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

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

By: Robert Long Foreman will die if people don't listen to his podcast.
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  • 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.

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Episodes
  • If We Can't Get Rid of Guns, At Least Give Us More Ways Out

    If We Can't Get Rid of Guns, At Least Give Us More Ways Out
    May 15 2024
    If you live in or near New York City, you should go tomorrow to Amy Bennett's art show opening. It's at the Miles McEnery Gallery, at 525 W 22nd St. I would go, but I live in Kansas City. It's hard to get to places like New York from places like Kansas City. It can be done, but it’s not easy. I had the tremendous pleasure of writing an essay to accompany Amy's show, which is included in a digital catalog that you can access here. The nice thing about something being digital is that you can make it available to lots of people. So follow the link. Read my essay. Marvel at Amy Bennett's paintings. See the show in person if you can. Exits Exist, and Not Enough of ThemI should warn anyone reading this that partway through this section of the newsletter it gets pretty dark, and addresses the subject of school shootings. I was a substitute teacher, yesterday, at the luxury high school, which is my preferred subbing location. When I see on my substitute teaching app that someone needs to go there and fill in for a real teacher, I scramble to claim that eight-hour job for myself. I want to spend the day at the luxury high school. I want to make a little money supervising its well-behaved teens.You might be asking yourself what’s so great about the luxury high school? What makes the high school luxurious?It’s not a private high school. It’s not like that. I don’t think I’d want to go there if it were private. Those places tend to attract the wealthy, and while plenty of wealthy kids are lovely people, the ones who aren’t are worse than the not-lovely kids of the middle and lower classes. Or the rich ones bother me more, at least. The luxury high school is one of the public high schools in our district, and I don’t know how it works exactly, but apparently students can elect to attend the luxury school instead of one of the other two that we have. People tell me the luxury high school is “more project-oriented” than the other schools, but no matter how many times I hear those words, I can never seem to figure out what they mean. I nod and say, “Yeah, that makes sense,” but I don’t know what anyone is talking about. The thing I like most about subbing at the luxury school is that the students there are for the most part calm and focused. They do their work quietly, which means I can work on my own stuff. I take my laptop over there and do what I would do at home, except in this other location, and I get paid to be there. I have to stand up and walk around the room, and make it look like I’m a real authority figure from time to time, but mostly I can just sit and work. I get more done there than I do at home. Everybody wins.The luxury high school is more relaxed than other schools. When I’m in the room with students, the noise level increases from time to time, but it has not yet reached a point where I feel I need to tell everyone to quiet down, to focus on work. I can let them be. I may not love that they’re talking to each other about stupid b******t; maybe I would prefer it if they did their work. But they talk about stupid b******t at acceptable volumes, and years after I graduated high school, I remember the stupid b******t conversations more fondly than I recall any work I did there. Why not let the students generate those memories, when their usual teacher is away? Why not give them a couple hours off? It’s not like the teachers leave me instructions that forbid the formation of fond memories. It’s not like if the students did their work they would solve climate change. Having conversations with one’s peers is itself a kind of education. Everything you do in a school is part of your education—which is something that took me many years of schooling to really understand. The little things are as important as the big things. It all accumulates.The luxury high school is more like a college than the other schools, in that students have a little more freedom than they have elsewhere. Throughout the building are small rooms with glass walls and conference tables. You can walk past and see what’s going on inside, and make sure no one is making bombs or solving climate change when they’re not supposed to. These “flex spaces” are where students can get away from their peers, if they work better in isolation. They can work in one with a student from another class.I’m impressed with the architecture of the place, with the building itself and the atmosphere it makes possible. About a third of the classrooms don’t even have doors, they’re large recesses in the hallway with comfortable seating. I heard from someone that the luxury high school was supposed to be an office complex when it was built, but was then repurposed as a school. I don’t know if that’s true, but it would explain why, unlike most schools, it’s not a death trap.I’m impressed more than anything by how many exits the luxury high school has leading out of it. I thought of this yesterday when I ...
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    21 mins
  • Kisses Sweatier Than Wine

