How it Works

I have a lot of fun with this blog.

It is always interesting to view my Feedjit tracker and see where people are when they land at Round Bend. I've written on an array of topics here, and people around the world have an interest in many of the things I write about.

Eighty-percent of my traffic comes from Google, people surfing for stuff.

They don't stick around this blog for long in most cases, and you have to wonder if the landing even registers in their surf-soaked minds at times.

Once, months ago, I wrote a short analysis of the similarities between the poetic sensibilities of Baudelaire and Bukowski. I see that combo a lot; people around the world seem to understand and hunger for the poetry of those two giants.

The poets have a tremendous affinity, which Buk may have understood, though Baudelaire was in no position to appreciate the fact. He died many years before Buk arrived on the scene.

I hope when the lovers of Buk and Baudelaire see my short essay here they appreciate what I've written.

Who knows?

Another search topic I see frequently is Irwin Shaw's "The Eighty-Yard Run." This masterful short story, which I've cited several times here, is a big draw. Would-be short story writers out there, trying to solve the mysteries of the masters, want to know what makes this story special.

I've written quite a a bit here about Africa and the AIDS epidemic, a huge subject worldwide, of course. Readers from Canada, New Zealand and Great Britain are digging deep into the subject, curious about what's what on the battlefront against the insidious disease.

Round Bend, without a technical and scientific approach to the epidemic, may give these readers some small input regarding the tragedy of AIDS.

Lord knows this blog won't sate them, but they look nonetheless. If only for a moment.

Other subject matter supersedes all of the above however as I read through my list of visitors' searches every day.

 The two biggest? "Punk lyrics" and "big tattooed tits."

Are you surprised?

Every degenerate asshole in the world arrives here because I've written, fleetingly, about punks and sucky tattoos and big creamy tattooed tits, themes of great import in the new modernism evidently.

And it's happening all because I, in a moment of absurd clarity, made this blog entry on July 21, 2010.

Now isn't that something?



TS

Old School

I've never been a big telephone guy.

Even back when I was a kid and the chicks called my house to talk to me in order to impress me I'd shun the telephone.

"TS!", my mother would cry out when the phone rang and some hot eighth-grader wanted to hear my velvety voice woo her for a movie date, "it's for you!"

To hell with it, I had no use for the telephone. Sure, I'd go make out with said babe in the movie house, but I wasn't about to make a date out of it. Over the phone!

I wanted to suck her tongue, not talk to her!

I didn't like phone conversations. I feel the same way all these years later.

Alas, I was just gifted minutes on a small cell phone: the thing is so tiny it feels like an unhatched sparrow egg in my hands.

Quite unusable.

I gave my new number to a friend today. He called and left a voice mail.

Unintelligible.

How does this shit work?

I miss land lines. Do they even have land lines these days?



TS

On to New Hampshire

The transparency of the corruption in American politics amazes me and has for a long time now.

A handful of multimillionaires fight it out to see which one of them can be the most vulgar.

Yet people willingly turn a blind eye.

Millions are spent on attack ads that mostly avoid the need for policy decisions that should be on the front burner in any political debate.

Serious debate rarely happens, replaced by a sideshow of poor punditry and gossip that would make a starlet blush.

Elections are bought and sold like commodities, the seat to the highest bidder while we are bombarded with nonsense and egoism of the ugliest variety.

People are persuaded to believe that the essence of politics is who can fart the loudest and make the biggest stink.

The process reeks of course, and it is the fault of every American who buys the package and allows it to happen by repeatedly voting against his best interests.

In the main, the largest segment of U.S. society gets raped while the fat cats dance off with the spoils.

It's a crying shame, but it'll likely never change.


TS

Star Power

I've had a couple of manuscripts under my nose of late and missed a day or two posting here, but suffice to say things are brewing in the Round Bend editorial offices overlooking the parking lot next door to the Unitarian Church in S.W. Portland.

Prime locale, wonderful view.

I'll announce more concerning a few publications that are in the works, but this isn't the right time to go ahead with that.

Instead I'd like to tell you that I've relaxed the past two evenings by taking in Lonesome Dove, the iconic Western written by Larry McMurtry and turned into a made-for-television flick back in 1988.

I watched the entire thing. It was awful, but engaging for the star power of Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duvall.

Never in the history of filmmaking have two greater actors  had so little to work with.

I can recall wondering what all the fuss was about when the series started. I never bothered to investigate.

