In The DropBox: Loma, Big Big Train, Glass Hammer, and Doncourt/Olsson

The first album in this batch of DropBox offerings is a wondrous work of art from a group called Loma. They are on the Sub Pop label, of all places, and with Don’t Shy Away they have come up with a subdued, spacious masterpiece. Emily Cross (vocals), Dan Duszynski , and Jonathan Meiburg have collaborated to create music that reminds me of the best of Talk Talk and Laurie Anderson. This is music that takes its time to develop, yet grabs the listener’s attention from the first note. Brian Eno is a fan, and he lends his talent to “Homing”. Cross’s breathy vocals are gently enchanting, while a chugging sax provides counterpoint. On “Jenny”, crickets chirp in the background as muffled drums beat and a guitar is slowly strummed. It’s so inviting – as if they asked the listener to join them in an intimate jam session on their back porch. This album came out of left field, and I can’t stop listening to it. If you are a fan of Kate Bush, Talk Talk, Brian Eno, or Over The Rhine, you owe it to yourself to check this one out.

While St. Cecilia is the patron saint of this site, Big Big Train could be considered the patron group. It was mutual love of their music that brought many of Spirit of Cecilia’s contributors together, and we eagerly anticipate every new release of theirs. The latest from BBT is a recording of their November 2019 show at the Hackney Empire. It’s a very good performance, featuring songs from English Electric, Folklore, Grimspound, and The Grand Tour. For long-time fans, it’s also a bittersweet affair, since it includes the final performances of Dave Gregory, Rachel Hall, and Danny Manners. If you haven’t heard anything by BBT but were curious, this BluRay/CD package is a perfect introduction. David Longdon’s voice is in excellent form, and the band plays even the most challenging passages to perfection. Nick D’Virgilio’s drumming is exceptionally fine. The primarily acoustic “The Florentine” is a highlight with its lilting vocal harmonies and Hall’s ecstatic violin solo.

Back on this side of the big pond, Glass Hammer have released a download-only collection of favorite tracks from their early years. They have rerecorded them, and it is a lot of fun to hear these 20+ year old tracks given new life. I especially enjoy the ones from 1998’s On To Evermore, an album that is one of my favorites of GH, but which slipped under the radar for a lot of prog fans.

Finally, an album from Tom Doncourt and Mattias Olsson, Cathedral. The dark artwork matches the music perfectly, which was composed and recorded before Doncourt’s death in March of 2019. It includes Gregorian chant-like vocals, lots of mellotron and synths, as well as some hard rocking guitars in places. The highlight is the 12:34 long “Poppies In A Field”. Doncourt and Olsson obviously put a lot of thought into the arrangements of these songs, and I am impressed with how they are able to create a unique atmosphere. It is a fitting tribute to Doncourt, and if you are looking for an album to play on a rainy, gloomy Sunday afternoon, then Cathedral will fill the bill.

Okay, that’s the latest from the Spirit of Cecilia DropBox. A true masterpiece from Loma, some fan service from two old favorites, and an intriguingly dark work from Doncourt and Olsson. My next post will be my favorite albums of 2020. We have had a bumper crop of great music this year, so it might be a long one! Meanwhile, I’ll leave you with Loma’s video for “Fix My Gaze”:

Kirk and the Libertarians

To be fair, though, Kirk never attempted to ally with or to placate the libertarians in any way, especially after the mid-1950s.  They became nothing but “chirping sectaries.”[2]  Kirk presented his arguments against libertarianism in a fashion at once detailed and scholarly as well as vindictive and savage.  Nothing raised Kirk’s ire, especially after the 1950s, more than did libertarianism and its adherents.  Still, it must be noted that Kirk wrote little about the topic, he also spoke little to his students about it, and he maintained friendships with several persons openly tolerant of and even enthusiastic regarding it, such as Peter Stanlis and Larry Reed.[3]  He softened his critiques by distinguishing the “doctrinaire” from one who “believes in an enduring moral order, the Constitution of the United States, free enterprise, and old American ways of life.”  The latter, he argued, simply had an “imperfect understanding” of politics and were quite well-intentioned.[4]  “With them I have little quarrel,” though they, through their confusion, give strength to the genuinely mad libertarians, Kirk lamented.[5]  In each of his blatant criticisms of libertarianism, Kirk also listed what he shared with them, in terms of kinship.  As with Kirk, the libertarians “try to exert some check upon the vainglorious foreign policy of the United States” and they attempt to fight inhumanity in economics as well as in politics.[6]  The best libertarians become conservatives, Kirk hoped, or they introduced the young to good ideas.[7]

