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.
-
Reading
Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard
I recently noted British bad-boy photographer Martin Parr’s slip-cased, two-volume Parrworld: Objects and Postcards, the latter volume of which displayed Parr’s 5,000-strong postcard collection. Now comes a (relatively)...
-
Reading
Waltz With Bashir
Like Art Spiegelman, I have an aversion to the rubric “graphic novel.” Golden Globe-winning Israeli film Waltz With Bashir was first an animated film and now also exists as a 12...
-
Watching
Chewing Up the Small Screen
In the vast wasteland known as television, the gap between the Olympian heights of shows such as The Wire and the subterranean depths of reality TV and that ode to...
-
Reading
Through Black Spruce
As I was reading and immensely enjoying Through Black Spruce (Viking), Canadian author Joseph Boyden’s newest opus, I came to the realization that I never read something by a...
-
Reading
Musing on Muses
I view those books concerned with writers’ love lives and how that affected their work at large with at least detachment and perhaps even skepticism—though unquestionably I respect the...
-
Reading
Becoming Manny
The Manny Ramirez story seems to have a wider audience than just local baseball chatter, and may even go off track and venture into the quagmire known as human relations....
-
Reading
Oxford Atlas of the World
Assuming you have not been totally co-opted and reduced to an incidental node in the circuitry of the faceless conspiracy known as the WWW, it’s possible you may have...
-
Reading
Ghosts of Chicago
Some years ago in a conversation with the then-ebullient Thisbe Nissen, a recent spawn of the famous (Iowa) Writers’ Workshop, I asked—as I am occasionally prone to do—if...
-
Reading
Poster Art
Except for movie and music concert art of the late ’60s (JZ Lynch, R. Crumb, Skip Williamson), posters have not occupied as prominent a place in American culture as in...
-
Reading
Our Life in Gardens
No doubt in the publishing world there is a lingering hope that books specific in topic—bread-baking, quilting, knitting, bird-watching—have application to the broader project of the life well-lived—...
-
Reading
Runner
Thomas Perry’s The Butcher’s Boy and Metzger’s Dog are two of the best books of whatever niche/genre in which you place Perry’s fiction. He is...
-
Reading
Get Lit
Luckily, only a quartet of so-called small (literary) magazines have chosen to subscribe me. Any more and I am certain I would have to start making ruthless and painful decisions...