Book #11 of 2020: The Ghosts of Birds by Eliot Weinberger

Back in the mid-90s I read Works on Paper: Essays and loved it so much that I promised I would read more Eliot Weinberger. Here I am nearly 30 years later keeping that promise.

The Ghosts of Birds has a few traditional essays or reviews, but more than half of them are kind of meanderings along a topic with collages of reminiscences or snippets of ancient texts or encyclopedia entries and a bit of comment intermixed. This is reminiscent of Walter Benjamin and his Arcades Project, or Paul Metcalf's works, or maybe Charles Reznikoff's Holocaust poems. One of the traditionally structured essays in here is about Reznikoff. There is a long rumination of George W. Bush and his terrible memoir, and it was refreshing to remember days when we thought "how awful and ignorant is this President?" Others are about indigenous American poetry, or Chinese verse through the centuries, or birds and art about birds. I promise myself again to read more Eliot Weinberger, and hopefully not three decades hence.