Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time

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The world is prepared to receive us, with all its fruits laid out for our consumption, and wrapped in cling film to meet our sanitary standards. Bond tosses it back to her with the admirably curt reply, ‘You forget I got a First in Oriental languages at Cambridge.

In this marvellous book you'll find a penetrating peon of praise to jazz aristocrat Duke Ellington, and you might also have good, if frustrating, fun arguing with James's blanket condemnation of the freer forms of jazz {he's really got it in for John Coltrane} on the perfectly sensible basis that it doesn't swing. He was well aware that he was surrounded by the kind of people whose only ambition was to cut off the electricity.But unless they were born as saints, they had to find out they were not infallible by listening to the words of others.

James catalogues and explores the careers of many of the century's greatest thinkers, humanists, musicians, artists and philosophers, with illuminating excursions into the minds of those historical figures – from Sir Thomas Browne to Montesquieu – who paved the way. As I was reading, I felt I was deepening my understanding and appreciation of Western culture, sometimes by taking a new look at a well-known figure, and other times by learning about a previously unknown person whose work I am know seeking out. There was a time when I could fairly fluently read Russian, and get through a simple article in Japanese about my special subject, the war in the Pacific. We take pride in offering a wide selection of used books, from classics to hidden gems, ensuring there is something for every literary palate. James attempts to lard them with so much inner irony and “surface” paradox, that this reader was stopped dead in his tracks, fruitlessly attempting to decipher what James is saying, and over and over failing to understand what it is that he is so damned pleased about.I would never have taken a note in the first place except out of the fear that what I was reading would soon slip away: a fear all too well founded.

Which now that I think of it, is pretty much what we watch James doing again and again – intellectual masturbation. But aside from one 8 word quote from “Requiem”, James’ narrative about her focuses on (1) her heroic stand against the tyranny of the state, and (2) “the beautiful incarnation of pre-revolutionary Petersburg” and “she was a femme fatale” and “love for her broken-nosed beauty was a common condition among the male poets”. I read this book a few months ago but cannot stop thinking about it -- the very antithesis of Cultural Amnesia. A little edge-rubbing to DJ, minor surface wrinkling to spine ends of DJ, VG+, bright and unmarked internally. Who are the “proponents of Cultural Studies”, and how do they “clumsily imitate” this mysterious language?He’s not shy about saying, in his Note on the Text, I have stuck with the traditional masculine dominance of the indeterminate gender … (and) the European tradition by which sufficiently distinguished females … referred to by their first names … Female readers can put all this down to unreconstructed chauvinism if they wish [he doesn’t care], but (their representatives in the book are not slighted) ‘merely outnumbered’.