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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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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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