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.
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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.

robertlong4man.substack.comRobertLong4man Arte Historia y Crítica Literaria
Episodios
  • Are Your Men on the Right Pills?

    Are Your Men on the Right Pills?
    May 10 2025
    Our cat Oscar likes to go in the garage. He will do whatever it takes to get there. He bolts past us when we open the door, and when he does we tell him he is the worst guy in the world, that he is a villain. When we say that, we are correct.There is nothing for him to do in the garage, no food for him to eat.He stayed in the garage too long, one recent evening, and when someone finally let him back out he was starving. It had been at least two hours since his last meal.He ate too much. He scarfed all the food he could and threw up on the floor.That’s basically what this newsletter is, this installment of the Pig City News Weekly Register Hoedown Quarterly Review Times a Thousand. I want you to know, before we take this any further, that this is basically the writing equivalent of someone puking cat food everywhere.I subbed for four days last week at the high school, the one where I like to be a substitute, because the kids there aren’t unruly—they are in fact quite ruly—and I can work there like I do at home. The students need nothing from me. They do their stuff and I do mine. I get paid to be at the high school, and I also earn money doing the work I would otherwise carry out in my unbelievably furnished basement.I actually get more work done at the school than I do at home on some days. So, the way I see it, when I have a chance to go over there, and I don’t take it, I leave money on the table. About $150 per day.Is that enough? No, it is not. But I have never been paid enough, and this is how it will always be.A couple of years ago, I went to a menswear store, here in Kansas City, and admired the clothing. What blazers they had! What shirts. I looked at the price tags on some of the blazers and shirts and shook my head. I said to myself, “Maybe someday I will afford to put on something nice like this.” I was, at that time, forty-two years old. I realized I must have said the very same thing twenty years before then, when I was twenty-two, at a different clothing store. At the rate I’m going, it will take another eight decades for me to afford a nice blazer.It’s a good thing I am so beautiful. I mean, thank goodness I look a hundred times better in my thrift store rags than the billionaires do in their finery.I ain’t broke, but I am not a big earner. I am of little to no value to this world and its economy. I care too much about the placement of commas in sentences to see a comma in my weekly earnings figures.But I have found, in this week of substitute teaching, that there is no sound that grates on me more than the sound of performative laughter. There was a lot of it at the high school on Monday. A group of kids huddled together and acted more excited than they could have been about stuff nobody really cares about. They described things they saw on TikTok, and as they did it they were beside themselves with put-on amusement. One of them would say something that was meant to be funny, and it wasn’t funny, but the person beside them would snort and hiss in a way that was meant to denote hilarity. It sounded something like laughter. It was not laughter.I thought it was an evil sound. It sounded to me like derision, like the way bullies snicker back and forth to unnerve their victims. I thought it must be the way guards laugh in the off-hours at Guantanamo Bay.After Monday, I didn’t hear much of that laughter anymore. I don’t know why not.But we are living in evil times, and I am thinking of the people I have known who are dead to me, to whom I will never speak again. Or, if we do talk, it won’t be like it once was. They will not hear the noise it makes, but the next time we meet, the door to my heart will slam in their faces.At a conference, some years ago, I was having a good conversation at a bar with a couple of other guys. We got along. We laughed at stuff together, in a way that wasn’t fake. It was, as the Irish say, “good craic.” We finished our drinks. I offered to fetch more of them, and I did. I bought my acquaintances their drinks. When I returned, I handed the drinks over, and in unison the pair of them turned their backs to me. They began talking to other people.It was fine; they were under no obligation to continue entertaining my company. I walked across the room and spoke to a staff member from the university press that was putting the event on. She was nice. When my drink was empty, I left.Maybe those two guys meant nothing by turning away from me abruptly. I doubt they planned to disregard me like that; it was just as likely an organic turning away from someone they were done talking to, who was wrong in thinking that getting us all more drinks implied that the conversation would continue. Maybe they are just like me, doing their best to be good people in a roomful of strangers and coming up short from time to time.But if they were trying their best, they could hardly have done a worse job. Their disregard seemed altogether deliberate, and I trust ...
