Quick Personal Update
CU Chancellor Phil DiStephano, my beautiful wife, Dedra, and me.
Hey Stormfielders,
My apologies for not having posted recently. My family and I have been on vacation in the West. We’ve spent the last nine days (all extraordinary) in Colorado. I’m writing this from Longmont. We return to Michigan (via my mom’s in Kansas) tomorrow. I’ll get back on a regular schedule by the end of the week.
Blessings to one and all, Brad
Physical Review Copies of RUSSELL KIRK: AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE Now Available
Remember, remember the Fifth of November.
Physical review copies of my biography, RUSSELL KIRK: AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE (out November 5, 2015) are now available from the University Press of Kentucky.
If you would like to review it for a journal, a newspaper, a magazine, a newsletter, or a website, please contact Kentucky with your request: permissions [at] uky.edu
And, pre-orders of the hardback are still $30.58 at amazon.com.
Anthem of the Heart: Why Neil Peart, Part II
[Please be warned: this is a serious essay with an advertisement at the end—so, don’t feel ripped off!–Brad]
Out September 15, 2015, from WordFire Press.
A week ago, I tried to explain—in the first of a multipart series—why I decided to write a book about Neil Peart, lyricist and drummer for Rush. Biographies of rock musicians generally either become fanboy lovefests, People-magazine exposes, or clinical dissections.
I pray and assume I’m guiltless when it comes to the second and third reasons. I’m sure, however, that I will rightly be accused of the first.
The youngest of three boys, growing up in central and western Kansas, I happily had a mother who allowed us to listen to whatever we wanted and read whatever we wanted. Television was never huge in our house, and I’m still rather mystified when peers of my age group quote The Brady Bunch or The Partridge Family. If I had the choice between tv and listening to an album, the album won every time. I don’t remember a time in my life when music wasn’t playing somewhere in the house or in the car. And, it wasn’t just rock. We listened to classical and jazz. Never opera, and I despised musicals and county music. I did come to love opera, but only in my adult years. Almost every room, however, had some form of stereo system, album collection, and headphone. From the age of 10 or so, I could hook up a fairly complicated stereo system, splice speaker wires, etc.
Though my brothers have long given up their love of progressive rock music, they did love it immensely in the early 1970s. My oldest brother is 8 years older, and my older brother five years older. From around 1971 or 1972 (I was born in 1967), I remember Jethro Tull and Yes. Soon, it would be ELO, Kansas, and Genesis, too. Rush, though, I’d never heard—or, at the least, if I had heard them, the band did not make an impression on me until the spring of 1981.
For some reason that I have since long forgotten, I got in trouble in the spring of 1981 while at school Back then, when discipline was still a central part of junior high education, any one of us could get any trouble for almost anything. No one questioned it back then. If the teacher or an administrator decided you were in trouble, you were in trouble. I was a very good student when it came to academics, but I could care less about rules. In fact, I hated them. Regardless, in the spring of 1981, I earned a detention—which meant sitting in the school library around a wooden table with the other kids who had earned detention. That day, it was me, another kid named Brad, and Troy. I’d know each of these guys since first grade, and I’d always been friendly with them. We weren’t, however, close. Troy, if I remember correctly, was wearing a Duke (Genesis) pin on his jacket. Of course, I was immediately taken with it. You know Genesis? I know Genesis! Exactly moments for a 13-year old. It turned out that Brad and Troy knew as much as I did about prog, but they had definitely embraced harder prog, while I had always gone for more symphonic prog.
Have you heard the new Rush yet, one of them asked me? Rush? No, never heard of them. Oh, Brad, you have to listen to Rush. Moving Pictures might be the greatest album ever made.
I’d had a lawn moving business for several years at that point, and I was rather frugal with my money—except for books, Dungeons and Dragons stuff, and albums. Of course, as soon as I left school that day, I purchased Moving Pictures. I can still remember staring at the album, taking off the cellophane, and removing the vinyl from its sleeve. There was something so utterly magical about dropping the needle on side one of a new album. Drop, crackle, hiss, pop, DUN, Dun, dun, dun “A Monday warrior, mean, mean stride”!!!!!! Where on God’s green earth had I ever heard anything so good? At that point in my life, nothing could rival Tom Sawyer. Then, Red Barchetta. Oh yeah, who wouldn’t want to get into a car and drive at outrageous speeds while escaping from authority? Even then, I was rather instinctively libertarian. YYZ reminded me of a lot of jazz my brothers had played me, and I thought every drum crash was the drummer (a guy named Neil Peart, I soon discovered) throwing glass bottles at a wall. Limelight seemed great. Camera Eye was utterly mysterious, especially for someone who had only known the big cities of Denver, Wichita, Dallas, and Kansas City. Witchhunt seemed appropriate, and I thought of the hypocrites I’d known who often acted without outrageous righteousness. Vital Signs seemed the perfect ending, catchy and a bit weird with words I’d never heard before, such as “evelate.”
