Oranges & Peanuts for Sale

by Eliot Weinberger

Presented at the PEN World Voices Festival as a “post-national” writer, Eliot Weinberger is “a sparkling essayist” (Confrontation), and his writings “a boundary-crossing, shape-shifting cabinet of curiosities” (The Bloomsbury Review).

Many of the twenty-eight essays in Oranges & Peanuts for Sale have appeared in translation in seventeen countries; some have never been published in English before. They include introductions for books of avant-garde poets; collaborations with visual artists, and articles for publications such as The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, and October.



One section focuses on writers and literary works: strange tales from classical and modern China; the Psalms in translation: a skeptical look at E. B. White’s New York. Another section is a continuation of Weinberger’s celebrated political articles collected in What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles (a finalist for the National Books Critics Circle Award), including a sequel to “What I Heard About Iraq,” which the Guardian called the only antiwar “classic” of the Iraq War. A new installment of his magnificent linked “serial essay,” An Elemental Thing, takes us on a journey down the Yangtze River during the Sung Dynasty.



The reader will also find the unlikely convergences between Samuel Beckett and Octavio Paz, photography and anthropology, and, of course, oranges and peanuts, as well as an encomium for Obama, a manifesto on translation, a brief appearance by Shiva, and reflections on the color blue, death, exoticism, Susan Sontag, and the arts and war.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Poetry

280 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 30, 2009

About the author

Eliot Weinberger is a contemporary American writer, essayist, editor, and translator. His work regularly appears in translation and has been published in some thirty languages.
Weinberger first gained recognition for his translations of the Nobel Prize winning writer and poet Octavio Paz. His many translations of the work of Paz include the Collected Poems 1957-1987, In Light of India, and Sunstone. Among Weinberger's other translations are Vicente Huidobro's Altazor, Xavier Villaurrutia's Nostalgia for Death, and Jorge Luis Borges' Seven Nights. His edition of Borges’ Selected Non-Fictions received the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism.

Reviews

[Jim Coughenour · Rating 4 out of 5]

Weinberger's essays are one of my favorite discoveries of 2010. Oranges & Peanuts is (I think) his latest collection, and it's excellent. It kicks into gear with a comically dyspeptic review of E. B White's 1948 essay for The New Yorker. "Here is New York," which along with disparaging White's "insularity" includes a sharp kick at The New Yorker's refracted "witty prose." For Weinberger this is not a compliment. "Discounting late publications of the inescapably famous, it is safe to say that The New Yorker, in its hundreds of thousands of pages over the last eighty years, has managed to miss almost the entirety of world literature."

That's just the amuse-bouche. Immediately after comes "Inventing China," an amplified version of EW's introduction to The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry, which was also my introduction to Weinberger. This particular essay kept a friend and me in caffienated conversation for a full month. There's another fine essay on the T'ang, and another evisceration – of Robert Alter's much-praised translation of the Hebrew Psalms. Weinberger has much to say on the subject of translation, all of it stimulating. I also appreciated his essay on Susan Sontag, taken by some readers (it seems, browsing about) as a cruel dismissal of her specific genius. I didn't read it that way. Weinberger praises her for her courage after 9/11 – the notorious, exceptional statement in The New Yorker - "And then there was Susan Sontag, blasting in her first sentences through the cluelessness and The New Yorker style-must-go-on prose..."; and for On Photography and Illness as Metaphor; but he's equally alert to her limitations, pretensions and poses. (For contrast, see Camille Paglia's insane, incandescent, wholly hilarious "Sontag, Bloody Sontag.")

Everywhere in these essays is the sign of a penetrating and original mind, nourished by the thought, poetry and art of several cultures, and a deeply satisfying dry sense of humor. The saddest essay came toward the end, "The United States of Obama," written in June 2008 when there was still so much reason for hope, before the dispiriting spectacle of the last couple years – "Surrender At Home; War Abroad," in the phrase of Tariq Ali's recent diatribe. But you can hardly blame a man for hope; only for being deliberately obtuse – and of that, there is no sign. Weinberger is a writer who makes me happy to be a reader.

