Stay True by Hua Hsu

It’s probably been almost two years since my friend Maddy recommended that I read Stay True by Pulitzer Prize winner Hua Hsu—and now I have finally read it and can say that I did, indeed, enjoy it.

I hope this isn’t me just living in the past, but I love the milieu of “the academy.” Stories that focus on people in University feel rife with possibility, and Hua Hsu does not disappoint. His memoir gives an account of being a young person at Berkeley and I felt transported to a nostalgic time in my life. The opening part of the book gives an account of being into hardcore punk rock and studying Derrida and working on magazines and I felt right at home. Reading the book made me feel nostalgic for that time in my life when it was normal to read Heidegger all afternoon and then go watch Fear Before the March of Flames play at the nearly stageless comedy club in downtown Kingston.

Of course, for Hua Hsu the experience is somewhat different because there’s also the layer of being a second generation American. Part of his text, I think, would resonate with a number of children of immigrants for the way he discusses the disconnect of expectations and the small ways generations find to connect. There are some tender moments bonding over music that are sweet without being saccharine. The experience of being a racialized person in avant-garde and subversive spaces is a compelling narrative to explore—

—but it isn’t the primary focus of the book. About halfway through the book, Stay True shifts into being more about loss and grief than youthful idealism. After spending several chapters establishing his core friendships, Hsu then reveals the tragic impetus guiding the memoir: the random murder of one of his friends. Hsu narrates going to a party and wanting to leave early to pursue a romantic connection. Then: police calls and visits, looking for information about one of Hsu’s friends. He was found dead, shot in the back of the head.

It feels crass to call his friend’s death a “mystery.” That makes the memoir seem like it’s geared towards our entertainment. Hsu, though, treats the case with a reflective and contemplative tone. Hsu goes through phases of responses, the first of which is being disconnected from joy. His music taste at the time goes through transformations to reflect his feeling, at first losing connection with his musical taste, cycling through more bleak and esoteric work before later embracing the kind of ‘mindless’ fun, escapist bops. Hsu’s survivor’s guilt gets its due, as well. We bear witness to his self-doubt: what if he had stayed at the party that night? Moreover, what if he wasn’t even close with his friend in the first place? One of his girlfriends prompts him to reconsider if his friendship was even a genuine friendship, and that is such an emotional gutpunch, especially because Hsu had been writing letters, essentially journaling to a ghost.

The reveal of what happened and the fallout does read like a traumatizing true crime documentary. Hsu’s friend was at the party and it just so happened that two men and a woman (one of them a couple) were scouting the scene. It’s a freak incident; a completely random target. When they see him leave his apartment, my understanding is that they held him up for his wallet. They then stuffed him in the trunk of his own car and they drove around to ATMs around the city, trying to use his debit card. At the end of the excursion, according to the testimony of the woman, the men led him out of the trunk and she heard a shot. The police report identifies that he was shot in the back of the head. The couple then took his car back to their place and left it on their front yard, out in the open. They were caught within a few days. No extended mystery. Anti-climactic with no good explanation for why Hsu’s friend was targeted, not that it would be any better if there was a ‘justification.’

The book offers an authentic and vulnerable account of the feelings Hsu experiences throughout the loss of his friend. The journey from young and idealistic students starting University towards this dark look at grief is a compelling one. Oddly, it lined up nicely with another read: Stuart Ross’ memoir The Book of Grief and Hamburgers. Both deal with the loss of friends and the complex and rippling effect of those losses into other areas of our lives.

Stay True is a compelling read; I felt connected with Hsu’s voice and saw myself reflected—a version of myself that is young, idealistic, and inspired by all the beauty of the world. I have been fortunate enough not to experience a loss so shocking or of such magnitude, but I nonetheless felt connected to Hsu’s self-doubt and his conflicted feelings about coming into joy after such grief.

It’s not ideal to use my usual sign-off of “happy reading” here, but the book does offer some reconcilement at the end which makes it—not happy, exactly, but—at peace.

An Equal Music by Vikram Seth

There’s an unfortunate phenomenon in which authors sometimes fall victim to their own success. For some, that means they stop pushing themselves and coast off of a formula that works. For Vikram Seth, it means he has slipped into Joseph Hellerism. It may be apocryphal, but Joseph Heller purportedly was asked how he’d respond to critics who say he’s never written a book better than Catch 22 and he purportedly responded, “I’d respond by saying that no one has written a book better than Catch 22.” Seth’s epic romance A Suitable Boy, clocking in at 1474 pages, is hard to live up to—it has such a rich cast of characters and is beautifully woven with multiple storylines. An Equal Music is also a love story of sorts, and it’s fine but it is unable to reach the same heights as his previous work.

