Lo mejor del 2009

Tal como todos los años Hijo del Medio se despide hasta marzo con el Best American Magazines Writing 2009, libro que recoge anualmente parte de lo mejor del periodismo estadounidense. Este año fue el más activo para este blog y para todo el ecosistema que gira en torno a la información. Sin duda, la revolución de internet, la crisis financiera sumándole males a la crisis de los medios y el destape de Twitter, marcaron un año muy intenso. Hablar de periodismo es apasionante, en especial cuando las audiencias se multiplican y la democracia de (y en) los flujos sociales se expanden. Los medios no pueden cerrarse y dejar de aprender de la tecnología y las audiencias, menos hoy, dice Alan Rusbrigder, director de The Guardian, frente a la idea de imponer muros de contención para los contenidos online. Probablemente esta frase suene mucho más de lo que creemos en 2010. Los siguientes son sólo algunos de los textos escogidos. Y esperamos comenzar en marzo con algunos de los textos escogidos por el Premio de Excelencia de la Universidasd Alberto Hurtado.

The Things That Carried Him

Don Collins stood in the sun and mapped out in his mind a rectangle on the grass, eight feet by three feet. He is forty-nine, wears a handful of pomade in his hair, and no longer needs a tape to take the measure of things.

Indiana state law dictates that the lid of the burial vault be two feet below the surface. That meant Collins had to dig down five feet, ultimately lifting out about a hundred cubic feet of earth. He wouldn't need a tape to measure that, either. Since 1969, his father, Don Sr., has owned the Collins Funeral Home, just up Elm Street, just past the little yellow house with the two yellow ribbons tied to the tree out front. As a boy, Don Jr. had lived upstairs with the spirits and the rest of his family, over the chapel. He and his younger brother, Kevin, would later work with their dad in the back room, embalming the bodies of their neighbors at three o'clock in the morning, and he still assists his father in his capacity as coroner. But Don Jr. has had enough of bodies in back rooms. He likes it better outside, in the sticky air, working with the earth

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The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace

He was six-feet-two, and on a good day he weighed 200 pounds. He wore granny glasses with a head scarf, points knotted at the back, a look that was both pirate-like and housewife-ish. He always wore his hair long. He had dark eyes, soft voice, caveman chin, a lovely, peak-lipped mouth that was his best feature. He walked with an ex-athlete's saunter, a roll from the heels, as if anything physical was a pleasure. David Foster Wallace worked surprising turns on nearly everything: novels, journalism, vacation. His life was an information hunt, collecting hows and whys. "I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today," he once said, "of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it." He wanted to write "stuff about what it feels like to live. Instead of being a relief from what it feels like to live." Readers curled up in the nooks and clearings of his style: his comedy, his brilliance, his humaneness

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Papa

"Well, Mr. Johnson," he said, "that's my spot right there. What you gonna put on my headstone?"

Johnson grunted. Mr. Brown talking foolish, headstones and all that. Like he might actually die someday. What's a man supposed to say to that?

He'd known Mr. Brown almost his whole life, since he was a boy, 12 years old, fetching coffee for the disc jockeys at WJMO 1490, a soul station in Cleveland. The jocks knew Mr. Brown because Mr. Brown made it his business to know the people who could play his records on the radio and keep making him rich. He'd check in with them when he came to town, hang out for a while. Easy promotion, just James Brown working, always working, at being James Brown

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The Homecoming

Growing up in a religious household, I got used to the sight of priests, but I always found them at once fascinating and slightly repellent. The funereal uniform is supposed to obliterate the self in a shroud of colorlessness, even as it draws enormous attention to the self; humility seems to be cut from the same cloth as pride. Since the ego is irrepressible—and secular—it tends to bulge in odd shapes when religiously straitened. The priests I knew practiced self-abnegation but had perfected a quiet dance of ego. They were modest but pompous, gentle but tyrannical (one of them got angry if he was disturbed on a Monday, the vicar’s day off), pious but knowing. Most were good men, but the peculiar constrictions of their calling produced peculiar opportunities for unloosing.

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