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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

Auteur(s): 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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  • 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 min
  • 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 min
  • 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 ...
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    28 min
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