The novel is about a quartet of musicians and follows, in part, their career. I quite liked witnessing the dynamics between Piers, Helen, Billy, and Michael (our protagonist and narrator) as they are offered important performances and a recording contract for Bach’s The Art of the Fugue. I also appreciated their superfan that follows them around, their lush agent, Erica, and the bigwig Ysobel that offers them a record contract. Even more engaging to me is that, early in the text, Michael’s girlfriend (and violin student) Virginie puts him on to an obscure work that he didn’t realize existed—a recording of Beethoven’s string quartet in C. minor, Op. 104. I seem to love the idea of ‘lost media’ in books, and watching Michael track down this lost piece was engaging.

The symbolism of that record also serves a functional purpose for the book. Michael unearths something that he thought was lost. On the same day, he’s on one bus passing by another and sees a woman he hasn’t seen in ten years on the opposite side. Ten years prior, they had a romantic relationship, but their careers went in different directions and there’s clear tension and regret over not seeing that relationship through. So, Michael reaches out and tries to get in touch with her on the same day he has found that long lost record. The record disappears from the story for a time and later resurfaces (this word choice is perhaps in poor taste) at the climax when it is flung into a lake and sinks for all time.

The trouble of the novel is the love story at its core. Readers will all have different interpretations, I’m sure, but to me I found Michael profoundly unlikable as a romantic lead. First of all, the fact that he is sleeping with his younger pupil is distasteful in itself, but he also does not treat Virginie very well. On the phone, he’s terse; he’s evasive and belittles her, and he stops engaging with her intimately. The fact is, he’s not in love with her and tells her as much. Worse, he cheats on her. When he and Julia encounter one another, they resume a romance, and she too is unfaithful to her partner. I have a hard time getting behind their romance because Michael is pushy with her and doesn’t respect her boundaries. He repeatedly does not listen to her when Julia says no. Time and time again he insists on intruding in her life, and it felt more desperate than passionate.

Perhaps I could let the obsessiveness and infidelity slide if there were enough moments to show the light they bring out in each other, but there doesn’t feel to me enough tenderness to justify the relationship. The relationship is entirely clouded by a brooding tone; the situation seems impossible—not in an erotic or fun impossible, but in a depressing impossible. I interpret the situation as Michael wanting a fresh start while Julia is looking for the perfect ending. Michael wants to relive their time ten years prior and refuses to let go of the past. Meanwhile, Julia is at the end of her musical career and it appears to me like she’s trying to settle the score (!) before she retires from playing piano. The disconnect between them sets up for a disastrous bond.

Later in the book, there’s a great scene in which Julia’s husband invites Michael to a party at their home. The invitation and the party itself are riddled with potential innuendos. It creates an atmosphere of suspicion: does he know? I would have liked that scene to go on for longer, actually; lingering in that ambiguity creates a great tension for the story that has otherwise read as a bit repetitive. Michael sits in the discomfort, narrating in a series of questions about whether Julia’s husband has found them out and what the consequences might be. In my view, Seth pulls the ripcord a bit too soon and Julia reveals that yes, he knows, no she doesn’t know how, yes she can tell from his face. 

To Seth’s credit, as unlikable as Michael is, Julia remains a sympathetic character. The secret at the core of her character is that she is going deaf. (Note to self: finally get around to watching the movie Sound of Metal). She knows that things are ending for her, and so her connection with Michael is mournful. She plays music with him as a quintet knowing that it will be the last time she will perform with others, and Michael cannot accept it. There’s an awkwardness surrounding her deafness, a secret that Michael finds himself forced to share (he’s the worst!—how dare he betray her confidence like that? Revealing her secret could ruin her!).

In fact, most of the characters are fleshed out pretty beautifully. They feel distinct. Authentic. When I think about the classics of literary fiction, particularly in the British tradition, I think of novels populated with unique and memorable characters. Seth seems to capitalize on that approach. The members of the quartet all have their affectations and interests, but Michael also engages with a broad range of colourful characters. Mrs. Formby, for example, is a family friend and former teacher to Michael whose spirit really shines. Her generosity leads to her promoting his career and loaning him (essentially for life), his prized violin. Seth’s knack for populating his books with real people is one of the highlights of the text.

