Dispatches from Vilnius

Wouldn't it be great if the government actually took suggestions?  I suppose they do in the form of polls and at the election booth but in the end it seems the government does what it wants to do anyway, regardless of what anyone else thinks.  The idea of the "suggestion box" apparently came from Heinz Company around 1910.  I would like to hear your thoughts on the many topics covered in this blog, good or bad.  I greatly appreciate that so many persons from so many different countries are looking in, and look forward to reading your thoughts when I return October 1  --  Jim.

I would be most remiss not to remember that day in September when the skies were filled with pillars of smoke where the New York City Twin Towers once stood before.  It is still too early to make light of the event, but to be honest the day would have completely slipped by me hadn't I seen several mentions on facebook.  Apparently, these casual onlookers weren't so distant as Frank Rich thought.  Walter Sipser, one of the men in the photo,  said they were all in "a profound state of shock and disbelief," as many were that day to see such a famous architectural icon go up in smoke.  The photo by Thomas Hoepker just made them look distant.  Even Hoepker seemed to question his own photo, not releasing it until five years later, when it became a "whipping postcard" for pundits and columnists alike looking to seize on anything to justify their moral outrage.  It seems the moral of this photograph is be careful how you are pictured in front of a trag...

Most persons' impression of the Dakotas is Mt. Rushmore , which Alfred Hitchcock fully exploited in the movie North by Northwest .  The monument was dedicated in 1941 by Franklin Roosevelt, but had been started 14 years before under the Coolidge administration.  Like so many things about the Dakotas, it was a deeply contentious issue, as the national monument is located in the Black Hills, long regarded as the strong hold of the Lakota (or Dakota) Indians. The French called them the Sioux , having first encountered the Lakota in the mid 17th century.  It's unclear where this term came from.  The conventional theory is that it is an abbreviation of the Chippewa term Nadowessioux , which is what they called the Lakota.  It supposedly meant "little snakes."  Seems like the Chippewa and Lakota didn't get along very well.  Unfortunately, the name stuck. To the Lakota, Mt. Rushmore is the very emblem of their long-standing grudge with the federal g...

It's not like Robert Plant and that former band he played with haven't sampled American classic songs before.  Plant sang a stunning version of When the Levee Breaks on Led Zeppelin IV , a song first sung by Memphis Minnie in 1929.  Like so many of the British bands, Led Zep loved sampling American blues, twisting the music and the lyrics into their own rock ballads. Led Zeppelin first came to the United States in 1968.  Their first major show was that Christmas , backing Spirit at the Denver Auditorium.  They were unbilled.  This became the snake that bit them earlier this year, when allegations of plagiarism surfaced in regard to the opening guitar melody on Stairway to Heaven being lifted from Randy California's Taurus .  This was apparently an attempt to block the release of the deluxe remastered set of Led Zeppelin IV , until Randy's family got the long overdue royalties they felt they deserved for the song.  Randy had never pressed t...

If not king, it seems Romney wants to be king maker, saying he would "be helping the person who takes the banner for us."  What banner, you may ask?  That of "loser?"  This is a man who has tried twice to run for president and failed.  Last time around, there was so much animosity toward him in his own party that we saw no less than seven highly dubious candidates thrust to the front of the pack to take the "banner" of front runner away from him.  Each fell by the wayside, but not because Republicans rallied around Romney, rather because his war chest was so big none of these Republican pretenders had the money to compete with him across the grueling primaries. As it was, Santorum carried the popular vote in 11 states, Gingrich two, and Ron Paul managed to steal away the Virgin Islands.  At one time or another, Donald Trump, Rick Perry, Herman Cain and Michelle Bachman all led Mitt in national polls before their campaigns self destructed.  Ye...

It seems the novel would have died the same death as its namesake had it not been for its inclusion in the Armed Services Editions in 1945.  Maureen Corrigan notes in her new book on The Great Gatsby that the novel had floundered for decades, unable to sell, due it seems to its lack of strong female characters.  Even Fitzgerald lamented that this was the case in a market driven by women readers at the time.  Not even a film version in 1926 could boost sales. So We Read On appears to be an engaging new look at the novel.  Corrigan herself said she was nonplussed by the novel upon first reading, but after 50 readings has come to regard it as America's greatest novel.  Of course, she's not alone in this opinion.  The Great Gatsby frequently tops lists and is number two (behind Ulysses) in the Modern Library Top 100 . The novel has been reprinted many times in many different languages, resulting in more than 25 million copies sold worldwide. ...

