” about my submission’s publishability, which was uncommon.188 And the orals a few months later were a true cakewalk, on account of my maturing abilities as a tactician amid the fog of war.189 Two of my committee members fell into bitter debate with each other during the exam, thereby exhausting most of the allotted time. I recall reaching for a Danish—Bronnley tended to bring Danishes for such events, I will give him that—then sitting back to watch the sparks, the battle having something to do with the French reception of Heidegger. “You have no conception of death,” the external examiner from Philosophy shot at Dr. Bronnley while packing up his laptop.

  Therefore, I was confident the problem with my proposal had nothing to do with my ideas. The problem had to do with an incompatibility and a tragic lack of critical reflexivity on the part of the university as an institution. For the choices made in presenting my proposal, germanely grounded in the conceptual contours of the subject matter, were simply not comprehensible from the lofty vantages of the so-called ivory tower. I was like a fiddle or jaw harp, a drum or harmonica, emitting a rich and textured frequency; meanwhile, on the other side of the room, the university was trying to transcribe my rich sounds onto tinfoil.190

  It does not matter what exactly was said or sung in that boardroom as I planted myself, solidly, in front of Dr. Bronnley and his straw colleagues. They wore tweed jackets and ties and power suits, while I defiantly donned my grandfather’s faded striped-green golf shirt, as though draped by the red flag of permanent revolution. I will note that the stuffy contempt on Bronnley’s doughy white face, of which I was unafraid, was ultimately backed by a reserve army of institu
tional power. But more detailed description of the fallout from my already mythologized stand can be left to local historians.191 What remains significant is that on that day—in that moment—I was no longer even myself. I was done with collecting the songs of the folk, and carrying the information around on my portable recording device, as though carrying a canoe, à la portage. It was now time for the folk to carry me.

  * * *

  The Hobo’s Grave

  from Ron Leary192

  Recorded in Windsor, Ontario

  Along the side of the road I’ve been walking

  From job to job,

  Looking for anything that’ll keep me surviving.

  Been too long that I been broken.

  There’s an unmarked grave that is cov’ring

  Me after all these years.

  I could never amount to nothing,

  No effort could move me forward.

  But I’ll lie free,193

  I’ll lie free,194

  I’ll lie free,195

  I’ll lie free.196

  * * *

  Notes

  106 By definition, there is no recorded trace of this presumably prehistoric moment. However, for a highly original analysis of more recent developments in the history of the concept, such as can be found in the work of Plato and Jesus, see John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

  107 Warren Weaver, “Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication,” in Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1949), 3. Although Weaver merely wrote an introductory essay, which was placed before Shannon’s pioneering research, the text as a whole is often referred to as the Shannon-Weaver theory of communication.

  108 Claude E. Shannon, “The Mathematical Theory of Communication,” in Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1949), 29–115.

  109 Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1949).

  110 James Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (New York, NY: Routledge, 2008).

  111 Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding” in Media and Cultural Keyworks, Second Edition, eds. Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner, 137–144 (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).

  112 Hall thus anticipates the digital tactical media movement, which explores the power of individuals to creatively resists cultural structures of power. See, for example, Critical Art Ensemble, The Electronic Disturbance (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1994); Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter, Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 185–214; David Garcia and Geert Lovink, “The ABC of Tactical Media” (post to Nettime mailing list, 1997); Rita Raley, Tactical Media (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).

  113 See Dale Ricks, “Song Collecting Is Song Collecting,” Canadian Folkloristics Bulletin 42, no. 1 (2004): 35. Ricks’ critique, albeit brief and buried in a endnote, is twofold. First, he claims that, by cutting off the ends and the beginnings of songs, an archivist such as Livingston can only misinform and thus deprive “future generations.” Second, he argues that Livingston’s refusal to write down the names of the performers he recorded is a sign that he was planning to exploit their creative labour like so many other folklorists and song collectors of previous generations, a plan cut short, however, by his untimely death in Trois-Pistoles. I argue that these claims tell us more about the poverty of imagination within contemporary Canadian folklore scholarship than they tell us about anything else.

