December 27, 2019 Best of 2019 Listen to Hebe Uhart, Now That She’s Gone By Alejandra Costamagna We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! Hebe Uhart. Photo: Agustina Fernández. In section 16, grave 34 of the Chacarita Cemetery in Buenos Aires, pumpkins and tomatoes now grow. Pumpkins and tomatoes, just like that. A scene that could have been written by Hebe Uhart, who, since October 12, 2018, has lain in a grave there. An image worthy of her stories: reality interrupted by strangeness. “A story is a little plant that’s born,” Uhart used to say that Felisberto Hernández used to say. Hernández was one of her go-to authors, along with Natalia Ginzburg, Fray Mocho, and Simone Weil. Uhart starts her magnificent story “Guiding the Ivy” by announcing, “Here I am arranging the plants so they don’t overcrowd one another, pulling off dead leaves, and getting rid of ants.” * Some time ago, at the launch party for one of her books, Hebe Uhart—born in 1936 in Moreno, Argentina, author of some fifteen volumes of stories, novels, and chronicles, winner of the 2017 Manuel Rojas Ibero-American Narrative Award, rural schoolteacher, philosophy professor in her youth and leader of literary workshops until the end of her days, curious in the extreme, chronic traveler, and admirer of the animal kingdom—confessed the following: I follow Chekhov’s advice, which I believe in absolutely: forget about the content of what the characters say and pay attention to how they say it, look at how the characters move, how they walk, how they are silent. I’m interested in people’s specificity. How we move, how we walk, how we keep quiet: that is what Uhart observes in each of us. But also how we pause, how we sneeze, what onomatopoeias we use, how our being is revealed through everyday gestures that at times can contradict the ideas we claim to hold. It’s through these minute observations, and her repudiation of generalities, that the writer unfurls her tentacles to construct her characters. And along the way she sets the coordinates for a wisdom of her own, old and at the same time very simple: one of permanent awe. In the pages of her books are the primordial questionings, the first attempts to understand the world—“the who-am-I’s and the what-am-I-like’s,” as the protagonist of one of her stories says. What are we? Where are we going? Where did we come from? The classic questions of philosophy are in her pages anchored to the most domestic of situations. Hebe Uhart trains her eye on the things we witness so often that eventually we stop seeing them. Read more >>
December 27, 2019 Best of 2019 What’s the Point? By Michael Chabon We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! As of spring 2020, I will be stepping down as Chairman of the MacDowell Colony’s Board of Directors. It’s time for somebody else to sit in the chair. When I took this position, nine years ago, Barack Obama was the President of the United States, Donald Trump was facing the imminent collapse of his financial empire, and Prince, David Bowie, Leonard Nimoy, Nora Ephron, Ursula K. Le Guin, Philip Roth, Gene Wilder, Muhammad Ali, Amy Winehouse, Elmore Leonard, Alan Rickman, and my father were still with us, just to mention the people who meant a lot to me. Along with BookCourt bookstore in Brooklyn, Saab automobiles, RadioShack, and, apparently, common decency. So, you’re welcome. These feel like such dire times, times of violence and dislocation, schism, paranoia, and the earth-scorching politics of fear. Babies have iPads, the ice caps are melting, and your smart refrigerator is eavesdropping on your lovemaking (and, frankly, it’s not impressed). Read more >>
December 26, 2019 Best of 2019 Our Town and the Next Town Over By Joanna Howard We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! The author as a child, dressed as Oscar the Grouch. Every year it floods on three sides of our town. I do not know how any town could have floods on three sides, but there it is. My mom says it is because the very rich people who live on the lake to the south of us keep the water levels too high so they can run their speedboats year-round, and then every spring, the rains come and we flood, and no one cares because we are all poor. It floods to the south along the river with the park with all the pavilions and the baseball diamonds and the tennis courts and the Frisbee golf course, and the small municipal (in-ground!) pool. And it floods on the southeast, behind the high school, and the motels near the highway. The Townsman Inn and Restaurant and Lounge has been renovated twenty times in half as many years, due to floods, most recently to feature taxidermy animals, on a shelf above all the booths, that stare at you in a menacing way over your coffee. And the one little tiny movie theater in town just seems to have water standing in the first three rows forever and always, and yet it remains open and we go see movies there, we just don’t sit in the first three rows. It floods to the northeast of town, too, all the way up practically to my Uncle Fuzz’s place, where he sleeps in the daytime while my aunt Margie sups on Sweet’N Low. There is the rust-red creek creeping up the concrete steps of my Uncle Fuzz’s house, while he is sleeping by day, because he is on graveyard shift his whole adult life at the tire factory, until he retires early with asbestos poisoning (from the tire factory). Read more >>
December 26, 2019 Best of 2019 Dice Roll: The Phantom Gambler By Michael LaPointe We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! On September 24, 1980, a man wearing cowboy boots and carrying two brown suitcases entered Binion’s Horseshoe Casino in Las Vegas. One suitcase held $777,000 in cash; the other was empty. After converting the money into chips, the man approached a craps table on the casino floor and put everything on the backline. This meant he was betting against the woman rolling the dice. If she lost, he’d double his money. If she won, he’d lose everything. Scarcely aware of the amount riding on her dice, the woman rolled three times: 6, 9, 7. “Pay the backline,” said the dealer. And just like that, the man won over $1.5 million. He calmly filled the empty suitcase with his winnings, exited Binion’s into the desert afternoon, and drove off. It was the largest amount ever bet on a dice roll in America. “Mystery Man Wins Fortune,” the Los Angeles Times reported. No one knew the identity of the fair-haired young Texan who’d just made history, and so he became known as the “Phantom Gambler.” “He was cool,” said Jack Binion, president of the Horseshoe. “He really had a lot of gamble in him.” But it would be years before the phantom would be seen in Vegas again. Read more >>
December 26, 2019 Best of 2019 One Word: Salty By Myriam Gurba We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! One kid raises their hand. They ask, “Miss Gurba, why’d you become a high school teacher?” This is a classic time-killing move. My tone turns serious. I respond, “It was an accident.” Hearing a public school employee be so blunt widens kids’ eyes. They’ve baited me into a tacit game of truth or dare and I’ve knowingly broken the rules. I’m pretty sure they expect me to belt out the opening lyrics of “Greatest Love of All.” They want a saint. What garbage. Catholics raised me, but I’m not a martyr. Still, even teenagers know you’re not supposed to admit that you stumbled into their classroom, but who cares? I did and I stayed and I continue to stumble in every morning. Something my students ask me less often is whether or not I like teaching. Something they ask me even less often than that is what I like about my profession. Read more >>
December 25, 2019 Best of 2019 On Cussing By Katherine Dunn We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! So. We cuss. Some of us cuss by saying mercy me or suffering succotash. I like to say shooty-pooty, which I learned from a nice Baltimore boy back in 1963. It’s a Cub Scout version of shitty-pity, which is a cutesy diminutive for just plain shit. This kind of substitution for a cuss word is what linguists call an amelioration. It softens the blow while still addressing the topic. This is not the same as a euphemism, by the way, which tries to evade or screen the subject. Americans are big on substitute amelioration. We invent thousands of them daily, it seems. Darn for damn, gosh for God. They often sound as though we started to say the taboo word but caught ourselves. Almost all of us have darker vocabularies if we’re pushed. We all have strong vocal reactions to pain and surprise, to anger or fear. We often use the same language in response to the strong positive stimulus of pleasure or awe or humor. Cuss words and phrases, whatever they may be in our individual vocabularies, are the most potent words we have for expressing emotion. Read more >>