February 28, 2024 First Person Good Manners By Hebe Uhart Hebe Uhart. Photograph by Nora Lezano. Hebe Uhart had a unique way of looking—a power of observation that was streaked with humor, but which above all spoke to her tremendous curiosity. Uhart, a prolific Argentine writer of novels, short stories, and travel logs, died in 2018. “In the last years of her life, Hebe Uhart read as much fiction as nonfiction, but she preferred writing crónicas, she used to say, because she felt that what the world had to offer was more interesting than her own experience or imagination,” writes Mariana Enríquez in an introduction to a newly translated volume of these crónicas, which will be published in May by Archipelago Books. At the Review, where we published one of Uhart’s short stories posthumously in 2019, we will be publishing a series of these crónicas in the coming months. Read others in the series here. Yesterday I was riding the 92. The bus was half-empty and a woman of about sixty or seventy caught my eye. It was difficult to get a sense of her age, or her social class. Could she be poor? No, but she didn’t seem rich either, nor did I pick up on any of that visible effort the middle class put into their appearance: dressing neatly, in complementary colors. Her clothes reminded me, more than anything, of someone trying to go incognito. She didn’t come off as a housewife; I decided she had the look of a government inspector. She sat down beside me. “Señora, I’m getting off at Pueyrredón,” I said, so I wouldn’t have to get up if her stop was before mine. “Works for me,” she said, “I’m getting off at Laprida.” Read More
February 27, 2024 First Person My Friend Ellis By Geoffrey Mak Photograph by Ben Ross Davis. Twice in his life, Ellis made a contract with himself. He’d promised he would give himself five years and by the end of them, if he still wanted to kill himself, he would. Both times he’d made this contract, he still wanted to die at year five. But since, for a few months during each five-year span, he had a break from his compulsive ideations, he told himself it meant that the clock had reset and the contract was void. That, and he didn’t want to kill himself, not really. I met Ellis in New York when I was twenty-six. He was the soft-spoken cybergoth—black mesh top, bleached-blond hair shaved to a perennial buzz—who always danced by the speaker stacks at warehouse parties. The angles of his jaw and his heavy brow lent him a harsh beauty. He told me about his suicidal thoughts the first time we had dinner. We didn’t know each other well, really at all, so his pain alarmed me. “I’ve had them ever since I was young,” he added. “Me too,” I said. Read More
February 26, 2024 Diaries July Notebook, 2018 By Daniel Poppick Jacques Hérold. From a portfolio in issue no. 26 of the Review (Summer–Fall 1961). Parable of the Movie “I like your movie. I can tell that horror is a big influence.” “Thank you, yes, I love horror movies.” “Oh, I didn’t mean horror movies. I meant horror.” “Thank you again. The feeling of horror itself also happens to be one of my biggest influences.” “You’re welcome. But I didn’t say anything about a feeling.” “I beg your pardon, but what kind of horror is neither a movie nor a feeling?” “Me.” “But we just met. You didn’t influence my movie at all.” “Well then. I take it back.” Read More
February 23, 2024 The Review’s Review Philistines By Nancy Lemann Welcome to Disney World! Photograph courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. 1. Once I had to go to Disney World with my small children. On the way to the airport our taxi driver exhibited signs of Obsessive Disney Disorder—when he found out where we were going he started obsessively describing and listing and explaining everything that had to do with Disney World, even though he was a grown man. We stayed at the Portofino Bay Hotel, a Disney-owned property that is a replica of the storied village on the Italian Riviera. There were imitation Renaissance churches and Mediterranean piazzas clustered around a fake harbor with old Fiats parked on the cobblestones and fishing boats moored in the fake bay. Outside cafés ranged on the harbor, serving espresso under green-and-white striped awnings. Italian cypresses were planted along the pools. If you didn’t know it was a Disney replica of a real place, it would have to be characterized as being extremely tasteful and lovely. So you did tend to get confused between: Is this a theme park of Italy or is it just lovely and pleasant. There is a REAL Florida out there that is TRULY historic. I madly drove out to find the REAL Orlando, forgetting my phobia of freeways. After almost getting killed (horns blasting at my side, cars swerving out of my way), I did find the real Orlando. It is situated on several lakes lined by turn-of-the-last-century Victorians and bungalows. I went to the history museum. The number one industry in central Florida is cattle. Has anyone in Florida ever seen a head of cattle? No. But maybe that was before Disney. Read More
February 22, 2024 Eat Your Words Cooking with Franz Kafka By Valerie Stivers Photograph by Erica Maclean. In Franz Kafka’s first published story, “Description of a Struggle,” the narrator is sitting in a drawing room at a rickety little table, eating a piece of fruitcake that “did not taste very good,” when a man walks up to him. The man is described as an “acquaintance,” but we soon realize he is a double, or another part of the narrator’s self. The acquaintance has fallen in love and wants to boast about it. “If you weren’t in such a state,” he scolds, “[you] would know how improper it is to talk about an amorous girl to a man sitting alone drinking schnapps.” The comment seems to threaten an unchecked appetite. What would the lonely, schnapps-drinking man do if tempted by the girl? The struggle that follows, metaphorically speaking, is between the sides of the protagonist’s character—on one side, the man who desires to stand apart from society and guard his creative self, and on the other, he who wishes to fit in and reap the pleasures of fruitcake and amorous girls. Read More
February 21, 2024 Poetry Stopping Dead from the Neck Up By Delmore Schwartz Gustav Klimt, Tannenwald, 1901. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, public domain. Today we are publishing a previously unpublished poem by the poet, critic, and editor Delmore Schwartz. Schwartz was hailed as a promising short story writer and poet in the generation that included Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and John Berryman; a longtime editor at the Partisan Review, he was the youngest person ever to win the Bollingen Prize in 1959. (Some of Schwartz’s poems and letters were published in the Review in the eighties and nineties.) The poem below was discovered without a date, but is immediately recognizable for its recasting of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” from an alcoholic’s perspective. This riff is made poignant by the fact that Schwartz’s later years were characterized by mental illness and alcoholism. He died, largely isolated, at the Chelsea Hotel in 1966. Whose booze this is, I ought to think I know. I bought it several weeks ago. It stands there stolid on the shelf Making me feel lower than low Reminding me how I am low, Making me think of Crane and Poe. My fatlipped mouth must think it queer To stop without a single beer, To stop without a single beer The deadest day I ever spent In boredom and in self-contempt, Sober, sour, discontent. My fingers have begun to shake, My nerves think there is some mistake. The only other thought I think. Is how I failed to be a rake, A story which should take the cake. The booze stares at me like a brink. But I must wait for five, I think. Long hours must pass, before I drink; Long hours and slow, before I drink. The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in April.