Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 67
January 23, 2020
Quote of the Day: Reading as Resistance
At the American Booksellers Association’s 15th annual Winter Institute gathering, held this year in Baltimore, author Rebecca Solnit spoke about how reading and publishing can be acts of quiet resistance in an age of distractedness and “glib false certainties.” Per Shelf Awareness: “At its best it’s a liberation project,” said Solnit of writing and bookselling.
Reader’s Corner: ‘Uncanny Valley’
My review of Anna Wiener’s lucid and somewhat frightening memoir of her time among the confidence boys of Silicon Valley was published atPopMatters: Anna Wiener writes about being one of those dreaming New Yorkers who had thought she could make it in publishing as a member of the $30k a-year “assistant class”. But the rising …
January 22, 2020
In Memorium: Terry Jones
To honor the passing of the great Terry Jones, a comedic troubadour of some renown, let us take a moment to consider the glory that he brought to the character of one Sir Belvedere: For something completely different, look for Jones’ highly underrated documentary Boom Bust Boom, a fantastic study of the history of economic …
January 21, 2020
Screening Room: Oscar-Nominated Documentary Shorts
The 2020 edition of the Oscar-Nominated shorts program is hitting theaters next week. My review of the five-part documentary program, nearly all of which are fantastic if sometimes hard to watch, was published at PopMatters: When assessing a short-film anthology, sometimes a theme presents itself and other times you have to go looking for one. …
Continue reading Screening Room: Oscar-Nominated DocumentaryShorts
January 19, 2020
Writer’s Desk: Who Knows?
W. Somerset Maugham, the happy-looking chap pictured above, was among the most popular writers in the English language at the height of his career in the 1930s. He had some advice for novelists: There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. Sometimes the best advice to follow can …
January 14, 2020
Screening Room: The Oscars and ‘Joker’
In response to yesterday’s fairly uninspiring Oscar nominations, here is a piece I wrote for Eyes Wide Open about why every single other best picture nominee deserves to win more thanJoker: Yes, that includes JoJo Rabbit. Even the cringey and self-congratulatory Nazi slapstick of Taika Waititi’s quasi-Wes Anderson anachronism-riddled World War II satire — which …
January 12, 2020
Writer’s Desk: Know When to Stop
In John Guare’s heart-stopping 1990 play Six Degrees of Separation, one of its alternately delusional and searching protagonists is a painter-turned-art dealer named Flan. At one point Flan, who is both criminally mercenary and honestly enraptured by the paintings he flogs, soliloquizes about his past life: I thought… dreamt… remembered… how easy it is for …
January 10, 2020
Screening Room: ‘Just Mercy’
Based on Bryan Stevenson’s book about his crusade against the death penalty, the new movieJust Mercy stars Michael B. Jordan as Stevenson and Jamie Foxx as one of the poor defendants railroaded for a murder he didn’t commit (ironically, in the town that inspired Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird). Just Mercy is playing now. …
January 6, 2020
Screening Room: ‘Les Miserables’
French director Ladj Ly’s scorching new movie, Les Misérables, is set in the same poverty-stricken outer neighborhood of Paris as Victor Hugo’s novel and involves many of the same themes of systemic oppression, but the story is Ly’s own. Les Misérables is opening this week and will be available later on Amazon Prime. My review …
January 5, 2020
Writer’s Desk: Philip Pullman
Maybe you are spending January catching up on HBO’s adaptation of Philip Pullman’sHis Dark Materialsseries. Maybe you are actually taking the long cold winter to get some writing done. If the latter, here are some tips from Pullman himself, courtesy of Radio 4: Ignore the market and write what you want—Write what you want to …
