Articles Written By Robert Birnbaum
Robert Birnbaum is editor-at-large at Identity Theory. All the sketchy details of his life will be (re)fabricated in his memoir-in-progress, Just Talking: How to Do Things With Words. His weblog can be found here.
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Apropos of Nothing
The Party Line
One of the more poignant scenes in Bernardo Bertolucci's film The Conformist (based on the Alberto Moravia novel of the same name) has the character Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant) recalling...
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Current Reads
Question, Questions, Questions?
Amongst the incalculably lengthy list of authors who have not received their due (also an incalculable notion) you will find, with regularity, the name of Padgett Powell. Powell (Edisto), who...
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Genre Genre Genre
Police and Thieves
For 25 years Lou Manfredo was a functionary in the Brooklyn courts and it is clear the knowledge and culture he internalized there is ably and compellingly exhibited in his maiden...
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Rare Medium
Waiting for the Electrician
At almost any given moment one may stroll the streets of urban America (unfortunately, I can't speak for the hinterlands) and observe what appear to be human beings perambulating (the...
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Current Reads
Raise Your Children Well
Po Bronson first came to my attention with his 1995 lampoon of the insular world of bond-trading, Bombardiers. My next awareness of him came in a conversation with novelist and Iowa...
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Iconography
An Original Original
Inexplicably, 27 years after passing to his glory, there are only a handful of biographies of the great American jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk. To paraphrase an obscure rhythm and...
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Serious Fun
In It for the Money?
Saying someone needs no introduction used to have some validity--before life in the post-industrial world went all 365/24/7 on us. Now the exponential explosion of sense-wracking gossip, trivia, ED adverts, and...
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Back in the Day
LA, LA, LA, LA, LA
New York City may be the American megalopolis hated by outlanders and flyover-zone residents (in part because apparently that's where that unfortunate rubric originated), but L.A. seems to draw...
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Mi, Mi, Mi, Mi
The Crepuscule
News of--one of the trade magazines referred to him as "legendary"; I can imagine the chuckle he got from that--bookseller Vincent McCaffrey's foray into fiction with his novel Hound got...
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The Coffee Table
Power to the Peaceful
Having studied with Gary Winogrand and been critically well-regarded (by Susan Sontag, among others), photographer Mitch Epstein early eschewed the artsy conceit of black-and-white photography to experiment with and perfect...
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Rare Medium
Waste Not, Want Not
One wonders what it would take to shock the American (or any public) to action with revelations of wrongdoing, corruption, or human and animal abuse as the muckrakers of a...
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Bookbag
Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom
Forgive my temporary amnesia but I cannot recall what caused the heightened awareness of Latin American literature resulting in the so-called Latin American Boom of the '60s and '7...