I can still see my 13-year old self reading the lyrics of Moving Pictures. I read them again. And, I read them again. And, again. And, again.
And, the pictures of the three guys who made up the band? They looked so cool. They didn’t look hippiesh and all wizardy like the Yes guys on Yessongs. No, these three guys looked like they could’ve grown up around the corner from me.
So, there you have it. Neil Peart has been my hero since detention at Liberty Junior High School, Hutchinson, Kansas. He taught me not to be him, but to be myself. Thank you, Brad and Troy. Thank you long forgotten teacher who thought I was a trouble maker. You were probably right. Little did you know, however, that you were the catalyst that lead me to Rush and to Neil Peart. And, here I am, thirty-four years later, and I’ve just written a book on the guy.
[And, here’s the advertisement:]
On September 15, 2015, WordFire Press, founded, owned, and presided over by the incomparable Hugo-nominated science fiction author, Kevin J. Anderson, and his equally amazing wife and famed author, Rececca Moesta, will be publishing my biography, Neil Peart: Cultural (Re)Percussions.
It will be $14.99 for the paperback and $5.99 for the ebook (all formats).
For another 48-hours, however, you can order it as a part of the Humble Bundle Music Book Bundle. For $15, you can get an advanced review copy of NEIL PEART: CULTURAL (RE)PERCUSSIONS as well as a number of other fantastic books, including CLOCKWORK ANGELS: THE NOVEL. And, you even get a preview of the sequel, CLOCKWORK LIVES. It’s well worth it, especially for just $15.
Here’s the link: https://www.humblebundle.com/books
Owen Barfield, POETIC DICTION, 1928 (Full Book)
Owen Barfield, ca. 1923. Taken from http://www.owenbarfield.com.
I could go on and on about how much this book has shaped my own life and every aspect of my thought. But, if you’re checking this out, you’re interested in Barfield, not Birzer!
If you’ve not read this, I envy you.
Here’s the first edition, published only six years after Barfield wrote it as his undergraduate thesis at Oxford.
My apologies for all of my marginalia.
Plimmer Interview with J.R.R. Tolkien, 1968
Source: Plimmer, Charlotte, and Denis Plimmer. “The Man Who Understands Hobbits.” London Daily Telegraph Magazine, March 22 1968, pp. 31-32, 35.
Stephen Smith in the Wall Street Journal on Shakespeare
Excellent article today in the Wall Street Journal by my great friend and HC colleague, Stephen W. Smith.
Ignorance of “Cymbeline” is ignorance of Shakespeare—of his art and his wonder, of his mind and heart, and most revealingly, of his great desire for peace. While “The Tempest” and the “The Winter’s Tale” often win more acclaim among the late plays, “Cymbeline” is their equal, and may be the most comprehensive drama that Shakespeare ever wrote. The play is indeed “tragical-comical-historical-pastoral,” if one may dare quote Polonius. It is Shakespeare’s “poem unlimited,” well worth the serious attention and fresh production the Public Theater is giving it in Central Park this month.
And yet not all have judged “Cymbeline” so important or solemn. Samuel Johnson lamented the “folly of the fiction” and its “unresisting imbecility,” while George Bernard Shaw skewered it as “stagey trash” and wondered if so great an artist could really mean to talk to readers “like their grandmothers.” How could a drama of Shakespeare’s maturity provoke such responses?
To keep reading and you should, go here: http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-play-outlines-the-long-painful-drama-of-self-knowledge-1438979789
A Letter to My Daughter on Her Eighth Birthday (August 8)
Mt. Cecelia, near Great Falls, Montana.
August 8, 2015
Dear Little One,
On this day, we should be celebrating with eight candles burning fiercely on a cake, a cake made with all of the love in the world. Would it have been chocolate or lemon or vanilla or strawberry or some weird thing we’d never thought of before you’d entered the world?
On this day, brightly colored boxes, and sacks, and ribbons, and balloons should be cluttering and littering the kitchen table.
On this day, all seven kids should be filled with a restless joy, anticipating the moment, but savoring the mystery. Some quietly and some, naturally, mischievously.
On this day, there should be singing and more than a little bit of Birzer-patented wackiness and mayhem. The cats should be confused, and the floor should be ready to receive the tipped-over drinks, the crumbs of cakes, and the meltage of iced cream.
On this day, you should be sitting proudly with the rest of your family. Would your eyes still be so penetratingly blue, your hair so dark and full of curls, your skin as white as china?
