I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: RADCO-“Didn’t You Know” (2017).

Since this essay is about Mennonites, I decided to see if I could find any Mennonite rock bands.  Well, Radco was a “punk” rock band from Vancouver, BC.

Drummer Amber Banman described their music as

A heart crushing, unstoppable, rock and roll machine. Ha-ha .We like to say we’re too polite for punk rock as we all generally mind our P’s and Q’s. But oh boy, can we rock!

They have a few songs on bandcamp.

This song does rock (although there is a xylophone melody at the end).  It’s catchy with solid guitars.

The lyrics are indeed a polite diss track:

Pay attention
Before you miss
All of these things
That you could have kissed
Didn’t you know I wanted to go
But you left me standing by my front door

As of 2018 Radco were no more, although three of them went on to form The Poubelles (Amber sings lead in this band).

[READ: July 1, 2019] “Mennonites Talking About Miriam Toews”

The July/August issue of The Walrus is the Summer Reading issue. This year’s issue had two short stories, a memoir, three poems and a fifteen year reflection about a novel as special features.

I really enjoyed Miriam Toews’ All My Puny Sorrows.  I haven’t read her book A Complicated Kindness, but I gather that it (like Sorrows) shines a light on Mennonite culture.

The introduction to this piece says that Kindness introduced the world to the Mennonites of Manitoba’s Bible belt.  Her 2018 novel Women Talking is a fictionalized account of women living in the aftermath of sexual assault in an ultraconservative Mennonite colony in Bolivia (that book sounds painful to read).

This piece is a collection of cartoon panels each one a person expressing a real sentiment about Toews (although the panels are fictionalized).

The illustrations are by Jonathan Dyck and I love his style which reminds me a of across between Chris Ware and Adrian Tomine–good company to be in, for sure.

Some thoughts:

• Why doesn’t she write about progressive Mennonites?
• She can’t still call herself a Mennonite writer.
• She’s the only reason I can still call myself a Mennonite.
• She writes about Mennonites fro Non-Mennonites.
• Mental illness, abuse, oppression-we like to think these things don’t happen to us, but not talking about them doesn’t make them go away.
• Everyone’s just uncomfortable with a woman who is so vocal.
• Her books are all the same.
• Mennonites have always ha a problem with art.
• A story isn’t the same thing as truth.
• Je meea jeleat, je meea vetjead * *The more educated, the more wrong.

and my favorite:

• No one knows how to pronounce her last name.