The Forms that the Book Swallows

“The process was more akin to taking off a mask and remembering that there was another mask down there all along.” – Henry Adam Svec

Ben Robinson Interviews Henry Adam Svec

Henry Adam Svec is the author of American Folk Music as Tactical Media. His writing has appeared in The New Quarterly, C Magazine, MOTHERBOARD, and elsewhere, and his musical performances have been presented in galleries and festivals including 7a*11d, FADO Performance Art Centre, and Sappyfest. He is also co-creator of Donair Academy, a digital role-playing game exploring Atlantic Canadian cuisine. He currently teaches at the University of Waterloo.

Henry Adam Svec. Life Is Like Canadian Football and Other Authentic Folk Songs. Invisible Publishing. $19.95, 184pp., ISBN: 9781988784700

I first came across Henry Adam Svec’s work in 2014 while working at McMaster University’s CFMU. Svec had just released his Artificially Intelligent Folk Songs of Canada – an album ostensibly written by an AI he co-created – and in our interview (where I repeatedly referred to him as Henry David Svec due to my love of Henry David Thoreau), I fell completely for the hoax. 

Svec’s new book, Life is Like Canadian Football and Other Authentic Folk Songs, brings together many of his previous musical projects, including The CFL Sessions, where he claimed to have discovered a trove of recordings by Canadian professional football players in the 1970s, as well as his Folk Songs of Canada Now, which claimed to retrace the song collecting exploits of the Canadian folklorist Edith Fowke.

Life is Like Canadian Football and Other Authentic Folk Songs comes labelled as a novel, but it reads more like a long set of liner notes for a bizarre concept album. The book braids together a multitude of footnotes along with the lyrics to songs from Svec’s previous projects, as well as an account of his song collecting work following his time as a translator for an eight-piece Slovakian folk symphony, a graduate student at the University of Western Ontario, an artist-in-residence at the Banff Centre, and a performer at Sackville, New Brunswick’s Sappyfest.

Here, I talk to Henry Adam Svec about working across multiple mediums and genres and how this novel builds on his earlier work in rethinking the relationship between creativity and authenticity.

Ben Robinson: Firstly, I’m interested in how this book came to be. Your previous song collecting projects seem to build on each other in terms of ambition and scope – from experimenting with persona in The Boy from E.T., to the introduction of “found” “archival” material in The CFL Sessions and The Lost Stompin’ Tom Songs, to a further distancing of yourself from the material with the Artificially Intelligent Folk Songs of Canada. You’ve worked across different mediums over the course of these projects – including music, text and live performance – so what inspired you to explore these projects again in book form?

Henry Adam Svec: For me, the central piece of those projects had always been performance, and I was never quite happy – except for maybe two or three times – with the way the performances had gone. Performing is difficult. Not only do you have to write or plan, you then have to deliver, and also sit with the response! Which of course can be magical and exhilarating. But I started to wonder whether or not, as a performer, and as an organizer, and as a documentarian, I had really been able to do justice to the work. This is how the idea for a book started, with me thinking in terms of preserving or assembling the projects for the page. As I began to write, however, it started to turn into something else entirely, I think.

BR: Yes! Certainly something else entirely. Can you talk a bit about the decision to label this book a novel? In one of many footnotes, you make reference to “insisting…that the text be categorized as ‘fiction’ as a precautionary legal measure,” while the press release calls it “a grossly inaccurate ‘memoir.’” How did you settle on framing it as fiction as opposed to a memoir? And did the way you were thinking about genre change throughout the writing process?

HAS: I have struggled with genre over the years in relation to these projects. Like, what am I doing? Is this stand-up comedy? Performance art? A musical? How am I supposed to describe my work to a journalist, or a prospective venue? I never got very good at that, which was a small problem. I suppose the genre shifted, too, depending on the nature of the institution or site of presentation. Anyway, I also struggled with genre in the process of writing this book. Again: What am I doing? There were a lot of false starts and rewrites – and important chats with the editor, Leigh Nash. Early versions had much less of the narrator himself; the register was more conceptual or theoretical. For reasons that I can’t entirely explain, it was when I started to think of the text as a novel that the voice and structure started to take shape. It felt as though I suddenly knew what I was doing and what to call it. Fiction also seemed, at a certain point, like simply the most accurate way of labelling the book. 