[Robert Reinhard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tis collection of essays written over 20 years ago provides another testament to Weinberger's greatness and catholic knowledge of the world's writers and intricacies, juxtaposed. Just among the offerings, the longer essay on translation and the nations and languages that he has appreciated outside any western canons is remarkable. Not just for its literary value but today 20 years later when the stories of other, the immigrant, the "foreign" is tearing the world apart for lack of knowing the significance of the word and activity of translation in a braod sense.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful collection of short, intriguing essays. Weinberger seems very much in the tradition of those he most admires (Pound, Williams, Oppen, etc.) and has a beautiful taste and feel for the art of poetic translation. While I loved the essays about translation and various Chinese poets I prove his point by never having heard of, I find I most appreciate his 'political essays'. That is, Weinberger gives blunt voice to the too-often unspoken spinelessness of the modern poet, as she or he retreats from brutal american reality ever further into an academy the uselessness of which is as obvious as it is denied. Weinberger is no crank, as his deft appreciation of the possibility of the internet makes clear. He's a beautiful, welcome voice for hope and human effort.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Weinberger gets only one thing wrong in this book--he claims he's not an artist. I don't know if there's anything in this book to match his very best work--"The Dream of India," "The Falls," "Muhammad"--but it's a superb collection, both beautiful and scholarly, marred only by the occasional bit of crotchetiness.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

A set of essays on art and politics. Weinberger's writing style is a treasure, bright and lucid--I aspire to his kind of prose. The essays are wide-ranging, eclectic, and cosmopolitan, from thoughts about New York City to the color blue to the Iraq War to Emily Dickinson. His essays on avant-garde poets (none of whom I had ever heard of) and on translation were maybe the most striking to me. Some of the political essays haven't aged incredibly well (reflecting in a 2007 piece on Democratic candidate Obama that it seemed to be a sign that everyday personal racism in America was a thing of the past), but others are prescient (the essay on the Iraq War which makes the elliptical point that the troops have been used and exploited and left with no psychological support, which sows a bitter harvest of PTSD that we're still reaping).

Favorite essays include "Gu Cheng" and "Kenneth Cox," complex and humane looks at two very difficult men and poets; "Alter and the Psalms," an enjoyably snarky look at a translation of the Psalms; an exploration of the life of the publisher James Laughlin; and the title essay, which is on the surface an assortment of facts about oranges and peanuts, but put together becomes an oblique exploration of the many wide-ranging connections in this global world through history. Sometimes the juxtaposition of the collected essays does them a disservice--I couldn't help but be somewhat annoyed that he seems more judgmental of Susan Sontag's over-use of italics than he does a poet's axe murder of his wife, but they originally appeared separately so it's a function of them being brought together.

A multi-faceted, enthralling stroll through a fascinating range of topics.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is Weinberger's largest collection - nearly 300 pp. Essays are in different chapters, according to subject. This is the beginning of him being more political. I had already read as a stand-alone the long "What I Heard About Iraq in 2005" essay, so I skipped over that. It is a bit outdated. But it is interesting that some of the things he complained about in the Cheney/Bush II's regime became even more horrendous under DJT. And, we were all so optimistic with the election of President Barack Obama. Oh well.
I had forgotten how well he wrotes about the art of photography. And his commentary on translating. As usual, I found a few books and authors I had never heard of before to pursue - especially older Asian writers.
Each essay has a date at the end, which is helpful. And even more so, the Acknowledgements at the beginning of the book, providing us with information on where the essay was published, and often why it was written.
A left-leaning Ezra Pound, I do love reading his work.
4 out of 5.

[Philipp · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a crime Weinberger is not better known. Essays about the love of knowledge in the widest sense; the beauty of Chinese poetry, matters of translating poetry, multiculturalism in US literature (it's not real, it always has to be filtered through Americanism - the successful stuff is always Vietnamese-Americans, the Vietnamese literature gets ignored), the promise of the Obama presidency (all of our pre-Trump naivety!), and so much more.
I wish there were more knowledge-kraken like Weinberger out there.

[Cooper Renner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Especially interesting to me when he writes of writers (though I skipped much of the Sontag essay) and literature, and his addition to his earlier What I Heard About Iraq book is full of great—and infuriating—information, most of which was new to me. Eschewing jargon and alliance to “schools” of writers and the various NEA/creative writing monopolies (yes, I realize that’s a kind of contradiction), he talks about what is real—not the careerism of commodity literature.

