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Eliot Weinberger’s new collection of essays plays with familiar forms like the public address, the book introduction, and war reportage. His specialty is to sift huge amounts of historical and apocryphal information, strip away its context, and give a condensed account of his subjects’ most dreamlike qualities.
Asked to explain a photograph of a man selling oranges and peanuts on a street in Mexico City, he ignores the photograph and arranges some carefully selected information about oranges and peanuts in general.
In England and Sicily, [the orange] was the symbol of the victim’s heart; you pinned the name to an orange and hid it in the chimney until the person died. The peanut has never been a symbol of anything, though some African tribes believed it was one of the few plants to possess a soul.
Introducing a portfolio of blue engravings, he considers the history of blue as a concept.
Go back far enough and there is no blue.
Blue, black, blonde, blaze, the French blanc, and even yellow all derive from one proto-Indo-European word: *bhel—that which is shining, burning, flashing, or that which is already burnt. […]
Go back far enough and Africans, in the European languages, are blue. Ravens, in the Icelandic sagas, are blue.
In Welsh, glas is the color of the sky. Grass, and silver; glas is also vigor, the life-force. In Middle English, blewe is the color of both the sea and of burnt-out ashes.
This is classic Weinberger—dropping the reader into the middle of a rich conversation, and letting the spaces in between his observations indicate a vast intellectual territory that remains unknown and unknowable. These experimental flourishes carry over to his more traditional essays, too. Of the Chinese poet Gu Cheng, he writes, without commentary, "He was always seen wearing a tall cylindrical hat that had been made from the leg of a pair of blue jeans."
In "What I Heard about Iraq in 2005," Weinberger relates news items, opinions, and rumors about the Iraq War side by side, as if they were all equally valid forms of hearsay. The effect is both overwhelming (it’s too much to process at once) and chilling (it calls into question our whole means of understanding the war).
Weinberger insists that he is neither an artist nor a critic, but rather a "literary writer." It’s a useful distinction. For an artist, his writing is too much like research; for a critic, his lack of citations would be scandalous. It’s safer to say Weinberger plays literary games with the facts. He worships Ezra Pound. He’s an expert on Chinese and Latin American literature. Like Borges, he seems to hold encyclopedias in his head. Like Bolaño, he makes writers sound like the beautiful, doomed heroes of some epic saga.
Pound, Borges, and Bolaño have all been published by New Directions. So have Octavio Paz, George Oppen, Susan Howe, Gu Cheng, Forrest Gander, and Bei Dao—all of whom Weinberger discusses in this collection. One of these essays is a profile of James Laughlin, the founder of New Directions, whose mentor was—naturally—Ezra Pound. Of the 29 books Weinberger has written, edited, and translated, 16 are published by New Directions. He says, "As an adolescent in the 1960s, I, like many others, would buy any New Directions book I saw—although I probably had never heard of the author—simply because it was published by New Directions." No other living writer embodies a publishing house the way Weinberger embodies his. Maybe this reflects the crippling insularity of avant garde writing. Or maybe it’s fitting that all these kindred spirits are gathered in one place.
Weinberger contends that when writers describe their fellow writers, they are often describing themselves. Sure enough, when he says the work of Kenneth Cox has "an almost mineral hard perfection," he might as well be describing his own book. Of Susan Sontag’s criticism, he says, "Brilliant syntheses of what were often continental ideas, unfamiliar to American audiences, her best literary essays were unmatched models in the art of the introduction." The same could be said of Weinberger—although his "continental" ideas frequently come from the continents of Asia and South America.
As an introduction to decades of work by New Directions, and to the wide frontiers of post-national literature, Weinberger’s essays provide an unmatched introduction. They make us strikingly aware of the huge gaps in between our tiny bits of knowledge about the world, and they remind us that the common endeavor of all writers is something singular, demanding, and noble.
(November, 2009)
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