I think that the art of the hoax and the art of fiction are similar.

BR: It’s interesting that you bring up the accuracy of the label as that doesn’t necessarily seem to have been a concern with your earlier projects. In some ways, this project takes the opposite approach of the musical projects that involved an element of hoax in that you are upfront about the fiction. Does the concept of the hoax still play a role in this book? Is there a relationship between the hoax and fiction?

HAS: I think that the art of the hoax and the art of fiction are similar. And Mark Twain and Edgar Allen Poe, for example, were writers of literary hoaxes, which they published in newspapers, so there is a personnel connection as well. I guess the main differences have to do with how you lead your reader or audience in – and why. The CFL Sessions was not a hoax, at least not at first, because the purpose was not to deceive. There was no purpose! But it ended up working as a deception, which was both fun and stressful, sometimes, as a performer. Or, maybe not as a performer, but as a person. I agree that the book takes a different approach. You could say that my ideal audience member in the live context maybe started with belief, wavered to disbelief, and then settled into some kind of enchanted wonder. On the other hand, the reader of fiction tends to start with the idea that the text is largely imaginary; so, yeah, any play or movement here is in the other direction. I do think that the writing of fiction involves a more generous attitude towards the reader. Hoaxes are perhaps most fun for the hoaxer.

BR: I like what you say about starting in the imaginary and perhaps moving away from that as the story progresses. Though I wouldn’t necessarily characterize it as a hoax, I think your book does trouble that line between belief and disbelief. I’m wondering here about your relationship to the fictionalized Henry, who serves as our narrator. We get a character who, as far as I can tell, shares a number of biographical details with you, the author, but who also lives firmly in the worlds that you created in your past projects. How did you negotiate that balance between autobiography and fiction? Do you think of this book in terms of autofiction?

HAS: One of my favorite places to go is the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles. I’ve been there a few times now. It’s a museum but also a labyrinthine art exhibit; yet it is not immediately clear where the artifice is – which parts are fabricated and which are real. The most amazing, impossible artifacts are historical and some of the most banal turn out to have been invented...I think. It’s hard to say for sure. The place was a relatively recent (and late) discovery for me, but I like the idea of a book that branches out and connects up with the real world, and other texts in the real world, even if the world it connects up with isn’t consistently actually existing. 

In terms of finding a balance between autobiography and fiction, there was just a lot of revising and rewriting, and trying to assemble the pieces in a way that gave the most resonance. And, actually, because “Henry Adam Svec, Folklorist” was a character that I first “lived” as a performer, the line between fiction and autobiography is kind of blurry here to start with. Writing almost required me to “think back” to the time in my life when I was working at Library and Archives Canada in the basement, even though I have never been there and, according to an employee I met in Ottawa after a show, there is no basement in Library and Archives Canada. But there was a time in my life when I was talking a lot about my time in the basement of Library and Archives Canada! And I did actually “collect” songs at one point – several of which are included in the book. Instead of putting on a mask and inhabiting a character, then, the process was more akin to taking off a mask and remembering that there was another mask down there all along, and so on. So, is that autofiction? It’s one of the forms that the book swallows for sure. 

I like the idea of a book that branches out and connects up with the real world, and other texts in the real world, even if the world it connects up with isn’t consistently actually existing.

BR: Yeah, the mask beneath the mask rings true for me with the way the book is setting up multiple frames or working in multiple modes at once. I’m wondering how these ideas of fiction, hoax, belief/disbelief connect to your ongoing interest (or disinterest) in authenticity as it relates to creativity. Can you talk about how your suspicion of authenticity began and perhaps what function it serves in the book’s title? In particular, I’m thinking here about the Charles Taylor quote from your first book American Folk Music as Tactical Media: “The struggle ought not to be over authenticity, for or against, but about it, defining its proper meaning.”

HAS: I am suspicious of authenticity, but I am also skeptical that you could easily discard an idea that has been so prevalent over the course of modernity. Authenticity is a construct, but, as the saying goes, constructs are real. Who said that? I forget. I still think that Charles Taylor’s pragmatic approach is a reasonable one, but my thinking about authenticity in American Folk Music as Tactical Media was presented more clearly than in Life Is Like Canadian Football and Other Authentic Folk Songs. My first book was a revised and expanded version of my dissertation, and so the context and expectations and objectives were much different. 

