Essays on everything from Pol Pot to bourgeois poets on the
government dole are penetrating and achingly accurate in this
collection by the founder of a now-defunct, respected literary
magazine, Montemora. The book is divided into two parts -
Inventions of Asia and Inventions of Poetry: the first, regional,
the second, literary. In both there are social, historical and
political analyses of pith and substance. The author first looks at
the East as imagined by the West and goes on to such exotic topics
as Matteo Ricci, a 16th-century Jesuit missionary in China,
prostitutes in Bombay and an excellent study of benighted
Kampuchea. He is aware of Eastern philosophy, poetry and social
systems as is evident in the essay entitled "A Few Don'ts for
Chinese Poets." For those more caught up in Western culture, he
offers us fresh, stimulating opinions on Langston Hughes, Kenneth
Rexroth, Charles Reznikoff, Octavio Paz and others. There's Allen
Ginsberg and his guru with a million dollars in real estate -
America's hunger for meaning gone whacky. Whatever Weinberger
touches upon - and he covers many topics not mentioned here - he
does with a deft and insightful intelligence. His homage to Kenneth
Rexroth is not only the best thing said about an often-dismissed
poet, but is a touching memoir. He even includes Whittaker Chambers
in his pantheon of weirdos, heroes, saints and rogues and manages
to bring something new to this man's story. Literate and
entertaining, this is an impressive wingding of intellectual
prowess. And it's a pleasure to read. (Kirkus Reviews)
Written for publication in magazines abroad, translated into
sixteen languages, and collected here for the first time, Eliot
Weinberger's chronicles of the Bush era range from first-person
journalism to political analysis to a kind of documentary prose
poetry. The book begins with the inauguration of George W. Bush in
January 2001-and an eerie prediction of the invasion of Iraq-and
picks up on September 12, with an account of downtown Manhattan,
where Weinberger lives, on the "day after." With wit and anger, and
sometimes startling prescience, What Happened Here takes us through
the first term of the "Bush junta": the deep history of the
neoconservative "sleeper cell," the invention of the War on Terror,
the real wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the often bizarre
behavior of the Republican Party. For twenty-five years, Eliot
Weinberger has been taking the essay form into unexplored
territory. In What Happened Here, truth proves stranger than
poetry.
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