On the topic of the violin, what I found disappointing in the story structure is its ending. Throughout the book, Michael and Julia’s relationship sits in the foreground and there are any number of moments that I think warrant a permanent dissolution of their affair. When it finally happens for real, it feels weirdly unearned—not a genuine climax, but simple period at the end of a sentence. Even throwing the record into the lake feels understated. The denouement goes in an entirely different direction; with about forty pages to go, the story is no longer primarily about Michael’s romantic endeavour. Instead, we see him quit the quartet and mill about purposelessly. We also find out that Mrs. Formby has died and has left Michael her violin. In life, she had told Michael that he would need to return it so that she could rearrange her assets and give funds to her nephew. Michael accepted that the time was coming, and is surprised to find out she had a change of heart before her death. Her nephew then reaches out, threatening a lawsuit. This bit of drama is short-lived and as a result gives the ending an unfocused quality. The conflict is an echo of the novel’s main theme: the pain of loss, the joy of recovery, the deepening pain of once again losing that which we thought was returned. The obscure record, Julia, the violin: they each follow a similar pattern. To that end, the violin lawsuit piece makes sense, but it feels like a whimper at the end of the movement rather than a crescendo. It feels like the characters don’t really learn anything, but get to enjoy their stasis. Michael, at the end of the novel, has not committed to returning to the quartet and goes back and forth on whether to go to Julia’s performance of The Art of the Fugue. He simply cannot stay away from the beautiful music—and music is a clear stand-in for Julia and vice versa.

As you’ve likely noted, there are clear parallels between the characters’ emotional states and the other elements of the text. The descriptions of the instrumentation, for example, often mimic the depressive streaks of the characters. The description of the violin and how it is touched mimics the way Michael feels, too. There are lush descriptions of both sound and visuals; partly, Seth seems to highlight the visuals when Julia is losing her hearing, which is a nice touch. There’s a clear craftsmanship to the work; the novel is quite proficient in that respect.

An Equal Music is generally good, but if you’re like me you’re going to have to accept that the main character is unlikable. It’s a love story that makes more sense as a cerebral exercise rather than one of the heart. The bond between the lovers seems to me more about their contexts and life circumstances than genuine affectionate moments, so it doesn’t quite land for me in that respect. I still like Vikram Seth’s writing and his ability to economically flesh out characters is a true talent. Now that I’ve read Seth’s three published novels, I’m going to have to convert to his poetry or wait for the encore: A Suitable Girl —a sequel thirty three years in the making (so far).

In the intermission, happy reading!

Fenway Punk: How a Boston Indie Label Scored Big on Baseball's Greatest Rivalry by Chris Wrenn

  I bet none of you would have predicted that I’d one day be writing a book review for a book that is, technically, about baseball. Let’s be real, though, what brought me here was the music. Chris Wrenn is the founder of Boston-based record label Bridge Nine, who primarily release and promote hardcore punk music. With B9’s initial claim to fame being the release of American Nightmare’s first EP, they’ve also expanded their reach and offered releases from bands like H2O, Strike Anywhere, Polar Bear Club, Terror, War on Women, and Crime in Stereo (go listen to …Is Dead, that album rules). 

Anyway, Fenway Punk: How a Boston Indie Label Scored Big on Baseball’s Greatest Rivalry is about Wrenn’s entrepreneurial powers to build Bridge Nine from the ground up. The genesis of the label is pretty bizarre: Wrenn recounts how he bankrolled his initiatives by selling novelty t-shirts outside of Fenway Park. He played into the rivalry between the Red Sox and the Yankees, selling “Yankees Suck” shirts and stickers. The fact that he was able to squirrel away some funds and use that to record music for American Nightmare is pretty entrepreneurial and admirable, I will say.

One of the less palatable components of the book is, well, the reflection of a different time. Wrenn talks about fighting in parking lots for money, rolling with crowds that broke into houses to steal booze, and other youthful shenanigans that strike me as the kind of bro-ish machismo that drives so many people away from the hardcore scene.

One of the more interesting aspects of the book is hearing about the politics of being a vendor outside a stadium. Wrenn gives background into how they had to operate under the radar and avoid being busted. Strategies included things like having one guy with a money bag and extra merch while someone sold a few things at a time—if they got caught, there would be less loss because the guy in the backpack could throw on a cap and blend into the crowd. The structure of the market also made it easier to sell, for example, stickers. Selling stickers at Fenway and later Hot Topic funded Wrenn’s musical projects, which is just wild to me. Back to politics, it was also interesting to hear about how the code enforcers built relationships with vendors. It was like reading about the mafia and / or crooked cops making secret deals.

