Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 104
June 23, 2017
Weekend Reading: June 23, 2017
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Yes, even with the opioid epidemic, meth is still a very big problem. Why are people protesting at Julius Caesar? The right’s voter-ID law suppressed 200,000 votes in Wisconsin last year; Trump won the state by a little over 20,000. Things to worry about in 2100: Heat, heat, and the heat. What the hell is “the flippening“? “People just have all their friends from kindergarten” and other reasons it’s hard to make friends in St. Louis. Don’t count the Democrats out yet. Is Michael Bay a geniu...
June 22, 2017
Screening Room: AFI DOCS Film Festival
Last Wednesday through Sunday, Washington, D.C. hosted the AFI DOCS Film Festival, one of the country’s top showcases for nonfiction movies. Many of the documentaries screening there will be opening throughout the country in the coming weeks and months, with at least a couple likely Oscar nominees among the batch. A few of the highlights:
Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press (Brian Knappenberger) — A taut and alarming look at how the entrenched interests of certain wealthy millionaires (P...June 18, 2017
Writer’s Desk: It’s Not Hard
[image error]Writing isn’t easy. All that time alone, the self-doubt, the back aches, the certainty that you could have nailed that one paragraph if you had just five more hours.
But on the other hand, it’s not that hard. You look at the page, put your hands on the keys, and start making stuff up. Eventually you stop.
Ethan Canin, whose cool and chiseled story collections like The Palace Thief don’t exactly feel off the cuff, cuts to the thick of it in this interview from The Atlantic where he’s talking a...
June 16, 2017
Weekend Reading: June 16, 2017
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The Daily Mail “pictures Britain as a place populated by delinquents and bomb-makers, sexual deviants, spongers, social workers and gay bishops, a dark and fruity manifestation of the editor’s daily fears.” Here’s the 25 best films of the century so far, how many have you seen (and liked)? Beer consumption peaked in 2013, in large part because the Chinese aren’t drinking as much. Once people start asking whether the president is out of his mind, is there any way it ends well? Who’s buying t...June 15, 2017
Screening Room: ‘Okja’
The movies of Bong Joon Ho (The Host, Snowpiercer) keep getting odder and less predictable; mostly for the better. His latest, Okja, is a story about a girl and her pet monster who get ensnarled in a byzantine corporate conspiracy featuring a mad-hatter turn from Tilda Swinton.
Okja opens in theaters and on Netflix on June 28. My review is at PopMatters:
South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon Ho has said that Netflix, the distributor of his new movie Okja, gave him final cut. That’s easy to believ...
June 11, 2017
Writer’s Desk: Who Do You Write For?
[image error]Denis Johnson, the author of Jesus’ Son and Tree of Smoke among other great works of quasi-Beat genius, died a couple weeks back at the age of 67.
Although his rehab-stippled talent took a while to be recognized, he finally won the National Book Award back in 2007. In a blessedly brief interview about that award, he gave one of the best bits of writing advice ever. In response to the question of who his ideal reader or audience was, he responded:
...I write for my wife, my agent, and my editor.
June 9, 2017
Weekend Reading: June 9, 2017
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Getting Somali girls in Minnesota to take part in sports. Uranium mining, toxic runoff, the Grand Canyon … what could go wrong? Hello single-payer: Looks like Nevada is about to let about 3 million people buy into Medicaid. Ladies and gentlemen, the panicker in chief. The entire coal industry employs fewer people than Arby’s. Spend 15 minutes a day reading the right books and you’d have a good solid education—so was born the famous Five Foot Shelf. Cool things: New York’s new Subway Librar...June 4, 2017
Writer’s Desk: Dorothy West
[image error]When she died in 1998, Dorothy West—born last week in 1907—was described as the last living member of the true Harlem Renaissance. Raised in an upper-class black family in Boston, she won a writing contest while still a teenager and moved to Harlem to join up with the neighborhood’s burgeoning writers’ community. Though she was at the beating heart of the Renaissance, rooming with Zora Neale Hurston and palling around with Langston Hughes (who dubbed her “Kid”), not to mention publishing her...
June 2, 2017
Weekend Reading: June 2, 2017
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Soderbergh is back. Sure, the world is burning, but hey, what about her emails? How to give a (tiny) middle finger to the world. Toni Morrison on keeping your life separate from your work. The next Taoiseach of Ireland is probably going to be a gay 38-year-old South Asian doctor. The (unfinished) Keystone Pipeline is already leaking. Chinese workers investigating violations at a factory that makes shoes for the First Daughter have gone missing. Print and read: Stephen Miller, white r...May 28, 2017
Writer’s Desk: Ian Fleming on Sticking With It
[image error]Ian Fleming, who had a blast as a real spy for Her Majesty and then an even bigger blast writing about a made-up spy, was born today in 1908.
His James Bond novels weren’t the greatest pulp of the postwar era, but still generally smashing good fun (more so than the Sean Connery movies, that’s for sure). Even so, Fleming wasn’t a careless stylist; he worked at it.
According to Andrew Lycett’s Ian Fleming: The Man Behind James Bond, Fleming once gave this advice on writing:
You will be constant...
