Cultural Amnesia – Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

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In 2008, James came out with Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time, comprising more than 100 brief essays on 20th century writers, musicians, artists and philosophers. The result was a witty and illuminating compendium — with an urgent plea for humanism in the face of tyranny. Some people call James a show-off. That's a matter of taste. I don't mind show-offs if they genuinely have a lot of knowledge to show off, and you can't fault James on that score. From the evidence of this book, he must have done nothing but read for twelve hours a day every day for the past fifty years. What's astonishing is how much of it he remembers. It would take me a lifetime to read all the writers he can reference within a single essay. I was reminded of this many times while reading Clive James's new and enormous book of biographical essays, Cultural Amnesia, because Bond's breezy insouciance is something Clive James seems constantly trying to pull off. Of the hundred-plus figures James writes about, fewer than twenty-five worked in English. Some of the others don't even exist in translation yet, but that's all right because James has read every single one of them in the original, and he's going to make damn sure you know about it. Even my career on television, I was essentially a writer who was saying it. I'd write it in my head just before I said it. But what I didn't want to do is leave anything out. I still haven't written a play and I missed that. I might do that yet. I think the essay is the really powerful literary form of today, even more so than the novel.

Clive James is a well-known Australian writer, critic, broadcaster, and poet; he has often been described (in the US) as a public intelectual. Cultural Amnesia spotlights his comprehensive and deep knowledge is of Western culture, with a special focus on 20th-century Europe. The volume is comprised of 106 biographical profiles of a wide range of writers, musicians, artists, actors whom James deems important to know to understand 20th-century cultural, intellectual, and political life. (Note that some figures lived in earlier centuries, but James always makes their relevance to the 20th century clear.) These brief essays are organized alphabetically, and structured around one or more quotations from the individual being featured, which James uses as a jumping off point for a series of ruminations. While he stays focused on the life of the individual being profiled in some cases, in others his thoughts take him to other cultural and political figures. Following his connections and seeing how his mind works is part of the fun of reading this collection. I told fairly good stories. They got better as the years went on. I'm still doing it now, I suppose.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

in the West, someone obsessed with material things is correctly thought to be a fool. In the East [meaning pre-1991 Eastern Europe and USSR], everyone was obsessed with material things." NOTE: Cultural studies is an innovative interdisciplinary field of research and teaching that investigates the ways in which “culture” creates and transforms individual experiences, everyday life, social relations and power. And if individual essays are often exceptional, the way they fit together in the book as a whole has problems. The main one being that there is almost a theme to the book, but not quite. The theme which looms largest is the way in which the twentieth century can be characterised as a clash between two forms of totalitarianism, left and right. But to really make this work, about a quarter of the essays, the ones which don't bear on this subject, would need to be cut. Alternatively if it's just going to be a random collection of biographies, a different quarter should be cut, namely some of those which do concern totalitarianism. As it is, we are left halfway between, not sure if the book is darting around with general curiosity, or if it's trying to build some kind of cumulative argument. Aphoristic and acutely provocative: a crash course in civilization' – J. M. Coetzee, author of Disgrace For a more detailed critique of the Introduction: James tells us that throughout his reading and writing career, he made “annotations” which seemed to be beyond a narrow subject, belonging to a “scheme” which could perhaps be approached far in the future, perhaps near the end of his life. He talks of the threads of this larger scheme as “clarities variously illuminating a dark sea of unrelenting turbulence … Far from a single argument, there would be scores of arguments. I wanted to write about philosophy, history, politics and the arts all at once, and about what had happened to those things during the course of the multiple catastrophes into whose second principal outburst (World War I was the first) I had been born in 1939, and which continued to shake the world as I grew to adulthood.”is of an anti-hero, so doesn’t count. Throw her in the bag with Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Sarte, Goebbels, and several others, who only appear in their own essays to be pilloried and condemned. WHEN I FIRST read this magnificent line, the second half of it begged to be the title of a book. I copied the line into an early instalment of my journal, so it must have been when I was at Cambridge, where I had a brief period one winter of joining Browne’s collected works in Pembroke Library after the early nightfall, as if those moulting leather-bound volumes were a gang of old drinking chums. At the time I had no idea what kind of book mine would be. The phrase was a cap looking for a head to fit. Later on, when I was assembling my first book of television criticism, it took me a while to remember that there was a suitable title all set to go. Visions Before Midnight seemed just right: the television programmes were visions, they happened before midnight, and the falling phrase had something in it of a civilization coming to an end, which was roughly the way the BBC sports commentators made me feel.