More of the book was about baseball than I would have expected, which is my own naivety. Wrenn seems genuinely invested in recounting the glories and heartbreaks of the Boston-New York rivalry. The highlight of that component of the book was hearing about New York playing in Boston following the September 11th attacks and how the community changed around the time. Mostly, I didn’t really feel much towards the baseball drama.

Honestly, I wanted some more music stories from the book. When I heard about links to Converge or Sick of It All or Crime in Stereo, I perked up and felt invested, but the music faded into the background. With Wrenn’s long career of supporting music and being on tour with bands, I would have thought that there would be far more stories about the dramas and landmarks of the Boston hardcore scene. I wanted to hear those stories. Surely it would be appropriate to have a journalistic approach and share some fun anecdotes about Wrenn’s personal involvement with bands. Why did bands explode? What went wrong with releases? I mean, sure, there’s the time Terror got scooped up, but I feel like there are other layers of chaos that could’ve been addressed.

All in all, it was an enjoyable experience, but I would have preferred to spend more time in the pit than in the stands.

Happy reading!

Girls Against God by Jenny Hval

        There is an illicit pleasure in reading Jenny Hval’s Girls Against God. The main character is charged with hate and sees hate as a true creative force; the titillating cynicism and adolescent rage of the book couldn’t help but bring smiles to my face.

The main character of Hval’s novel is a young girl in conservative Norway that is looking for any kind of alternative to the quotidian existence she sees around her. To that end, she has an obsession with black metal and witchcraft and what she refers to as the “cosmic internet.” The novel follows these fascinations as it jumps around in time; we see her early roots as a member of a black metal band that (maybe) never actually plays concerts—instead she engages in performances so subterranean as to be undetectable and not even music related. The lines between music, visual art, witchcraft, and language collapse. So too does the idea of an independent producer become incomprehensible as subversive art becomes by necessity a collective, collaborative work. The other component of the book follows the main character’s filmic ambitions, including a full account of her film in the back third of the film. If you’re looking for a conventional story, Girls Against God is largely lacking, but if you’re looking for some vibes and philosophical reflection, Hval’s work is an absolute treat.

If you’re a true devotee of my reviews, you might remember my commentary on The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan. I find that premise extraordinarily unlikely. One of my critiques of The Hearing Test is its referentiality to other art works and it really relies heavily on readers’ knowledge. Girls Against God does something similar, but Hval is much more generous in elaborating on its touchstones. There are extended summaries and analyses of the works, often replete with imagery. In that way, the text is more accessible even in its offputtingness. Or, maybe it’s just that the touchstones are more part of my cultural lexicon.

Hval expounds in particular on the aesthetic of early black metal—an interesting angle, given the author’s own musical style. She describes music videos found as extra features on early black metal CDs and the way she describes its grittiness and content and wild cuts and sweeping shots of high-contrast nature is just perfect. In the aesthetic, she sees a primitivism that restores sincerity to art. When planning for her film, she notes, “I don’t know what the film is going to be about yet, but I like the early black metal aesthetic, so near to my own childhood. Strangely, it gives me hope, hope that it’s possible to make art primitively, in a way that isn’t steeped in professionalism and compromise. Art that still hates. I remember how much hope there is in hatred” (8). That manifesto sets the direction for all of the main character’s efforts. I adore this notion that hatred is hope—indeed, there has to be hope for there to be hatred, or else we would simply have indifference and apathy.

Throughout the book, she seeks connection with others through various means. One way that manifests is in the Satanism associated with black metal: “I can establish a connection or a pact, demonstrated through the connect-the-dots drawing between myself and the world of the gods, the underworld, or between myself in the past tense and myself in the present. Or all of it simultaneously. Maybe I could even draw up a map between me and you” (26). She’s trying to be part of something bigger than just herself. The connect-the-dots metaphor works in that way; she’s looking to be the lines between points. To that end, when she plans her film, she thinks, “Maybe this film has created a place to meet” (26). She makes a direct address to the audience—which is in itself odd, given that there is not a frame narrative that establishes she’s writing for others. Nonetheless, she presents the audience with a series of questions: “Do you also recognize the desire for secret and impossible connections? Do you recognise the loneliness, could we share in it? Could we get closer to each other? Could you and I and the film be the start of a we? A we which takes the form of an expanding community of girls who hate?” (26).

