Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 108
March 31, 2017
Weekend Reading: March 31, 2017
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The largest humanitarian crisis that the world has faced since 1945 is starting to happen right now. Public funding for the new NFL stadium in Las Vegas works out to $354 per Nevada resident. Tolkien to Wharton: breaking down the words most favored by male and female authors. So now your Internet Service Provider can sell your entire browsing history (and pretty much any other data they have about you); thanks, GOP! Oh, Camille Paglia, whatever happened? Hey, Hemingway was a packrat. Someth...
March 26, 2017
Writer’s Desk: Stay Strong
[image error]We lost the great Jimmy Breslin this past week. A shoe-leather New York scrivener who banged out columns and books and snazzy oratory since the 1940s, Breslin made the ink-stained wretches in The Front Page look like hacks. He was the writer you thought of when you heard somebody say, “They don’t make ’em like that anymore.” This was the guy who could explain the soul of the city in a tear-inducing newspaper column and then go run for mayor with Norman Mailer on a lark.
A lot of people in New...
March 24, 2017
Weekend Reading: March 24, 2017
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Rebecca Solnit on not giving up: protesting and the long game. Making maps less imperialistic – shrink Europe to its real size. Presidenting is very hard, no fun at all. Rick Perry reveals his true inner Aggie. Forget work, more men are spending their lives inside the gaming world. Print and read: No sympathy for Trump hillbillies; or, why there’s no reason for liberals to escape their bubbles if Trump voters never will. Bonus print and read: Why do doctors keep putting stents in otherwise...March 20, 2017
Screening Room: ‘T2 Trainspotting’
It’s been about twenty years, what have the lads from Trainspotting been up to? Much the same as before, only with less heroin, it would appear. T2 Trainspotting, the hit-and-miss but turbocharged sequel from all the original crew, is playing now.
My review is at Film Journal International:
The last we saw Renton (Ewan McGregor) in Trainspotting, that verve-and-nerve 1990s midpoint between Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie, he was absconding with several thousand pounds that he and his junki...
March 19, 2017
Screening Room: ‘After the Storm’
The newest movie from Hirokazu Kore-eda, After the Storm, opened this week in limited release. My review is at PopMatters:
When is success or hunting for it a trap? Is it better to have dreamed of great things and fallen short or to have never had ambitions at all? Those are a couple of the questions that Hirokazu Kore-eda’s TV-like melodrama about wayward fathers and disappointed women After the Storm tangles with. Fortunately for the viewer, Kore-eda leaves those questions mostly hanging i...
Writer’s Desk: Watch TV and Movies
[image error]Well, not always. But sometimes when you need inspiration, anything with imagery and people can do. Tennessee Williams liked to hunt for his characters, particularly women, in other media.
In his book Follies of God, James Grissom wrote about reaching out to Williams in the early 1980s for advice on writing. Williams told him that in his youth, the world of characters, what he called “the fog,” just came to him. Later on, it wasn’t so easy:
Writing early in the morning or deep into the night,...
March 17, 2017
Weekend Reading: March 17, 2017
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New low or just more of the same? Hidden Figures, a film about black women scientists and the space race without a single explosion, has now made more money at the domestic office than Jason Bourne, Star Trek Beyond, and X-Men: Apocalypse. The politician from Iowa who believes he will determine what constitutes a real American. The author of Hillbilly Elegy is moving back to Ohio and starting a foundation to fight the opioid epidemic. The no-good, very bad, truly lousy repeal, broken down....March 12, 2017
Writer’s Desk: Write to Write
[image error]In 1953, writer Aidan Higgins sent Samuel Beckett one of his short stories, hoping for some feedback. Beckett sent a long, constructive, and very generous critique.
As part of his response, Beckett included this aside:
Work, work, writing for nothing and yourself, don’t make the silly mistake we all make of publishing too soon.
Publishing too soon might seem like a small price to pay for getting one’s work out there—what struggling writer would complain? But Beckett’s advice is solid, nonethe...
March 11, 2017
Reader’s Corner: Why Does Arkansas Hate History?
[image error]The word “censorship” gets thrown around a lot these days, not always responsibly. But every so often you see a case that seems to fit the textbook definition.
One of those instances happened this week in Arkansas, which you may also know as Missour-ah’s underachieving and even more miserable neighbor. The state legislature there is considering a bill that would actually make it illegal for schools to teach the books of Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States.
As Melvil...
March 10, 2017
Weekend Reading: March 10, 2017
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Rolling back rights: Why courts would never allow the Selma march to happen today. The new Interior Secretary rode to work on a horse; because he’s a cowboy. Regulatory rollback: Get ready for more crazy people with guns and car pollution! Now the EU might want its own joint nuclear deterrent … just in case. Nobody from the six countries on the new and totally improved travel ban has killed an American in the US in the past 40 years. Want some numbers that will make you quite angry? Here yo...