The matter of libertarianism, however, seems to have been intensely personal in his mind.  That is, Kirk willingly separated those libertarians he liked from those he despised.  To Kirk, men such as Stanlis and Reed could be wonderful, as they enjoyed a friendship.  Kirk himself had happily labeled Randolph of Roanoke an “aristocratic libertarian,” and he greatly admired J.R.R. Tolkien who identified his own politics as “anarchy (philosophically understood)” and Christopher Dawson, who grew more fearful of an unwieldy Leviathan with each passing year.[8]  Men such as Frank Meyer and Murray Rothbard, however, were loathsome to Kirk.  “One may say of them in general that they are ‘philosophical’ anarchists in bourgeois dress.”[9]  To Kirk’s mind, little if anything separated the utilitarian libertarian from the wanton libertine, and John Stuart Mill and Murray Rothbard epitomized the movement.  “Since Mill, the libertarians have forgotten nothing and learned nothing,” he wrote.[10]  Like the devil, he continued, the libertarian “can bear no authority temporal or spiritual,” and embraces, often, “sexual eccentricity.”[11]  Further, the doctrinaire libertarian is “metaphysically mad.”[12]  And, perhaps, most cuttingly, betraying prejudices at several levels, Kirk wrote, “The representative libertarian of this decade is humorless, intolerant, self-righteous, badly schooled, and dull.  At least the old-fangled Russian anarchist was bold, lively, and knew which sex he belonged to.”[13]  Hardly dangerous to society, though, Kirk concluded, most libertarians are “repellent merely.”[14] 

Frank S. Meyer, the fountainhead of “fusionism”—an attempt to reconcile traditionalism with libertarianism—fired the first salvo in a continuing war against Kirk with a questioning piece in 1953 in the American Mercury and a bitter piece in The Freeman, 1955.  The earlier piece attempted to assess The Conservative Mind in what the ex-Communist Meyer considered the dialectic of western history, the struggle between tradition or conservatism and individual liberty or “what used to be called liberalism.”[15]  While one might find much to appreciate in The Conservative Mind, the reader would also suffer aggravation as “he restricts his survey to one line of conservative thinking,” while dismissing the importance of Thomas Jefferson, Herbert Spencer, and Lord Acton.  In the end, Meyer thought, the reader could profit more from Kirk’s history than from his understanding of modern American society and its myriad of problems.[16]

Two years later, in 1955, Meyer’s editor at The Freeman, Frank Chodorov asked his writer to explore the “New Conservatism” as a movement dangerous to the libertarian cause.[17]  Entitled “Collectivism Re-baptized,” Meyer viciously attacked the “New Conservatism” as best represented by Kirk’s The Conservative Mind, Program for Conservatives, and Academic Freedom.  These appeared, successively, “in descending order of quality,” he claimed.  Led by the would-be “prophet,” Kirk—with Peter Viereck, Robert Nisbet, and Walter Lippmann merely tagging along—the “new conservatism” embraced no principles but only a “tone” and “an attitude.”  Search as much as one might, Meyer explained, he would find no “clear and distinct principle” regarding the “field of human action—the area of ethics, politics, and economics” in Kirk’s writings.  Instead, Kirk seemed to have embraced a somewhat shallow “High Anglican Christianity,” the Platonic republic “with the philosopher-king replaced by the squire or the vicar.”  The Michiganian embraced and promoted such words as authority, order, community, duty, and obedience as fetishes, neglecting freedom, Meyer continued.  In the end, Kirk’s books, published between 1953 and 1955, served as little more than “another guise for the collectivist spirit of the age.”[18] 

One early and prominent supporter of post-war conservative causes lambasted Meyer in a personal letter to Chodorov. 

We are the great conservative mass of citizens who have been dwelling in cyclone shelters for the past twenty years.  We see in Dr. Kirk the most articulate, believable, and historically most unassailable of those opposed to the welfare state.  Now . . . those who might be easily in Mr. Kirk’s camp, and he perhaps in theirs, are about to tear him apart because of some egotistical difference of opinion. . . . These splinter writers if allowed to carry on will wreck us.  Conservatism needs a structure and a home.  My concept of a home is a place which may not be so orderly but is secure and comfortable, and gives us a feeling of pride in its impregnability. . . .  Mr. Meyer and his colleagues . . . are encouraged to dynamite the home of the conservatives.[19]

In a letter to the editorial page, Needles wrote: “Meyer’s sickening attack on Russell Kirk will give much comfort and propaganda material to the statists.  I am quite sure that it will be quoted widely as evidence that conservatism is really Toryism, selfish and greedy.”  Interestingly, of the four letters The Freeman printed in response to the Meyer’s piece, three were overwhelmingly negative, while only one offered some praise of his article.[20]  Equally important, T.S. Eliot, Wilhelm Röpke, and Erik Kuehnelt-Leddihn each sent a letter of congratulations to Kirk for “being attacked by the Freeman.”  Prominent Americans such as Felix Morley, Frederick Wilhelmsen, and Richard Weaver also offered Kirk their appreciation.[21]  Clearly, a rift was becoming visible not only to the players but to the spectators as well.

According to Kevin Smant, Meyer’s biographer, Meyer felt no remorse in his views, but he did about expressing them as loudly as he had.  His response, however, was to create his own conservative platform, explicitly outlining what would become known as “fusionism,” a mixing of traditionalism with libertarianism.[22]  He soon received a Volker Grant to do just this.[23]  “There is a concerted effort to denigrate Russell Amos Kirk, which you have detected,” Kirk wrote to Bill Buckley in 1956. 

