He was the bestselling poet in American history. What happened?

Was never a fan - and hadn’t thought of him for decades - but there is no doubt that at the time he was big.

Just one paragraph that opened my eyes …

In the mid-1960s McKuen discovered the Belgian singer Jacques Brel and his fellow chansonniers, performers in the story-song tradition who were popular in the cabarets of Europe but hadn’t yet made inroads in the U.S. market. McKuen translated and sang a number of Brel’s songs, and fully rewrote Brel’s song “Le Moribond” as “Seasons in the Sun,” which was recorded by the Kingston Trio. (It would later be a No. 1 hit for the singer Terry Jacks.)

… in my mind, Scott Walker and more recently Marc Almond were the two ‘Walker Channelers’. Never had any idea that Rod was another.

This post was getting too long and confusing in draft mode. So - instead I am writing a short post and will then append with comments to cover off each point I want to make. A living post if you will!

The genesis of the post is that @dave commented on one of my posts about Feedland suggesting that I publish a post about Feedland here.

First off, I am a big fan of the functionality of Feedland and in awe of how @dave - much like @manton - just keeps delivering enhancements and extensions to his world without the teams of hundreds - if not thousands - that VC backed startups seems to ‘need’.

As an ex 1999.io user (I was there before MicroBlog properly launched) .. I recognized the interface immediately. There is a style that Dave uses. Not my favorite - but I appreciate the consistency.

I found it pretty easy to set up Feedland - and it ‘just worked’. Since then, there are things I have discovered that would make for an even easier life (at least if you were talking about my life that is).

I will post thoughts into the comments below in an attempt to keep simple and less ‘rambly’.

I wrote a long email to Substack last week with a combination of personal comments together with some comments received from readers.

I opened the email with;

“No questions - but definitely a lot of input. Most of which I have written to you about in the past and generally received a ‘thanks we will let the dev team know’ kind of response … and then nothing.”

Precisely one week later a template response …

“We will pass your feedback along to our Product team. However, please note their team does not respond to messages directly, so it is expected you won’t receive a follow up. “

#NailedIt - other than I wasn’t expecting to wait a week for a template response.