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.

    robertlong4man.substack.com
    RobertLong4man
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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
RobertLong4man
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  • This Is the Hour of Lead

    This Is the Hour of Lead
    2024/11/08
    I am suspending these Hoedowns for the time being. They have been going pretty steadily, on one platform or another, for several years. It’s time for a break. I don't know how long it will last—maybe a month, maybe a year, or forever. But I am as stunned as a lot of people are, and I woke up Wednesday morning, having barely slept, needing to revise myself in significant ways. I have suspended my social media accounts, also maybe for a week but maybe forever. I can't write something that's wryly funny, or hysterically stupid, when I feel like god has buried his fist in my chest. Everyone with a paid subscription to the Hoedown: your support means more to me than I know how to say, and I am thankful for it. But you may not get your money's worth for a while, so by all means suspend or halt those contributions, and put your money toward something that gets results.I find I am all but allergic to anything having to do with the recent election. I don’t want to turn on the radio. I don’t want to hear those voices, and I don’t even mean the candidates’ voices, but rather the voices of smart radio people who talk with their noses as much as their mouths. They all matriculated at the Smarm Academy, and have fond memories of casual evenings spent on the Quad Bucolic, playing lazy games of soccer and comparing trust funds. But as much as I hate this recent election, and everything about it, I will tell you this thing. I substitute taught at the luxury high school on election day. I overheard students discussing the election. One girl, a ninth-grader, was telling a classmate that it didn't matter if Kamala Harris did "something sexual" to "get herself a job," she was still a better candidate than Trump. I didn’t know what she was talking about. I don’t know where people get their disinformation anymore. Hearing that was not the first inkling I got, that things would go badly on election night. But it was a big inkling, that things were not going to happen the way I hoped they would. Why are people so eager to tell the same horrid stories about every woman they find out exists? Why do the people who hear those stories apparently clamor to believe them? Why do people hate women so much? It is true that Harris should have distinguished herself more from Biden. It's incredible to me that she didn't. She shouldn't have campaigned with Liz Cheney, but I don't even know if it would have made a difference. People have lost their minds. They will believe anything. I have read some op-eds since election night, about how as citizens of this nation we shan't disengage. We cannot give in and lose hope, because we need all the strength we have to fight and resist what's coming. We have to be the neighborhood Winston Churchill, holding the line against the horde. I think I said similar things in 2016, but what does it even mean? Where is the fight they keep talking about? Is someone leading it? How does the fighting work, exactly? Should I drive around in my car, and hope I see the fight somewhere, so I can lend it my formidable strength? Are we getting together to fight whatever we’re fighting, or are we all doing it in our own ways, and hoping for the best? What are the long-term goals of this resistance? How will it lead to a better world than the one we have now, which I want to hide from for the rest of my life?My experience of political engagement has brought me twenty-five years of defeat, horror, and disappointment. The best parts have been when the disappointment is delayed a few months, after some moments of quasi-triumph, and everything goes back to getting worse. If anyone knows how to get new results that will make me stop looking up small cities in Guatemala I can try to persuade my family to move to, before things get really bad, let me know if I can help. Because even though Guatemala is in the same time zone we live in right now, there is no way my family would go with me there. Also, I’m sure there are bigger problems in Guatemala than the ones we have here, and I have too much stuff now to relocate like that. Where in Guatemala would I put all these books? I don't think the Democrats we have right now know how to get different results from the ones we’ve been getting throughout my lifetime. I’m not sure they even want them. Not like the rest of us do. And if they run another lawyer in four years who campaigns with Republicans and/or talks about how the Republicans are fundamentally good and we need them to be at their very best, so that we can be our best, I will burst into flames. I will turn into lava. Here I am, announcing the suspension of the Pig City News Weekly Register Hoedown Quarterly Review Times a Thousand, and I can’t seem to stop typing. It’s a form of mental illness, I think, to imagine there is a point to this, to think that when you talk someone else really listens. It's not unlikely that a week or a month from now I'll be back to my old self again, spewing ...
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    9 分
  • Who's Afraid of NotebookLM's Capacity to Analyze Texts by Virginia Woolf and Other Authors?

