Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 143

Reader’s Corner: Paul Theroux’s ‘Deep South’

Paul Theroux has spent decades traversing the world and writing about it. Although some of his fiction has been set in America, his travel writing has always been the sort of thing that required a passport. In his newest book,Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads, Theroux rectifies that oversight with a deep dive into the American south and its beautiful and fraught contradictions.

Deep Southhit stores last week.My reviewis atPopMatters.

There’s an essay called “The South of the South” that...

Reader’s Corner: Morrissey, Book Two

Somehow Morrissey went from the crooning pseudo-Wildean frontman for The Smiths to the first modern writer to have their book made into an instant Penguin Classic. For all that we love about him, his fey and aloof humor and those jabbing little daggers of surreality in his lyrics, it didn’t seem quite proper at the time that his life’s story would be in the catalog right there next to Montaigne.

But, then, as the publisher apparently argued, “it is a classic in the making.” That could be said...

Weekend Reading: September 4, 2015

Over half of the psychology papers being published maybe shouldn’t be. The link that wasn’t: Dre, Tupac, and Burning Man. “We are not a big city anymore.” When it came to autism, Dustin Hoffman didn’t help. Bonnet rippers and other tales of the Amish publishing mini-boom. No, there won’t be a third Harper Lee novel. Print and read: Totally awesome excerpts from Cameron Crowe’s originalFast Times at Ridgemont High book.

Quote of the Day: Trollope in China

Historian Simon Winchester in the Times Book Review on an unexpected encounter:

Traveling in China back in the early 1990s, I was waiting for my westbound train to take on water at a lonely halt in the Taklamakan Desert when a young Chinese woman tapped me on the shoulder, asked if I spoke English and, further, if I knew anything of Anthony Trollope. I was quite taken aback. Trollope here? A million miles from anywhere? I mumbled an incredulous, “Yes, I know a bit” — whereupon, in a brisk and...

Screening Room: ‘The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution’

“Power to the people” (PBS)

After a series of documentaries that dug into the 20th century African American experience with uncommon power, Stanley Nelson (Jonestown, Freedom Riders) turns his gaze to the story of the country’s last great radical movement, and how it was destroyed just before falling apart.

My review of The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, which opens this week in limited release and will likely come to PBS sometime soon,is atPopMatters:

At some point, revolutionar...

Readers’ Corner: The Scary Printed Word

From the Duke Chronicle, regarding the school’s decision to have students read Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoirFun Home:

Several incoming freshmen decided not to read “Fun Home” because its sexual images and themes conflicted with their personal and religious beliefs. Freshman Brian Grasso posted in the Class of 2019 Facebook page July 26 that he would not read the book “because of the graphic visual depictions of sexuality,” igniting conversation among students. The graphic novel, written by...

Weekend Reading: August 28, 2015

The 1815 Tambora eruption caused darkened skies, apocalyptic gloom, blizzards in June, and changed art to boot. In China, plenty of new cities, just no people to fill them. What’s “hybrid war“? Maybe it wasn’t Brownie’s fault. Says Brownie. How would you even deport 11 million people? Something else that the Stanford Prison Experiment didn’t consider. Print and read: El Salvador’s murder rate is nearly 1 out of every 1,000 people.

Screening Room: ‘Z for Zachariah’

Z for Zachariahisa quiet but intensely melodramatic story about three people trying to make a go of things after the end of the world.Unlike most of your post-apocalyptical adventures (and there are at least two more young adult ones due to hit theaters this year), has threats aplenty but there of a more elemental nature: loneliness, boredom, starvation, bothering to go on.

It’s a smart piece of work and thusly more than likely to get lost in the end of the summer cinematic shuffle.

Z for Zac...

Screening Room: ‘We Are Your Friends’

Zac Efron feels the beat (Warner Bros.)

It’s been about 40 or so years since DJ Kool Herc started spinning in the Bronx, but every few years the culture wakes up to the idea that, Hey, this DJing thing might be its own kind of creative expression. Thusly, ever so earnest films like We Are Your Friends, with Zac Efron as a striving DJ from the San Fernando Valley trying to make it in a cold, cruel world.

My review ofWe Are Your Friends, which opens this week,is atFilm Journal.

The trailer is he...

Writer’s Desk: Inspiration Close at Home

Sometimes it comes easily. The words flow and the paragraphs and plot lock together with smooth and powerful precision like girders in a swiftly-built tower.

‘A Woman Reading’ by Camille Corot (c.1869)

Other times (most times), it’s a struggle to get even a good page done after a full day spent at the writing desk. That’s where inspiration comes in.

But where do you find it when it goes hiding? Usually, you can’t wait, you have to just keep plowing ahead.

In a long, sprawling piece for the Ne...