Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 23
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 …
June 13, 2023
Screening Room: ‘Asteroid City’
Wes Anderson’s newest movie, Asteroid City, opens this Friday. It is everything you would expect. Depending on your perspective, that could be a very good or very bad thing. My review is at Slant: A dryly comedic bricolage of mid-century Americana and postwar anxieties with only the lightest dusting of plot, the 1950s-set Asteroid City finds Wes …
June 11, 2023
Writer’s Desk: Keep at It
For a Danish Baroness who did not necessarily need to write, Karen Blixen took the vocation seriously. Publishing under the pen name Isak Dinesen, she wrote poetic prose, memoir (Out of Africa), and lovingly crafted Romantic-styled short stories (Seven Gothic Tales). She didn’t feel the need to do things the standard way. As she related …
June 9, 2023
Screening Room: ‘Against All Enemies’
The frightening new documentary Against All Enemies premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last night. My review is at The Playlist: The MAGA mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 shared many surface similarities with the ideologically opposed mobs that fought against police in American cities over the past few years: improvised …
June 5, 2023
Reader’s Corner: ‘Monsters’ and Liking Great Art by Bad People
My review of Claire Dederer’s new book, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, ran in PopMatters: One of the great attributes of Claire Dederer’s bracing, funny, honest, yet uneven new book Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma is how rarely (if ever) she uses the word, even though her subject matter aims right at many problematic things. The thesis she wrestles …
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