Subject grouping in the Essays & Articles archive.
Originally published in The Washington Post, 1996. A review of Leslie Fiedler’s essay collection The Tyranny of the Normal, which ranges across organ transplants, sideshow freaks, and the religious core of the 1960s counterculture. Pinchbeck argues that Fiedler abandons critical rigor for personal performance, and that his claims about the popular mind overstep what his kind of criticism can support.
Written for The New York Times in 1996. A profile of identical twin animators Timothy and Stephen Quay, timed to the US premiere of their first live-action feature, Institute Benjamenta, adapted from Robert Walser’s novella Jacob von Gunten. The piece covers their Philadelphia origins, their London career, the puppet film Street of Crocodiles, and the influence of Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Svankmajer.
On the sons and daughters of the Beat writers, and what it was to grow up as the offspring of a literary counterculture. Written for The New York Times Magazine.
A 1995 Washington Post review of John Pemble’s Venice Rediscovered, which traces how Byron, Ruskin, Henry James, and John Addington Symonds turned Venice into a myth of exquisite decadence. Pinchbeck follows Pemble’s argument that preservation proved as fatal to the city as modernization would have been, embalming it for tourists by the time D.H. Lawrence dismissed it in 1928.
On how digital reproduction was undermining the contemporary art world’s economics — an art market built on scarcity and the unique object confronting a medium in which copies cost nothing and originals do not exist. Written for Wired in December 1994.
Written for the Forward in 1994. The piece reviews Tropical Synagogues, Ilan Stavans’s anthology of Jewish Latin American short fiction, and reports on its launch at New York’s Americas Society. It notes Alberto Gerchunoff’s ideal of the Jewish gaucho, stories by Moacyr Scliar and Isaac Goldemberg, and Stavans’s claim that these writers remain isolated from mainstream culture.