The Pig City News Weekly Register Hoedown Quarterly Review Times a Thousand: The Podcast Podcast Por Robert Long Foreman will die if people don't listen to his podcast. arte de portada

The Pig City News Weekly Register Hoedown Quarterly Review Times a Thousand: The Podcast

The Pig City News Weekly Register Hoedown Quarterly Review Times a Thousand: The Podcast

De: Robert Long Foreman will die if people don't listen to his podcast.
Escúchala gratis

Acerca de esta escucha

 It is now mandatory for all US citizens to have podcasts, with episodes coming out at least twice a month. If I don't achieve a certain unspecified number of listeners, I will be executed. Help me. Please.

robertlong4man.substack.comRobertLong4man Arte Historia y Crítica Literaria
Episodios
  • Ride Me to the Moon

    Ride Me to the Moon
    Jul 3 2025
    My dream self wrote a song. Or it wrote the chorus to a song, at least. I dreamed that I was somewhere—I can’t be more specific than that—and near me were some soccer hooligans, or another sort of British loud guy. The boys were drunk. Over and over they shouted, “You should have seen her when she had her beautiful hair!” I recalled the tune they sang this to when I awoke the next morning. I like to awake in the mornings. As soon as my eyes opened, I searched for those words online and found they don’t come from an actual song. Not one I could find, anyway. Will I write a song in waking life, one that will accompany the chorus from my dream? No, I will not. I don’t know how to do that. I could use generative AI to write the song that goes with the chorus. Six months ago, I might have done that. But I never really liked AI. What would it even mean to “like” AI? Everything I ever made using AI, as a lark, as a diversion, seems to me now like an abomination. I thought it was fun, not long ago, to make a theme song using AI that I could play at the start of my newsletter audio recordings. Now I realize that playing with AI because it’s kind of fun for a minute or two is like rubbing mercury into your skin for a minute or two. It sticks to you. It gets in there and doesn’t come out.The dream I had about the chorus to a song that’s not real is not the only time I made something in my sleep recently.I wrote to an old friend of mine, recently, who does the screenprinting at a t-shirt shop in West Virginia, Kin Ship Goods. I have bought many of their shirts. I am wearing one now. About half of the ones I have say WEST VIRGINIA across the front, and I wear them often because I live in Kansas City but I’m from West Virginia. If I ever have amnesia, and I’m out somewhere and don’t know who I am anymore, due to head trauma, or a dissociative episode, I want to be able to look at my shirt and find out what state I was raised in.Last month, I was at a Samantha Crain show with my daughter. I wore a Kin Ship Goods shirt, and a fellow West Virginian approached me when I went to the bar to close my tab. I hadn’t been drinking; I had bought a sparkling water for myself, and an orange Slice for my daughter—she’d never had one before. The woman from West Virginia who approached me said she grew up in Charleston and lived in Florida. She was in Kansas City to grade essays from high school AP exams. All I’m saying is, Kin Ship Goods shirts bring people together at Samantha Crain shows.But the reason I wrote to my screenprinting friend was that I’d had two ideas for West Virginia t-shirts in my sleep. I will tell you now what they are.One of them would look like a quiz you might take in kindergarten, or first grade, I’m not sure which, where you have to match words with drawings. You also have to do that on Duolingo; maybe it would look like Duolingo. On one side of the shirt would be a couple of drawings, one placed above the other. On the other side would be words. The words on the word side would be “sled” and “toboggan.” The drawings on the drawing side would be of a sled and what people who aren’t from West Virginia might call a stocking cap.A person looking at the shirt would have to mentally match the drawings to the words, and would have trouble, because to most people “sled” and “toboggan” are synonyms. This is a t-shirt that only people from West Virginia would understand. In my home state, a toboggan is not what you call a sled, it’s what you call that kind of hat that you wear to keep your head warm. Like a beanie, I guess—except no one in WV would say the word “beanie,” because you don’t need to say that word when you can say “toboggan.”The other shirt idea I had is simpler. It would have someone on it driving a car through outer space to the moon. It would have the words “Ride me to the moon!” across the front. This is another West Virginia thing. In WV, you can ask someone, “Could you drive me to the Moundsville State Penitentiary?” And people will know what you’re saying. But you can also say, “Could you ride me to the Moundsville State Penitentiary?” and no one will object to that phrasing, or be confused. They will take you to the Moundsville State Penitentiary. In West Virginia, the words “drive” and “ride” are in some contexts interchangeable.I will be interested to see what my dreaming mind conjures up next. Maybe it will think of a way to solve the problem of a federal government that has gone criminal, by doing a series of unforgivable things. They include: openly supporting the mass murder of civilians, many of them babies and children, in a place far from here that has furthermore been bombed to dust using munitions manufactured in places like Illinois and New Mexico; organizing a widespread program of kidnappings that end with people who haven’t been charged with any crimes being relocated to, and in some...
    Más Menos
    22 m
  • Man Undercover: Maybe My Incessant Complaints about Everything That Happens Can Tell Us Something about the Need for "Conflict" in Works of Fiction

