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.
-
Rare Medium
Renovating Fiction
Forgive me if you have a problem with me honoring another dead white man but, in my world, to ignore the publication of a book by Jorge Luis Borges, who...
-
Poetry
Having Fun With Words
North Carolina-born poet Tony Hoagland (What Narcissism Means to Me), who is well-regarded and lauded in the poetry world (which is hardly ever confused as the real world), might have...
-
Iconography
Sad and Slow
The pantheon of chanteuses whose voices and phrasing could jackhammer your buried feelings from the tomb of defenses that life inevitably creates is not especially large—but its members are...
-
New Finds
Peace, Love, Happiness
Poet Paul Guest (My Index of Horrifying Knowledge) was permanently paralyzed in a bike accident at the age of 12, which, as Mary Karr points out, “is the least interesting thing...
-
Current Reads
Mother and Son Reunion
In that evanescent realm which I think of as my reading experiences there are a handful of writers whose narrative skills move them beyond the increasingly respectable category of so-called “...
-
Back in the Day
Slicks and Slickers
In American history one might corral any number of examples—Vietnam and Iraq, Warren Harding and George Bush, the elections of 1876 and 2000, Enron and AIG et al., and more—to...
-
Apropos of Nothing
You Say Tomato, I Say Tomato
Ever since I read (in 1977) Thomas Whiteside’s exposition on tomatoes, entitled simply “Tomatoes,” I have used it as an example of 1) the discovery of a piece of writing on...
-
Genre Genre Genre
Two Dead Women
Though both bestselling authors (being a singular category) John Grisham and Scott Turow are well liked in what is a testy and envy-rich sub-culture, I have not been moved to...
-
Coffee Table Gallery
Black Is the Night
The term film noir gets tossed around quite a bit in the polyphonious public conversations about movies—it’s possible that its meaning has been diluted to mean anything that...
-
Writing About Writers
Birds Without Wings
There may be a tendency to dismiss intra-left political conflicts with a version of the old saw about literary squabbles—that is, the reason they are so impassioned and contentious...
-
Back in the Day
That Devil Rum
Though my education was decidedly inferior (a product of the Chicago Public Schools and lower-tier universities), that dis-educational experience did not seem to affect my interest in history and its...
-
Back in the Day
When the Dancing Stopped
While I assign to the film Saturday Night Fever the role of token/emblem of the worst decade in my lifetime, I have never enlarged that judgment to include the...