Eliot Weinberger’s first book of essays, Works on Paper, was published in 1986. Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei: How a Chinese Poem Is Translated came out the following year. He has translated the work of Octavio Paz, Jorge Luis Borges and others from Spanish. ‘What I Heard about Iraq’ was published in the LRB of 3 February 2005 and soon afterwards as a short book by Verso. Angels and Saints came out in 2020. His most recent book is The Life of Tu Fu, a fictional autobiography of the Tang Dynasty poet.
Some evangelical Christian websites have been reproducing my LRB blog post on Mitt Romney, presumably less interested in his trochaic surname than in his Mormon underwear. One of them reprints, on the same page as my post, an article by Gary Bauer, president of American Values, chairman of the Campaign for Working Families, and perennial television talking head for the Christian right:
There are many reasons Mitt Romney will never be elected president. These include, in descending order of importance: 1) He is a Mormon who wears funny underwear. 2) On a family vacation, he drove for many hours with his dog, Seamus, strapped to the roof of his SUV. 3) He is a stuffed shirt, full of 'pious baloney', as the incomparable Newt recently put it. 4) He has been on both sides of every issue, while denying that he ever held the opposing view. But what will sink Romney is his last name. Americans do not find two-syllable names ending with a long e presidential. They are associated with diminutives and baby-talk and lack the requisite gravitas. American history is littered with these losers:
Absorption of Solar and Lunar Essences by Anonymous (4th century)
Alchemy of the Purple Coil by Anonymous (12th century)
A treatise on sexuality. The female sexual organ is referred to as the ‘furnace of the reclining moon’. A later commentator notes that ‘it has never been known that one can obtain immortality by mounting women.’
Arcane Essay on the Supreme...
In 2009, Bernard-Henri Lévy circulated a petition complaining that his good friend, confessed and convicted child-rapist Roman Polanski, though known as an 'ingenious filmmaker', had been apprehended 'like a common terrorist'. Scores of writers and movie people in his circle signed. Now, predictably, Lévy is back, defending his good friend, accused rapist Dominique Strauss-Kahn, in The Daily Beast – a web magazine that finally lives up to its name.
The strangeness of such religious material again and again makes it incomprehensible that such figures should be considered holy, but if you look instead at their adventures as a remedy for the drudgery,...
In 1950 André Breton published a prose poem by Octavio Paz in a surrealist anthology. He thought one line in the work was rather weak and asked Paz to remove it. Paz agreed about the line...
Octavio Paz occupies a unique position in the Spanish-speaking world. He is the foremost living poet of the language as well as being one of the most authoritative interpreters of the Hispanic...
Borges died on 14 June, in Geneva – which bare fact virtually calls for an ‘English papers please copy,’ as they used to say, so complacently scant and grudging were the notices...
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