Hval’s narrator’s gesture is twofold. On the one hand, she’s aiming to escape the prison of subjectivity and on the other she’s trying to build a subterranean network of connection. Reflecting about her relationship with religion, she notes, “Sin is still inside me; everything is my fault and my responsibility, because I’m doomed to be alone, locked inside this subjectivity” (37). There is an exhaustion to the process of creating oneself: “I am so tired of chasing after it, this subjectivity, looking for something that’s all mine, that doesn’t have any context, surroundings or background. It’s so lonely. It’s so limited. It’s so heavy” (37). I appreciate this angle to exploring the posthumanist principle that we are not individuals but rather we exist in a context that has formulated us. She continues, “The subject is reflected negatively, the subject is so alone, so threatened, so scared, so dying, so guilty” (37). She considers how she wants to swap some of these negatives for “something else, something shared” (37). The passage ends with a delightful crescendo and what some might deem an anticlimax but which nonetheless has a ring of truth for those in the know. She concludes the passage, “I want to take part in a chaos of collective energy. I want to be in a band” (37). The fact that a band is what embodies that collective energy and chaos is just so humorous but also it imbues me with a sense of nostalgia and the optimism of such a project. The other side of Hval’s project is the desire for community, specifically through her witchy communities: “In blasphemy, there’s a secret pact, a desire for a community that isn’t rooted in the Christian, Southern spirit” (43). She elaborates on how the subversiveness allows for these connections:

Blasphemy protects us against the moral fables we grew up with; blasphemy renounces anything that requires our submission. It shows us a crack in this reality, through which we can pass into another, more open meeting place. Blasphemy has not forgotten where it came from; it maintains that defiance and energy. Blasphemy looks for new ways of saying we. And the band is a we, a community that happens without anyone asking. It’s an unknown communal place, an impossible place. In a place like that, we can make art magic. (43)

I love that spirit of togetherness and spontaneity. I feel like it elevates the idea of being in a band to a metaphysical tour de force.

I’ll return to that in a moment, but I also want to bring up the idea of time. Bands shape sound in time, so there’s a bit of a connection already. There’s also a stunning series of pages—too long to quote here—where the narrator describes her experiences with the early days of the internet. She describes its cosmic power, its ability to connect people across time. It brought me back in time, completely. The way that she describes the experience of finding communities, largely anonymously, and sharing files, connecting over subterranean media—it’s a perfect blast from the past. Then, towards the end of the book, the narrator gives an account of a photograph. Just before the photograph, she blasphemes and she delights in the moment where it is impossible to tell her apart from her well-behaved classmates. She notes that it is “impossible for an unknowing eye to spot the difference in our smiles, but at the moment this picture was taken, I’ve just said fucking hell, in the middle of the photo shoot” (214). The moment is imbued with a power because, even though it’s such a mundane kind of rebellion, it is elevated as symbolic of the collapse between herself and others—yet one that is distilled in time. In aspic? She continues on to say that “Half the class are about to stop smiling; they are about to look around for the sinner as they cautiously cross themselves and touch their hands to their hearts” (214). It’s a moment where the offense has not yet been detected and “a moment later, everything will be defined, crossed, damned, forgiven and blessed” (214). The moment that lacks definition has its subversive power: “right now, in this image, there is chaos; the students aren’t sure what happened yet, who said the word” (214). She continues, “Sound is faster than comprehension, faster than what they call heart and soul and sin. Right now my voice could have come from any of my Christian classmates, a slip of the tongue, a Tourette’s tic; that’s why they react and why they are about to cross themselves” (214). Hval seems to present the idea that a sin has its power when it has not yet been defined or remedied; sin exists as potential and “everyone in the class is a potential sinner” (214). The narrator notes, “the uncertainty is shapeless, even in the middle of this conformity; they themselves aren’t exempt; the guilt includes everyone in the room and leaks from one thing to another. No one remains dry, everyone is defined” (214). It’s a great parallel to the idea of everyone existing in connection with one another. Everyone gets joined by sin and guilt into one mass and “just as the most evangelical of them feel defiled when we’re taught by the lesbian teacher; they fear that she’ll lure them over to her side, that they will say what she says, that they’ll become, or realise that they already are, like her” (214). The notion of the subversiveness awakening something in its audience gives it a compelling power—and there’s a kind of optimism in that.

