The subtle ways in which "Expert in a Dying Field" by The Beths has changed me as a person

Recently a friend introduced me to The Beths, an alternative rock band from New Zealand. I picked "Expert in a Dying Field" out of their discography at random and gave it a listen while I was picking up groceries. When I was in high school and surrounded by people who were very serious about listening to music, it was almost like I had music homework every week if I wanted to be able to keep up with the stuff they were talking about. I got very serious about "listening to music" as a critical and reflective process for the first time, and in the years since, I feel like I've atrophied a bit on that front.

As a very serious person who likes to take things very seriously, I wanted to spend my time drowning out the experience of being in a grocery store to seriously listen to this band a friend recommended to me. And having given the album a serious listen… I think they're pretty cool. And it's got me thinking about the way I talk about the things I like.

Once upon a time, someone told me that I should put a "links" page on my website, where I essentially just link to a whole bunch of other stuff I like on the internet.

My links page has been pretty quiet for a while. I still edit it periodically—every time I need to hide something I've since grown embarrassed of. It wasn't too long after I first added the page that someone else managed to convince me that it was a waste of time. A wise person who's since scrubbed themself from the internet once made the point that if you truly care about something, you can do a lot more in service of it than include it in a list of things you like. Indeed, a mere list of things about you doesn't really tell me anything about you, except maybe the things that come to mind when writing such a list.

To that effect, I recently spent 24 some odd consecutive waking hours rewriting my website in PHP to bypass a technical limitation in my static site generator and finally create my reviews page. Rather than merely list the things I care about, I'd take the time to write about them, to explain what they mean to me.

So that's what I've been trying to do this week and it's… hard.

It's hard, I think, for a few reasons. It's hard because unlike the mere list, which asks of us only to imagine ourselves as fitting into neat boxes of people who like or are into specific things, it asks us to to be willing to be vulnerable¹ about something that made us who we are. I don't list The Three Body Problem in my list of my favourite books because I think it's an unambiguously good book (it's also a very sexist and jingoistic book), I list it because it's had a profound impact on me, on the way I think about science fiction, on the way I think about thinking about science fiction, and how I relate to it. I can't un-read The Three Body Problem—I'm not that person anymore.

I watch Any Austin explain the hydrology of video game environments on YouTube to distract myself from everything I find painful in the real world, and I rewatch my favourite movie, Synecdoche, New York to drown myself in it. All in all, I spend a terrifying amount of my life being fed other people's stories, all of which swirl into this soup, or this metanarrative that I tend to think of as myself. Whether that's listening to my professor explain CSS specificity rules, doomscrolling through YouTube or desperately straining to figure out what Judith Butler has to say about who I individually am, they're all in there, making up parts of the larger whole.

Way back when, I remember the day my friends and I first got together to commiserate about this strange feeling of living life through a membrane of popular media.

The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudoworld that can only be looked at ~ Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord, p. 2

At the time we thought the problem was that we put too much emphasis on the experience of others' creation, rather than making the proactive effort to create our own. We were creatives, we figured, and so we ought to spend more time creating, holding each other accountable to create rather than consume. It took us a while to realize it but in hindsight it feels hard to overlook the fact that you can't really have one without the other.

I don't think the creative is necessarily any more actualized than the critic. Both the act of creation and consumption can be transformative in their own right. Both creation and consumption involve a curation: whereas the creative creates something from nothing, the consumer pulls threads from everything to weave a new tapestry of everything they've ever watched, read or listened to.

I've become so accustomed to not reading that I don't even read what appears before my eyes. It's not easy: they teach us to read as children, and for the rest of our lives we remain the slaves of all the written stuff they fling in front of us. I may have had to make some effort myself, at first, to learn not to read, but now it comes quite naturally to me. The secret is not refusing to look at the written words. On the contrary, you must look at them, intensely, until they disappear. ~ If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino, p. 34

If you were to ask me what my favourite book is, I'd probably tell you it's If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino. If you were to ask me what book has most profoundly changed who I am, I'd probably tell you it's The Truth about Stories by Thomas King. The difference is that while I can quote one at length, the other feels like a distant memory of assigned reading in my first year of university—one that set me down an irreversible course to writing hundreds of weirdly solipsistic articles on my gemlog.

There is no resisting stories. They wash over us and shape who we are. There is no forging new stories in lieu of receiving the stories that came before our own. They're all part of the same metanarrative of who we are. That's not to say we need to take every story told at face value, only that once you hear a story, you can't unhear it. I think there's a lot more to be gained in accepting their role in our life with a willingness to know how they'll shape our future.

Okay, so what about The Beths? Well, I think that "Expert in a Dying Field" is a good album, and if you're into alternative/indie rock music maybe you should check it out. Whether it'll have any staying power, whether it'll substantially change who I am as a person, has yet to be seen, because it's too early to tell. But I'm excited to find out nonetheless.

Footnotes

¹ Vulnerability, the running theme of this year in Nat content

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