By Maddy Posner //
Visiting Assistant Professor Anton Svynarenko teaches Russian at Swarthmore, with a research focus on modern languages and literatures and background in queer theory and childhood narratives. On a windy afternoon, I sat down with Professor Svynarenko to discuss why you shouldn’t meet your idols, the underrated supremacy of Joanna Newsom, how Starbucks desecrates indie music, and so much more. Our very own videographer Zephyr Weinreich recorded the majority of our conversation, which will be posted on our Instagram for your viewing pleasure.
Maddy Posner: For the first question today, which artists or bands shaped your college years?
Anton Svynarenko: Well, in college, I did little else. I mostly listened to music. So it won’t be an easy choice. I guess the first one I have to name would be The Smiths, because they were kind of the lingua franca, you know? Everyone I wanted to talk to spoke that language, or at least it was the most likely language to be spoken by people I wanted to talk to. It was like the Smiths had a kind of unifying force. And I actually saw Morrissey for the first time, about a month ago at the Met, and I was kind of on the fence before I got my ticket. But I thought, no, I owe it to him, and he walked out on stage with a bunch of daffodils and he had the audacity to open with “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.” And I just burst into tears and I would never, never look back. The Smiths are precious and I think they mean something to everyone who is to any extent, honest with themselves. Then I have to name a band that’s just for me, that was a personal and jealously guarded act, and that would probably have to be the Go Betweens, this Australian band that I adore, that I consider kind of my own, and I share them very reluctantly. They never made it big, and they had one song that could be considered a hit, “The Streets of Your Town,” and I was once at Starbucks, and I heard a cover of [it], and it sounded like Starbucks. And I felt kind of violated. No, they should not be as famous. But they are very near and dear to me, and they continue to color all the periods of my life. There is no life without them. And then the third one, let’s say Love, because their album Forever Changes is my go-to answer when people ask me “What’s your favorite album?” You know, at first dates and such. So, yeah, my default is Forever Changes. It’s, I think, the greatest album of the ’60s, and that’s saying a lot. And it’s a very gentle, soft, psychedelic folk album that does a lot of what the 60s were known for, but also it does it in such an idiosyncratic, such an anxious and dark way that no one else could even approximate.
MP: Great. Okay, the second question is: do you listen to music of different languages? And if so, how is the experience of listening to music different as its language differs?
AS: I try to listen to as much music and different languages as I can, but I still don’t do it enough. I think the second most listened to language in my catalogue would be French and Portuguese would be the close third. I’m really into Brazilian music, Tropicalia and whatnot. But I have to admit that I do not trust myself to love a song without understanding at least the gist of the lyrics. So every time I encounter a new album by a French or Brazilian or whatever artist – or Japanese, would probably be my fourth – I run the lyrics through Google Translate at least, just to kind of orient myself. And I only have to do it once. Then I’m in the clear. But yeah, I’m still a kind of verbally dependent person, words are my stock-in-trade. So I got to know.
MP: Yeah, that’s very fair. You basically already answered this question with your prior answer, but I’m going to ask it quickly anyway. When you first listen to a song, is it the words or the melody that have primacy? I’m particularly interested in this idea.
AS: Well, it is a trick question, is it not? It’s kind of like when students show up to my office hours and ask me, is form or content more important? I cannot separate the two and I wouldn’t advise anyone to try. But as I say, I’m a man of words, I do it for a living, and I always at least partially rely on lyrics. I’m very forgiving of lyrics when it comes to that, but still, I am not indifferent to them. And also, just as a little kind of personal tidbit, I grew up in the 90s in a newly post Soviet Ukraine, and my access to music was extremely limited. We just wouldn’t get any decent music in my mid-sized town in Eastern Europe because the original CDs from, let’s say, America or the UK, were prohibitively expensive and no one really bothered to import them, and the bootleggers, the pirates, they knew there was not enough demand, so it wasn’t worth their while to make bootleg copies of those decent albums. So my initiation into music occurred through reading and through writing, because what we did have access to were some Moscow based music journals, magazines, newspapers, all kinds of print media. So before I heard, I don’t know, Tom Waits or P.J. Harvey, of whom you would not think of as obscure artists, but they were virtually impossible to find in my hometown. So long before I heard them, I read all of those reviews and I kind of fell in love with their music, with my vision, with my ideas of music, through someone’s writing and through the act of my reading. So I think that also left a kind of imprint in the end. I am beholden to the linguistic part of music forever.