Towards the end of the book, there is dedicated focus to the symbolism of aspic. Aspic is a kind of jelly in which other things float. It’s a great symbol for the lack of distinction between individual entities. A passage that identifies the sense of connection in aspic reads as follows:

Aspic is made from the collagen in the bone marrow of pigs, and I dream it’s also made from our own bones and our own marrow, because marrow is the very best we have to give of ourselves. In the marrow is found the collagen, the creative power, the coherence. The same sounds ring in marrow as in margin. In my language it’s even the same word. In the margins are the experiments, the bonus material, the unwritten scenes, the unused leftovers, a suggestion for a new world, a suggestion for impossible connections. In the margins are the comments, the hope and hate, suspended in the thick, translucent marrow broth. (229).

For all its sprawling nature, Girls Against God has a knack for recreating this kind of connective aspic. There are a number of strange false starts to the book that float around. The focus on the margins and experiments is critical to what Girls Against God is up to. It is itself “bonus material”---auxilliary content about other works. It is the unused leftovers; consider, for example, we get the fragment of her film as an additional chapter that takes up a reasonable portion of the book. 

Girls Against God asks a question that I find perpetually troubling whether it’s phrased as “can the subaltern speak?” as it is in the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, or as it appears in Mark Fisher’s question about capitalism: “is there no alternative?”, or indeed, as it is asked by Terese in Girls Against God, “Why does resistance always end up just polishing the traditions?” (69). Hval is exploring the idea of how we might preserve a space of genuine resistance to tradition, a genuine alternative that does not get subsumed into the aspic like everything else. She notes this paradoxical position—wanting to have connection as a form of subversion and yet preserving a special space for the truly radical. Hval offers an extended meditation on the topic: “Think about that word, EXCLUDED. To exclude something, to explain something. THe nature of the subversive isn’t actually to be directly visible but to roam the shadows, to give texture to the seemingly shiny and clean, to scrawl public walls with inexplicable nonsigns that refuse to materialize into language” (96). She’s looking for that shadow space: “the subversive desires to be seen and not seen simultaneously, it desires both to be excluded and to be explained” (96). I think that’s a critical observation for the counterculture; we are riding the line between legibility and rewriting. The trouble, as Hval notes, is that “it’s so easily muted, left behind, forgotten, excluded without being explained. Or it gets picked up and transformed into a language we all understand, that is, explained, but for some reason that always seems to mean commercialised” (96). This succinct passage puts to words the trouble I feel with my own subversive subcultures—how much are we preaching to the choir? When we are preaching to the masses, how does the meaning get hidden behind dollar signs?

I really appreciated the way Hval characterized the grotesque resistance in black metal music videos. I’m not sure I recorded the quotation, but there’s a part where she describes the sound of the music like flies and worms wiggling out of the tape. As she navigates the “cosmic internet” she finds additional videos and details to supplement her research into primitivism in art. She finds a clip of “a black metal gig that looks as if it took place in an assembly hall in an early nineties secondary school” (8). In her note, “wholesome Norwegian youths talk amongst themselves and walk in and out of the room while the band plays on, completely unaffected. Black metal crawls unnoticed through adolescence, mine too” (8). There’s a real love of the genre and the music scene that shines in Hval’s work. There’s a sincerity and authenticity to the depiction of shows like this—I can vividly picture videos of grainy punk shows in a rented church. She thinks about how “it doesn’t burrow down completely. But for as long as it’s there it lives and crawls” (8). She reflects on how one one of the youths in the video could have been her “if [she]’d been a few years older, or if the clip had been from 1997 and not 1991. If [she] hadn’t been a girl and excluded from the black screen” (8). She concludes, “It could have been me: we could have hated, all of us, together. Instead I had to hate alone. Provincial hatred” (8). In the description of black metal music videos, the graininess of the image, the rapid cuts, the high contrast colour palettes, and so on, brought me back to a special moment where the internet made all kinds of possibilities real. Essentially, it was a modern day dada movement. I think in particular of the revolution it caused in my brain when I saw the video for Some Girls’ “...Warm Milk” or the freneticism of The Locusts’ album Plague Soundscapes. Sure, it’s not quite the genre Hval described, but it’s adjacent enough to feel the same.

