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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

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
  • The Great Unsubscribing

    The Great Unsubscribing
    Sep 8 2025
    I have good news and bad news.The good news is that I now have a chapbook coming out, from Cutbank. It’s called Heavens to Betsy. It’s about a time last year when I ran out into the street to save a pug dog from getting murdered by an oncoming dump truck. It’s also about what it means to be a hero, and the burdens that come with putting everything on the line to save the life of a precious creature. One of the chapbook’s threads is a parody of Tuesdays with Morrie, in which I imagine what it would be like if Betsy the pug dog were a man I visited every Thursday who was dying of tuberculosis and loved to dispense wisdom. You can see the list of winner, runners-up, and finalists here; check it out for yourself it you think I’m lying: https://www.cutbankonline.org/The bad news is that the Pig City News Weekly Register Hoedown Quarterly Review Times a Thousand may be coming to an end.I have suspended paid subscriptions. The suspension is likely to be permanent, at least as long as the PCNWRHQRTaT is on Substack. Some weeks ago, the Substack app sent a push notification to its users that was antisemitic and authored by the owner of a Nazi newsletter that Substack hosts. I have known for a while that Substack hosts Nazi newsletters, which is why I have wanted to find an alternative. I have not found an alternative that doesn’t cost hundreds of dollars per year, and so this newsletter hasn’t gone anywhere. I considered the situation all right enough to keep writing and sending stuff out. Just because Nazis, I thought, use the same service I do, that doesn’t make me a Nazi. And, you know, I shop at the hardware store. Maybe a Nazi also shops at the hardware store. That doesn’t stop me from biking over there when I need to buy nails.But it’s time, now, to have some principles and act on them. A fraction of every payment that comes to me through Substack goes to Substack; and I can’t have my glorious newsletter funding, even in a minor way, people who are associated with actual, real-life Nazis. I mean, if every time you went to write a new newsletter you had to reenact some version of this scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, you might think twice about writing more newsletters:I’m going to take more seriously the relocation of this newsletter somewhere else. I will make time for it. In the meantime, I will only use it to make announcements concerning my grand achievements, like the chapbook I now have coming out, which I hope some of you will order and read. It’s something I feel really good about and I think you will like it. I think you will have a better time reading it than you would doing a lot of other things. Is Heavens to Betsy better than getting a good massage? Yes, it is.Is reading my chapbook better than having sex? Yes, it is better than sex. A lot better, actually, and not only because you can read it at the park without getting arrested. If you have paid money into this newsletter, and my suspension of it leaves you feeling ripped off, then write to me immediately at robertlongforeman@gmail.com. I will make things right. I will send you a signed copy of one of my books, or something. I’ll send you photos of my glorious smile—only my mouth, not the rest of my face. I’ll do that for you.And I don’t mean to imply that I judge other people who continue to use Substack. Hell, I still have an account with them. I’m sending this thing to you right now. Part of what makes it easy for me to end this one is that I don’t make much money from it. Some people make lots of money from theirs. Ending it would harm them financially.And I will continue to subscribe to a limited number of Substacks. But I am also undertaking what I call The Great Unsubscribing. I get so many emails I don’t read. Lots of them are from Substack people, whose newsletters I signed up for but have never actually read. As soon as they show up in my inbox, I hit delete. I suspect lots of people do that with mine, too. I’m starting to doubt whether this is a useful form of communication.I am taking the trouble, now, to unsubscribe to everything. I don’t want to see things anymore that I don’t like to see. I wake up most mornings, now, with no new emails. It is wild.I will offer one brief anecdote that has nothing to do with self-promotion. Because I was at the YMCA again, recently, and I can’t help myself.I was in the steam room this time. There were three guys in there, one to the right of me, one to the left, and another pacing back and forth across the steam room like a dog that had some kind of fever and thought walking around would cure its fever. He was talking nonstop about how he used to be a landlord and owned fifty-two units in Columbus Park. That’s a neighborhood in Kansas City.It once was the city’s Little Italy, and it’s one of the only parts of KC that feels to me like its own self-contained neighborhood. I don’t mind that other parts of it don’t feel like ...
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    9 mins
  • What the Final Scene in Barton Fink Means in 2025

