Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 50
January 31, 2021
Screening Room: ‘The World to Come’
In Mona Fastvold’s The World to Come, two women fall in love on a farm in mid-19th century upstate New York, with their husbands none the wiser. My review is at Slant: As the two chat over tea and chores, Tallie’s nearly unblinking attentiveness helps Abigail to overcome her shyness. “I find that everything I …
Literary Birthday: Norman Mailer
When not heaving out controversy-grabbing articles and books, Norman Mailer (born today in 1915) was making a big stink of showing up at protest marches, running for office, or gabbing out of both sides of his mouth on some talk show. His books and articles were often reflections of that garrulous gasbag personality. His 1967 …
Writer’s Desk: Follow Your Own Advice
Writers do not lack for advice. They are, in fact, drowning in it. This very site adds another drop to that flood most weeks; hopefully not entirely in vain. Yes, sage advice from working authors can be crucial to those of us struggling to get words (the right words) on a page each day that …
January 26, 2021
Screening Room: ‘Nomadland’ Best Picture
After much deliberation, the Online Film Critics Society released our list of the best movies of 2020. Nomadland quite deservedly took the most awards with six wins, including best picture. Here are the rest of what we thought were the most worthwhile cinematic endeavors of that very strange year just passed: BEST PICTURE· Da 5 …
Reader’s Corner: ‘The World Turned Upside Down’
My review of Yang Jisheng’s new history of the Cultural Revolution, The World Turned Upside Down, was published at PopMatters: For the first few years of the Cultural Revolution, China ripped itself apart in a frenzy of finger-pointing, denunciations, and pogroms. The combination of didacticism, divinely-ordained illogic, and thirst for public declarations of guilt (preferably …
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January 24, 2021
Writer’s Desk: Get the Details Right
In her novel The Mars Room, Rachel Kushner mined the details of her life in San Francisco, specifically growing up on the Pacific side in downmarket Sunset, long before Silicon Valley. Here is how she described it: The Sunset was San Francisco, proudly, and yet an alternate one to what you might know: it was …
January 17, 2021
Writer’s Desk: Only If You Have To
Around the time of the release of his documentary Harmontown, the ridiculously prolific and idea-rich writer Dan Harmon (Ricky & Morty, Community) took part in an AMA on Reddit, where he delivered some tips on the trade. This one hit home: Nobody can tell you that it’s going to work out. Outcome can’t be controlled. …
January 16, 2021
TV Room: ‘Night Stalker’
My review of the new Netflix true-crime series Night Stalker ran at Slant: Netflix’s Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer, a four-part series about Richard Ramirez, the sadistic serial rapist and murderer who terrorized the citizens of Los Angeles and San Francisco in the mid-1980s, is dramatically satisfying but structurally rote. Director Tiller Russell …
Literary Birthday: Susan Sontag
When Susan Sontag (born today in 1933) published Notes on Camp in 1964, she was already something of an enfant terrible in the literary world. This inventively formatted and passionately argued book-length essay further fueled her reputation at a time when the lines between high and low culture were blurring fast. In elliptical fashion, the …
January 10, 2021
Writer’s Desk: Once Again, With Feeling
A few days after 9/11, Ian McEwan wrote in The Guardian about the aftermath of the tragedy, the shock it had caused in the people he knew. Despite the world-spanning nature of the events, he noted that “the reckoning, of course, was with the personal.” In describing how people channeled their traumatized watching into fantasies …