Hval’s book is, in many ways, about representation and connection. She philosophizes that “to describe is also to construct form and perspective; it’s the reflex of mortal dread” (206). She wonders, “could language be used for something else? Aren’t there other reasons to write? If we let go of the descriptions, will we discover that we’re no longer moving at all, since we already exist within everything in here?” (206). Girls Against God is a quest to renegotiate with language and art: “we’re given up shapes, our own shells and components and we’re back in a flow, that gelatinous substance that ruled the earth before the harder minerals, rock types, skeletons and shells came into existence. This could be the beginning, the white egg, the original place, the original life” (206). Girls Against God is a quest to find that area of potential, the origins, the not-yet before everything gets established and codified. 

Hval meanders in all the right directions. It felt to me to be a deeply intimate and resonant novel that was also accompanied by humour and thoughtfulness. Hval’s other novel, Paradise Rot, had a bit more in terms of story, but she clearly has a gift for introspection and ambitious projects to revolutionize both literature and the world.

Hope we can appreciate the margins without taking out their teeth. Happy hating!

Perfect Youth: The Birth of Canadian Punk by Sam Sutherland

  We are all born into communities with legacies not our own. The histories of our communities can often be tumultuous and may or may not continue to resonate with us. If you know me, you know that I love punk rock bands and the culture that goes along with it—the spirit of dissent against mass culture, the progressive and inclusive mindset punk rock necessitates, and the spirit of friendship and community that goes along with it. The way I characterize the punk subculture, though, hasn’t been universally true. The values, the sound, and the spirit have all evolved over the years, as we can see in Sam Sutherland’s rock journalism book Perfect Youth: The Birth of Canadian Punk.

Perfect Youth focuses on Canada’s “first wave” of punk in the 1970s and early 1980s, with Sutherland noting many of Canada’s historic firsts (like, for example, having the first band to ever to glue show posters to telephones poles). Each chapter offers a report on the history and significance of particular bands and / or narrows in on a Canadian community and discussed how punk evolved in that place. You can likely predict some of the major cities for punk rock—-Toronto, Hamilton, Ottawa, Winnipeg, Calgary, Vancouver, and so on. Sutherland gives a clear apology for lumping all of the Maritime bands into the same chapter.

I have to admit—I am not a fan of 70s and 80s punk, and so I had few personal connections to the bands Sutherland documents, even in the rare circumstance that I had heard of them (D.O.A., Dayglo Abortions, SNFU). In turn, as Sutherland introduced new bands, I would take to Spotify to do some preliminary listening. I would say that the recordings were, at worst, unlistenable, and at best tolerable. I can’t say I fault the recording industry; technology has come a long way in the last fifty years. That said, I have such a hard time looking past (er…hearing past?) terrible recording quality for the quality of the actual songs. Some of the tunes were a little catchy, sure, but nothing gripped me with the edge I hope for in punk. I guess it’s inevitable that aesthetic trends change and evolve. I’m sure some of the heavy bands I love now will be quaint in fifty years, too.

Sutherland documents a very different punk culture than the one that I’m used to, for better or for worse. Some of the stories are amusing (like bands playing the same 10-song set over and over until someone notices and cuts them off), or intense (the rivalries and riots breaking out at shows), or bizarre (the singer of SNFU throwing an octopus into the crowd, the 222s being funded by the Mafia to record a teeny bop version of a classic French song), etc. Sutherland does have a knack of choosing effective moments to set the stage (as it were) for the punk rock community. There is a lot not to like about early punks, such as the spitting and fighting and violence among crowds, or excessive and deadly drug use, or the sometimes antifeminist or antiLGBTQ+ mindset. But again, times change and I’d like to believe that (most) of the above has diminished in the scene.

What I really love about Perfect Youth and other books like it is how it inspires a sense of community. It captures the energy of outcasts and inspires a sense of community. Sometimes that comes through in anecdotes of small-scale touring or identifying connections between band members (did you know Minor Threat’s Ian MacKaye played in Canadian band The Diodes, for example?). It’s amazing to think about these small connections that explode into something of deep significance—even bands that released one recording fifty years ago are still talked about (and newly available thanks to streaming services). The DIY spirit of these early punk crusaders is infectious; it makes me want to run to the streets throwing up show posters, start a punk zine for the local scene, and hop in and out of bands for the rest of my life.