We should be taking photos of you, a princess, a queen, a faerie, a ballerina, an American girl.
Would your friends come and join us? Would they run wild on the deck? Would they chase the cats? Would they love our woods and our swing set? Would the boys draw swords to slay dragons?
Probably.
But, of course, these are just dreams. The dreams of the living. The dreams of those left behind. The dreams of those who miss you with a pain as fierce and as indescribable as any ever given.
Your life was so bright, it burned all too quickly. At least from the view of this clouded, skeptical, doubtful, angry, and yet hopeful father.
Where Cecilia Rose’s body rests–in the cemetery across the street from our house. This photo taken by our great friend, Laura J. Smith.
From the beginning, the Lord of Life wanted you for Himself. He is a jealous god.
You were not made for corruption, or hard choices, or easy choices, or sin. You were made to take the straight path. And, accompanied by the armed might of elves and warriors, you went straight from here to eternity. From your mother’s womb into God’s hands.
Did Elbereth smile upon you as you passed Taniquetil?
You, oh little one, are chosen, sacramental, and blessed.
God gave you a mother, a woman who gladly bore you for nine months, a woman chosen to be a vessel of grace. And, when that nine months had ended, God turned that mother’s grace into a strength—a strength unmatched in this world of chaos.
Oh, little one, I miss you so profoundly, and I love you equally so. You are never out of my mind, and you always reside in my soul.
And, yet, however much I might disagree with God’s decision, I know that you are wrapped in the arms of love, forever safe and forever happy.
Someday, I pray, you will guide each of us to our eternal home. Hand in hand, we will journey as father and daughter. And, when we arrive, I will ask for the one thing I will never have with you here, a dance with my Cecilia Rose, daughter of song.
With all of my love, Dad.
My great aunt, Cecelia, who also died too young. Our Cecilia is named after her.
Socrates on Why One Must Be Good No Matter the Cost
Soc. Are we to say that we are never intentionally to do wrong, or that in one way we ought and in another way we ought not to do wrong, or is doing wrong always evil and dishonorable, as I was just now saying, and as has been already acknowledged by us? Are all our former admissions which were made within a few days to be thrown away? And have we, at our age, been earnestly discoursing with one another all our life long only to discover that we are no better than children? Or are we to rest assured, in spite of the opinion of the many, and in spite of consequences whether better or worse, of the truth of what was then said, that injustice is always an evil and dishonor to him who acts unjustly? Shall we affirm that?
Soc. Then we must do no wrong?
Soc. Nor when injured injure in return, as the many imagine; for we must injure no one at all?
Soc. Again, Crito, may we do evil?
Soc. And what of doing evil in return for evil, which is the morality of the many-is that just or not?
Soc. For doing evil to another is the same as injuring him?
Soc. Then we ought not to retaliate or render evil for evil to anyone, whatever evil we may have suffered from him. But I would have you consider, Crito, whether you really mean what you are saying. For this opinion has never been held, and never will be held, by any considerable number of persons; and those who are agreed and those who are not agreed upon this point have no common ground, and can only despise one another, when they see how widely they differ.
A Farewell to Rush
Usually Neil rejects the Limelight, and the whole band heads off the stage without a bow. Instead of milking applause, they show a short movie as they Exit… Stage Left. So, when this happens, it looks like A Farewell to Rush…
2112.net has all the details on the tour that is now history:
Digging deep for these setlists, “Losing It” and “How It Is” were performed for the first time ever, and while most of the songs from the first half of the show have been performed on relatively recent tours, many of those performed after the intermission have not been performed in decades: “Jacob’s Ladder” was last played in 1980; “Hemispheres: Prelude” in 1994; “Cygnus X-1: Part 3” in 1980 (“Prologue” was played in 2002); “Lakeside Park” in 1978; and “What You’re Doing” in 1977. Closing out the show is a teaser of “Garden Road”, an unreleased original song…
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PROGARCHY EXCLUSIVE
An Interview with Yes’ Alan White (August 3, 2015)
Prog Rock’s quintessential super group, Yes, will be heading out on an American tour again this summer/fall, including the third annual Cruise to the Edge in mid-November. The most notable change in the line-up, of course, will be the absence of Chris Squire on bass—the first time ever for a Yes tour.
PROGARCHY’s Kevin McCormick recently spoke for with Yes drummer extraordinaire, Alan White, as he prepared for rehearsals for the upcoming tour.
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PROGARCHY Thank you so much for taking time to talk with us. I think I speak for all of the members of Progarchy.com in offering our condolences after the recent and sudden death of your colleague and friend, Chris Squire. Obviously he was such an essential part of Yes, founding member and the only person to appear on every Yes album. Are there…
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Stormfields 