The gang with whom your pal Frank Meyer is associated seems to be most active in the fell enterprise.  There are wheels within wheels; and boring from within has not ceased to be.  Meyer has obtained a subsidy from the Volker Fund for the express purpose of undermining the influence of one Russell Kirk; and you gave him some additional cash for that worthy cause.[24]

Buckley responded, but this was the first diplomatic effort to bring the two together that would, eventually, tire him.  “I think that about one half of such diplomatic talents as I dispose of were regularly exhausted in editing a magazine that regularly published both Frank Meyer and Russell Kirk,” he admitted years later.[25]  First, he claimed via mail, Kirk just being paranoid.  Second, though, Meyer would not use the Volker money, as well as the Buckley money, to attack Kirk.  Rather, he desired to come up with a form of conservatism that incorporated but also that attempted to transcend Kirk’s ideas.[26]  Whatever motives existed in the funding of the project, Meyer eventually did, of course, both things. 

Needles also contacted Kirk, letting him know about his letter to Chodorov as well as making a contribution to the yet-to-be-born Modern Age.  Kirk revealed much in his response, casting Meyer as a typical American progressive, desiring 100% Americanism:

That silly piece by Frank Meyer in the FREEMAN is part of a curious conspiracy by Chodorov, Meyer, and certain other atheists and pacifists and anarchists—insane conjunction!—to cast your servant into limbo.  I was forwarned [sic].  These gentry will injure only themselves, of course.  Meyer is a neurotic little ferret-like creature, with the glittering eyes of fanaticism, who goes about telling everyone that he USED to be a Communist.  “Methinks the lady doth protest too much.”  I don’t know whether his conversion preceded the Smith Act.  He sees himself as the Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of 100% Americanism, conducting heroic purges.[27]

Kirk assumed Chodorov was targeting Modern Age more than Kirk, but he was uncertain.  His information, he said, came from someone working at the libertarian Foundation for Economic Education.[28]  Most likely, this was Kirk’s long-time friend, Ed Opitz. Kirk further believed that Meyer had not read The Conservative Mind, but had merely gleaned ideas regarding it from various reviews of the book.  Equally telling, Kirk believed that Chodorov had inappropriately and unjustly claimed the mantle of Albert Jay Nock.  He, Kirk, had as much right to claim the mantle as Chodorov and perhaps more, given Kirk’s close friendship with Nock’s best friend, Bernard Iddings Bell.[29]  When the Needles letter, in part, appeared in the September 1955 issue of The Freeman, Kirk wrote, “I see that a part of your first letter was printed at last.  I am told that both the FREEMAN and HUMAN EVENTS are overwhelmed with letters of protest.”  Now convinced that many libertarians represented only a fanatical sect, attempting to bolster their egos rather than the common good of the movement, Kirk concluded his comments with, “The Supreme Soviet of Libertarianism is shaken.[30]”  To William F. Buckley’s father, Kirk noted with some irony, that while he expected attacks from the liberals, he did not imagine them coming from his allies.  “It is amusing, while waging such battles on the frontier at my own expense,” he stated, “to be knifed in the back by such chairborne condottieri as Frank Meyer and Frank Chodorov.”[31]  Not without importance, William F. Buckley, Jr., recruited Frank S. Meyer to become an editor of his new National Review from its opening issue.  Meyer, along with Chodorov, “will take up their stilettos against the National [Review], once any opinion appears therein which deviates in the least degree from the Holy Writ of Cobden and Bright,” Kirk warned Buckley.[32] 

Like Kirk, Meyer rarely visited the New York offices, preferring to write from his home in Woodstock, New York, where he also homeschooled his sons.  Meyer also feared that coming to New York City might expose him to many KGB operatives, who still wanted him dead for his earlier betrayal of that cause.[33]  Priscilla Buckley, one of Bill’s sisters, thought this providential and healthy for all involved.

It was considered a lucky thing that Frank was ensconced at Woodstock, at a safe distance from New York.  He was difficult to work with in person.  Like the good ex-Communist that he was Frank could go on for hours, pacing up and down, chain-smoking cigarettes, willing to talk into the wee hours to make any point, no matter how minor.  The rest of us, with a magazine to get out every week . . . just didn’t have the time to listen, or the energy to fight every point, or the inclination to make high drama of any given point.  His visits to New York were few.[34]

Another person connected to National Review, Whittaker Chambers, who had thought highly of Kirk’s The Conservative Mind in 1953, now saw the division between Kirk and Meyer as an irrelevancy in the larger tides and movements of history.  “I have almost nothing in common with the effort of Meyer or Kirk, whose rationales, no matter how formally logical, seem to me, by contrast with teetotal reality, chiefly an irrelevant buzz.”[35]  Sadly, Chambers viewed the two men “silhouetted in a death struggle against the door to which I had left the key,” children wrestling over the love of a father.[36]  They were, he thought, as Cain and Abel must have seemed to Adam and Eve.  That only six years earlier Chambers had challenged Kirk so vigorously speaks volumes about the divisions in the movement against encroaching conformism in state, education, and corporation.

