Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 47
April 4, 2021
Writer’s Desk: Avoid Writers
In most professions, it makes sense to apprentice with a master. What better way to excel in, say, metalwork or coding? But according to George Bernard Shaw, the same does not apply to the writing arts: Keep away from books and men who get their ideas from books, and your own books will always be …
April 3, 2021
Screening Room: ‘Funny Face’
The newest film from Tim Sutton (Memphis, Dark Night) is both ode to pre-gentrification New York and a kind of anti-Joker. My review is at Slant: Funny Face takes the cliché of the isolated urban male antihero and turns it on its head. Featuring characters who float through a city seemingly indifferent, if not openly hostile, to …
March 30, 2021
Literary Birthday: Anna Sewell
When Anna Sewell (born today in 1820) was 14 years old, she injured her ankle and never quite recovered full mobility. Spending most of her life crippled, she was still able to get around via horse-drawn carriage. It always pained her to see how most horses were treated in Victorian England. Several decades later, she …
March 28, 2021
Writer’s Desk: Nothing Wrong with Imitation
You could spend a good part of your life just trying to catch up with the output of Larry McMurty, who passed away this week. Screenplays (Brokeback Mountain), essays, nonfiction, and novels galore (The Last Picture Show, Lonesome Dove). He was also one of the country’s great used book merchants. He once gave Texas Monthly …
Continue reading Writer’s Desk: Nothing Wrong with Imitation
March 24, 2021
Literary Birthday: Flannery O’Connor
When Flannery O’Connor (born in Georgia today in 1925) first met her teacher Paul Engle at the University of Iowa in 1946, because of her thick accent he had to ask her to write down what she wanted to say. She wrote, “My name is Flannery O’Connor. I am not a journalist. Can I come …
March 21, 2021
Writer’s Desk: Don’t Worry About Grammar
People make assumptions about writers. That we have some magical talent bestowed by the muses. That we have read everything under the sun. That we really want to take a look at their sheaf of poems or 30-page memoir about their “quite interesting” life and murmur encouraging things. Assumptions are also made about our mastery …
March 18, 2021
Literary Birthday: George Plimpton
A snootily-dialected, aristocratic, and yet somewhat clownish enthusiast of many pursuits, George Plimpton (born today in 1927) was not only a load-bearing pillar of 20th century New York publishing, he made the writing life look positively a gas. Besides running The Paris Review (which, he often noted, was not based in Paris and did not …
March 14, 2021
Writer’s Desk: Let It Rip
In his “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” Jack Kerouac had some ideas for how to get things down on paper. Jack being Jack, most of those ideas pivoted around identifying the smoldering ember of creativity and using that to set the kindling of your prose ablaze. Some fragments of dharma: “Time being of the essence in …
March 13, 2021
Screening Room: ‘French Exit’
Michelle Pfeiffer, Lucas Hedges, and a charming cat are featured in Azazel Jacobs’ new adaptation of French Exit, a novel from Patrick DeWitt (The Sisters Brothers). French Exit is playing now in limited release and opens wider in April. My review is at PopMatters. Here’s the trailer:
March 12, 2021
Literary Birthday: Dave Eggers
Raised in suburban Chicago, Dave Eggers (born today in 1970) was only 21 years old when his parents died in rapid succession, leaving him to raise his eight-year-old brother, Toph. Eggers moved them to the Bay Area, where he helped found the short-lived Gen-X humor magazine Might and started the longer-lived website Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly …
