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.