A year later, in 1956, Meyer again went after Kirk, this time for his views on John Stuart Mill.  In fairness, Kirk had written this article to spite Meyer.  “It serves, by the way, to answer Meyer, who, as a quarter-educated man, simply doesn’t understand what I’m writing about,” he wrote when submitting the piece to Buckley.[37]  Kirk, as detailed in chapter four of this biography, feared the utilitarianism of Mill’s liberalism.  Invited by Buckley to respond to the piece, Meyer claimed that his opponent had, strangely, attacked Mill by placing another Brit of the same century, James Fitzjames Stephen as the former’s better.[38]  In particular, Kirk “appears to select for praise those ideas which Stephen’s imagination dress from the Romantic pagan-Teutonic mystique of folk, community, force, and power.”  Each of these, he continued, led to the “nightmares of the twentieth century.”[39]  In his own autobiography, Kirk allowed that Meyer might have thought him a “Trojan horse within the conservative camp.”[40]

In their personal correspondence, the two were quite civil, if somewhat distant, with one another.[41]  In one letter, however, Meyer reached out in a kind of peace offering: “however much we may differ from time to time in our view of some of the problems of conservatism, I think we share a firm respect for quality and excellence.”[42]  Meyer even invited Kirk to contribute to an edited work, What is Conservatism?, and the latter accepted.[43]  By 1962, two full years before What is Conservatism? appeared, Meyer even inserted a footnote in his book, In Defense of Freedom, that read:

In the last year or two, however, in a number of his contributions to periodicals, there has been observable some weakening in his intransigent New Conservative position and some sign of a greater sympathy with the position of the American conservative consensus on individual freedom.[44]

Whatever tempering this represented, Meyer still began his book with “Collectivism Rebaptized,” making it clear that his nemesis remained Kirk.

In his private correspondence, Meyer also offered mixed views about Kirk.  This becomes especially obvious in his correspondence with even more radical libertarians such as Rose Wilder Lane, the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, and a famous journalist and author in her own right.[45]  She had also been close, at one time, with Albert Jay Nock and Isabel Paterson. 

Just now, I am wary of ‘conservative’ because of the Metternich-Burke movement represented by Kirk and Viereck, among other, who call their views ‘conservative.’  They are really opportunists with lip-service to traditional[ism], as Metternich and Burke were.[46]

From Lane’s perspective, Kirk had perverted one of the most important words in American history, “revolution” by connecting it almost exclusively to the French Revolution, thus diminishing the American.  Further, she considered Kirk not only the “damndest [sic] kind of black reactionary,” he also represented one of the single most dangerous threats to the American character and to western liberty.[47]  Kirk, she continued, along with Buckley, represented the true “enemies of freedom and of all human values.”  She and Meyer, she claimed, offered true revolution.  “A person who acts to defend . . . their innate, inalienable liberty, cannot ‘conserve’ the status quo.”  Instead, she continued, “he must change it, he must abolish much of it.  He is an abolitionist, a radical, a revolutionist.”[48]  Kirk misunderstood the past, believing communism something new.  In reality, she believed, almost all of history had been communist with most of the great thinkers of history conserving such communism.  Only the Americans had broken from this.  With no real grounding in history, she concluded, Kirk could only look up to God and embrace a false mysticism.[49]  In response, Meyer actually defended Kirk, at least in a relative sense.

Kirk has thought deeply but is wrong-headed and one-sided.  You may have seen my reviews of both of these worthies [Kirk’s CONSERVATIVE MIND and a book by Viereck] in the Mercury but you may not have, and being lazy, rather than repeat here I am send you clippings of what I said.  I was perhaps a little kinder to Mr. Kirk than I should have been if I were writing a more detailed and scholarly critique.  He is particularly weak when he discusses the contemporary situation. . . . It seems to me that a great deal of what Kirk and his supporters say is based on a confusion of the relation of individual men to God and to each other in the realm of Love with particular forms of social organization—with which dogmatically, at least, the Church has no intrinsic connection.[50]

When the Volker Fund asked Meyer his opinion of Kirk and his efforts to raise money for Modern Age, Meyer recommended against him.[51] 

While Kirk did not respond immediately, when he finally did answer Meyer, nine years later, he tore him apart.  Indeed, his review of Meyer’s book, In Defense of Freedom, serves as Kirk’s apotheosis of vitrolicity.  “The reader begins to tire after the first chapter,” he wrote.  Taking his former Marxism and mutating it into an ideology, “Meyer now transfers his political passion to conservatism (of sorts)—which he would erect into an ideology, slogans and dogmas.  He burns to purge this new true faith of deviationists, to create a disciplined sect of the faithful, to become the law and all the prophets to young persons marching to Zion.”  Never having overcome his former attachment to Marx, Meyer paints his own antagonists with too broad of a brush, incapable of nuance.  After denying that he belonged to anything called the “new conservatives” or that such a group even existed, Kirk argued that Meyer would make a goddess of liberty, an abstraction to be worshipped, but leading to the anarchy found in parts of then-modern Africa.  Even in an era of political religions, Kirk sighed, Meyer “can appeal to little but to the arrogant ego.  With this last,” he concluded, “he is plentifully equipped.”[52]  Never before or after, would Kirk savage something so brutally in print.  Tellingly, Kirk only mentioned Meyer twice in his autobiography, and with almost no context or explanation of the man other than that he was a zealot, whether on the left or the right.  If Meyer thought his debate with Kirk important, Kirk did not, at least over the long run.  Others, though, have.  Critically important figures such as Whittaker Chambers viewed it as the beginning of an ending of what had started so well, only a few short years earlier. 


