Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 42
July 25, 2021
Writer’s Desk: Put in the Effort
In this interview, Minnesota author Charles Baxter explains how he knows he is on a good streak: I work during the morning. I pace; I stare out the window. I sit with my head in my hands. If I can feel myself breaking out into a sweat, particularly from my underarms, and if I give …
July 21, 2021
Literary Birthday: Ernest Hemingway
Like many eager young men at the time, Ernest Hemingway (born today in 1899) tried to enlist to fight in World War I. “I can’t let a show like this go on without getting in on it,” he wrote to his older sister Marcelline. “There hasn’t been a real war to go to since Grandfather …
July 20, 2021
Literary Birthday: Frantz Fanon
“Decolonization,” wrote Frantz Fanon (born today in 1925) at the beginning of his revolutionary-philosophical text The Wretched of the Earth (1961), “is always a violent event.” He knew what he was talking about. Born in the West Indian French colony of Martinique, Fanon studied in France to be a psychiatrist and published the pioneering work …
July 18, 2021
Writer’s Desk: Watch TV and Learn
Say you have written a book. You have been lucky enough to have your book published by a major house. Maybe you have even gotten some good press. But nevertheless, the income stream is negligible. What do you do to keep writing and not have to hold down a separate job? Maybe write a book …
July 13, 2021
Literary Birthday: Wole Soyinka
Like his cousin, world-renowned musician and activist Fela Kuti, Nigerian poet and dramatist Wole Soyinka (born today in 1934) is almost as well known for political agitation as his art, the latter of which made him the first black African to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. He made numerous enemies with his outspoken critiques …
July 11, 2021
Writer’s Desk: Write As Though You Are Already Gone
Sometimes the best advice can come from writers reminding you of what other writers have said. For instance, there is the 2012 speech that Jeffrey Eugenides gave in which he gave some advice via what one writer related about another writer’s advice: In his 1988 book of essays, “Prepared for the Worst,” Christopher Hitchens recalled …
Continue reading Writer’s Desk: Write As Though You Are Already Gone
July 10, 2021
Reader’s Corner: ‘Seek You’
My review of the new graphic novel from Kristen Radtke (Imagine Wanting Only This) ran in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune: In Jim Shepard’s recent bio-noir “Phase Six,” a character mockingly defines loneliness as “solitude with self-pity thrown in.” That line’s chilly dismissiveness would not play well in Kristen Radtke’s immersive, novelistic and intensely humanistic book-length graphic essay on …
July 9, 2021
Screening Room: ‘Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain’
In Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain, documentarian Morgan Neville (Won’t You Be My Neighbor?) tracks the alt-chef’s rise to fame and his struggle over what to do once he reached the top of the mountain. Roadrunner opens next week in limited release. My review is at PopMatters: The current theatrical landscape in which celebrity …
Continue reading Screening Room: ‘Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain’
Literary Birthday: Ann Radcliffe
Given that she was later referred to by Sir Walter Scott as “the first poetess of romantic fiction,” it is fitting that many dramatic rumors about Ann Radcliffe (born today in 1764) swirled around her. There were stories that she had died young, gone mad (potentially being locked up in an asylum), or even arrested …
July 4, 2021
Writer’s Desk: Try Again, Try Harder
Writers love little more than those days when the words just arrive, streaming from your mind to the page with seemingly little to no effort on their part. It can, of course, be glorious to go from eking out a few lines to finishing five pages in a morning. But Samuel Johnson has a warning: …
