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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Mi, Mi, Mi, Mi
My Way
As an unrepentant Vietnam war dissenter, political contrarian, and admirer of Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, and Christopher Hitchens, I had a feeling I would not be able to read very...
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Writing About Writers
Michiko and Martin
My first impulse upon encountering this article, found in/on the ostensibly British Guardian newspaper/website penned (forgive the old-school locution) by their Manhattan correspondent Ed Pilkington, was dismissal. And...
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Confab
Our Brave, Stupid New World
Reading Agni editor and Harvard mentor (The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age) Sven Birkets at his best is like listening to an old-style baritone crooner...
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New Finds
Who Is Leslie Jamison?
Leslie Jamison certainly has some weighty credentials—though I am in a quandary as to which element of her neophytic novelist capsule-bio/gestalt moved me to pick up her debut...
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The New Pantheon
Attention Must Be Paid #55
My guess is very few of you have read novelist Gilbert Sorrentino (Mulligan Stew, Gold Fools), probably through no fault of yours, and most certainly through no fault of his. ...
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Apropos of Nothing
Stuffed
Probably everyone knows someone whose predilection for collecting has gone off the rails and might be viewed as a pathological condition. (Consider the two daffy uncles in Diane Keaton’s 1995...
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Poetry
Inseminating the Elephant
May is National Older Americans Month, Get Caught Reading Month, Meditation Month, Clean Air Month, Haitian Heritage Month, and a host of others—in honor of which I want to...
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Iconography
Cagey Men
For the purpose of this communiqué I don’t need to resolve whether myth-making is both a necessary and sufficient ingredient of nationalism—let’s agree that it is at...
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Rare Medium
Spring Blossoms
Spring brings forth a number of wonders, not the least of which are the quarterly editions of so-called small literary magazines. Since I am graced to be on the mailing...
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Current Reads
Antwerp, Before and After
Such has been the influence of Chilean novelist Robert Bolaño that every posthumous publication of his ouevre has been hungrily devoured by the growing multitudes of his admirers....
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Writing About Writers
The Sage of Baltimore
As is occasionally the case, I owe (and I hope I speak for his Washington Post readers) a debt of gratitude (whatever that is) to Jonathan Yardley for apprising me...
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Apropos of Nothing
Sounds and Silence
One may view our encounters with sounds and silence as a quotidian matter, but as Patrick Madden quotes Montaigne in his collection of essays, “From the most ordinary and commonplace...