You Got That Right, Pal

K.C. Bacon turned me on to this Joseph Epstein essay from the Wall Street Journal.  I agree with it in the main, though I could quibble about a few of Epstein's lesser points.

The author's thesis is strong, if obvious to those of us in the writing trade.  Few people care about poetry outside of academia.

Bacon reminded me of another Epstein essay that I read years ago, which covered a lot of the above material in more depth.

"Who Killed Poetry" is actually the better read if you have a little time to digest it.

TS

It Won't Be Easy

Words are easy.
You can slop a few
here and there and get
away with murder.

Painting?
That is something else.
Slop paint around too much
and you'll earn
a demerit.

You'll have to
live with yourself,
which is never as easy
as slopping words around.

That is for sure.


TS

Opening Day

The Major League Baseball season starts today, and I can't decide whether I want to watch the games or organize a boycott.

I've had a love/hate relationship with baseball for many years, as I related in this piece about my fleeting career as a baseball writer in the 1980s.

(You can read a polished version of that amazing piece and much more if you buy this book by Buddy Dooley.)

Sometimes the game of baseball induces utter boredom for me, which causes me to wonder why I ever liked it to begin with.  At other times, particularly when I recall playing third base in high school and junior college many years ago, the juices start to flow again.

Or at least trickle.

As I discovered early on the left corner of the diamond was no place to nap unless you wanted to risk being murdered by a line drive. Even then I might grow sleepy, but that is because I was a dreamy lad.  I managed to lose track of both the pitch count and the number of outs in an inning on more than one occasion, just as I do now as I try to read Being and Nothingness while watching the BoSox vs. the Yanks.

Baseball is timeless, have you heard?

I've watched a handful of Major League baseball games in person over the years, and now I've mainly forgotten them.

I did watch Catfish Hunter throw a no-hitter in Oakland once, I think.

Another time, in San Francisco, I sat next to a band of Dixieland Jazz players wearing pork-pie hats. That was pretty cool.

I know I didn't see Hunter's perfect game, but I saw this one on television last year.

"Yeah...Woo!"  I documented the damn thing like I was there and not sitting in a bar talking to the guy next to me who never played baseball.

One other memorable televised baseball moment occurred for me as I watched a game in 1986.  I was as stunned as any mild-mannered baseball fan has ever been as I watched a grounder go between Bill Buckner's legs.

To this day that is as funny and fucked up as anything you will ever see.

I chased a foul ball down in the third tier of the old Seattle Kingdome one time. A ten year-old baseball memorabilia collector offered me fifteen bucks for it on the spot.

I threatened the kid with ultraviolence and he backed off.

Just kidding, I gave the ball to my daughter, who will one day give it to this little slugger, which is the way things ought to work, the way they do work in a decent world.

The Kingdome was the worst baseball venue in the history of the game by the way.

Best thing that ever happened to Seattle.

Speaking of baseball memories, here's a shitty little story.

Anyway, Major League Baseball starts today, and former Boston slugger Kevin Youkilis now plays for the Yankees.

See what I mean?   Why shouldn't we boycott these uncaring millionaires?

But this is Opening Day... maybe I'll take another crack at Ulysses and watch a couple of innings.  With any luck, Jon Lester will knock Youkilis on his keister a couple of times.


































TS

City

TS

Down

They can deny it all they want, but the Ducks came out tonight and played scared in the first half against the Cardinals of Louisville.

Once they discovered Louisville's players tie their sneakers the same way everybody else does and adapted to the intimidating environment it was too late.

They were fine in the second half, but the damage was done.

Still, Oregon beat the Vegas line (10), which even I didn't really figure they'd do.

The Ducks were a senior-dominated team this season, but a couple of their young guys can really play.

Losing Kazemi will set them back.  Though well-coached I don't see them doing as well next season.

I wasn't happy with the results of any of the games tonight.  My favorites all lost.

TS

Window/Bob Thomas

TS

Sweetness

Oregon wasn't supposed to be here and few are giving them a shot against the overall number-one ranked Louisville Cardinals, but they have to play the game, right?

