Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 43
July 2, 2021
Screening Room: ‘A Choice of Weapons’
In John Maggio’s documentary A Choice of Weapons, the photographer and filmmaker Gordon Parks dazzles not only as a groundbreaking artist but as a continuing inspiration to younger photojournalists. A Choice of Weapons played at the Tribeca Festival and is coming to HBO later this year. My review is at Slant: Born in 1912 and …
June 28, 2021
Literary Birthday: Mark Helprin
After a peripatetic youth that included stints in Paris and Jamaica, Mark Helprin (born today in 1947) was inspired to write his first short story while at the graves of William and Henry James. Learning that a nearby funeral was for a young man killed in Vietnam he was also inspired to join the military. …
June 27, 2021
Writer’s Desk: What Obama Read and Why
This should be obvious: Read more to write better. But what to read? Everyone has ideas, ranging from books on writing to books whose style and insights can teach you something. In this LitHub piece, Craig Fehrman talks about Barack Obama’s relationship to literature specifically as a writer. In Dreams from My Father, Obama wrote …
June 21, 2021
Literary Birthday: Octavia Butler
As a black woman who grew up poor in Pasadena, Octavia Butler (born today in 1947) faced a host of obstacles in her quest to become a bestselling author. Reportedly inspired in her childhood by seeing the B-movie Devil Girl from Mars and thinking she could write better than that, Butler started publishing short fiction …
June 20, 2021
Screening Room: ‘False Positive’
In John Lee’s oddball horror flick False Positive, a young woman (Ilana Glazer from Broad City) is thrilled after a fertility doctor (Pierce Brosnan) helps her get pregnant. But pretty soon it becomes clear that this will not be an easy and happy birth process. False Positive will be available this week on Hulu. My …
Literary Birthday: Lillian Hellman
Lillian Hellman (born today in 1905) was raised comfortably in Louisiana before her family, who did not always manage their money well, moved to New York. There, she worked various jobs while trying to get her writing career off the ground. When it did, with the 1934 premiere of her hit play The Children’s Hour, …
Writer’s Desk: Lie to Tell the Truth
The passing of the great Janet Malcolm this week at the age of eighty-six is not a thing that the world of writing will bounce back from. One of the great profile writers the New Yorker ever had, Malcolm had a spare and wry yet richly illustrative style that compressed whole volumes of insight into …
June 17, 2021
Literary Birthday: Chris Van Allsburg
Caldecott-winning author Chris Van Allsburg (born today in 1949) began his creative career studying and making sculpture. Some of his pieces from the 1970s have a puckish, off-key humor that would later be familiar to his readers (1974’s Event at the Observatory shows a B-movie flying saucer crashed into an observatory dome). He only took …
June 13, 2021
Screening Room: ‘The Lost Leonardo’
Andrea Koefoed’s new documentary The Lost Leonardo, which just screened at the Tribeca Film Festival, is a fascinating look at the mania surrounding a (possibly) rediscovered painting by da Vinci. My review is at Slant: While the intersection of hype, art, and money is fertile territory and Koefoed makes the most of it, he misses …
Writer’s Desk: Read Raymond Carver
That’s what Rachel Cusk noted when she was asked to list her six favorite books. She included the collected stories of Raymond Carver, once the demigod of American creative writing for his oft-imitated clean, spare, scalpel-like style (sure, it may have been the work of editor Gordon Lish, but who’s keeping track?) because he can …