[Q · Rating 4 out of 5]

Different from elemental thing but the essays that make him famous are worth the read

[Patrick Redford · Rating 4 out of 5]

new directions publishing i should have been more familiar with your game

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been reading this one, a couple essays before bed, off and on for the last three or four months, so my thoughts are a little hazy about early sections-- but this is definitely a book of sections, with differing focuses and appeals. There's a lot in here about Chinese poetry, both contemporary and the influence of classical styles on the same, which made me wish I had one of Weinberg's anthologies to go along with the reading. It's erudite and alert stuff which still managed to go over my head. There's maybe the most lucid take I've ever seen-- I wish I were this good when I talked about it to my students-- about the role Pound and other modernist's understanding (flawed, but hindsight is a bitch) of Asian lits-- and how it MADE the modernists. This is in the essay "Inventing China," which is remarkable.

There's a lot of political writing here, too, especially about the Iraq war and Weinberger's outrage over what he calls at times "the Cheney-Bush administration." I think at the time this would have really stoked my fires, but at this distance, the rote recitation of facts-- about costs, about misunderstandings and just willful ignorance of local customs-- doesn't shock the way it once did. In other words, I feel like these essays could use more art, be more persuasive rather than strictly documentary.

There are also funny formal experiments, mostly dealing with accumulating fragments of things.

It's a wide ranging and rangey book. There are a lot of different kinds of things in here. It's hard to imagine reading it cover to cover, except over a really long span of weeks like I did.

[Paul Secor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many fine essays included here. Some I'm sure I'll return to over time: "Oppen Then", "Niedecker/Reznikoff", "James Laughlin", the title essay, "The Arts and the War in Iraq", among them.
For me, Mr. Weinberger misses the mark at least a couple of times. "Where Was New York?" is an attack on a straw man. No one reads E.B. White for cutting edge writing about his times, at least I don't. I read him for the grace of his prose.
And Mr. Weinberger, like many of us, got caught up in Obama's con game - see "The United States of Obama".
And it's interesting to read "Susan Sontag", which begins as an essay praising Ms. Sontag and ends up tearing most of her work down.
Eliot Weinberger is a thoughtful man who is passionate about the things he loves and thinks are important.

[Scott Tienken · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tad draws a glyph on the zone between them with his cigarillo. This is not a moment for puffing and blowhard. No. He needs to be emphatic. He is in disagreement and he intends for a disagreement to take, not some loving negotiation. He can be strong, too, sometimes. Decisive, even. A glyph can become cursive.
'No way, Mart. No. Nuts to 'exceptional.' This boy is a mediocre. Clear cut. Yes.'
There being too much of the moon blue and crescent about the holes, membranes and surfaces across from him to be too firm, though. Or just adamant. O what vendor, what ruthless hawker of oranges and peanuts guiled him out of his billfold all those moments ago? When did he become this sap? This him so anxious to lose.

[Beth Marzoni · Rating 5 out of 5]

The more of his work I read, the more convinced I become that Eliot Weinberger is among the finest minds in English-language letters today---perhaps in letters period. This collection highlights his incredible range and his incredible skill, and includes a number of pieces that should be required reading for every American. Here's a writer who will make you think and think about what matters.

[Tuck · Rating 5 out of 5]

the essay alone "What I Heard About Iraq in 2005" is worth the price of admission. these are widely ranging essays on things like the 3 Gorges Dam in China to reviews of poets like Oppen, Huidobro, Paz, and the color blue and exotes. my favorites are about the political world of usa.

[Jayson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Less focused than Weinberger's most recent collections--this, Karmic Traces, and an Elemental Thing--Oranges and Peanuts is still a delight that will please devotees of the essayist and translator's writings.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

As usual lots of interesting stuff to ponder upon. I didn't enjoy this book as much as his wonderful collection, Karmic Traces. Particularly liked the section on Chinese poetry...

[Lukas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eines dieser Bücher, die neue Fäden spinnen. Ich will jetzt chinesische Lyrik und das gesamte Verlagsprogramm von New Directions lesen, angefangen bei William Carlos Williams.