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    26 m
  • Badolescence

    Badolescence
    Apr 3 2025
    Late at night last week in another country, my family and I talked with a Canadian couple about what America has come to. We agreed that what’s happening is bad, and I listed the good things that come to mind when I think of Canada: the Kids in the Hall, Alice Munro, Sidney Crosby, Leonard Cohen. “Where would we be without Leonard Cohen?” I said—though, to be honest, without Leonard Cohen I wouldn’t be different. Probably not at all. I like his songs, but I don’t know them well, not like I know the work of, say, Dave Foley, Bruce McCulloch, and the other Kids in the Hall. If you could take everyone who is currently dismantling what passes for our federal government, and force them to watch one movie, read one book, listen to one album, spend an hour with one painting, or engage with an artifact from another artistic medium, in the hope that it might fix them somehow, and pull their souls back from the brink of hell—which is where they are currently going, and trying desperately to pull us all with them—then what would that book, movie, album, painting, poem, or whatever, be?I, for one, would make them watch this 1982 film of a Randy Newman show that features appearances by Ry Cooder and Linda Ronstadt.The government dismantlers would have to watch the whole thing. The only way it works is if you watch the whole thing.Would it work? Would it solve the problem of them? No, not most of them. I know that. Maybe the better question is this: when this is all over—and it will be over, someday, after more people die, and we all suffer a while longer, maybe a lot longer—how do we fix those who are responsible for all that is currently going down? Let’s imagine they can be fixed. Let’s project a future in which there are consequences for those who do what are truly the worst things. What does rehabilitation look like, for the lunatic who wants all our kids to get measles, so that only the strongest of them survive? If they put me in charge of trying to fix our current Secretary of Health and Human Services, I would force him into detox for six months and subject him to mandatory viewings of that Randy Newman show and the 1966 John Frankenheimer film Seconds, in which an unhappy man is given another chance at his adulthood, and can pursue his dream of being an artist, rather than a guy behind a desk at a bank. Mere days into his new life, he finds that despite how he now looks like Rock Hudson and can paint all day long and have all the passionate sex he wants, he is still miserable. The cabinet member in my care would have to read “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” more than one time. He would have to read Song of Solomon and do chores.I would probably not, in the name of solving his poisoned soul and mind, show that broken man the hottest new TV show on Netflix, the British show that's called Adolescence. I don’t think it would help get the job done.If you don't know, Adolescence is a scripted show about a young teenage boy who murders a young teenage girl. The show spends its four episodes contemplating what led him to do that. It points fingers at the culture at large, the rhetoric that adolescent boys are exposed to via Instagram and elsewhere. Andrew Tate’s name comes up at least one time. Andrew Tate, if you don’t know, is an ugly man who brags online about treating women horribly in real life. I doubt he can be fixed.Adolescence is, if nothing else, an interesting TV show. I don’t regret watching it. There is no denying the feats that it performs, with every hour-long episode consisting of one continuous shot. In the first installment, we start with a couple of detectives in a car, discussing apples, and follow them to the suspect’s house, where a SWAT team, or something like it, battering-rams the door and holds the family at gunpoint. They take the kid to the police station and interrogate him. As they go from place to place, via car, there are no cuts in the action. It’s really something. The creators of the show must have had to choreograph everything the actors did with great meticulousness, especially on that first episode, with its police station full of people who walk through the frame in one direction or another. If even one of those blokes made a wrong move, like at minute forty-seven, they would have had to start all the way back again at the beginning. The fourth episode shows us the family of the adolescent boy, who is away in prison, a year after he committed the murder. They are getting by and still trying to wrap their heads around what happened. In some of the final minutes, the mother and father do their best to determine where they went wrong, how they brought up a kid who would commit murder at age thirteen, and what elements of the outside world must have guided his hand as he stabbed his victim many times. When that last episode ended, I felt a little bit like I had just watched an extended and technically impressive version of the anti-drug public ...