Turns out I didn't miss much, but I'm glad I finally saw it.

I'll bet my mother liked it. She liked Westerns to begin with, being a big fan of Zane Grey. I don't remember talking to her about it, but it was her kind of sentimental bullshit.


TS

Thomas Frank

Michael Kinsley is a little bitch, but he mostly gets it right in this review of Thomas Frank's new book about the American oligarchy.

Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? is a seminal study of America in these times.

Can't wait to read this latest.


TS

Faith-Based Politics

You want to know something?
Hitchens was right about these dumb shits.

Hitchens pissed me off more than once in the past decade. But he was on the money regarding evangelicals.

If you're a religious person, fine.  Just keep your dumb, reactionary politics out of my sight.

Praise the Lord!



TS

Jonesing

Self explanatory.


TS

Heaven

One of the great moments from Stop Making Sense.


TS

The Buddy Holly Story

Busey takes a lot of crap these days for his persona, but he did an excellent job in this bio-pic of Buddy Holly.


TS

Dead Flowers

Jagger and Richards wrote it, but I always preferred Townes' vocals.   In this version he sounds resigned to the inevitable, tired, purely emblematic of deadness.

TS

Ballad of a Thin Man

The Malkmus version from I'm Not There.


TS

Hicks' Top 15

Bob Hicks, the former Oregonian arts writer who now keeps an arts journal on the Web, thinks Charles Deemer's In My Old Age is among the best books he read in 2011.

Hicks placed Deemer's book of poems on his top fifteen list for the year.

I'd have to agree that the book is pretty darn good, and I also believe Hicks has it rated too low.

It's in my top five.

Lists are subjective by nature of course, but you can see my top fifteen by scrolling down the sidebar to the right.


TS

Loaded

I'm changing hats this week.

Off comes the football helmet with the big yellow O plastered on the side. On goes a visor with a shaded-green bill.

I'm evolving from wide-eyed football analyst to squinty-eyed editor, and because I am more capable than most of making the transition from huddled head-banger to lonely pencil-wielder, I expect to have a great deal of fun in the short term.

I will be reading the work of a pair of writers who evidently trust my profound literary good sense, if not my grammatical expertise.

Such wise men are rare, so I humbly thank them for allowing me the privilege.

A whale of a story has landed in my lap from an author given to lusty meditations on boats and commerce, on Mexican whores and lazy workers, on capital and risk, on things that matter in the rainy world of sage-poets and dreamers.

From another source, I shall soon receive a manuscript telling a story that, like the recipe for a good, albeit questionably healthy breakfast, has been circulating in the vast space of the cyber-world for months.

The overriding question is--will the traveler find nirvana at the end of the road?

What we have shall soon be revealed first to me and a few others, and later, with luck, to you.


TS

Not Bad, Just Not Good Enough

It feels a little anti-climatic now, the Ducks' victory in the Rose Bowl.

The Oregon football program has been good for so many seasons in a row that winning a meaningful game--that is becoming champion of something besides the PAC--was only a matter of time.

The Rose Bowl last night felt like just another game, which, interestingly, is exactly what Darron Thomas said in a post-game interview.

It hadn't sunk in for Thomas in other words that winning the Rose Bowl is a significant accomplishment. The game felt like any other to Thomas, who has lost just three games in two seasons as Oregon's starting quarterback.

Winning a lot in a sense makes one jaded, expectant of the desired results. Perhaps that is one way of measuring both the depth of my boredom at season's end and the stature of the Oregon program under the leadership of Chip Kelly.

Twenty years ago I might have been overwhelmed with excitement about what happened yesterday in Pasadena.

These days I prefer to rue last season when Oregon should have beaten Auburn in the national championship game.

(Always keeping that negativity close, because that's where one best controls it.)

The Rose Bowl is nice, if not the ultimate football prize.  It'll be interesting to see how things play out next year, with Darron Thomas returning for a third season, with the stunningly gifted De'Anthony Thomas earning more carries in the likely absence of LaMichael James, and with 34 of 44 players returning from the two-deep roster, many of them young stars ready to shine.

Maybe I'll conjure interest in the championship game this week, but it's unlikely, because I really have no use for LSU and Alabama, despite knowing they are both excellent.

Feels to me like the season is finally over.

Good.


TS

The Greatest

I've said this myself, and I believe we can all assent, LaMichael James is among the greatest.

Here's to a Happy New Year and a Duck win in the Rose Bowl tomorrow.


TS