    Who's Afraid of NotebookLM's Capacity to Analyze Texts by Virginia Woolf and Other Authors?
    2024/10/31
    I almost hit SEND on this thing before I realized it’s Halloween. Two Halloweens ago, the magazine hex published my 1,000-word short story “Spider.” It’s about a spider that follows a woman out of the dream she is having and into her life, making it more complicated. Read it now, or hear me read it at the start of the audio recording of this newsletter.I dreamed I lived in a neighborhood where residents of four households near my house were angry with me. Why four? I don’t know. I had gone to their lawns, dug rectangles out of their grass with a shovel, and replaced the grass with bronze plaques I had made. They featured some of my original writing. I don’t recall what the writing was, but everyone was upset. These people didn’t want bronze plaques, they wanted grass. I had to apologize to the homeowners, telling them I have these borderline-manic episodes where I feel so inspired, and so full of things I want to tell everyone, that I have to do something to get it all out. What I did this time was make bronze plaques and embed them in lawns. I had to atone for what I had done. I had to remove the plaques and spread grass seed on the rectangles I had dug. Much of the dream consisted of planning these corrective measures. I thought I should wake up in the middle of the night and undo what I had done under cover of darkness. That way, no one would see me out there working. I might not feel so ashamed. This dream was plainly inspired by two things. One is that not long ago some workers from Google Fiber went through our neighborhood, digging rectangular holes in the lawns of all of the people who live here. They didn’t tell anyone they were going to do it. The only communication we got from Google were signs sticking out of our lawns that read, “Thank you for your patience.” Patience with what? The little signs didn’t say. Later, someone came and spray-painted the parts of the lawns where they would dig. I didn’t know what the spray paint was for. A few days after that, the crews arrived and they started digging. It didn’t take them long. They dug the holes, they ran cable through the ground, I guess, and most of the holes they covered again, while others, like the one on the edge of my lawn, now has a box of some kind embedded inside.The other thing that I don’t doubt inspired the dream is that I once again have that cyclical misgiving—it may be a seasonal misgiving—that the creative work I do is an imposition on anyone it’s presented to. Writing something and making it available to other people is equivalent to tearing up someone’s property and shoving the thing I have made where the nice grass used to be. They didn’t ask for this thing to be there. Why is it there? Why haven’t I done something more useful with my time than this? Come on, man.D.A.R.E.I wanted to share something I saw in the news about a substitute teacher.This guy in Minnesota apparently subbed for an English class where he—in order to help the students understand literature, I guess?—reenacted the murder of George Floyd. In the reenactment, he was the murdering officer, and the role of George Floyd was played by a high school student.But that’s not all. He did a series of other things:“According to the school’s statement, the substitute also:* Twisted a student’s arm behind the student’s back and showed pressure points on the chin* Fake punched a student with his fist “really close” to the student’s face* Mimicked holding up a gun and pointing it at students* Repeatedly made racially-harmful comments and told sexist jokes* Spoke in disturbing detail about dead bodies he had seen and shared explicit details about two sexual assault cases he investigated* Stated cops would be the best criminals because they know how to get away with stuff, adding that he once received an “A” grade on a paper about how to get away with murder* Stated police brutality isn’t real”Apparently, he told the students he is a police officer. The story says that status of his has not been verified by the school district. One thing I find really frustrating about the story is that it isn’t funny. Maybe I would laugh, if I heard these details in the right context, but it would be the way I laugh out of surprise. It would be mirthless. Having been a substitute teacher on occasion for the last year or so, I know from on-the-ground experience that there is a great deal of potential humor in the concept of a substitute teacher entering a classroom, ignoring whatever lesson plans they’re given, and instead doing a bizarre series of things that make no sense. If done properly, this person could be like Mr. G, the high school teacher in the film Bottoms, played by NFL running back Marshawn Lynch:Alas, what happened at the school in Minnesota isn’t funny. If his classroom performance had been caught on video, I don’t doubt it would be horrifying. If we could hear the “jokes” he told the students...
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    29 分
  • I Sacrificed a Short Story to the Spirits of AI. In Return, They Gave Me a Podcast about It.