NOTES

            [1] A personal note.  When I told a friend of mine, a prominent member of the libertarian movement for decades now and an Ivy League graduate, that I’d been named the “Russell Amos Kirk Chair” at Hillsdale, he gave me a sad look and said, “He was really an evil man.”

            [2] RAK, “Libertarians: Chirping Sectaries,” Modern Age 25 (Fall 1981): 345-51; and RAK, “A Dispassionate Assessment of Libertarians,” originally delivered at the Heritage Foundation and later reprinted in The Politics of Prudence (Bryn Mawr, PA: ISI Books, 1993), 156-171.  See also RAK, “Professors and Politics,” National Review 28 (May 14, 1976).

            [3] In his vast corpus of writings, RAK only openly engaged libertarians in two pieces.  One of RAK’s students, Alan Cornett, has confirmed that RAK said little regarding the subject to his students.  Alan Cornett to Birzer, November 22, 2013, personal correspondence.

            [4] RAK, “Chirping Sectaries,” 278.

            [5] RAK, “A Dispassionate Assessment of Libertarians,” in Redeeming the Time, 157.

            [6] RAK, “A Dispassionate Assessment of Libertarians,” in Redeeming the Time, 157-158.

            [7] RAK, “A Dispassionate Assessment of Libertarians,” in Redeeming the Time, 157-159.

            [8] On Tolkien’s anarchism, see JRRT to Christopher Tolkien, November 29, 1943, in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), 63.  On Dawson’s move toward such a position, especially after 1935, see Birzer, Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson (2007).

            [9] RAK, “Dispassionate Assessment of Libertarians,” in Redeeming the Time, 160.

            [10] RAK, “Chirping Sectarians,” 275.  On libertinism, see RAK, “Dispassionate Assessment of Libertarians,” in Redeeming the Time, 162.  Rothbard and RAK reconciled, at least in part, by 1993, as each put aside differences to advise Pat Buchanan on a possible second run for the presidency.  Their fear of a neoconservative foreign policy allowed each to overcome their mutual distrust.  See Paul E. Gottfried, Encounters: My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2009), 170.

            [11] RAK, “Chirping Sectarians,” 275.

            [12] RAK, “Chirping Sectarians,” 279.

            [13] RAK, “A Dispassionate Assessment of Libertarians,” in Redeeming the Time, 165.

            [14] RAK, “A Dispassionate Assessment of Libertarians,” in Redeeming the Time, 165.

            [15] On his communism, see his insightful and revealing, The Moulding of Communists: The Training of the Communist Cadre (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1961).

            [16] Frank Meyer, “Conservatism and Individualism,” American Mercury (July 1953): 140-141.

            [17] Kevin J. Smant, Principles and Heresies, 32.

            [18] Frank S. Meyer, “Collectivism Rebaptized,” The Freeman (July 1955), 559-562.

            [19] Robert Needles, M.D., to Frank Chodorov, July 8, 1955, quoted in Smant, Principles and Heresies, 33.

            [20] In the “Readers Also Write” column, The Freeman: A Monthly for Libertarians 5 (September 1955): 632.

            [21] RAK to WFB, September 1, 1955, in RKCCR.

            [22] Smant, Principles and Heresies, 32ff.

            [23] See WFB to RAK, April 6, 1956, in RKCCR.

            [24] RAK to WFB, April 2, 1956, in RKCCR.

            [25] WFB, Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography (Washington D.C., Regnery, 2004), 288.

            [26] See WFB to RAK, April 6, 1956, in RKCCR.

            [27] RAK to Dr. Needles, July 13, 1955, in RKCCR.

            [28] RAK to Dr. Needles, July 13, 1955, in RKCCR.  RAK helped Opitz with a small group called “The Remnant,” sponsored by the Foundation for Economic Education in New York.  As RAK described it, it was “an informal association of clergymen who believe that the primary concern of the church is the ordering of souls, rather than the ordering of the state.”  See RAK, “A Few Clergymen Seem to Prefer Soapbox to Pulpit,” TTP, Ada Evening News (May 31, 1965), 4.

            [29] RAK to Dr. Robert Needles, July 21, 1955, in RKCCR.

            [30] RAK to Robert Needles, September 1, 1955, in RKCCR.

            [31] RAK to Bill Buckley’s father, July 13, 1955, in RKCCR.  In the same letter, he claimed, “I never have called myself a New Conservative, and no one ever has called me that to my face.”

            [32] RAK to WFB, September 1, 1955, in RKCCR.  By 1959, RAK’s views on Chodorov had softened somewhat, giving him guarded praise for his book, The Rise and Fall of Society, the most Nockian of his books.  RAK offered this caution, though: “Nock had nothing of the utopian in him: but Chodorov does, tho [sic] he is less utopian in this book than in some of his earlier writings.  The Chodorov utopia is society without he state, a condition in which men enjoy the benefits of voluntary community without political authority over them.”  See RAK, “Salvos Against Collectivism,” Chicago Sunday Tribune Magazine of Books (April 26, 1959), 2.

            [33] Priscilla Buckley, Living It Up at National Review: A Memoir, 187.

