Claire Hanan - The Official Website for Claire - Journalist, Publisher & Mizzou Grad

Salvete, omnes! It's been too long, dear readers. With the capstone project coming to a close and the rest of my coursework, I've regretfully neglected you. Anyway, what follows is an abbreviated update: 

David Simon's "Treme": Amazing. Watch it if only for the music alone. I wasn't sure if some of the holdover actors from "The Wire" would be able to make the transition, but they've become their new characters seamlessly. Check out one of my favorite scenes in which Creighton Bernette (John Goodman) gives the youtube world his thoughts on post-Katrina New Orleans. 

New York: I'm officially landing there June 5th, and will start the publishing program the next day. I can't even begin to express my excitement. 

The capstone: The trip to Meredith Corp. in Des Moines, IA, went fabulously. Details to come in the "Better Brunch" tab. Above is a grab of page in our "Brunch Bazaar" feature. I'm having issues uploading such a large pdf, but the entire mag should be available soon. 

What I'm reading now: 
Barbara Kingsolver's "The Lacuna" 
"Best New American Voices," edited by Dani Shapiro
"Gravity's Rainbow," Thomas Pynchon 

My website: 
What do you think of the new layout of the portfolio page? Let me know! 

From Emily Nussbaum's feature on The Wire's David Simon in this week's New York Magazine. Nussbaum asks him twice why he doesn't dabble in documentary film, considering his shows often blend truth with fiction. In an e-mail, this is his final response:

“We know more about what Huey Long represented and the emptiness at the core of American political culture from reading Robert Penn Warren than from contemporary journalistic accounts of Long’s reign. We know more about human pride, purpose, and obsession from Moby-Dick than from any contemporaneous account of the Nantucket whaler that was actually struck and sunk by a whale in the nineteenth-century incident on which Melville based his book. And we know how much of an affront the Spanish Civil War was to the human spirit when we stare at Picasso’s Guernica than when we read a more deliberate, fact-based account. I am not comparing anything I’ve done to any of the above; please, please do not presume that because I cite someone else’s art, I claim anything similar for anything I’ve done. But I cite the above because it makes the answer to your question obvious: Picasso said art is the lie that allows us to see the truth. That is it exactly.”