Dispatches from Vilnius

I hadn't realized we had been going at it for over one year now.  Our anniversary was May 5.  We started with Team of Rivals , and have logged over 240 posts and countless comments since then.  Thanks very much for all of your participation!

Heading out for a long weekend, and thought I would leave you all with this title, The Year Before the Flood: A Story of New Orleans , which sounds like a spirited history of the Crescent City. Welcome to the fold, Carol : )

After six or so tries I finally managed to become a contributor (in name only, still; this doesn't count). Thanks for asking me in. IMO (never h), the group is most distinguished.

One of the more interesting aspects of Treme has been the focus on the Mardi Gras Indians , an indelible image of New Orleans.  I found this brief history on the Indians, and you can't beat Dr. John's version of My Indian Red .

The anniversary of Texas emancipation brings to mind Ralph Ellison's novel ,  So now we have Juneteenth , the novel that Ellison's executor, John Callahan, has ably quarried from that mountain. The book is more than Ellison fans could expect, yet less than Ellison probably hoped--an ambivalent masterpiece. It celebrates the promise of interracial love even as it cannot square its black and white points-of-view. It flares with stylistic pyrotechnics--passages that match Invisible Man for energy--even as its plot feels unfinished and its monologues too windy. Perhaps most strikingly, Juneteenth aims to speak to our current racial dilemmas even as it harkens to an age before "the inner city," "black power," and the "underclass." It is easy to see why Ellison could not wrap up his epic: the novel revolves in an intelligence too complex and too quick, ironically, to come to completion. As his Invisible Man ...

Gintaras et al., Thanks for inviting me to join your discussions. I have been reading the posts and I am very impressed. I am still a Professor at Macquarie University although I have cut back the undergraduate teaching to concentrate on Research. Currently I have two books under way: 1. A study of the first ever university- level Australian History Course in the world- Stanford in 1907-8 2. A book called A REBELLIOUS SOLDIERY AND A RAPACIOUS PEASANTRY? Australians and the French 1916-1920. I have ambitions to write a biography of TW Stanford who lived in Melbourne for much of his life-spiritualism, art, entrepreneurship... We will see!

Obama plans a fourth trip to the Gulf Coast before making a speech from the Oval Office outlining the position of the White House on the BP oil spill.  News has gotten grimmer and grimmer these past weeks, as the volume of oil spewing out of the Deep Horizon well is now estimated at over a million gallons per day,  based on new spillcam observations, making it by far the worst oil spill in US history. The President appears to be bearing the brunt of criticism, as Gulf Coast governors question his leadership and coordination efforts.  The same governors who wanted no part of the federal stimulus bill or national health care.  Meanwhile, BP stocks continue to tumble with revelations of much more oil spilling out of the well head than previously thought, along with very high quantities of methane gas that threaten the invaluable food chain in the Gulf of Mexico.  

Some of the writing and suggestions for books from the linked Times article are a little too precious to believe, but Portis' The Dog of the South sounds like it might be fun. I didn't realize he had written so many novels: http://www.amazon.com/Dog-South-Charles-Portis/dp/1585679313/

It has gotten a whole lot uglier since this Reuters aerial photograph, as BP and company are no closer to capping their oil well than they were 6 weeks ago, with the only real solution at this point being a relief well that is still 2 months off.  The spill now exceeds that of the Exxon Valdez spill 20 years ago, and probably will surpass that of the oil Saddam unleashed on the Persian Gulf back in 1991.

Watching Treme, I find myself with the urge to go back and read William Alexander Percy's classic memoir.

Nice to see you can find Black Like Me in Google books.  I was telling my daughter and son about the book, as I had read it back in high school.  I was surprised to see it was first published in 1962.  I thought it had come out much later.  Anyway, I think a book like this is appropriate when it comes to understanding how the "other half" lives in this country.  We still have this ridiculous tendency to view the racial issues as "economic," as if trying to deny the racism that remains a sore point in American society.

Not so long ago I picked up this book, but haven't gotten around to reading it yet.  Here is a review from the NY Times , To trace the subtle reciprocities between philosophizing and living is the ambitious task that Robert D. Richardson sets himself in his absorbing, if also frustrating, biography “William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism.” James’s philosophical conclusions played themselves out in a life of such endearing originality as to lead Alfred North Whitehead to call him “that adorable genius,” and he has served as a hero in more than one novel, including my own “Dark Sister.” Richardson goes after the man with the gusto, indefatigability for detail, and, yes, adoration, that William James deserves.

A lot of new books on Obama on the market, many of them unflattering , but Jonathan Alter offers an inside look at the first year of this administration in his new book, The Promise: President Obama, Year One , ... an exceptionally well-written account of President Obama's first year in office. Brimming with fresh and judicious ideas, his book fuses political analysis, subtle insights into the president's mind and policy debates into a fast-paced, crisis-filled story. " The Promise ," based on more than 200 interviews with Obama and his close friends and aides, provides an uncommonly candid look inside a somewhat walled-off White House .

 Not too often I get excited about a television show, but Treme is the real deal.  Finally, something that captures the look and feel of New Orleans without devolving into a bunch of cliches.  The music is fantastic, and the story lines offer a compelling narrative of events in the aftermath of Katrina.  Seems the show has struck a nerve, as HBO has picked it up for a second season. One of the many references in the series, is the 1927 flood with Creighton trying to get himself to go back to a novel he started on the flood.  One scene shows him reading Rising Tide by  John Barry on the porch of his Garden District home. PBS ran a documentary on Faubourg Tremé last year, which I would like to see.  Spike Lee also did a documentary a few years back on the aftermath of the storm entitled, When the Levees Broke .  And, of course I can't recommend Zeitoun more strongly!  Great account of what happened to one family during the storm, which...

Not that I was there, but from everything I've read Expo 67 was one of the best international expos ever with some truly ground breaking exhibits.  Here are some images and video clips from the CBC archives .

WASHINGTON – America's "Great Compromiser" Henry Clay called government "the great trust," but most Americans today have little faith in Washington's ability to deal with the nation's problems. Public confidence in government is at one of the lowest points in a half century, according to a survey from the Pew Research Center . Nearly 8 in 10 Americans say they don't trust the federal government and have little faith it can solve America's ills, the survey found. The survey illustrates the ominous situation President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party face as they struggle to maintain their comfortable congressional majorities in this fall's elections. Midterm prospects are typically tough for the party in power. Add a toxic environment like this and lots of incumbent Democrats could be out of work. The survey found that just 22 percent of those questioned say they can trust Washington almost always or most of the ti...