MP: That’s beautiful. Do you see parallels between your literary and/or philosophical interests and the kind of music you’re drawn to?
AS: Perhaps not immediately, like they’re not immediately apparent. There are some parallels, I guess, that are amusingly incidental. For example, the Go Betweens. My personal favorite, the band that I am so reluctant to share with the undeserving crowd. They have a song on what turned out to be their last album, Oceans Apart, and it’s the first song called “Here Comes the City,” and it contains one of my all time favorite lyrics: “Why do people who read Dostoyevsky look like Dostoyevsky?” And it’s a question I have also pondered a lot. Or, I don’t know, my go-to favorite song, also by the Go-Betweens, would probably have to be “Cattle and Cane,” and it’s a piercingly nostalgic song of growing up in the middle of nowhere in Australia. I am very much invested academically in different conceptions of childhood, I’ll be teaching a whole course on literary depictions of childhood. So there are those kinds of echoes that I don’t think can be formalized or systematized in any way, but they are present and if you look for connections, you can establish them. I am very fond of minimalism in writing. I don’t always teach it, but that’s a whole other conversation. But as a reader, as a book lover, right, I tend to prefer writers who are very kind of stylistically austere and, I don’t know, in Russian, I’m one of those assholes who, when someone asked them, “Are you a Tolstoy person or a Dostoevsky person?” I say, “I’m a Chekhov person,” right? Because no one has ever thought of bending the rules like that before. I write a lot about this Russian writer, Leonid Dobychin, who is also very, very minimalist, very kind of bare bones. So if we take that as our point of departure, yeah, I listened to a lot of music that also seems to be as kind of constrained and doing so much with less. Like, I don’t know, Galaxie 500 or Young Marble Giants, a terrific band that a few people remember, they only put out one album. But I think that album is basically like a Raymond Carver story or something. So, yeah, you could do that, you could kind of push that square peg into that wrong hole, but they kind of organically flow out of one out of the other.
MP: Really quick, follow-up question based on that. Do you grade your students’ essays better when they’re sparser or more simplistic?
AS: So simplistic is a word that I would grade down for…Yeah, I appreciate elegance, I appreciate sparseness and yeah, opulence, I think, is harder to earn in one’s writing. It can be done, right? But like it’s a tall order to to make your paper worthy of its ornaments.
Zephyr Weinreich: Typically Swarthmore students specialize in brevity.
MP: If you could design a literary course around an album, which album would it be and why?
AS: Okay I actually have an answer to that question that I didn’t need to doubt or second guess. It would be any album by this band called 16 Horsepower. They only had four albums, so maybe either their first “Sackcloth ‘n’ Ashes” or their last “Folklore,” doesn’t matter. It’s a Southern Gothic band, although they come from Colorado of all places. But I have a soft spot for Southern Gothic literature, and they would just pair up so nicely with all the American Lit that I never get to teach because I teach Russian Lit. But I’ve always been a fan, I grew up reading Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner and Eudora Welty and so all of those people are kind of my literary idols. I think the music of 16 Horsepower as a perfect sonic equivalent of what they do in their literary work. So, yeah, that would be a very dark and funny class, I think.
MP: If you could host a dinner with three musicians, living or dead, who would you invite and who would the soundtrack be? Challenge: One of the three has to be one of the three that aren’t in your top three bands.
AS: Oh, I definitely would not invite Morrissey to my dinner party. No, he’s so hard to please menu wise. Okay, so Jonathan Richman. Hands down. That’s the most kind of personable, companionable, amicable musician I know, he already feels like a friend, I think, to know him is to love him, to listen to him, is to befriend him. There is just no other relationship possible between him and his listener. Then I would choose Laurie Anderson, an old, wise and wise cracking lady, Lou Reed’s widow, who is just a tremendous musician in her own right, and she always has a treasure trove of anecdotes to tell and the way she tells them in her music – as well as in her performance art and in her filmmaking – the way she tells those anecdotes is such that they all are effortlessly turned into poetry, and any little trivia bit that she shares becomes a haiku, and I just venerate the woman. And then the third one – oh, I would invite Chris Knox, of one of my favorite bands, not from Australia, but from New Zealand, Tall Dwarfs. Also very little known, undeservedly so. He has fallen on some hard times, he had a stroke and there are benefits thrown for him every once in a while, so I think he could use a good meal. And also, if they don’t know him already, maybe if he meets Laurie Anderson and Jonathan Richman, they could collaborate or at least help him out somehow. So I think they would all get along famously. And also Jonathan Richman is really handsome, that doesn’t hurt either. And the soundtrack, well, I would play Tall Dwarfs to convince Laurie Anderson and Jonathan Richman to lend a hand to Chris.
