The Intellectual

Ainsley Morse and Ilya Kukulin discuss Morse's book, "Word Play: Experimental Poetry and Soviet Children’s Literature" (Northwestern University Press, 2021), in this week's featured SHCY conversation.

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• E72.1: Zazous and Schlurfs, bonus episode – available exclusively for our patreon supporters
• Anti-fascist books and merchandise – Posters, clothing and merchandise using artwork by or inspired by the Edelweiss Pirates and other 1930s anti-fascists in Germany.

• Thanks to our patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jazz Hands and Jamison D. Saltsman.
• Episode graphic, mural of a group of Edelweiss Pirates in Cologne, courtesy wwwuppertal Flickr, CC by 2.0.
• Edited by Louise Barry
• The theme music was Functionizin’, by Fats Waller, courtesy of the Swiss Foundation and Wikimedia Commons.
• Also featured was Richard Wagner’s Gerechter Gott, performed by Ernestine Schumann-Heink also courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

"That’s the problem with a lot of things these days," wrote Bob Dylan in 2022, "Everything is too full now; we are spoon-fed everything. All songs are about one thing and one thing specifically, there is no shading, no nuance, no mystery. Perhaps this is why music is not a place where people put their dreams at the moment; dreams suffocate in these airless environs." 

This mournful attitude — for a lost age of artfulness, mystery, and hope — pervades Dylan's 2022 book, Philosophy of Modern Song. In this sense, it's a quintessentially conservative book. But decline and nostalgia are not its only themes.  In short bursts of prose reflecting on sixty-six totemic songs (from Webb Pierce's 1953 hit "There Stands the Glass;" to The Fugs' 1967 proto-punk romp "CIA Man;" to Nina Simone's unimpeachable "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood"), Dylan conjures a country — and canon — defined most of all by mutability, motion, and menace.  Dylan's America never stops moving, reinventing itself, or rebelling against its own strictures. Things get better; things get worse; what they don't do is stay the same. 

To help us make sense of Bob Dylan's idiosyncratic vision of America and American song, we're joined by Know Your Enemy musician-in-residence (and Bob super-fan) Will Epstein. Besides providing the music for our show, Will is a song-writer, composer, and improvisor; his latest album, WENDY, is out from Fat Possum records. (Download it or buy the vinyl here.) Music may not be the place where most people put their dreams these days, but it's still where we put ours. And there is no better way to understand America's dreams than by listening — closely — to its music. 

Sources:

Bob Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song (2022)

Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One (2005)

Sean Wilentz, Bob Dylan in America (2010)

Clinton Heylin, Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited (2003)

Martin Chilton, "Bob Dylan and the Great American Songbook," May 24, 2022

Raymond Foye, "Bob Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song," The Brooklyn Rail, Nov. 2022.

Hua Hsu, "How Nam June Paik’s Past Shaped His Visions of the Future," The New Yorker, Mar 29, 2023.

John Szwed, Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith, coming Aug 2023.

...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

In this conversation with RevDem assistant editor Lorena Drakula, Michael Freeden – leading political theorist and author of the new book Concealed Silences and Inaudible Voices in Political Thinking – discusses the various forms of political silences; the problems of superimposing and inventing voices; the effects of the unnoticeable and the unknowable in political thinking, with the aim of understanding the complex and often hidden aspects of silence that shape our political beliefs and actions.

In this episode, Matt and Sam go deep into the life and times of Whittaker Chambers, most famous for his role in the "trial of the century"—the trial of Alger Hiss for perjury after Chambers accused Hiss of being a Communist spy during his years working in the federal government, especially the State Department. The two figures, once friends, came to symbolize a clash that was bigger than themselves, and prefigured the turn American politics would take at the onset of the Cold War. Chambers would become a hero of the nascent postwar conservative movement, with his status as an ex-Communist—one of many who would congregate around National Review in the mid-to-late 1950s—bringing his moral credibility to the right as one who had seen the other side and lived to tell his tale. Before all that, though, Chambers's life was like something out of a novel: a difficult family life, early brilliance at Columbia University, literary achievement in leftwing publications, and years "underground" engaging in espionage for the Soviet Union against the United States. "Out of my weakness and folly (but also out of my strength), I committed the characteristic crimes of my century," writes  Chambers in his 1952 memoir/jeremiad Witness.  Your hosts break it all down, assess his crimes and contributions, and explore one of the most consequential American lives of the twentieth century. 

Sources:

Sam Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (1997)

Whittaker Chambers, Witness (1952)

Whittaker Chambers, Cold Friday (1964)

Whittaker Chambers, "Big Sister is Watching You," National Review, December 28, 1957

The Whittaker Chambers Reader: His Complete National ReviewWritings, 1957-1959 (2014)

William F. Buckley, Jr., editor, Odyssey of a Friend: Whittaker Chambers Letters to William F. Buckley, Jr. (1969)

L. Brent Bozell, Jr. and William F. Buckley, Jr., McCarthy and His Enemies: The Record and Its Meaning (1954)

Murray Kempton, Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties (1956)

Landon R.Y. Storrs, The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left (2013)

Richard H. Crossman, editor, The God that Failed: A Confession (1949)

Lionel Trilling, The Middle of the Journey (1947)

Matthew Richer, "The Cry Against Ninevah: A Centennial Tribute to Whittaker Chambers," Modern Age, Summer 2001

Christopher Hitchens, "A Regular Bull," London Review of Books, July 1997

Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis, "No Laughing Matter" (YouTube, 2007)

Jess Bravin, "Whittaker Chambers Award Draws Criticism—From His Family," Wall Street Journal, March 28, 2019

Isaac Deutscher, "The Ex-Communist's Conscience,"  The Reporter, 1950. 

John Patrick Diggins, Up From Communism: Conservative odysseys in American intellectual history, (1975)

Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left, (1961)

Larry Ceplair, Anti-Communism in Twentieth-Century America: A Critical History, (2011)

...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!