I personally felt good about the Ducks' chances in the first two games, sensing the team gelled during the Pac-12 tournament.

But Louisville is a different breed than OSU and St. Louis.  Louisville is one of the few programs that rounds up all the thoroughbreds out of the gate every year, particularly since Rick Pitino became head coach.

It isn't so much that Oregon's low seeding has finally cursed them, but rather being thrown into the toughest bracket in the tourney--the Midwest--inconveniently put them up against this traditional power too early.

I think Louisville beats Oregon, Michigan State beats Duke, and the winner of the Michigan State/Louisville elite eight game goes on to the championship game and the title.

That's the way I see it, and I haven't been wrong very often recently...

Kidding.

TS

Billy Joe Shaver

Good old country tune by one great honky tonk artist.

"I was not even born yet when my father first tried to kill me."

TS

Dylan, 1975

The Rolling Thunder shows were unannounced throughout New England. Tickets were snapped up within minutes for the small-venue shows as word-of-mouth notice circulated through communities like the one I lived in at the time--Waterville, Maine.

Alas, the ducats were long gone by the time I tried to buy a pair.

Always regretted missing this.

Later: Web Sheriff took this down, so don't bother.

TS

Two

This...

...and this...

That is all, folks.  Not chipper today at all.




TS

Deemer Poem

An intense, new poem on love and hate by Charles Deemer at his new blog.

He explores the incongruity of men killing their women, circumstances wrought from social and self-inflicted values that too often portray acquiescence and compromise as forms of weakness.

I would add, uninvited, that a similar intransigence by extension motivates the warrior class...inviting mayhem.


TS

The Iranian Connection

Arsalan Kazemi is one of college ball's best rebounders.  And now his Ducks are in the Sweet 16 behind his stellar play.

Oh, man!

TS

Shaping Up

First into the Sweet 16? Michigan, a big winner over VCU.

Oregon gets its chance v. St. Louis at 4:10. Go Ducks!

Speaking of sweetness...at just 4.99 for all the games last season the tourney was a hard deal to pass up.

This year beats that like Minnesota laying a whuppin' on UCLA.  The tourney stream is free this year, one instance of a great product deflating in the marketplace, not because it's value has diminished but because the basketball god in the sky intervened and said it is just.

Right?

Or as the GOP might say, it's just another rotten instance of people getting too much "free stuff."

TS

Bigelow on Corporate Education

Bill Bigelow, a popular educator who taught history in the Portland, Oregon school system for many years, is a prominent advocate of an academic prejudice calling for a "rethinking" of the structural foundation of our schools.

Bill is displeased, as well he should be, with our educational system's approach to teaching a viable history curricula in U.S. high schools. First and foremost, the retired educator is critical of a U.S. educational system that has, er, historically churned out a steady diet of pablum about our nation's role in world geopolitics.

The effects of this long history of shallowness is today everywhere present in American life as the U.S. largely ignores the causes and effects of its recent wars, not to mention its myriad other problems.

Bigelow doesn't stop there while buttressing Howard Zinn's enormously important critique of the rampant self-delusion in the U.S. body-politic.

Rather than bullshit artists like the abysmal Obama and his pathetic foe Romney in the recent election, why can't the U.S. create a ticket comprised of people like Sanders and Bigelow, progressives who truly understand corporatism and greed are cancers eating away at America's fundamental essence?

A neo-progressive party for the ages in other words.


TS

Ducks!

The Ducks came out and played defense like the dickens against an over matched OSU team, setting the tempo and tenor for the day.

Oregon was the quicker team, no doubt, or at least more primed for this matchup.

My Ducks were never really threatened, as Oregon's coaching and senior leadership, combined with the stellar play of freshmen Damyean Dotson and Dominic Artis, caused that house of cards from Stillwater to collapse; to suddenly become stillborn.

Next:  St. Louis, a better team than OSU, but beatable.

I may yet wish Oregon into the Sweet 16.

Can't wait!

TS