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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.com
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Episodios
  • Stop the School to Sunday School Pipeline

    Stop the School to Sunday School Pipeline
    Jul 4 2024
    It’s the fourth of July. It’s time for you to watch this video again, or for the first time if you never saw it:You may have heard that SEMO Press, publisher of my novel Weird Pig, among many other books, is shutting down. It’s a terrible thing, and I’ll never forgive the creeps in charge who destroyed an organization that brought good things into a world that doesn’t have enough of them. But I have good news. Thanks in part to the fanatical machinations of SEMO Press director James Brubaker, Weird Pig has a new home: Black Lawrence Press. This is also thanks, of course, to the hard work of Diane Goettel, BLP’s Executive Editor—for which I am thankful. So now you can go to BLP get the copies of Weird Pig that you are so desperate to have. If you haven’t read it, let me recommend it to you now—almost four years after its release. Even after all this time, a lot of people still don’t know Weird Pig exists. But the people who have read it report laughing during the experience of reading it, and otherwise finding joy in its pages. It would make a great gift for Father’s Day, but then that’s already happened this year. So why not start a tradition of giving gifts on Labor Day? Why don’t you give someone Weird Pig, as a reward for their backbreaking labor?If you have a book club, now would be the perfect time for you to force everyone in it to read Weird Pig. If you don’t have a book club, now would be the perfect time to kidnap a handful of strangers, duct tape their hands together, sit them down in your sunroom, set mimosas before them, with straws for them to drink the mimosas through, since they can’t use their hands, and with God’s light shining on their faces make them talk about Weird Pig as if they read the book, which they have not done at all.Or, get this: you could go to Costco.One thing that upsets me about the publication of Weird Pig is that, even after all this time, no one from SEMO Press, or any other press, has taken me to Costco. I saw this video online last week that had Colm Tóibín in it. I’ve never read anything by Colm Tóibín. I’m sure I will soon, because this is one of those moments where I write a sentence like, “I’ve never read anything by Colm Tóibín,” and realize it’s kind of embarrassing. I should have read some Colm Tóibín by now. I don’t know why.I guess he just published a new book, which is not the one I will read—and why is that, I wonder? How did I decide, without even thinking about it, that his new book will not be the one I read? I imagine it’s the one he would want me to read, since he’s just published it. Sometimes I’m a mystery to myself. Because Colm Tóibín has a new book out, his publisher made this video of him going to a Costco. I don’t know what Costco it was, but I guess he’d never been to one. And that makes me feel better about not having read one of his books. Everyone in the world has at least one thing they’ve never done. I guess they thought it would be adorable and fun, to take this Irish novelist to a place that’s so utterly American. They filmed him walking around and getting free samples of different things, the way people do when they visit a Costco. I’d say he looked like a fish out of water, but he didn’t. Everyone fits right in when they go to Costco. I didn’t watch much of the video, though I would go back and finish it if I knew he had one of those giant slices of Costco pizza. I’d like to see the Irish eat that pizza. It’s so greasy.But the video made me want to publish another book. I was kind of on the fence, before, about whether it would be a good idea to do that again. The last time I published a book, a pandemic happened. Who knows what the next one might bring. I didn’t realize that when you publish a book now you get to go to Costco. I’ll bet Colm Tóibín didn’t even have to drive himself over there. I’ll bet they took him in someone else’s car. The Culture You DeserveThis Friday, I will have an essay on another Substack, The Culture We Deserve. Every Monday, Jessa Crispin publishes an essay over there, and they publish one by a guest writer every Friday. My essay, this Friday, concerns The Way of the Househusband, an anime show and manga series by Kousuke Oono, which is about a dangerous Yakuza gangster who gives up his violent life, gets married, and devotes himself to cooking and cleaning, but persists in being a frightening and intense, if nonviolent, man.You have to be a paid subscriber to The Culture We Deserve to access my essay, but it’s worth it. It doesn’t cost much, and Jessa and her husband Nico Rodriguez do great work over there. They even have a podcast.Church of the LibraryMy brother Jim wrote in his newsletter recently about what it’s like when atheism softens into agnosticism, among other things. And I was interested to read about that, because I think I’ve traveled on a similar trajectory to his. As a teenager, and for ...