    I Sacrificed a Short Story to the Spirits of AI. In Return, They Gave Me a Podcast about It.
    2024/10/18
    Last week, I sacrificed a short story to the gods of artificial intelligence. I was curious about Google’s NotebookLM feature. It’s the latest thing that they have now. If you give it a link to a website, or upload a document, it will use AI to provide you with a summary of whatever you’ve given it. You can chat with an AI personality about the document, and respond to any questions you have. It will make claims and cite passages from the text in order to back them up. It will furthermore—and this is the really weird part—generate an audio conversation in which two people discuss the document you have given it, as if they were recording it for a podcast. But neither of the people actually exists, and the conversation never took place.It is yet another strange new thing in the long parade of strange new things. It’s one more thing that makes me wonder how anyone can teach literature now. A student can take any essay prompt you give them, feed it to NotebookLM, and get a fairly competent response, which they can then turn in for a grade. AI detectors can only do so much, and I can’t imagine it’s hard for young people to outsmart them.I wanted to see what NotebookLM would make of my short story “Midnight Oil.” It’s a story I wrote some time ago, and which I gave up trying to publish. I decided it just isn’t good enough to persevere with. It is too ridiculous for its own good. Maybe its wings aren’t strong enough for it to fly on its own. But it definitely has its moments, and I don’t want to just burn it or bury it somewhere. So I’m devoting this newsletter to it. I’ll read it for the audio version, and for this written version I will cut and paste it, below. First I’ll show you what NotebookLM spat back at me when I fed it “Midnight Oil.” Here is the summary:The excerpt, taken from "Midnight Oil.C.pdf," presents a darkly humorous and poignant story about a brother and sister, Jack and Suzie. The text unfolds through a series of events centered around Jack's impulsive and eccentric business ventures. The story begins with Jack announcing his intention to open a pet cremation service called "Midnight Oil," much to Suzie's initial disapproval. The narrative then follows the chaotic day as Jack's business takes off, unexpectedly receiving a flurry of customers with dead pets. However, the most dramatic turn of events comes when a customer arrives with a bucket of live kittens, prompting a conflict between Jack and Suzie. Their differing perspectives on the situation - Jack's ruthless capitalist drive versus Suzie's moral concern for the kittens - culminate in a physical altercation. Ultimately, Suzie prevails, preventing Jack from cremating the kittens and ultimately taking them in herself. The text explores themes of familial bonds, the complexities of morality, and the struggle between idealism and practicality. It examines the clash between Jack's reckless entrepreneurial spirit and Suzie's attempt to inject compassion and ethical consideration into his business dealings. Through this seemingly absurd narrative, the author reveals the intricate interplay between human connection, personal responsibility, and the unexpected consequences of unchecked ambition.Key TopicsPet cremationFinancial troubleFamily tiesBrotherly conflictMoral dilemmaIt’s an excellent summary. All of the most important story elements are represented there. It also expresses pretty succinctly, I think, what’s wrong with the story, and why it ultimately just isn’t as good as other things I’ve written. The moral dilemma is too absurd for the story’s good. One of the characters thinks it’s okay to burn living kittens to death. It doesn’t make any sense.In a realistic short story, anyway, it doesn’t look right. Absurdity and gravity are at odds with one another, and the written thing suffers as a result.I wrote the story in the first place as an experiment. I used to give an assignment to students in fiction workshops, in which I challenged them to take one feature of their word processing software that they’ve never used before, and make it the foundation for a page or two of text. If they never tried using footnotes, now was their chance to play with footnotes. Students never failed surprised me and themselves, with what they came up with. It was a good time. It’s also something I like to do sometimes with my own writing. What does that button on the Microsoft Word “Insert” ribbon do? I have no idea. Let’s make a story out of it.In the case of “Midnight Oil,” I wanted to write a short story that had math equations in it. I wanted some of the math equations to make no sense and not really be mathematical.When it was finished, I liked the story. No one else did. I came to understand why. So I offered it up to the artificial intelligence. I cleaved some meat off of my brain and presented it to the AI gods, so that they may devour or discard it. I’ll put it below, and ...
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    54 分

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