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)
During the past several years, Eliot Weinberger's inventive prose
has earned him a reputation as a candid social observer and
penetrating essayist. Works on Paper is the first collection of his
writings, twenty-one pieces that juxtapose the world as it is and
the world as it is imagined-by artists, poets, historical figures,
and ordinary people. "Inventions of Asia," the first section, deals
primarily with how the West reinvents the East (and how the East
invents itself): images of India circa 1492 (where Columbus thought
he was going); Christian missionaries in sixteenth-century China;
Bombay prostitutes as seen by a New York photojournalist; Tibetan
theocracy transplanted to the Rockies; a Confucian bureaucrat's
address to crocodiles; the shifting iconography of the "tyger";
looking for an answer to an ancient Chinese poem of questions; how
the children of Mao have reinvented Imagism; Kampuchea Under Pol
Pot. "Extensions of Poetry" explores the ways in which the world
affects the imaginations of individual poets (George Oppen,
Langston Hughes, Charles Reznikoff, Octavio Paz, Clayton Eshleman)
and indeed entire movements, leading at times to unexpected
incarnations and transformations. Weinberger ponders such strange
conjunctions as Whittaker Chambers and Objectivism, anti-Semitism
among American Modernists, bourgeois poets--present-day wards of
the academy and the state--confronting the issues of peace,
American foreign policy, and The Bomb.
General
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