One of the struggles for me as a writer has been in trying to remove or strive beyond the disciplining of academia, where the text is usually aimed at an instrumental communicative purpose, and where, as a writer, you are expected to take positions. You could say that that battle became part of the content of this new book. Ultimately I think that there are different views about authenticity that compete and co-exist in the novel, spoken by a variety of voices and sources, and part of the narrator’s quest is to find his own way in and amongst them, a quest he passes on to his imagined reader as well. 

BR: I think you’re right about the struggle to get outside of academic structures being present in the book. Footnotes (of varying degrees of legitimacy) occupy a lot of space on the page here and you’re using them in a different way than I would have expected – more as true citations than as a space for asides. The footnotes situate the book in a particular academic tradition while also doing a bit of a sendup of the kind of academic who can only make sense of the world through theory, the kind of person who would cite Roland Barthes after being sucker-punched in a bar fight. Can you talk about your decision to include the footnotes in the novel and how you see them functioning?

HAS: I think they have multiple functions. There is a kind of reality-effect produced by their presence, by the citations in particular; the narrator is an academic and this is how he understands what it means to think and write. Similarly, the footnotes work to establish credibility and authority for the narrator, in part through convention, even if that’s also undercut and sent up, as you say, almost immediately. Of course, they also, in terms of the narrative unfolding, allow for wormholes and comic asides and anecdotes to be woven together, which made for a more “polyphonic” presentation than one line of text alone would have allowed. The narrator introduces the songs, and comments on aspects of his own introductions, and then we have the songs, with his voice staying present at the bottom of the page, and the story still unfolding there too. It’s not unlike what I was doing as a performer, really, with the stage banter between songs, though it’s more layered and developed in the novel. The footnotes also splay out the text in a way that makes reading a bit of a treasure hunt, which seemed to nicely double the song/authenticity hunting trope. But finding what felt like a balance and coherence of functions for the footnotes was definitely one of the challenges. I even started procrastinating at one point by reading about the history of footnotes! 

I am suspicious of authenticity, but I am also skeptical that you could easily discard an idea that has been so prevalent over the course of modernity.

BR: Ha! The wormhole of all wormholes! Speaking of the project sprawling out in different directions, lastly, I want to ask about where things go from here. It’s maybe too early to tell, but do you feel like you got any closer to your desired effect with the novel versus the performances? Are there any other mediums you’d like to explore with this project, or does this feel like the end for Staunton R. Livingston?

HAS: I don't know. I am proud of the book. The songs are their own thing, in a way, and the music certainly gets lost in translation to the page. Still, I think that the novel is a much more realized version of the story that I started to tell with the performances. On the other hand, it’s more like I discovered along the way that there are all sorts of other effects to explore, because you can do anything you want as a writer. The audience is not in the room. In retrospect, I almost see the performances as a laborious and weird research process for the book. But they can all cohabit the same multiverse, as long as I keep remembering to update my credit card for the web page subscriptions! (The Lost Stompin’ Tom Songs have sadly been lost once again.)

Right now I am revising/rewriting a screenplay that my friend Erin Brandenburg wants to direct, a movie that will also feature songs by Ron Leary, who is going to play the main character; so music continues to be of interest. A movie set in Windsor, Ontario! (Of course, Ron is one of the great songwriters whose work is also gathered into the novel's second section, including Laura Barrett, Andrew Vincent, Olenka Krakus, Mathias Kom, and more.) We have no funding or anything, but it is going to happen. And it will be exciting to revisit performance in the context of book readings, whenever that becomes possible, where I imagine I'll play some of the songs as well. I'd love to do a tour in the next year or so, pandemic permitting. Aside from that, I just want to write books now. I have a few ideas in progress, none of which involves Staunton R. Livingston. I do love him, and maybe I'll come back to him one day, as he remains somewhat elusive. But I am looking forward to collecting some new characters.

Ben Robinson is a writer, musician and librarian. His most recent publication is the poetry chapbook Low Vacancy from Kalamalka Press. He has only ever lived in Hamilton, Ontario on the traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Mississaugas. You can find him online at benrobinson.work.