MP: That’s very gracious of you to want to help him out in your dinner. Give us some music related reading recommendations. Ideally fiction, and maybe throw in a nonfiction if you have one.
AS: Number one, that would be Long Players by Peter Coviello. Pete was one of my professors in grad school. He’s a 19th century Americanist, he mostly writes about Henry James and Melville, but somehow, being really prolific and just hardworking, he squeezed in a personal memoir called Long Players, published a few years ago, about his tenure at Bowdoin and the dissolution of his family and [how] his friends also became family in the wake of that personal collapse. So each chapter is narrated through a song, and it is just heartbreakingly beautiful, and it is also a marvelous testament to music as precisely an instrument of memory and an instrument that grants life cohesion. Pete taught me a lot about academic stuff, more than most people. But he also taught me a lot about music, and thanks to him, I don’t think I discovered a lot of bands, but he did something even more valuable. He taught me how to love bands that I had heard, and I knew I wanted to love more, but couldn’t bring myself to. So, for example, Superchunk. I always kind of had felt some affinity, but then he really kind of brought it home for me. Number two, Marianne Faithfull. I adore Marianne Faithfull, and she sadly passed away earlier this year, and that was when I finally picked up her memoir called, simply, Faithfull. It is just a breathtaking account of the British 60s, of Swinging London, and it is rife with anecdotes, with stories about everyone and their brother from Mick Jagger – whom she dated for a few years – to Bob Dylan, whom she only saw a couple of times, but all those anecdotes are just priceless and the tone of her voice is completely inimitable. She’s just the coolest woman that ever lived. It’s a manual on coolness, that memoir. She had a really tough life and she did a lot of drugs, but not in the way that musicians sometimes do, she was homeless for a while. And so she is really steadfast, she’s really a staunch in her refusal to sentimentalize her addiction or her entire past, which kind of encapsulates the entire rock and roll lifestyle with all its excesses and indulgences, and the toll taken by [them]. But at the same time she refuses to deny that, you know, it was a great deal of fun to be there at that particular moment in time. It’s a terrific book, and in her coolness, she ends it with a little recipe. She says, even if you regret having read my book, even if you think that you have not learned anything, here is something to make it worth your while. Here’s how I make lemon chicken or something. So she was another hero of mine, and she’s a very versatile musician, but also a really kind of sharp-witted writer.
ZW: Could we get a fiction work?
AS: One of the most regrettable decisions in my life was reading Bob Dylan’s novel, Tarantula. I like his Chronicles, I don’t think he’s an outstanding prose writer. His novel was just kind of college writing at its most pompous and I’m afraid I would have to say pretentious. Really, really sophomoric stuff. So, yeah, maybe I could, if I could get away with a piece of advice, don’t, you know, don’t meet your idols, don’t read your idols. At least not Bob Dylan. Actually, I have a counterexample. Leonard Cohen. I read both of his novels and they are both pretty great, especially The Favourite Game. Yes. So no, Cohen could do it all. Dylan cannot.
MP: What song would you choose as the theme for your life right now?
AS: Right now? “Antenna” by Sonic Youth. I’ll explain, if I may. So it’s a song. It’s the highlight of their last album, The Eternal. And I had been putting that album off for years, if not decades, because I knew it was the last Sonic Youth album before they broke up. So all these years, I subsisted on the illusion that I still had one more Sonic Youth album left and that meant that they had not broken up. That meant that there was still some kind of imaginary future for one of my favorite bands. And I’ve been a Die Hard fan since, well, ever since I can remember. So I’ve finally, I don’t know, I don’t remember what motivated me to give that album a listen, but now I am kind of basking in it and I’m protracting it. I’m trying to make it last because then I will have no more Sonic Youth left, and who wants to live in a world with no Sonic Youth.
MP: Did you just listen to this recently for the first time?