    What the Final Scene in Barton Fink Means in 2025
    Jul 19 2025
    I think my favorite part of Barton Fink is when Barton goes to a dance hall, having just written the whole screenplay he’s been unable to write for the entire movie, and while he’s there he has a great time yelling at sailors about what a writer he is. He is a creator! He points to his head and cries, “This is my uniform!” It’s a weird thing to say, because how is his head a uniform? It would make more sense if he said it was his rifle, or his artillery. It doesn’t really matter, because the important thing is that he’s pointing to his head and shouting. People in Barton Fink talk about their heads a lot. John Goodman talks about things going wrong “at the head office.” I like the part where he is exuberant and shouting at people, feeling as good as it can feel to be a writer. He is basking in that moment when you have reason to believe, even if it’s not true, that the hardest work is behind you, that you have written something good, if not great, and that anything is possible. In case you haven’t seen the movie—WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD—that scene ends with Barton Fink getting punched in the face and falling unconscious. When he wakes up, back in his hotel room, with a hangover, he drinks a glass of orange juice and gets a phone call. He learns he is a finalist for a major writing award, one that I think is meant to be a version of the Pulitzer Prize. We never find out if he wins the Pulitzer, but it’s not important. It doesn’t really matter. By the time the movie comes to an end, we understand that Barton Fink has done the impossible. He has written a masterpiece. And then, in the final frame, the sly grin that encroaches on Barton’s otherwise impassive face tells you everything you need to know about what lies ahead for him. That’s right. He’s going to be a father.I was thinking about this, a minute ago, because it seems like people online are talking more than ever about generative artificial intelligence.They don’t talk about it in real life. If you go to the garden store, the grocery store, the YMCA jacuzzi, the rock climbing gym, or a movie theater, people don’t talk about generative AI. It’s important to spend time in those places when you can. We have to get away from the internet, spend money on raw vegetables, and cling to pretend rockfaces with our hands from time to time. We have to dwell in the world that’s real if we’re to survive the one that is not.Rock climbing is really hard. I’ve been doing it, now and again, but it ain’t easy. For one thing, I am terrified of heights. For another, after ten minutes of climbing, I can barely move my wrists because my forearms are so sore. I have to think a lot, when I’m climbing rocks, and since thoughts are a viscous liquid that run through our bloodstream, traveling from our brains to our extremities whenever we conjure them up, my veins get jammed. My heart has to work extra-hard. It’s like forcing grape jelly through a straw with the power of your lungs.Sometimes I’m not thinking my own thoughts at all. I’m letting other people’s thoughts into my mind, by way of my eyes. That’s right. I have been reading books.I have been clearing off my shelves. I have been getting rid of books that have sat there for years, in many cases, perpetually unread and taking up space. I have determined that I must have some empty space on my shelves, for once, and to accomplish that I have taken down one book after another, given it a chance, and in most cases I have gotten rid of it, a couple of minutes or hours later. It’s a wonderful way to spend your time, to treat books in your library like they’re contestants on The Gong Show. Every book I open is under suspicion. If it’s good, then great, I’ll keep reading it. Maybe I’ll even hang onto it for some reason when I’m done. But most of them don’t pass the tests. As soon as one of them starts to bore me, or rub me the wrong way, it is gone. It goes in the pile of books I’m going to mail to an organization that supplies gently used books to prison libraries. Out of several dozen titles so far, I have finished just two of them. One of them is Snatch, by Gregory Mcdonald. I think I got it for free because my library was giving books away. I don’t recall why they were doing that. It seems like there used to be more books about crime and heists and stuff, where the menacing bad guys turn out to have hearts of gold, and their schemes somehow involve diplomats from nations in Africa or the Middle East. The film The Hot Rock, which is based on a novel by Donald E. Westlake, was like that. I watched it last year. The other book, of the dozens I have auditioned and mostly thrown out is, Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri. It’s a book I should have read already, one that I have always been embarrassed to not have read already. Every story in it is excellent. I expected it to be good. I didn’t know how good it would be.I am capable of ...
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    14 mins
  • 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...
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    22 mins
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