In (Briefly) & About With Will

Vintage International's blurbs in praise of 'About Looking' really pimp John Berger's as a mind with which to tangle, but his starkly obvious limitations as a thinker leave me coughing hard and dry for what I can do that he can't. From page 7, in WHY LOOK AT ANIMALS?: 'A peasant [the second time he pointedly deploys as an example a peasant, as opposed, I suppose for *some* reason, to a noble-born or person of rank]...[I]s glad to salt away [his pig's] pork.' And on page 42, in PHOTOGRAPHS OF AGONY, he declares with an unctuous finality that there can be 'nothing to say' about people who do not find 'arresting,' and who pass over, photographic depictions of violence and bloodshed - thereby, albeit completely unsupported, negating an implication made to the contrary not a couple of paragraphs earlier. In all, I am alarmed at his apparent haste in cogitating.

If anybody needs me, I'll be out and about looking for myself...


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