One of rock’s finest guitarists and a true gentleman, Dave Gregory, has decided to retire from his glorious time in Big Big Train. Here’s Gregory’s message on social media today:

I’d like to say how very touched I was to read the many comments and tributes from you folks, that flew in following the announcement of my departure from Big Big Train and the cancellation of the U.S. tour. Thank you everybody, I hope eventually I’ll be forgiven for letting the side down at this point. Events have reached a crossroads and it’s best that I make a move now to allow the band to re-group and make future plans.

The excellent Randy McStine will soon be occupying the vacant spot stage left, and I wish him and Big Big Train all the very best for the future. There’s a chance you may see, or hear me perform with them again somewhere down the line. I’d like to thank all the band members and road crew for their past brilliant work in helping put the band where it is today. Big thanks also to the behind-the-scenesters Sarah Ewing, Kathy Spawton, Steve Cadman, Niall Hayden, Nellie Pitts, Glenn Codere, Sue Heather, Tobbe Janson, Geoff Parks , Simon Hogg and all who assisted in making last year’s Grand Tour the success that it was.

Once again thank you all, we are sure to meet again at some point – Coronavirus willing – so please stay healthy, stay safe.

As sad as I am about this news, I can’t help but remember and remind myself that Gregory has given so much beauty and integrity to the world: in XTC, in Tin Spirits, and in Big Big Train.

What a blessing this man is.

From my perspective, the only living guitarist who rivals his soul and ability is Alex Lifeson. What a great time to be alive. Thank you, Dave!

Prior to this, I had prided myself on writing seven-, eight-, or even nine-page handwritten letters. My family and friends had filled our letters with news, with details of great adventures, with reviews of the latest books we had read and music we had heard. We filled the entire page with snippets of poems or lyrics, with some rather inexpert doodles; sometimes, I’d paste photos into the letter or squiggle in some band name such as Rush, Talk Talk, or Yes. There was an individualistic art to long-form letter correspondence.

I still have boxes and files full of these letters received from friends, and I cherish them as some of my finest possessions. I hope and trust the recipients of my letters feel the same. These letters represent small but mighty little communities: neighborhoods, suburbs, towns, republics, and – sometimes – dynasties of letters.
— Read on www.acton.org/religion-liberty/volume-30-number-1/solution-cancel-culture-true-community

March 19 is the Feast of St. Joseph, the patron saint of my mother’s side of the family, the Basgalls and the Kuhns. The traditional family prayer:

“O God, whose attribute it is to be always merciful and to spare, protect us through the intercession of St. Joseph from crop failures. In order to make ourselves, at least to a certain extent, worthy of this grace, we solemnly vow to keep the feast of St. Joseph as a holyday of obligation for all time and to spend some hours of that day in public prayer.” 

Later, they prayed “the powers that be to preserve the growing crop, destroy grasshoppers, worms and bugs and finally to mature the grain, allow a bountiful harvest and furnish a high-priced market.”

Home | reMarkable
— Read on remarkable.com/

I use my remarkable tablet (first version) all of the time. One of my indispensable devices. I’m sure version two will be excellent.

Hans Jonas was born into a German Jewish household in 1903. As a boy, he longed for excitement. However, the most exciting events always seemed to be happening elsewhere. It seemed unlikely that he could fulfill his boyhood “dreams of glory” in the monotony of everyday life there.

Before the First World War, the most significant world events in his memory had been the sinking of the Titanic and the Balkan Wars. Comparing these events to his “charmed life — in a country that had known nothing but peace for decades, that was flourishing economically, and as a child in a comfortably situated family,” he found his life and the lives of his family members to be very boring.

— Read on amandaachtman.ca/2020/03/18/what-matters-is-that-something-is-happening/

Again, it is possible that Burke actively disliked the principles of the American Revolution, but there exists no such evidence one way or another. What we do know is that Burke, when pushed, supported the American cause for independence, though he very much lamented the breakdown and breakup of the British commonwealth.

From my perspective, Burke was a vital ally in the cause, as patriotic to the American cause as any American revolutionary leader. He not only defended our cause, he did so in a way that could have easily been regarded as treasonous by his own people.
— Read on theimaginativeconservative.org/2020/03/edmund-burke-support-american-revolution-bradley-birzer.html

READ MYRON MAGNET’S THOUGHTFUL PIECE.

https://www.city-journal.org/humanities?utm_source=City+Journal+Update&utm_campaign=70042a1bd0-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_03_16_01_31&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_6c08930f2b-70042a1bd0-109326713

No one captures the tragic paradox of culture more poignantly than the twentieth century’s greatest poet, William Butler Yeats, who came away from the carnage of World War I fearing that we humans “are but weasels fighting in a hole”:

Civilisation is hooped together, brought
Under a rule, under the semblance of peace
By manifold illusion; but man’s life is thought,
And he, despite his terror, cannot cease
Ravening through century after century,
Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come
Into the desolation of reality:
Egypt and Greece, good-bye, and goodbye, Rome!

As our own civilization ravens and uproots, only to come into the desolation of false and lying illusion, so far more farce than tragedy, that’s my worry, too. Watching the hard-eyed troops surge by in Communist China’s 70th anniversary parade in October, the rank upon rank of fit young men and women toting high-tech weaponry and marching with eager determination, as if treading down all before them, it was hard not to wonder how we’d fare if we ever had to fight them, given President Xi Jinping’s undisguised imperial designs. As I watched, I couldn’t help remembering the 2016 photos of American sailors kneeling in humiliated submission on the deck of their U.S. Navy patrol vessel, which they had allowed diminutive Iranian gunboats to seize without firing a single shot in the Persian Gulf. Did they not believe, had they not been taught, that they had anything worth defending?

Myron Magnet, City Journal’s Editor-at-Large, is a National Humanities Medal laureate.