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    20 m
  • All Eyes on Ian Fleming, Etc.

    All Eyes on Ian Fleming, Etc.
    Jun 21 2024
    We need to do something about this James Bond fellow. Let me explain what I mean. Because I’m not saying it in a fun way, like maybe I’m pretending to be Goldfinger, having an incredible time on a private jet with my golden finger.No, I’ve been reading Ian Fleming novels. I started with Dr. No, moved on to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and have just finished Casino Royale, the first installment in the series. You don’t have to read the books in order. No one checks. I started reading them in the first place because I saw one in the New Fiction section at the library. Dr. No wasn’t new, but it had been reprinted, so, close enough, I guess. I thought if I checked it out I might have a good time reading a book. I thought it could be a reading adventure, like what those kids have on Superwhy whenever they read books.I had, also, been thinking about James Bond. I had been comparing him, in my mind, to Ethan Hunt, the hero of the Mission Impossible films and TV show.When I compare any two characters in my mind—which I do only on occasions that demand it, as it is a laborious process that leaves me exhausted for days afterward—I shut my eyes as tightly as I can and picture one of the characters. Then, with great concentration, I imagine the image of the other character, some distance from the first, for safety’s sake. Through painstaking mental effort, I pull the first character closer to the other, and then do the same with the second, until finally they are side-by-side, no space between them at all. This can take hours, and someday it will kill me. But it’s the only way to go about this work that I know of.In the end, I felt like Ethan Hunt was a much more interesting character than James Bond. He just seems like he does more things. He climbs, he runs, he puts on masks. He’s usually dressed for movement, and he’s good at pretending to be people he’s not. What does James Bond do? Well, he looks good in a suit. He’s particular about how he likes his martinis to be served—so he has the formidable trait of being finnicky about drinks.He doesn’t wear disguises, that I can recall. He rarely uses an alias. In fact, one of the things this international superspy is most famous for is the way he tells people his actual name, repeating his surname so as to give it extra emphasis and make sure everyone remembers to call him James Bond, which is his real name. It’s an intriguing quality to have, when you’re an agent of something called the “secret service.” I went into reading Dr. No, the first 007 novel I picked up, with an open heart and an open mind. I wanted to have fun. I think it was printed on the back cover that none other than Raymond Chandler said Ian Fleming was the best suspense writer around. That’s quite an endorsement.Raymond Chandler wasn’t wrong. Ian Fleming knows how to show readers a good time. The pace of his novels is consistently high. His hero travels to exotic locations. He eats great food and drinks a lot. The drinks are always good, and so is the food. He has hot sex with beautiful women to whom he is not attached in any way. They’re either provided to him by the secret service, as colleagues that he then sleeps with, or they appear out of thin air, like the woman whose name I forget from Dr. No. Bond arrives on the shore of an island, near Jamaica, where he suspects Dr. No has built his secret hideout. As he plans his next move, a woman walks over to where he is. She is startled to see him. She is beautiful and not wearing any clothes.Now that I’ve read three Ian Fleming novels, it seems to me that the appeal of James Bond is that he’s a man who has everything handed to him. He messes up fairly consistently. He gets his friends killed, he gets captured, and he loses at baccarat when it’s his mission to not lose at baccarat. But somehow, by god, he wins, usually thanks to someone else intervening on his behalf, and in the end M begrudgingly congratulates him. 007 has done it again! The women he falls in love with, and to whom he comes around to feeling he could perhaps actually devote himself to, conveniently die, so that he never has to follow through with being tied down. The novels are a breeze to read, and it’s fun to read a breeze. But let’s face it: as a character, James Bond kind of sucks. To illustrate how much he sucks, let me cite a couple of passages from Casino Royale.In this first one, Bond has learned that Vesper, the woman who was assigned to aid him on his current mission, has been kidnapped, and is likely being used as bait to get to him:This was just what he had been afraid of. These blithering women who thought they could do a man’s work. Why the hell couldn’t they stay at home and mind their pots and pans and stick to their frocks and gossip and leave men’s work to the men. And now for this to happen to him, just when the job had come off so beautifully. For Vesper to fall for an old trick like that and get ...