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    26 m
  • Stories Are Made out of Eggs

    Stories Are Made out of Eggs
    Mar 12 2025
    Incrediwife and I had the sort of conversation folks like us are having now. We discussed what new breakfasts we can eat, to replace the ones we usually have, which are made using several eggs. We are not egg fiends, but we consume them most mornings, often with kale or bell peppers scrambled in there. I love cuisine.Now, thanks to the ghouls who are running our country, many of whom have never shopped at a supermarket, because they have always been so rich they have had others do everything for them, a dozen eggs in Kansas City cost $7.50. We have to moderate our egg consumption so we don’t lose too much money.Ours, I realize, is not yet an extraordinary hardship. We have tofu in our refrigerator at all times. A tofu scramble is always an option. We like oatmeal. I have a vegan brunch cookbook. Incrediwife, our kids, and I are prepared for this moment.I don’t know, though, what the next moment will be like. Will more people take the turn we have, and start making tofu scrambles instead of cooking eggs? If so, that could make tofu scarce. What will the next shortage be? And what’s going to happen if thousands more retirees stop getting the Social Security checks that have kept them from going hungry and unhoused? That’s a much bigger problem than my household not having eggs. I thought about getting a chicken coop and putting chickens in it. Chickens lay eggs. We could feed the chickens whatever we want, and take their eggs from them despite their protestations. We don’t have much of a backyard, but we have no neighbors in back of our house. There are only the woods out there. We could handle chickens. They make nice sounds.I looked up chicken coops online, and my first thought, when I saw this one on Chewy.com, went something like, No way. I cannot imagine confining chickens to such a limited space for their entire lives, strictly so I can continue stuffing my face with their eggs. They would have no room to move around! They would not feel joy. It’s without a doubt one of the most absurd thoughts I have had recently. Because, you know, chickens would be lucky to live in a small coop in my backyard. It would be about a hundred thousand times better than the places most of them live. You know? So, yes, eggs cost too much, and I expect things to get a lot worse. Things can always get worse. And they will.But sometimes, when I enter a room, and one of our cats is there, I say hello to him. You’re allowed to say hello without expecting a response. I don’t expect a response from the cats.And starting a paragraph with a conjunction is a great way to abruptly change the subject in your newsletter. But I am so tired of watching scenes in TV shows where one character tells another about their shared history. They retell a scene from their past, and the scene they retell is one they were both present for, which both of them remember. It happens on A Thousand Blows. It happens on Yellowjackets, and probably every TV show. Even the good ones do this thing that drives me up the wall. I wanted to provide an example of this in action, but when I tried googling it, not expecting much, or knowing how to describe what I’m going on about in a succinct google search, I found a website that’s meant to help people whose televisions have recently begun to address them specifically. Like, the programs aren’t for a broad audience of people anymore, the TV shows are instead directed at this one person. Their TVs are trying to tell them something important through the TV shows. It is apparently a symptom of mental illness, to become convinced that the TV is doing that. I know why people on television tell each other about things from the past that both of them remember with clarity and don’t need to have explained to them. They are speaking to one another for the sake of the viewers. They are telling each other things they both already know so that whoever is listening will learn about them. It’s a way for the writers to demonstrate for whoever is watching who these characters are, where they came from, and how and how well they know one another. It is a symptom of what some people like to call “character development.” And it is not only unnecessary, it’s a boring thing to sit through. It’s a way to check a certain kind of box, a way to help those who write in teams, the way TV writers do, feel like they are doing their jobs. If you’re writing a story and it’s going well, you don’t have to go out of your way to develop characters. That’s what’s supposed to happen in the course of telling your story. We learn who the characters are through their actions and from how they speak. If you feel like you need to stop and have a character explain to the audience who they are, that’s a sign that of one of three things: * You are William Shakespeare, it’s the sixteenth or seventeenth century, and the rules are different because it’s the past and you’re writing for the stage.* You’re ...
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    20 m
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