            [34] Priscilla Buckley to Kevin J. Smant, August 26, 1993, in Smant, Principles and Heresies, 60-61.

            [35] Whittaker Chambers to WFB, Jr., Christmas Eve 1958, in Odyssey of a Friend, 229.

            [36] Whittaker Chambers to WFB, Jr., May 7, 1959, in Odyssey of a Friend, 247.

            [37] RAK to WFB, October 5, 1955, in RKCCR.

            [38] WFB to RAK, February 13, 1956, in RKCCR.

            [39] Meyer, “In Defense of John Stuart Mill,” reprinted in In Defense of Freedom, 165.

            [40] RAK, Sword, 150.

            [41] See the few letters in the RAK-Meyer Correspondence, in RKCCR.  George Nash has put the relationship in fine perspective.  See Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America: Since 1945 (New York: Basic Books, 1976), especially chapters 5 and 6.

            [42] Frank S. Meyer to Dr. RAK, August 5, 1959, in RKCCR.

            [43] RAK, “Prescription, Authority, and Ordered Freedom,” in Frank S. Meyer, ed., What is Conservatism? (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1964), 23-40.

            [44] Meyer, In Defense of Freedom (1996 version), 59fn12.

            [45] Rose Wilder was born in 1886 on the homestead of her famous parents, Laura and Almanzo Wilder, near De Smet, Dakota Territory.  She worked as a journalist at several papers, including the Kansas City Post as well as the leftist San Francisco Bulletin.  After a visit to the Soviet Union in 1921, though, Lane renounced her leftist leanings, declaring: “I came out of the Soviet Union no longer a communist, because I believed in personal freedom.”  She published her most famous book, The Discovery of Freedom, a wide-sweeping examination of the Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian tradition of liberty, in 1943.  In addition to the Discovery of Freedom, she wrote Henry Fords Own Story (1917); The Making of Herbert Hoover (1920); The Peaks of Shala (1924); Hill Billy (1926) ; Cindy (1928) ; Let the Hurricane Roar (1933) ; Old Home Town (1935); Give Me Liberty (1936); and Free Land (1938).  She also wrote numerous articles and short stories for Harpers, the Saturday Evening Post, and Ladies’ Home Journal.  Throughout her adult life, Rose remained an anti-statist, natural rights advocate.  “The revolutionary basis (of this country) is recognition of the fact that human rights are natural rights,” she wrote, “born in every human being with his life, and inseparable from his life; not rights and freedoms that can be granted by any power on earth.”   In the 1960s, Rose covered the Vietnam conflict for the Ladies’ Home Journal.  She died in 1968 in Danbury, Connecticut, as she was about to embark on a world tour.

            [46] Rose Wilder Lane, Danbury, Conn., to Frank S. Meyer, 6 October 1953, Box 9, Folder 119, in Rose Wilder Lane Papers, Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa.  Hereafter, HPL.

            [47] Rose Wilder Lane, Danbury, Conn., to Frank S. Meyer, 28 January 1954, Box 9, Folder 120, in HPL.

            [48] Lane to Meyer, September 18, 1956, Box 9, Folder 120, in HPL.

            [49] See, also, Lane to Joan Clark, July 11, 1958, Box 2, Folder 19, in HPL; and Lane to Clark, March 11, 1960, in Box 2, Folder 19, in HPL.

            [50] Meyer to Lane, October 10, 1953, Box 9, Folder 119, in HPL.

            [51] Lane to Meyer, January 28, 1954, Box 9, Folder 119, in HPL.

            [52] RAK, “An Ideologue of Liberty,” Sewanee Review 72 (April-June 1964): 349-350.

A NonPrickly Conversation About Porcupine Tree

The latest dialogue between Spirit of Cecilia Editor-in-Chief and Arts Editor Tad Wert concerns one of the giants of prog and contemporary music in general: Steven Wilson. A restless soul who has been involved in many projects – No-Man, Porcupine Tree, Blackfield, among others – and revelatory remixes of classic albums, Birzer and Wert discuss his work with the late, lamented Porcupine Tree.

Brad: Tad, I’ve been thoroughly enjoying Rich Wilson’s biography of Porcupine Tree, Time Flies, from Rocket 88 books, the same publishers who brought us the Spirit of Talk Talk. Wilson is an excellent writer, and the research he did for the book is impeccable. I’ve learned quite a bit, including some fascinating tidbits such as that Steven Wilson and Tim Bowness approached not just members of Japan but members of Talk Talk(!) to become a band or a project around 1991.  The members of Talk Talk declined, but members of Japan became parts of No-man and Porcupine Tree, of course.  Can you imagine what a Wilson/Bowness/Japan/Talk Talk band might have been?  My heart pounds just thinking about it.

I first heard Porcupine Tree while driving through Fort Wayne in 2002.  Fort Wayne is one of the closest cities to us (it even has a Barnes and Noble’s bookstore), and one of the local stations was playing “Trains.” I was blown away, and–thanks to my very understanding wife–we had to stop at the local record store.  I bought In Absentia, Up the Down Stair, and Stupid Dream. One of my excellent students at the time, happened to be a PT fan, and he very graciously gave me a copy of Voyage 34 and Stars Die (the Delerium collection), about a year later. I was hooked, and I purchased the entire back catalogue at that point.

