Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 21
July 13, 2023
Reader’s Corner: ‘Zippy the Pinhead’ to ‘Nancy’
I interviewed Zippy the Pinhead creator Bill Griffith about his new book on the mastermind behind the comic strip Nancy. Griffith is speaking about the book, Three Rocks, with Matt Groening at San Diego Comic Con. My interview ran in Publishers Weekly: How do you feel about going to Comic-Con? It’s not my turf—I don’t …
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July 9, 2023
Writer’s Desk: Take Some Time Off
Some writers live by the routine. Others abhor them. Both are correct. Charles Yu, the imaginative stylist of Interior Chinatown and the series Westworld, told PBS that he appreciates the importance of non-writing time: What I do is try to frame a question or idea in a useful or interesting way, set my subconscious to …
July 5, 2023
Screening Room: The Starring Chicago Film Festival
I wrote an article for Eyes Wide Open about a very specific film festival I worked on in Chicago in the summer of 2001: As movies editor for citysearch.com’s Chicago node, I should have been covering that thundering shift in the moviemaking landscape. But I did not truly see what was happening. I could tell …
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Screening Room: ‘The Lesson’
My review of the surprisingly good (for being in many ways so unsurprising in its twists and mysteries) The Lesson is at Slant: Every moment in The Lesson’s early going seemingly exists to illustrate pulp novelist Jim Thompson’s famous saying: “There is only one plot—things are not what they seem.” We see eminent novelist J.M. Sinclair …
July 2, 2023
Writer’s Desk: Forget About It
When the novelist Lauren Groff (who wrote the inimitable Matrix) has writer’s block, she thinks there could be a few different issues going on. It could be impatience or maybe a fear of imperfection. There is also the block caused by what she calls the canary in the coalmine. This is your unconscious telling you …
June 30, 2023
Screening Room: ‘The League’
I reviewed The League, the new documentary from Sam Pollard (MLK/FBI) for Slant: The story of the Negro baseball leagues has the hallmarks of a feel-good story: determination, inventiveness, and relentless optimism in the face of unyielding hatred. But while Sam Pollard’s mostly straightforward and celebratory documentary The League doesn’t skimp on those elements, he also introduces …
June 25, 2023
Writer’s Desk: Don’t Think, Just Write
In between his poetry, journalism, and deciphering of the grand mystery that is Abraham Lincoln, Carl Sandburg also made the occasional attempt to figure out what is this thing called writing. In one of his more insightful pieces, “Trying to Write,” he looked back at the time he interviewed Babe Ruth (because it was the …
June 24, 2023
Reader’s Corner: Talking with David Simon
I recently had the great honor of talking with the great David Simon (The Wire, Treme, Generation Kill) about policing, writing, crime, and the graphic novel adaptation of his classic study of a Baltimore detective unit, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. A part of my interview with Simon is at Publishers Weekly: … …
June 18, 2023
Writer’s Desk: Don’t Think About It
Cormac McCarthy has appeared more on this site than most other writers. And for good reason. But I am going to go back to him one more time in honor of his passing this week at the age of 89. Though sometimes very long-winded on the page (rarely in a bad way, see Suttree for …
June 14, 2023
Reader’s Corner: ‘City of Blows’
Writer / director / actor Tim Blake Nelson has done everything from play a cornpone buffoon in O Brother, Where Art Thou? to write and direct The Grey Zone, one of the most chilling stories ever made about the Holocaust. His debut novel, City of Blows, is a gnarly satire about Hollywood, ambition, and how …