    Kisses Sweatier Than Wine
    Apr 30 2024
    Final Thought, FirstI know Pete Seeger is an unlikely guy to be listening to in 2024. But there’s an album of his that was rereleased some years ago, a recording of a performance he gave at Bowdoin College in 1960. He performs a song that Leadbelly wrote, which he and his group The Weavers turned into an apparently less good song. I guess that’s arguable.But Pete Seeger had his moments, and one was when, after the first verse of singing this song live, at Bowdoin College, he encourages the audience to sing along by saying, “If you believe it, sing it.”No computer will ever tell a person “If you believe it, sing it.” If it does, it won’t mean it, not like a person can mean it. It won’t be like when Pete Seeger said it onstage, and on a morning sixty-four years later another man felt those words in his heart, and he sat in his basement breathing, petting his cat, and looking forward to when his children would come home from school and he could hug them and ask how their days at school went. I know that tragedies happen. I know about atrocities. I know that sometimes the kids don’t come home from school. It’s a miracle, every time they do.This newsletter will largely be about artificial intelligence and the things it can make. I have some conclusions to work my way toward, but for now, right here, I want to say that while it’s not always so great to be alive, sometimes it is. Maybe I’m in an exceptional mood, because I just woke up from a nap, and kissed the wife I’m so lucky to spend so much of my one life with. But I came back down here to the basement, to finish my newsletter, and I know that while it hurts to be alive, a lot of the time, it is also beautiful. It is a great gift, to get to be a human being. I’ve never asked much of the people who read this. And I’m not asking for much when I say I want everyone who reads or hears this to spend some time today or tomorrow doing something that it takes a heart and a mind to do, something that requires humanity. Write someone a message that only they will truly understand. Take a photograph of something that has meaning to you or someone close to you. Join a protest for a cause you know is right. Tell someone you love them. Sing a song you know by heart. In your own way, make the world a little more beautiful. It’s something we all know how to do.And I’m not going to edit this part out later, when my mood changes. I’m keeping this part in, damn it. I don’t care what my future self has to say about doing things that are beautiful.The Hidden Room DreamI went out with some friends recently, in Lawrence, Kansas—not to brag or anything—and I talked with them about something I’d read recently. I don’t recall what it was exactly—an essay from online? a page from a book?—but the author, who I think was a woman, not that it matters, described a recurring dream she has had in which she discovers, in her home, a door she didn’t know was there, or knew was there and never bothered opening. She opens the door, in the dream, and finds it leads to a room full of undiscovered treasures. All this time, that wonderful room has been right there, and now she’s on the other side, and it feels so good to have crossed into it. She explained, in the essay, whoever it was, that this is a common dream lots of people have all the time. It’s the Hidden Room Dream—yes, it even has a name—and apparently I am the last to find out how common it is. What a buzzkill! Right? I thought I was the only one who had that dream.Actually, that’s not true. Last year, someone on a podcast described my recurring Hidden Room Dream almost perfectly, saying it’s a dream he has often. He goes into the hidden room and thinks, What’s this room doing here? It has all of this behind it? How have I neglected a place with such potential all this time? I thought it was a wild coincidence, that he and I had the same dream, but no, I guess our shared dream is just one of the nighttime slideshows that come with every human brain. But despite how common the dream might be, we are all free to interpret it as we please. Maybe the dream is your mind alerting you to untapped potential, or it’s a premonition of new ideas, new possibilities, maybe a cool watch that you’ll find lying on the ground outside a Citgo station that will lead you to a mystery that only you can solve.Maybe it means that. But I’d like to think that this dream is something like a preview of what it feels like to die. What if, when we die, it’s something like the Hidden Room Dream? What if it feels something like opening a door that’s been there all along, that we’ve always known was there but ignored in the name of carrying on? What if the feeling of dying, of being the one who dies, is the feeling that saturates that dream? Oh, so that’s what’s been behind that door all this time! How could I have never walked through this door before? Maybe that’s how it feels to...
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    43 mins
  • Phffoorremmann