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    22 m
  • Tough Guys Are Boring Unless They're Being Taken Apart

    Tough Guys Are Boring Unless They're Being Taken Apart
    Jun 13 2024
    My kids, wife, and I spent a recent week in Philadelphia and New York City, seeing family, seeing friends, making new friends, walking on the High Line, going to a show, and doing gymnastics in Central Park. We did other things, too, and we had a great time. I was not the one who did the gymnastics.What I can I say about New York City that hasn’t already been said? Absolutely nothing. That’s what. But what is new is a short story that was published just the other day at Bull magazine. Beware: it is, like other things I’ve published recently, highly sexual. Why have I been writing so much about sex? The answer is that I haven’t. It was in 2020 and 2021 that I wrote a lot about sex, and I think it’s because thanks to COVID I wasn’t around other people anymore. Like, not at all. I was with my family, but everyone else was inaccessible, because I didn’t want to get sick or make others sick. For the longest time, like so many people did, I felt the absence of nearly everyone on planet Earth, and my isolation expressed itself in this unlikely, weird antieroticism. I wrote about sex and how awful it can be, even when everyone involved is at least having an okay time. I was not the only one. I recall another writer on social media wondering publicly why everything she wrote at that time had turned abruptly sexual. She blamed the pandemic. I think she was on to something, and I don’t think it was just the two of us. Anyway. It’s only now that my antierotic stories are getting published. That’s how it is when you’re a writer. You write something, and unless you want to publish it yourself you have to wait sometimes a long time for anyone to see it. It’s not my fault. I don’t make the rules. I don’t even know how to make lasagna.A Tale of Two Adaptations of the Novel The Hunter by Donald E. WestlakeI have not read The Hunter by Donald E. Westlake, but I’ve recently watched its two film adaptations. Or, rather, I watched the whole of one of them, and the first half of the other, which I saw before, once, a long time ago.I watched these movies the way their creators intended: in increments of anywhere from thirty seconds to twenty minutes, over the course of seven to ten days, interrupted every time by the pressing need to go to bed so that obligations can be met the next day, or by a kid who wants to watch something else on the TV on which I have been viewing the film. I’m not complaining. It’s okay that I don’t get to watch whole things in one sitting. It’s a privilege to be one member of a household, to have demands placed on me by a whole in which I am one part. It can be vexing, but in this season of my life it’s where happiness comes from. The first of the two adaptations I watched was Point Blank, directed by John Boorman and starring Lee Marvin.As the poster for the film indicates, Lee Marvin plays a human head that has lost its body but grown a hand and bought a gun, so that it can talk to people and shoot bullets at them. Lee Marvin’s head is out for revenge, and for two hours it rolls around the city of Los Angeles, screaming about how great it was to have a body and how much he misses his arms and legs.I’m just kidding, of course—haha!—but not about the revenge. The story of the film is this: Walker, a criminal, is convinced by a friend and fellow criminal to participate in a low-stakes heist. But it turns out the stakes are higher than he was led to believe, and he gets double-crossed by his partner in crime and his own wife, who has fallen for the partner in crime. They shoot him and leave him for dead—but you’d better believe he’s not dead. He returns to the city, having convalesced, with all of his arms and legs, plus his torso and stuff, and gets to work.Here is one of the weirder parts of the movie, in which Walker has returned from his supposed death and tracks down his wife, intending to murder the man who betrayed him, who he has reason to believe is living with her: If you don’t feel like committing the minute or so to watching it, the scene at first consists of Lee Marvin walking through a cavernous hallway as his footsteps echo. The footsteps persist as we see his wife going about her day, and we see him driving around the city in search of her. The footsteps continue unnervingly through this montage until at last his wife enters her apartment and he bursts in behind her. He storms into the bedroom, where he empties his pistol into one side of the bed, which has no one in it. We can assume that it’s the side of the bed where he would be sleeping, were they still together. And so is he blasting away at the absence of his rival, or at the absence of himself? Whose blood is he really thirsting for? I watched that scene and couldn’t believe it. It’s a bizarre series of images and sounds. It’s the kind of thing that makes me feel like it’s good to watch a movie from time to time. It’s not long after that scene that the film ...
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    23 m
Arte Historia y Crítica Literaria
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