    Man Undercover: Maybe My Incessant Complaints about Everything That Happens Can Tell Us Something about the Need for "Conflict" in Works of Fiction
    Jun 13 2025
    I wish I could wear a wire to the jacuzzi at the YMCA near my house. I wish I could record the voices of the old men who stand in the hot tub for way longer than they’re supposed to and harangue everyone who joins them at the hottest tubby-tub in the city. There’s this guy who goes there every day with a plastic cup full of ice. I have learned that under no circumstances can I make eye contact with him. If I do, he will ask me a question, pretend to listen to my answer, and then talk at me about whatever is on his mind until someone else gets there—fresh meat!—or I leave.The other day, he learned that another man in the rub-a-dub-dub tubby-tub had served in the Marines, in Vietnam. The ice cup guy proceeded to admit that while he himself never served in the military, he admired what the Marines have done and continue to do. He asked this veteran if he had heard of Fallujah. Did he know what the Marines did in Fallujah? “They cleaned that place out,” he said. I don’t know why he brought up the battles of Fallujah—there were two of them, in 2004. A lot of people died in those battles. Many civilians were killed. Twenty-seven US servicemembers perished in the first battle of Fallujah. In the second, ninety-five were killed. Many more were wounded. I had to look those figures up; I am no military historian; but I remember hearing how brutal the fighting was in Fallujah, back when it was happening. If it had occurred to me, I would not have guessed that I would hear an old man who, like me, was never in the military, recall it fondly twenty years later to a real-life Marine combat veteran.Maybe it’s a way to support the troops, to brag at the YMCA about bloody conflicts you had nothing to do with, while having voted for the guy whose administration is working to eliminate what real-life support veterans have in the USA. I mean, I’m pretty sure the guy with the ice cup voted for our current president; he insisted to yet another old man, not long ago, that the president was making strategic use of tariffs, that the man he was speaking to was misinformed when he questioned that strategy. The president was making all those other countries finally pay. It was the right thing to do.More recently, I heard this same guy tell a couple of men, who were eating up everything he said with grins on their faces, how glad he is he doesn’t live in a country with secret police, like the Gestapo coming and hauling you away to a secret prison. He’s so glad that instead of that we have the regular police. “And if you get pulled over,” he said, “you know what to do, don’t you? You put your hands on the steering wheel, you keep them there, and you do whatever they say. ‘Yes, dear. No, dear. Yes, hon. Mm-hmm.’” He meant, in case it’s not clear, that you should do what they say as if you were obeying the orders of your domineering wife. This prompted a man who was almost completely submerged in the water, like you could only see his bald head sticking out from the surface, to talk about how he would never, ever take his wife with him to get his pontoon boat reupholstered. I can’t wear a wire to the YMCA jacuzzi. I always have on a bathing suit when I’m there, and no shirt. It’s very sexy, and someone would see the wire. They would ask about it. I would have to talk to them. Also, the wire would get wet. I could wear a suit and a tie to the jacuzzi. But I think someone there might think something was up if I tried doing it that way.Why am I like this? Why do I complain about people? What if that guy from the jacuzzi reads this? Isn’t it bad enough that all the slime and the juices that ooze out of that old man’s pores and his hair and scrotum get into the hot tub and mix with my slime and touch my skin? I don’t want that man to get mad at me, and splash his juice into my mouth in retribution.I’m not really worried. I know what will happen if that guy reads this. He will go straight to the hot tub, make eye contact with a stranger, tell them about it, and then yell at them about something else for forty-five minutes while chewing and slurping ice. But you know what? I think that my tendency to find a problem with every experience I have, and my insistence on complaining about even the good things that happen in my life, help me as a fiction writer. One way I make money is by reviewing and critiquing the work of other writers. I read entire novels sometimes, by writers who think they could use some assistance. Lately I have read several manuscripts that have a fundamental problem running through them: they are lacking in tension. They have no conflict. In scene after scene, characters get along with one another. They have a great time. Maybe one character develops a crush on a new character, who arrives from someplace else. Everyone encourages this person to pursue their crush. There’s no competition; there is no strife. Everyone is living it up in their personal galaxy of ...
    Más Menos
    28 m
  • "Then, with a sudden bang, the exit door flies open."