  114 "We have already seen that certain organisms, such as man [sic], tend for a time to maintain and often even to increase the level of their organization, as a local enclave in the general stream of increasing entropy, of increasing chaos and de-differentiation. Life is an island here and now in a dying world. The process by which we living beings resist the general stream of corruption and decay is known as homeostasis.” Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (London, UK: Free Association Books, 1989), 92. This does not mean, however, that folk song collection is a homeostatic process; in fact, contra Wiener, I argue that there is no room for the veneration of homeostasis in Livingstonian theory.

  115 I captured this version of “Down by Your Shady Harbour” in Dartmouth by the water after gormandizing a milky Maritime donair wrap. The noises emanating from my gastrointestinal system nearly drowned out the performance; luckily, I was able to extract the words nonetheless at the transcription stage. Let this stand as a vicarious lesson for future folk song collectors: Eat neither meat nor dairy directly before a field encounter, if at all.

  116 A clear expression of sympathetic magic, whereby distinct objects and entities are able to maintain a kind of causal relationship, by virtue of having once been in contact. James George Frazer, The Golden Bough (London: Macmillan, 1963). For a post-structuralist spin by which I have been influenced, see also Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity (New York: Routledge, 1993), 47–51.

  117 Preposterously, one needed to maintain “good” and not “satisfactory” progress in the program in order to guarantee funding. See the University of Western Ontario Communication Studies Program, “Program Expectations and Regulations,” 2008.

  118 Dir. John Badham, Saturday Night Fever (London, UK: Robert Stigwood Organization, 1977); Peter Doyle, Echo and Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music Recording, 1900–1960 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1997); Dir. Robert Klane, Thank God It’s Friday (Los Angeles, CA: Motown Productions, 1978); Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York, NY: WW Norton, 1974); Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics & Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986).

  119 See, especially, function XI of Propp’s Morphology: “The Hero Leaves Home.” Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folk Tale, trans. Laurence Scott (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1968), 39.

  120 Henry Adam Svec, The CFL Sessions, http://www.thecflsessions.ca. For an example of the coverage, see Chris Zelkovich, “Football Folk’s a Passing Fancy,” Toronto Star, August 9, 2009.

  121 Of particular relevance is the social judgment theory developed by Muzafer Sherif, which claims that persuasion has less to do with the rationality of an argument and more to do with the apparent relationship between that argument and the audience’s preconceived range of acceptable positions, in which “ego-involvement” plays a determining role. Muzafer Sherif and Carl Hovland, Social Judgment: Assimilation and Contrast Effects in Communication and Attitude Change (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 1961).

  122 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

  123 Fleet Foxes, Fleet Foxes (Seattle, WT: Sub Pop, 2008).

  124 See Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? (London, UK: Penguin, 2009).

  125 That Old-Time Mountain Dew” derives in ethics and tone, if not in melody or poetics, from the Irish folk song “The Rare Old Mountain Dew.” The song has undergone deep and fascinating alterations as it has moved to North America by way of Appalachia, finally settling in numerous regions across Canada, yet still in motion. See Annette Hempel, Drinking Songs of North America (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 1999).

  126 My trusty Shure SM58 held solidly by her mouth, Brigid Bunyan stood and sang as she gazed across the water at the United States of America, full of longing and desire. And, as I held the microphone, so did I.

  127 This song is not about the PepsiCo-produced soda pop Mountain Dew®. “Mountain dew” is an Irish euphemism for moonshine, which, however, has not stopped PepsiCo from exploiting “The Rare Old Mountain Dew�
� in their marketing campaigns. See Michelle Dean, “Here Comes the Hillbilly, Again: What Honey Boo Boo Really Says About American Culture,” Slate (August 24, 2012): n.p.

  128 Ian McKay, The Quest of the Folk (Montreal, QC: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994).

  129 On the cultural contradictions of folk song collection, see Robert Cantwell, When We Were Good: The Folk Revival (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Benjamin Filene, Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Marybeth Hamilton, In Search of the Blues: Black Voices, White Visions (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1998); LeRoi Jones, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York, NY: W. Morrow, 1963); Karl Hagstrom Miller, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

  130 As a cultural-material artifact, the Tesla automobile articulates entanglements endemic to the Canadian folklore scene; it is thus no surprise that the car has seemed to be popular among the professional Canadian song-collecting set. The Tesla is both an object with magical powers capable of rectifying the despoliation effects of modernity and the perpetuation of the core causes of those very despoliation effects (the logic of capital). Cf. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (Moscow: Co-operative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the U.S.S.R., 1935).