Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time

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L. Mencken it is said, very acutely, that “a guardian angel riding in his forehead made sure that the stuff from his brain’s bilges didn’t get through from his secret diaries to the public page. James’s philosophy of criticism is marvelously summarized in his intention about the book, which is to demonstrate the truth of his belief that our literary inheritance “is our real and inextinguishable fortune. In reviewing Arthur Schlesinger's journals, Hitchens notes a "disappointing absence of rancor," since Schlesinger seems to have a good word to say about almost anybody. Russian while seated at a café, usually the Copper Kettle (which is at Cambridge – as he’s quick to remind you) or some exotic locale during his extensive travels and TV documentary shoots. 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.

Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the

This is linguistic pecksniffian stuff you used to find in the back of The Atlantic Monthly where people reported quarrelling bitterly with their spouses over the use of “hopefully. He then studied for a further degree in English at Pembroke College, Cambridge, but did not read the required books. Sometimes he seems to hold these people up to some very demanding standards: he's convincing on Sartre's feeble response to Nazism, but surely it's a bit much to question why Wittgenstein never mention the Fascists in Philosophische Untersuchungen, a work of pure linguistic philosophy? It's frustrating, because there are threads running through all of this, several at a time -- but it's not tied together well enough to truly make for an argument (or several). How will we know if our earthly paradise is coming to pieces, if we don’t know how it was put together?This is no mere collection of bits; it is a book with a theme, namely how the Kingdom of Letters did or did not stand up to the murderous philistinism of the dictators, especially Hitler and Stalin. As he notes: Mao "started off as a benevolent intellectual: a fact which should concern us if we pretend to be one of those ourselves.

Cultural Amnesia - Clive james

Indeed, the title-slips are most baffling, since that's the sort of stuff that's easily checked even by non-German speakers: it's Jünger's Das abenteuerliche Herz, not Das abenteuerliches Herz (338), for example. He also skewered others’ literary pretensions, if not his own: “Rilke used to say that no poet would mind going to jail, since he would at least have time to explore the treasure house of his memory. Writing under the headline As Good as Heaney in 2009, Julian Gough in Prospect magazine championed two volumes of James’s collected verse.He says that, if he has done his work in assembling this volume properly, “themes will emerge from the apparent randomness and make this work intelligible. While the women ‘can earn millions for spending a couple of hours a day wrapping themselves around an oaf’. He published several poetry collections, including the Sunday Times bestseller Sentenced to Life, and a translation of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, which was also a Sunday Times bestseller .

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This arbitrary arrangement, which looks on the surface to be so rigorously thought-out, vexes the reader and leads to a feeling that despite certain claims to a unifying cultural vision, there is rather ad hoc approach to the project. He did an internet show, Talking in the Library, including conversations with Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes and Terry Gilliam. And let’s make “media” an interchangeable singular-plural the way “deer” is so all the schoolmarms of the English-speaking world can quit harping about it.not the actual achievement of science, but the language of science, which, clumsily imitated by the proponents of Cultural Studies, has helped to make real culture unapproachable for exactly those students who might otherwise have been most attracted to it, and has simultaneously furthered the emergence and consolidation of an international cargo cult whose witch doctors have nothing in mind beyond their own advancement. It turns out not to be quite that: many of the pieces are brief summings-up of these people's lives, but James presents each first with a brief biographical sketch, then a quote attributed to the person in question -- and then a longer bit that generally takes the quote as its starting point.

Cultural Amnesia – Necessary Memories from History and the

Rather, Heine is used as an excuse for James to extrapolate on celebrity, first with an aside on Greta Garbo’s lofty intellectual justifications for ignoring all fan mail, then, ickily, James’ own ruminations on the burden of fame. Typical BS quote, “Luxury is a necessity that starts where necessity stops”, is used to document (for the nth time) the miserable conditions of the workers’ paradise that the Soviet Union wasn’t. Cultural Amnesia is not only huge (it would be unputdownable if, at 900 pages, it weren't unpickupable), it is also a remarkable intellectual achievement.Conspicuously absent: Scandinavia, Africa (Camus is about as far he ventures), and most of Asia (Mao, Nirad C.