    "Then, with a sudden bang, the exit door flies open."
    May 27 2025
    I’m thinking again of migrating this newsletter to another platform. It can be done. It probably ought to be done.People get angry about newsletters being on Substack because the management of the company Substack is awful. Strangers yell at me on the street about it. The department store manager kicked me out of the menswear department. The problem with their argument, their insistence that everyone must leave Substack because the people in charge of it are bad, is that the management of almost everything is bad. There are alternatives to Substack, but who manages those platforms? What do they believe? I don’t know. Even if I knew for sure that they were perfect, companies can and frequently are sold by good people to others who aren’t good. There’s no perfect platform for newsletters. The other platforms cost money to use, which is why I haven’t taken my Pig City Hoedown elsewhere.I am wearing my new reading glasses, though. Glasses are insane. I know that “insane” is a word that it’s best not to use. I know that the stigma of mental illness runs deep in our vocabularies, and that saying things are “crazy” and “nuts” may perpetuate it. Saying them is one thing, I think; writing them is another. It’s worse, because if it’s written down that means I reread it several times and didn’t change it. Still, I find the sentence “Glasses are insane” to be a justifiable use case. It further dilutes the meaning of the word “insane” in a way that I find funny. But I may never use the word again. We’ll see. I once defended my use of the word “lame” to describe something as boring to someone who pointed out that it’s been said to be ableist. After I defended it, I gave it some thought, and never used the word that way again. It’s easy to give up a word, it turns out. I don’t think I ever liked saying that one much anyway.But I’m not used to having glasses on my face. I’m not used to having anything on my face. Until recently, I was physically perfect. Doctors would ask me to undress even when it wasn’t necessary, so that they could take in the sights and smells of corporeal perfection. They had never seen it before, and here I was to show them all. Now I am aging fast, and there doesn’t appear to be much time left, because I have to wear glasses if I want to read Shakespeare.I have been reading Shakespeare. I have had the Norton Shakespeare—a large, green book that’s heavy—sitting out for a while, in case I felt like picking it up. Last week, I was in the middle of reading a novel, one I had looked forward to reading, but which turned out, once I started reading it, to be less a rollicking adventure than The Detailed Explanation of Non-Events That Aren’t Interesting. So I said what the hell. I read All Is True, a late Shakespeare play about Henry VIII. It had some great lines that I wrote down, but I could see why no one ever suggested I read it before, or required me to read it for a class I was taking. There’s not much that happens. I mean, I’ve heard that Henry VIII did some wild stuff, like ripping the heads off of women, but that doesn’t make it into the play. His wife gets replaced by Anne Boleyn, and dies giving birth to a child? It seems like a fairly sanitized account of someone who is notable for having a lot more women executed than almost everyone in human history.I read All’s Well That Ends Well. I read The Merry Wives of Windsor.I am reading the plays people don’t really talk about. I’ve read MacBeth before; I’ve read King Lear. I’d like to read them again, and I might, but for now I am having the time of my life taking a long look at these other plays people don’t talk about, at least not to me.There are people I have known in my life who, if I told them what I was reading, would tilt their heads in my direction and say, “The Bard? You are perusing the work of the Bard? His genius was staggering.”I’m going to order a glasses case to put my glasses in. But it has to be one that was designed for men. I know I don’t have to tell you why. It should also be leather, because leather is the hottest kink there is.This leather glasses case has a lot of online reviews. But there’s no review online that tells me what I need to know, which is whether the glasses case will be enough to save me. I read The Murmur of Everything Moving, the most recent book by Maureen Stanton. Maureen once directed my dissertation, but that’s not why I read it. I read it because I wanted to, and because her books are good.It got me thinking about the suspension of disbelief, and what it means in autobiography. In fiction it means that you are willing to believe what you’re being told for the sake of the work of art. You are taking the ride that the author has invited you to take, despite whatever reservations you might have. Something like that. I don’t care.I don’t know that I have heard anyone talk about disbelief suspension in ...
    Más Menos
    34 m
Todavía no hay opiniones