    Phffoorremmann
    Apr 22 2024
    I should start with something controversial, so as to draw new readers to my newsletter who cannot resist the harsh iconoclasm of a practiced firebrand. But it can be hard to embrace controversy when there’s a genocide on, so instead I’ll direct you to an interview in which Shayla Malone, of The Missouri Review, asked some questions about my short story that the magazine published recently. I love to answer a well-asked question, and Shayla asked five of them. Thank you, Shayla, and the whole Missouri Review team!The rest of this newsletter rambles and digresses in a self-indulgent fashion, which means it’s just like everything else I’ve ever written. But the reason I gave it the title I did is that everyone should listen to the Harry Nilsson album Knnillssonn. I know people will call me a dreamer, when I say this. They’ll accuse me of not thinking realistically. But it’s my true and firm belief that if, on this day, everyone who read or heard this newsletter listened to the album Knnillssonn by Harry Nilsson, all wars around the whole world would stop, and none would ever start again. I should also mention, before I go any further, that there is an audio version of this newsletter you can listen to. I got some pretty good feedback on the first one I recorded and sent out, with people telling me my voice “is not bad enough, I mean, probably not bad enough, to make people want to drive headfirst into walls and buildings, so they never have to hear anything like it again; I mean, I guess it could be worse, is what I’m saying.” Also, I published a short story a couple years ago in a little magazine somewhere, but I never actually saw it in print and the magazine has no online presence, so as far as I can tell no one has ever read it. On the website, the issue is listed as “Coming Soon,” but it’s been that way since, I think, 2022. And I like that story, so maybe I’ll record myself reading it and release it as a “podcast episode.” Sometimes I don’t know what I’ll do until I’ve done it already. Something I will do for sure is read the first five or so pages of the novel I’ve been revising, at the end of the audio version of this newsletter. Because people can’t get enough of the sound of my voice.This Is Where the Real Threat Is Emanating from for You, Part OneI was reading an essay by the psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster, and came across the line, “this is where the real threat is emanating from for you, signalled by these letters.”I don’t have any idea what she’s talking about there, so I’ll provide no context. I don’t even know I could do it if I tried. Sometimes I read things I don’t understand. All I will say about it is that a real threat to me is emanating, and it’s signaled by some letters. I wrote the letters down, some time ago, and I have to deal with them now. Or, I don’t have to, but I am. And that’s just as bad.What I’m trying to say is, I have been revising two novels. I spent the last year ignoring them. I wrote short stories instead, and said I was done with book-length things. There was no point. I’m not sure there is a point now. But I am working on the two novels I wrote prior to just one year ago. I am getting back to it. I trade off. One day I’ll work on one novel; a couple days later I’ll work on the other. In between, I do the work I have to do to stay alive. The novel I’ve been working on today and yesterday is called We Eat the Rich. I thought it was finished already. I read it again recently and found that, 100 pages in, its momentum flagged. Some books’ momentums can flag. They’re allowed to do that. This one’s momentum, though, cannot. Its premise is too absurd for the reader to have even the slightest opportunity to say, Wait a minute. This is ridiculous. I have to keep throwing more weird s**t at them, so they don’t question anything I’ve already hit them in the face with. It’s a good strategy! There is no way this will not work out. To be honest, I’m uncertain about the novel as a whole, and I think it may have been a terrible mistake to write it in the first place. I’m sure I’ve explained it more than once in this newsletter already, but here we go again: it’s about four young women who roam America in a van and kill and eat rich people. They go to a house that looks nice, have a feast, burn the place down, and move on. They never get caught, because their van once belonged to a sorceress who cast a spell on it, or because they’re lucky, it’s not clear which. There’s not much actual bloodshed in the novel. I mean, there is some. There has to be some. But I’m more interested in the way these four characters talk to one another, and the world they generate inside their van, in which the things they do make sense and everything is inside out. The two novels I’m working on, and another one that’s finished that I’m querying agents with, form an unintended trilogy, in which ...
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    31 mins
Art Literary History & Criticism
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