Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time

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Cultural Amnesia" is a series of short essays inspired by aphorisms, well-crafted sentences, or simply neat ideas from a wide array of writers, artists, thinkers, critics, celebrities, or otherwise historical figures. If there is any overarching theme, it is a championing of humanism and the defense of liberal democracy against totalitarian ideologies. James does an admirable job of explaining why such a defense, in this day and age, is still necessary.

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While the women ‘can earn millions for spending a couple of hours a day wrapping themselves around an oaf’. Sometimes, but too rarely, this kind of wit is indeed brought to bear on political issues: he points out how outrageous it is that no one in the West finds the idea of the Kirov Ballet objectionable (though it has long been renamed in Russia), and wonders how people would react to the Himmler Youth Orchestra or the Pol Pot Academy for Creative Writing. Schillinger, Liesl (8 April 2007). "What Kind of Car Is a Ford Madox Ford?". The New York Times . Retrieved 11 July 2010. So while the focus is on some aspect of the person's life and work in a majority of the cases, James occasionally leaves them far behind and offers something completely different: the Thomas Browne leads to a discussion of arriving at book titles, Terry Gilliam leads to torture, and Heinrich Heine to fan letters. Conspicuously absent: Scandinavia, Africa (Camus is about as far he ventures), and most of Asia (Mao, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, and Isoroku Yamamoto are pretty much the extent of it).Clive James with his book Cultural Amnesia, 2007, a collection of biographical essays. Photograph: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

Cultural Amnesia by Clive James - Pan Macmillan

urn:oclc:861367282 Republisher_date 20180901165518 Republisher_operator [email protected];[email protected] Republisher_time 977 Scandate 20180814013003 Scanner ttscribe21.hongkong.archive.org Scanningcenter hongkong Source strikes me as meaningless: what does he mean by an inimical “language of science”? Who are the “proponents of Cultural Studies”, and how do they “clumsily imitate” this mysterious language? What does it mean to put the humanities to “careerist use”? Is this some kind of debate within academe that we are being subjected to? A lifetime's reading has gone into this doorstop of a book. But I have to ask: What was James thinking ? (...) But alphabet soup a la James left me with indigestion." - Matthew Price, The Los Angeles Times Stalin's obduracy was the historical fact that defeats imagination. Given his intransigence, no other scenario than armed confrontation was really possible. The idea that the United States chose to fight the Cold War can be discussed, but only in the context of the reality that it could not have chosen to call it off."Alasdair MacIntyre once wrote an essay called “How to Write About Lenin—and How Not To,” in which he said that the one unpardonable historical sin was that of being patronizing. If you could not or would not care to imagine what conditions were like in 1905 or 1917, then it might be best if you kept your virginal judgments to yourself. A lifetime in the making and containing over one hundred essays, this is a definitive guide to twentieth-century culture. 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. Altogether, it is an illuminating work of extraordinary erudition. The subject matter of many of the essays, dealing as they do with one or other form of totalitarianism, can be fairly bleak, and one thing a James fan might miss a little is the humour he usually brings to his writing. It's a pity that he seems to have felt it was inappropriate, because when it does emerge, in his lighter moments, the sentences can really come alive. How's this for a description of male porn stars: The decay of grammar is a feature of our time, so I have tried, at several points in this book, to make a consideration of the decline part of the discussion. Except in a perfectly managed autocracy, language declines, and too much should not be made of the relationship between scrambled thought and imprecise expression. . . . Everybody wants to write correctly. But they resist being taught how, and finally there is nobody to teach them, because the teachers don’t know either. In a democracy, the language is bound to deteriorate with daunting speed. The professional user of it would do best to count his blessings: after all, his competition is disqualifying itself, presenting him with opportunities for satire while it does so, and boosting his self-esteem."