AS: A couple of months ago, yeah. And now I’m kind of hung up on it, especially the song “Antenna,” which is Sonic Youth at its most wistful and least abrasive. They are in their Thousand Leaves mode more than, I don’t know, Daydream Nation. So, yeah, I’m not letting that one go for a while.
MP: I had a more specific question I wanted to ask. In a recent class, you referenced spending a long while trekking across California and New York. You framed it as being inferior to teaching Crime and Punishment. Who would you say composed the soundtrack of that time of your life?
AS: Well, lately, I’ve been on a massive Joan Shelley kick, Joan Shelley is also a contemporary musician, it turns out like a lot of contemporary music. She is exactly my age, actually. And I saw her live a couple of weeks ago with a friend of mine from Swarthmore. And he had not heard her music ever before. So when I asked him afterwards, how did you like it? He said, I would put my head on her shoulder. And there was nothing remotely sexual about it, but her music is just so comforting, so soothing, so kind of nurturing that it is a perfectly legitimate reaction to elicit. She is a very talented songwriter whose music is kind of modest and unassuming, but also very richly detailed, if you know where to look for it. And speaking of, you know, friendships, imaginary friendships with musicians, I think she’s one of my kind of gal pals. I mean, we’ve never even talked. But she started putting out albums the year I moved to the States and kind of, you, started my career here. And I saw her live in Chicago years ago, and she while her opening act played she was just hanging out in the room, and she was in the back of the room, so when it was her time to go on, she had to like push through the crowd and she kept saying, “Excuse me, I’m sorry, but, you know, I’m the headliner. I’m going to play the show that you bought your tickets for.” And all of that, just contributes to this personal connection that I feel to her and, yeah, she has eight albums and over the past couple of months, I’ve listened to all of them, like countless times. I didn’t want to leave her side, to, like, part company with her. Yeah, so, yeah, Joan Shelley, terrific singer songwriter from Kentucky. I think they moved to Michigan. Her husband is also in her band. So, yeah, next time she’s in Philly. Check her out.
MP: Okay, I will have to. Is there a particular song or artist you would urge everyone, especially your students, to listen to.
AS: So, number one…. Dead Kennedys’ Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables. Why? Because Swarthmore students are all so smart and they are going to get smarter and they may lose their capacity to appreciate simple, dumb, angry music. So I think they should jump at that opportunity. That train is leaving the station, right? While you can still enjoy punk rock, enjoy your punk rock. Okay, number two, I don’t think a lot of students realize how open-minded and tolerant – musically speaking – they currently are. The human mind ossifies, grows rigid, and I am 40 years old now, and I know that I only need my perfectly crafted, three minute pop songs, and I don’t want to overwhelm myself with any experimental stuff. So while you still can, once again, while your hearts are spacious and welcoming and your minds are nimble, listen to some weird out there stuff, and my personal recommendation would be Robert Wyatt, especially his 1974 masterpiece, Rock Bottom, which I think is a very nice entry point for kind of proggy, jazzy, soundscapy, kind of music, because it also contains gut wrenchingly beautiful melodies. My mom, for example, who is 67, and has pretty orthodox taste in music, adores this album. So if she can do it, so can you. And then number three would be The Replacements, because I think that even when they were very young, and they started out very young, probably younger than most Swarthmore students, they already were kind of wise beyond their years and they already saw themselves and their peers from a kind of anachronistic distance, from the future. As Paul Westerberg grew older, he remained kind of perpetually interested in what it means to be young, and interested in it without any condescension. If you wanted a punch line, The Replacements are the band that I believe understands youth, the best of all, and the band that is most respectful of youth as a category, as a concept.
MP: And don’t we all want that? Okay, thank you so much for those recommendations. I will be listening, and our entire audience should. Of the music that the kids are listening to these days, what appeals to you the most? What appeals to you the least?