All the Kochs' money and all the Kochs' horses will be needed to try to put Citizens United back together again after the Senate voted resoundingly to bring an amendment overturning this highly contentious Supreme Court decision to the floor.  It is still an uphill battle for Democrats to defeat Citizens United, but they have some unlikely allies in the Tea Party, which is just as much pissed by how old guard Republicans use corporate backing to stay in office.  In fact, Americans overwhelmingly want campaign reform so that insurgents have a better shot of taking down long sitting incumbents, whether they be Republican or Democrat. Still, the reach of corporate power is pervasive in our society and it will be difficult to get the 60 votes needed to overturn Citizens United in the Senate.  The USSC decision in 2010 opened the floodgates for corporate backed candidates in national and state elections.  Newt Gingrich kept his 2012 campaign alive almost entir...

I know that this may seem like my private bully pulpit, but feel free to comment!  This is an open forum.  I don't bite, at least not hard any way. BTW, it was great to see " Benito Cereno " have fun with TR. Great title!  I wish I had thought of it.

It was the novel by A.B. Guthrie Jr. that attracted me to Montana.   The Big Sky set the stage for Guthrie's homage to the West, which would consume him in the years to come.  The story follows the life of Boone Caudill, a native Kentuckian, like Guthrie's father, who gives into the great Westward urge.  He becomes a mountain man, friend of the Blackfoot Indians, and finds love and loses love in Teal Eye in rather melodramatic fashion.  However, it seems his biggest love is for the great expanse the West has to offer, which he describes in vivid fashion. Guthrie settled down himself at the Montana, and for better or worse set the template for Montana literature according to history professor, Keith Edgerton.  Guthrie won the Pulitzer Prize for The Way West and his books were eventually made into movies.  He became a screenwriter himself, notably for Shane , set in neighboring Wyoming, which is still regarded as one of the best Hollywood Westerns....

You be the judge from this short clip of The Sound and the Fury , but for me it doesn't look very promising. as Caddy (I presume) seems to be channeling Lauren Bacall, long before there were even talkies.  The story was initially set in 1910 (as told by Quentin).  Not that novels such as this one can't be re-imagined, but they usually don't turn out very well, like Baz Luhrmann's lurid interpretation of The Great Gatsby . This isn't the first time James Franco has tackled Faulkner.  Last year he gave us As I Lay Dying , another story that doesn't lend itself to an easy screen adaptation.  It was a game effort and I guess this gave Franco the confidence to go after Faulkner's signature novel. Martin Ritt had been the only one previously to take a shot at The Sound of the Fury , filming it in 1959, with Yul Brynner and Margaret Leighton as Jason and Caddy, with the interesting choice of Joanne Woodward as Quentin.  It was a star-studded cast that als...

You have to hand it to ol' Dick.  He doesn't miss an opportunity to castigate the current president.  He can't even write a short "biography" without condemning the Obama administration, turning an innocuous occasion like the Wyoming State Bar convention into front page news.  Now, others from around the country will no doubt fill the vacancies left by Wyoming lawyers who were upset by Cheney politicizing the event. Some thought that having a new ticker would give the former Veep a new lease on life, but since his heart transplant in 2012 he hasn't let this administration off the hook , blaming it for anything and everything under the sun.  As a result, he makes many appearances, like this one on ABC News only four months after the surgery.  He used this opportunity to castigate Obama as well, calling him one the weakest presidents in history, and saying he even preferred Carter.  Of course, that was an election year and maybe he thought he was he...

There are more famous peaks in Washington but the one that drew me back to my home state in 2004 was Desolation Peak.  It's not too far north of Seattle.  You take Highway 20 into the North Cascades and you will find the trail head .  After leaving Japhy Ryder (aka Gary Snyder) behind in Berkeley, Kerouac hitched the train up to Seattle and took a job as a lookout at Desolation Peak.  I had outfitted myself at REI and made the trek to the  US Forest Service fire lookout , which had become a mecca of sorts for Kerouac fans.  He spent 9 weeks there in the summer of '56 commuting with nature in an attempt to maintain the state of ecstasy he felt after his time with Snyder, or so the story goes.  It had been Snyder who recommended the post to him. I had long been drawn to such lookouts.  This one sat on a ridge.  In Florida they were raised up on metal scaffolding.   Desolation Angels was penned later, and wasn't published until...

