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Eliot Weinberger reads Decision Points so you don't have to
I salute Weinberger and the London Review of Books. You really took one for the team. This book must have been excruciating.
Read the review, not the book.
Decision Points holds the same relation to George W. Bush as a line of fashion accessories or a perfume does to the movie star that bears its name; he no doubt served in some advisory capacity. The words themselves have been assembled by Chris Michel (the young speechwriter and devoted acolyte who went to Yale with Bush’s daughter Barbara); a freelance editor, Sean Desmond; the staff at Crown Publishing (who reportedly paid $7 million for the book); a team of a dozen researchers; and scores of ‘trusted friends’. Foucault: ‘What difference does it make who is speaking?’ ‘The mark of the writer is … nothing more than the singularity of his absence.’
Read the review, not the book.
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London Review of Books be round the corners from me here. I nearly applied for a receptionist job there 2 years ago, but desisted when I realized it would involved being surrounded by poncey people and feeling like a dogsbody to arrogant and/or successful writers.
It usually has interesting looking books in its window, but too expensive to buy until they're on Amazon or in the second hand shops.
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Have you seen the Book Depository? The internet will bring you books cheaply; more cheaply than Amazon.
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I don't know about the London Review of Books. I haven't read it as it is so expensive, but I am wary of the ponciness and arrogance of literary figures. When I was a teenager I was desperate to be part of the literary world, and read all the review pages in the newspaper and followed all the news about the latest books and authors, but then i got all disillusioned like when I was 19 ish and realized how superficial a lot of them were. And meeting people who were reviewers and authors (I used to write for the Good Book Guide (a tiny catalogue-magazine) as my friend's mother was the editor, back when Niel Gaimon and Terry Pratchett used to hang out at the office there (I never met them, alas), but it was all so PONCY when I went to a literary award do, it was disappointing.
Not that I am not a literary-ponce myself, being born and bred in Bloomsbury and all, and living surrounded by it! I feel like a wee match girl, surrounded by the lights and staring wistfully through the windows at the forbidden wonders of the writer's life!
It would be awful to work as a receptionist for all the successful people, I think. Maybe ok if they were not arrogant and poncy. Duno.
I've met people who wrote for the Literary Review, and The New Statesmen, and they were very poncy and arrogant and not very intelligent (just Eton-Oxford educated).
Maybe I should go to some talks at the Literary Review place and see if they are nice there. More exciting near here be Houseman's Bookshop, where there are lots of left-wing talks and events. I never seem to get round to going, though used to go there every year when I was 5-12 years old to buy the Peace Diary for my dad for Christmas.
Also there is Persephone Books, a new shop publishing lesser-known women author's from last century or so.
And the School for Life shop, set up by Alain de Boton, which is a truly poncy laugh but has good books. I pop in, write down the titles of the interesting ones, then buy them from the second hand shop down the road instead.
I don't feel brainy enough to cope with London Review of Books world nowadays, alas. Brain boggled by life. All mushy. Wah!
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But hey, that attitude is probably partly why I am unemployable!
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Especially this bit:
"About 9/11 the text says: ‘My blood was boiling. We were going to find out who did this, and kick their ass.’"
And the bit about Billy Graham and "grace" - is that the Calvinism you were talking about a while back? I didn't realize people still believed that shit, you see, so it had never crossed my mind as a relevant issue. Alas, I now see why it is indeed very disturbingly relevant!
Didn't someone recently, some English politician maybe, or Scottish, say Goerge Bush was very intelligent - something along the lines of "you don't get to be president of the United States without being intelligent"? Or am I imagining that? It sounds unlikely.
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People still totally believe in Calvinism and it's a huge influence on North American religious and political culture.
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I am really shocked about the Calvinism - I had only heard of it because my ex studied it for his English degree as an amusing, quaint freak religious diversion from centuries ago!
Weird, the stuff they get up to in America. I wish we could just think, "how amusingly fucked up!" and leave them to it, but alas they attempt to worldy-dominate and it is scary.
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I am semi-privileged as I went to a private school and come from a relatively educated family (parents didn't have degrees, but read lots of social science and anarchism books and English literature), although I also had a shite childhood and was very poor and hungry. So I suppose I count as intelligent. I don't think I would have got to Cambridge without private school, though. Smaller and quieter classes and more individual attention make all the difference (my school wasn't better grade-wise than the good state schools). My friends from state schools who went to Oxford had much more stable family backgrounds, more money, and more professional qualified parents who had jobs.
But it is very hard to imagine Bush had MUCH intelligence. Maybe he had loads of extra tuition. Or got in on the basis of sports or something. I think it was easier back in them days for posh people because the interview process would have involved lots of cronies who knew each other. In fact one person I knew who wrote for the New Statesman allegedly got into Oxford due to family connections. Although someone I knew (my friend's mother who edited the Good Book Guide) went to Yale in the 70s and came from a normal middle-ish class Jewish New Jersey family. But then she was extremely intelligent. Hey ho.
I wish I had brains back but would rather just be happy and able to do things like riding horses over mountains and diving in coral reefs and stuff.