Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 32
August 7, 2022
Writer’s Desk: Leave it Loose
Who doesn’t like a tidy conclusion? Life is random. Does our art have to be? Isn’t a great part of the joy of creating and consuming art based on the possibility of finding a closure that our daily lives never offer? Of course it is. If nobody liked neat finishes, then mystery novels would not …
July 31, 2022
Writer’s Desk: Rules? What Rules?
J. K. Rowling (born on this day in 1965) has sold a few books in her career. So it is somewhat refreshing to see her resisting the urge to lay down some must-follow rules for other writers to follow. In fact, in this piece from 2019, she points out that her breakthrough came largely from …
July 30, 2022
Nota Bene: Werner Herzog’s Novel of War and Nature
In Werner Herzog’s spectacular new novel, The Twilight World, he tells the story of Hiroo Onoda, the Japanese soldier who famously continued fighting World War II on a remote island in the Philippines until finally surrendering in 1974. Mixing the sublime, the strange, human obsession, and the implacability of nature in his usual deadpan style, …
Continue reading Nota Bene: Werner Herzog’s Novel of War and Nature
July 24, 2022
Writer’s Desk: Stick With It
Of late Robert Heinlein’s legacy as one of the great postwar science-fiction writers has been somewhat forgotten, or overshadowed by his status as libertarian icon. But he deserves recognition not just for his great novels (Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land) but for providing us with some of the most salient writing advice ever …
July 20, 2022
Screening Room: ‘Nope’
Jordan Peele’s Nope opens this week. It’s like Get Out and Us … only not. My review is at Slant: In writer-director Jordan Peele’s chilling Nope, a struggling, Black-operated ranch that supplies horses for Hollywood productions faces an additional threat in the form of an extraterrestrial being that likes to suck animals and people up into …
July 17, 2022
Writer’s Desk: Short is Okay
It is easy to confuse length with profundity, brevity with shallowness. The reverse can also be true, of course, but readers frequently believe that an epic-length novel must have some kind of importance, even if it does not always justify its length. Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 320 pages, give or take) noted …
July 14, 2022
Screening Room: ‘The Gray Man’
Netflix’s next big bet to produce $200 million blockbusters to stream on the small screen is the Russo brothers’ The Gray Man, an assassin-versus-assassin thriller with Chris Evans and Ryan Gosling that shows a sharp drop-off in quality and imagination from the Russos’ MCU movies. The Gray Man streams on Netflix tomorrow. My review is …
July 10, 2022
Writer’s Desk: Try Anything
Sometimes you just cannot get started. It all feels wrong. You have a story, a poem, a whole book even, inside you. But it won’t come out. Don DeLillo was once asked by writer Kae Tempest about the accrual of a certain kind of detail: In your novels, there is a noticing of the everyday …
July 3, 2022
Writer’s Desk: Everything is Material
Gertrude Stein tended to be more known for who she was (holder of literary salons, quotable intellectual roustabout, knower of the famous) than what she wrote. This always bothered her. She would be irritated that today her profile remains primarily that of an expatriate rebel. But while much of her writing was high-minded experimentation, she …
July 1, 2022
Reader’s Corner: Of Punks, Relationships, and American Anxieties
In my latest graphic novel round-up for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, I covered three new titles which excel in very different ways: Nick Drnaso’s Acting Class is another entry in his series of blank-faced, haunting, Lynchian nightmares about American anxiety. James Spooner’s The High Desert is a thoughtful, cutting memoir about growing up a black punk …
Continue reading Reader’s Corner: Of Punks, Relationships, and American Anxieties