Sutherland is often able to interview punk legends and include their comments directly in the text, which helps to build that sense of community. For instance, he contacts Chi Pig by calling the bar that he often drinks at and they’re able to talk for a few minutes before they need the business line again. A member of the more contemporary punk band, Fucked Up, is interviewed about working at a prominent Toronto record shop and trading an old punk’s old band’s vinyl for magic mushrooms. Incidentally, Sutherland has a great sense of humour throwing in details like punk persona names.

I think the interview with Ford Pier from D.O.A. is the most resonant quotation for explaining why the scene means so much and is so unique. Sutherland documents the way Vancouverite bands responded to one another, how members of bands would give guitar lessons, and so on. Ford Pier speaks to the idea of fandom, stating that “Most people won’t meet Britney Spears. The thought doesn’t even cross their minds. So how could they be invested in what she says or does?” He compares the fandom for Britney Spears to watching an aquarium. There is no consequence for either of you. Punk rock is different in that you can meet your heroes; they can teach you guitar. There’s more of a personal relationship with the scene and that means that there are consequences for both producer and consumer; they can be receptive to one another, and there’s a kind of magic in that.

When I read a book like this that focuses on niche history, what I really love is how it offers a window into the history of a place. Since I’m most familiar with Toronto, I’ll comment on that city more specifically. Sutherland documents a number of punk shows that took place in the early days of punk. It’s amazing to me how much of that history lives on. For instance, Sutherland documents bands playing at The Horseshoe Tavern and the Rivoli. The historic culture around concerts is pretty incredible, too: lots of bands started as cover bands that would pop out an original or two, but some venues required original music and no covers, which meant that some bands cranked out new tunes over and over and over to make sure they could still play. 

When it comes to specific places, I was particularly interested in the chapter on Winnipeg. It’s common knowledge that I believe and am right that Propagandhi is the best band to ever exist, and definitely the best band to come out of Winnipeg. They formed about ten years too late to be covered in this book, though they do get a passing reference as the ongoing legacy of Winnipeg punk. It was interesting to read the interviews with Winnipeg first wave punks talking about the isolation of the place and how it contributed to the creative spirit of the place—and maybe some of the heavier bands documented in the book that have their legacy with bands like Comeback Kid.

The chapter on Calgary was also of particular interest, given that Calgary has a reputation of being conservative, if not regressive—-not receptive to punk culture. Yet, Sutherland challenges that stereotype by talking about the gay-positive and progressive culture in Calgary punk. Calgary and Edmonton stand out as some hallmarks of the earliest punk scenes.

As I mentioned above, I don’t know most of the bands Sutherland discusses. He references The Viletones, The Modernettes, The 222s, The Chromosomes, The Normals, Dub Rifles, Popular Mechanics, Low Life, Stretch Marks, Modern Mines, SNFU, The Diefenbakers, Subhumans, The Dishes, Teenage Head, and more. The Talking Heads and Teenage Head take up huge spaces in the punk landscape, and Sutherland pays special attention to some interesting ‘outcasts’ from the already outcast punk scene, like women and queer folk in music. It’s funny how often the former band members reference how they had no talent and just wanted to play fast and be bombastic. Then, listening to their recordings, it’s like comparing Olivia Rodrigo to Slayer. Sure, there’s a bit of an edge, but it seems surprisingly poppy (although I guess that’s even true for The Ramones). The evolution to be faster and harder is amusing to me when looking back at it with a historical eye.

In that light, the conclusion of the book is of particular interest. Most of the book’s “argument” is that Canada had a valuable role to play in the development of punk rock as a global export. In the conclusion, Sutherland offers a more specific thesis that hardcore music both killed and saved punk rock. As punk became more “mainstream” and acceptable, hardcore emerged to keep the scene underground. At the same time, hardocre became more rigid, enforcing boundaries (often white, cis, hetero male in nature) to continue pushing the boundaries of music away from commercial success. It maintained the punk ethos in one respect while reverting to strange conservatism in another. I think that premise would be worthwhile to explore in a sequel book (although I don’t think that Sutherland has the interest in that particular project).

All things considered, Sutherland’s book was entertaining and informative, despite my lack of personal investment in 70s and 80s punk. But, capturing the DIY and communal spirit of punk rock’s small world is a compelling venture. The enthusiasm is infectious, even when the soundtrack to the book left me feeling a little indifferent. Sometimes the story is what builds the present more so than the artefacts (in fact, many of the songs Sutherland references currently have fewer than 2000 listens on Spotify).

In any case, keep on rockin’ and I’ll see you in the pit. Happy reading!