Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 5

Screening Room: ‘Meeting with Pol Pot’

Rithy Panh’s film is hard-hitting yet illusive, much like the story its characters are hunting.

Writer’s Desk: Run With It

Here’s what Kaveh Akbar told Tin House about how he plans out his writing. In short, he doesn’t: I never know where I’m going! I think certainty is death to a poem. The language always knows more than we do… Don’t tell the words what to do. Let things flow.

Writer’s Desk: Sondheim on Quantity

Some people work and work even if nobody else can understand why. Interviewed not long before he passed away in 2021 at the age of 91, Stephen Sondheim talked about productivity: George Bernard Shaw kept writing plays until he was ninety-four. Of course, the last fifteen years they were terrible plays, but he did write them… One …

Continue reading Writer’s Desk: Sondheim on Quantity

Writer’s Desk: Write What You Love

We’ve all had the problem. You read something and it hits you on some level. Still, there is something missing. It has some elements that work but it never quite gets there. You may even think, If I was writing this… Follow that instinct. Listen to the voice of your inner reader. This is what …

Continue reading Writer’s Desk: Write What You Love

TV Room: ‘Mountainhead’

‘Mountainhead’ Review: Jesse Armstrong’s Acid-Singed Comedy About Modern Wealth and Power

Writer’s Desk: Don DeLillo on Not Wasting Time

Don DeLillo has famously regimented writing habits. Every day at the desk, with two long segments broken up by a run to clear his mind. Not a bad way of going about things, for anybody who has the ability to maintain that kind of 9-5 schedule, but also not the sort of thing that every …

Continue reading Writer’s Desk: Don DeLillo on Not Wasting Time

Screening Room: ‘Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning’

The (maybe) last Tom Cruise outing as Ethan Hunt is a thundering, bloated, and occasionally transportive epic of a thriller that leaves no cliché on the floor.

Writer’s Desk: Attention is Good

If a writer publishes and nobody notices, did it actually happen? To the writer, absolutely. That’s weeks, months, or years of gnashed-teeth labor in those pages. But to the rest of the world, not so much. Ron Chernow’s mammoth new biography of Mark Twain shows how the great American humorist, sentimentalist, lecturer, anti-imperialist scold, and …

Continue reading Writer’s Desk: Attention is Good

Writer’s Desk: Pay Attention

Mary Oliver won many awards over her career, starting with the Pulitzer. But the poem of hers that has resonated the most has a very simple and telling title, “Instructions for Living“: Pay attention.Be astonished.Tell about it. Those three lines contain everything a writer needs to remember.

Reader’s Corner: Spring 2025 Graphic Novels

Four new graphic novels cover a gamut of subjects, from a serious-minded study of Charles M. Schulz’s artistic legacy to the quiet, creatively turbulent life of Jane Austen and a pair of memoirs, one about a trauma-haunted love life and the other about growing up in Wisconsin’s ginseng capital.