I’d heard Steven Wilson in other projects prior to this Eureka! Porcupine Tree moment in Fort Wayne, but I’d not really appreciated his genius until I heard “Trains” on the radio that day.  I was, to put it mildly, rather gobsmacked. This, it seemed to me, nineteen year ago, was exactly what prog should be in the twentieth-first century.

While I still love “Trains,” it was actually The Sky Moves Sideways that convinced me that Wilson was and is a true genius. At the time of its release, some folks even speculated that it was a secret Pink Floyd album, and, while I very much hear the Floydian influence, the album is so very Porcupine Tree to me that I have a hard time seeing it as anything other than a masterwork of the band and of Wilson.

Tad: Brad, Porcupine Tree, along with Spock’s Beard, reignited my love for prog that had lain dormant for decades. After losing interest in the 80’s and 90’s, I rediscovered this vital genre via a prog-themed issue of Mojo Magazine. While almost all of it was devoted to the “classic years” of prog, one page featured some contemporary artists. Spock’s Beard was one, and Porcupine Tree was another.

Based on that recommendation, I picked up Spock’s Beard’s V, and PT’s In Absentia. I was hooked as well! I bought all of the Beard’s music I could find, as well as Wilson’s. I remember the Spring Break of 2002, when I took my family down to Florida. I loaded my mp3 player with nothing but Beard and Porcupine Tree, and that was what I listened to exclusively the entire vacation.

I, too, was convinced that Steven Wilson is a genius, and I tracked down as many projects of his that I could find. This was before streaming services, so some of it was hard to find. I never really have enjoyed his early No-Man music, even though that was more popular than Porcupine Tree at the time. If only the Talk Talk collaboration had occurred!

Porcupine Tree, though, was another matter entirely. Wilson’s seemingly endless supply of captivating melodies kept me hooked for a couple for months. Then I began to listen to the lyrics. Wow, there is some disturbing stuff there!

Brad: Great story, Tad!  Seems like we had a similar trajectory, though I actually and amazingly encountered Spock’s Beard with the release of The Light.  There was an excellent cd shop in Bloomington, Indiana, that seemed to have everything imaginable.  I should’ve spent more time on the dissertation, but the music never stopped calling me. And, the fellowship money was necessary for rent, for food, and for CDs!

As to the lyrics, I agree, Tad.  Whenever PT gets loud and heavy in the music, the truly dark lyrics come out.  The lyrics for In Absentia, Deadwing, and Fear of the Blank Planet are some of the most disturbing I’ve ever heard.  PT, overall, seems to have gone in three phases, lyrically.  For the first several albums, the lyrics are atmospheric and dewey.  In the middle phase (Stupid Dream and Lightbulb Sun), they’re clever and poppy.  In their last, the heavy phase, they’re just downright dark.  Maybe they lighten a little bit for parts of The Incident, but only a little bit. Even when PT gets heavy on “Dislocated Day” on The Sky Moves Sideways, the lyrics get dark.

PT has just released a massive boxset, The Delerium Years: 1991-1997, which includes all of the major releases of those years plus a disk of rarities, some remixed work, the full forty-minute version of the rock improvisation, “Moonloop,” and, what I’m most eager to see, a 140-page hardcover book with liner notes by the always amazing and excellent (and a Hillsdale graduate) Stephen Humphries.  Honestly, the liner notes alone are, to me, worth the price of the boxset. It’s high on my Christmas wish list.  And, should Santa not deliver, I’ll get it anyway!  Bah humbug. Humphries, it should be noted, might be the best writer in rock right now. Certainly, he or Jerry Ewing.

As much as I love Porcupine Tree, though, I do wonder how much they’ve influenced prog as a genre.  I mean this in the sense that–well, Radiohead, for example, affected pop and rock for at least a full generation.  How many prog bands over the last 20 years have inserted dark lyrics and heavy musical parts in imitation of PT?  I’m guessing quite a few.  Quite a contrast, say, to The Flower Kings, who almost never go heavy or dark (with exceptions). Any thoughts on this, Tad?

Tad: Brad, you raise an interesting point – how influential was Porcupine Tree in prog? I would say that for most of the 2000’s, you couldn’t avoid comparing any new artist to them. I was very disappointed when WIlson disbanded PT for a solo career, but in retrospect it was a smart move career-wise. PT was so integral to the prog scene there was no way he could have broken out of it, and we wouldn’t have masterpieces like To The Bone today. 

And I think he will end up being even more influential in the long run as a solo artist. What’s working against him is the fragmentation of music in general. When Radiohead were at their peak, music distribution was still dominated by the major labels. With streaming, consumers can tailor their listening to extremely small niches and never hear “big” artists. My students are incredulous when I tell them I would not recognize a single Beyonce song if I heard it, because I’ve never listened to any pop radio or streaming channels.

Before we wrap up this dialogue, I want to give credit to Wilson for his prescient warnings regarding the internet and social media. “Every Home Is Wired” from 1996’s Signify (my favorite of PT’s early albums, by the way) is incredibly prophetic. For me, the web came into its own in 1995, when the first decent browser, Netscape, appeared. One year later, Steven Wilson could foresee the dark side of anonymous online interaction and surveillance. And, of course, the entire Fear of a Blank Planet was a jeremiad against the isolation of children imposed by gaming, social media, and medication. And how about that killer guitar solo by Alex Lifeson!? 

It’s interesting that Wilson resisted being on Spotify for years, but he eventually gave in. (For what it’s worth, Neal Morse – former leader of Spock’s Beard – still refuses to participate with Spotify. He created his own streaming channel of just his music for paying subscribers.) Curious readers of this post can now listen to the complete discography of Porcupine Tree in one convenient location, something that took me months and many dollars to achieve!

Brad: Tad, all of this (your response) is simply excellent, and I can only agree and agree and agree.  Let me be blunt, though: Lifeson’s solo on Anesthetize is my favorite of all of his guitar solos, believe it or not.  And, I say this as a Rush fan since 1981!  There’s something about that brilliant track which brings the best out of Lifeson. I should also note: Lifeson is my favorite rock guitarist. So, my praise of this solo–while possibly over the top–has some weight.  Well, at least in my mind.

So, let me conclude–especially after re-listening to PT’s entire catalogue (well, almost–I skipped a track, here and there)–I do think that Steven Wilson is a man of integrity and genius. The prog world (indeed, the world) is better because of him.  Whether he’s in Porcupine Tree, Blackfield, No-man, or in his own fascinating solo career, he’s never uninteresting!  Prophet, maybe.  Genius, yes.

Tad: Agreed! Definitely a genius. I wonder how popular he would have been if he were active in the early ‘70s. In some ways, he is the Todd Rundgren of our time – brilliant songwriter, musician, and producer!

For readers interested in exploring Wilson’s PT-era work, I have created a Spotify playlist of my favorite tracks, which I’ve embedded below. An excellent sampler of his solo work is the album Transience, which Wilson compiled himself. The Spotify link for that album is here.

My Number 2 Album of the Year . . .

. . . comes from the outpouring of archival jazz releases I’ve been writing about lately. This, from my point of view, is the very best of that harvest: an astounding, life-affirming 1962 concert, buried in the archives of Ella Fitzgerald’s manager, completely forgotten until now, then released this fall as The Lost Berlin Tapes.

Back in West Berlin on the heels of two first-class live albums recorded there (1960’s Mack the Knife: Ella in Berlin and 1961’s Ella Returns to Berlin) plus a solid studio record based on classic swing and bop (1962’s Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie!) Fitzgerald and her virtuosic “fellas” — Paul Smith on piano, Wilfred Middlebrooks on bass, Stan Levey on drums — are at their absolute peak, in tune with each other and with an extroverted, enthralled Sportpalast Arena audience.

Every single note of this concert radiates warmth and inner joy, even when Ella detours into torch songs like “Cry Me A River” and Billie Holiday’s “Good Morning Heartache.” And when she and the fellas swing on “Jersey Bounce,” jump on “Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie,” dig deep into Ray Charles’ “Hallelujah, I Love Him So” (resulting in an immediate, complete encore!), they are unstoppable. And then she breaks into her trademark scat singing on “Mack the Knife,” playfully evoking Bobby Darin and Louis Armstrong’s versions, “forgetting” the words like she did for real two years before and making up her own, cruising to an utterly triumphant finish. Which she can’t help but top with the powerhouse down-tempo finale “Wee Baby Blues.”

I have had no finer feeling listening to music this year; I believe that whatever might ail your soul in these strange days, The Lost Berlin Tapes is mighty good medicine for it. Which is why you need to hear this, right now!

My #1 album? The polar opposite of this, but equally beautiful in its own way – The Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus’ extraordinary Songs of Yearning/Nocturnes. Get this limited edition double album (LP or CD) from Occultation Recordings on Bandcamp, before the first pressing is completely gone!

On Free Will ~ The Imaginative Conservative

The Stoics—who inherited so much from the pre-Socratics and from Socrates—wrestled repeated and incessantly (but not fruitlessly) over the issue of free will. If everything had a nature and if everything moral and just came from the right ordering of the universe, one must learn to conform to eternal dictates. Did these dictates harm or encourage our free will? Some Stoics were predestinarians, while others believed in the sovereign individual will choosing to become one with the Natural Law and the Heraclitan Logos. To be sure, all Stoics believed that any violation of the Natural Law was a sin, a violation against creation herself.

The next great moral treatises on free will can be found in Cicero’s On Duties and On the Laws. In the former, Cicero claimed, like Socrates had, that all decisions come down to the individual human person, either abiding by eternal moral laws or rejecting them. Cicero advocated for understanding and acknowledging what was eternally true, especially through manners and decorum. In the latter work, On the Laws, Cicero argued that all things are beholden to eternal truths, but they understand those eternal truths through the exercise of reason, which is the language of man to man, man to god, and god to god. It is, for all intents and purposes, the language of civility and order, that which binds the universe together in justice.
— Read on theimaginativeconservative.org/2020/12/free-will-bradley-birzer.html

Charles Carroll Biography for $6.25

My hardback biography of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the only Roman Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence, is on sale for only $6.25! Great stocking stuffers for the whole family.