AS: What do you listen to these days? I’m always relieved when I find out that my students are listening to something that I’m familiar with. I recently was talking to a friend of mine about new music and how we’re all screwed and how music is over and of course I agreed for the most part. We had a good run. Now is the time, I think, to catch up. There is no need to make new music. And we have plenty to revive, to rediscover, to revisit . . . but to finish up that story, I was talking to my friend and he asked me, what was the last album that you heard and you thought, okay, this was an old-timer. This is a keeper, right? And I said, well, that would have to be Carrie & Lowell by Sufjan Stevens, which to me – that conversation took place maybe a couple of months ago – that almost still feels new. And then I went to Pitchfork and decided to read their review of Carrie & Lowell and I discovered that they had already reviewed the 10th anniversary special edition of that album, and it was reviewed on a Sunday, you know, when they do those kind of retrospective . . . So it is already a kind of stone cold classic, but I’m not even sorry to say that I have not really kept up because every time I try to, I don’t really know what’s going on, but every time I try to rectify that, I wish I hadn’t. I don’t know, what is going on? What I do know is I really strongly dislike those algorithms and playlists. No, music is meant to be listened to in album form, as God intended, and also exchanged between friends and we should not delegate that beautiful duty of connection to a machine. Who are you cheating, right? No, you should discover your favorite band from a friend or a wannabe friend, or from someone who is desperately in love with you, or maybe even from a professor, right? But not from an algorithm.
MP: I would agree that sites such as Instagram and other online platforms have made [music] less intimate, made it less meaningful, made it feel more random and absurd. But I would also argue that in striving to make or discover the music of [my] age and generation, there would be something really important and something really valuable in that, especially given the ways that the Internet and technology has, in many ways, deconstructed the way that music is, quote unquote, meant to be disseminated or discovered. Because there is no “meant to.” I mean, there’s the one that you know and the one that, like, older generations are accustomed to.
AS: I know. Then, okay, then let me rephrase. Less like an old fart, let me put it this way. Don’t – if I’m here to, you know, give out advice – don’t limit yourself to what goes viral, right? Which, by the way, is something, the one thing that, if I have to name one thing that I appreciate, that would be those sudden instances of those resurgences, that, for example, that strange Kate Bush renaissance, that took place recently because of some viral fluke. A lot of music that I grew up loving is making a comeback and through these platforms that I don’t really care for, right? But, you know, desperate times. We can’t be too picky. I went to a Slowdive show last year, I think, and there were people with their parents. They were all kids. They were all kids and Slowdive were active in the early 90s, right? Well, then they reunited. So I’m all for that. Whatever it takes. If it’s TikTok, that brings Pavement back, well, okay, fantastic. I’d rather it were things were different, but you can’t be too choosy. So that is wonderful. However, I would urge our many listeners and readers to not confine themselves to Spotify because, first of all, not everything is on Spotify. You might think that everything is – no, a lot of it is, but not everything. And, you know, just go to your local record store and rummage through the crates, fish out a completely forgotten, obscure, soul record issued by Stax Records or Motown or a much smaller much less renowned label, just grab it and run. I mean, pay for it. Right, but there are scenes that are just so reliable that you cannot go wrong and that opens up your horizons, right? And I assure you that this garage band from 1965, that disbanded in 1966, and hailed from some one horse town in South Carolina, right? They are probably musically much more exhilarating than whatever got a 9.2 on Pitchfork last week. Okay, that’s my spiel.
MP: Thank you for the spiel. Are lyrics literature? Whose lyrics have, in your opinion, the greatest literary merit?
AS: Yeah, of course they are. That’s a no brainer to me. That doesn’t mean that they can or should be read apart from their respective music, right? I don’t know why anyone would want to do that, but where they are, where they belong in their proper musical context, of course. Okay… Joni Mitchell. There are days, and they are not rare, when I listen to, let’s say, Hejira or The Hissing of Summer Lawns or Court and Spark or Blue, basically any album from her stellar run between Ladies of the Canyon and Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, and I think to myself, okay, she is not just on par with the likes of Dylan and Cohen, she is actually superior to them. Then, number two, let’s do a little plug for Joanna Newsom, who is not on Spotify and therefore virtually unknown to the younger generation. She’s contemporary and yet already forgotten. Yeah, I don’t think anyone in her, our, generation can hold a candle to her, lyrically or musically, for that matter. She is up there with, I don’t know, Van Morrison and Joni Mitchell and so on and so forth. And then, let’s keep it consistent, let’s think of a third woman, Liz Phair. I love Liz Phair and I think she was one of the greatest and insufficiently acclaimed lyricists of the whole 90s indie rock scene, and she can be very crass, but not in an ostentatious way. Like she never . . . she knows how to swear. She knows how to put profanity to good evocative use. And even in her filthiest songs, she is always gently, tenderly, poignantly, profane. And I think that’s a very rare skill.
MP: Thank you so much for meeting with us today. It’s been really great talking to you.
AS: Thank you. Oh, it was such a relief after all those meetings.
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