I guess there's a Humboldt Peak for guns as there is for oil.  Not surprising given the estimated 300 million firearms in circulation in the United States, especially considering the durability of guns to last a lifetime.  The only real worry is ammunition. Sales have dropped sharply in recent months, as there no longer seems to be an impending worry of zombies or gun controls.  Not even the recent USSC decision on "straw purchases" created much panic among gun owners, as they figured it had nothing to do with them.  This is a major concern for suppliers who have gone public like Smith & Wesson, which has seen its stocks plummet. It seems that the greatest impetus for the spike in gun sales was the election of Obama in 2008.  There was widespread fear that he and a Democratic Congress would initiate sweeping federal gun controls.  That never materialized, but in 2012 the President made a big show of issuing executive orders in the wake of t...

I was intrigued by the charges of treason brought against Ezra Pound, and found this fascinating article by Robert Wernick that was published in the Smithsonian Magazine in 1995.  Wernick lays out the situation in lively prose, covering the infamous radio broadcasts, the trial and subsequent internment in St. Elizabeth psychiatric hospital for 12 years until finally released in 1957 with his "condition upon discharge: unimproved." What I found most amusing was that the Library of Congress selection committee decided to award its first Bollingen Prize to Ezra Pound in 1949.  This incensed Congress, who couldn't believe that an arm of its government could bestow such a high honor on a man of such unforgivable character.  In its rage, Congress revoked the award and abolished the prize.    However, the controversial prize was subsequently awarded by the Beinnecke Library of Yale University, which kept Pound as the recipient of the first prize.  Pound rem...

Painting of Lewis, Clark and Sacajawea by N.C. Wyeth, 1940 Idaho was an enclave for the Soshone, Nez Perce and other native tribes until the arrival of Lewis and Clark in 1805.  They more or less stumbled upon Idaho after they came upon the source of the Missouri river in Western Montana.  The explorers were determined to reach the Pacific, portaging their canoes over rugged terrain, crossing the Lemhi Pass into present-day Idaho.  They had been aided by the Shoshone, most famously by Sacajawea, who proved a vital interpreter as they encountered other Numic language speakers in the region, but it was the Nez Perce who would bail them out when they encountered the Bitterroot Mountains in late autumn. The Nez Perce provided food and shelter, and after the expedition team had recovered, gave them cottonwood canoes which proved much easier to handle in the Clearwater and Snake Rivers before reaching the mighty Columbia River.  I had followed part of the trail whe...

A little bit of philatelic history this morning.  The first US commemorative stamps were issued for the 1893 Columbian Exposition .  It was an impressive set of stamps for an impressive World's Fair, but the combined value ($16.34 or about $400 adjusted for inflation) of the commemorative set was too much for the average American.  Of course, if you looked at it as an investment, the full set is worth about $18,000 today in mint condition.  You can still find lower denomination stamps like the one above for reasonable prices.  The 2-cent "Landing of Columbus" goes for about $30. Stamps have become an indelible part of our history.  I've often thought that a fun way to teach history would be through stamps, but in this day and age most kids wouldn't have any idea what stamps are for. The US Postal Service has experimented with electronic stamping, however there isn't really any need for it, at least not yet.  Who knows with net neutrality ...

Labor Day weekend has traditionally been a time to enjoy public lands, taking advantage of the three-day weekend to spend some time outdoors at the end of summer.  However, Ted Cruz has introduced a radical amendment to the Sportsman's Act of 2014 which would have the federal government divest in a significant portion of public land in the West, either passing the land directly off to the states or auctioning it off to the highest bidder in a public sale. It doesn't matter that many states are already having a difficult time managing their state parks in the wake of the massive budget cuts pushed through by Republican state legislatures since 2010, or that sportsmen groups , for whom this bill was initially intended, want the land to remain a federal public domain.  Ted seems to think the federal government simply has too much land, making it difficult for poor ranchers like Cliven Bundy, who Cruz infamously supported in his standoff with the BLM earlier this year...