Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 24
June 4, 2023
Writer’s Desk: Act Like a Martian
The recently late Martin Amis had many attributes: lacerating critic, celebrator of Saul Bellow, caustic satirist (London trilogy in particular), polemicist, standard bearer of what the New York Times once sniffily termed “the new unpleasantness,” and by all accounts an excellent drinking partner. He also provided one of the most cogent definitions of what it …
May 28, 2023
Writer’s Desk: Stress, Anger, and Curiosity
As anybody who has followed Henry Rollins over the years knows, he is just as much a writer as he is punk rock frontman. Having penned everything from poetry and music criticism to travel essays over the years, he has put out a pretty solid body of work, not to mention his own publishing company. …
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May 26, 2023
Screening Room: ‘Lynch/Oz’
My review of the new documentary Lynch/Oz is at Slant: Is that an Oz narrative?” asks director Rodney Ascher in the second chapter of Alexandre O. Philippe’s trippy, tricky, and obsessive cine-essay Lynch/Oz. Ascher is clearly being a touch dishonest with the question because he’s at that moment referring to Beverly Hills Cop. He follows up that …
May 21, 2023
Writer’s Desk: How Does It End?
Jonathan Lethem does not write simple plots. Try diagramming what happens in, say, Chronic City or his Philip K. Dick homage Gun, with Occasional Music. Good luck! So it’s not surprising that he says he figures out the ending first: I usually live with the idea of a book for years, before I actually know …
May 19, 2023
TV Room: ‘Extrapolations’
My review of the Apple TV+ series Extrapolations ran on PopMatters: One difference between The Day After Tomorrow and the release of Scott Z. Burns’ eight-episode Apple TV+ climate change anthology series Extrapolations in 2023 is that now the human causes of environmental disaster can be openly discussed in a big-budget science-fiction production. The issue has become …
May 15, 2023
Screening Room: ‘Master Gardener’
After making the festival rounds, Paul Schrader’s Master Gardener opens next week in limited release. I reviewed for PopMatters: Everything in Paul Schrader’s Master Gardener exists at roughly a forty-five-degree angle to reality. The film has one foot planted in a mostly recognizable world but the other in a dreamland of the writer/director’s invention. It makes for a …
May 14, 2023
Writer’s Desk: Try, Try, and Try Again
Rejection letters are the worst. Even the ones that do not seem particularly cruel or critical. A rejection letter that does not even bother to specify what was so terrible about your writing is somehow even more cutting than a line-by-line critique. This is all part of writing, though. Even Judy Blume has her rejection …
May 7, 2023
Writer’s Desk: Write the Book You Need to Exist
Eleanor Catton thought there was a need for a book that was “structurally ornate” and lengthy but still had a driving plot. She looked around and didn’t find one that satisfied what she wanted. So she went ahead and wrote The Luminaries, which, as everyone likes to remind you, came in at over 800 pages. …
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April 30, 2023
Writer’s Desk: Be a Vampire of Raging Love
How do you live a good life in a fallen world? What can writers, or really any breed of creative, do to find something worth writing, imagining, making when surrounded by so much chaos and things seemingly designed to make you give up hope? A 13-year-old who wants to find a life in some kind …
April 23, 2023
Writer’s Desk: Tell the Truth Shamelessly
Often literary fiction is viewed as needing to be disconnected to some degree from what is happening in the world. Timelessness can be preferred to immediacy. For her part, Lydia Millet (A Children’s Bible) strives to write fiction that wrestles with everything happening around us. In The Atlantic, she described the challenge of doing that …
