『The Pig City News Weekly Register Hoedown Quarterly Review Times a Thousand: The Podcast』のカバーアート

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

著者： 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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  • "Then, with a sudden bang, the exit door flies open."

    "Then, with a sudden bang, the exit door flies open."
    2025/05/27
    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 ...
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    34 分
  • Are Your Men on the Right Pills?

    Are Your Men on the Right Pills?
    2025/05/10
    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 分
  • Badolescence

    Badolescence
    2025/04/03
    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 分

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