Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time

Product Information

For my own part, it made me think hard about all the fields of creativity that I seemed to love equally, whatever their place in a supposed hierarchy. But even here, James ruins things by making more out of this heroism and idealism than it can carry, and moreover digressing for two plus pages about how, if an American movie were it to made, it would HAVE to star Natalie Portman, then going on about his own infatuation with Portman blah blah … James has no choice but to refer to Scholl as “Sophie”. In the short term, many of my annotations went into book reviews and pieces for periodicals: writings which took an essay form, and which, when I collected them into volumes, I unblushingly dignified with that term. 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.

I gave up 500 pages into War and Peace, but I was able to understand James' references to it later on in the text. It was an essay by James, in another of his collections, that got me addicted to The West Wing, the DVD box set of which I've watched all the way through three times {so far} and for that alone I'm eternally grateful. It’s plain that James himself wished most painfully to be known as this sort of wit, that his pronouncements will have the charm of the sophisticated aphorism and be remembered for the fine phrase which he himself could craft. In the same week, I was filming in Greenwich Village, and spent an hour of down-time sitting in a café making my first acquaintance with the poetry of Anthony Hecht.

He might begin an essay with one quote or pretext that would imply a central idea, and then he would veer off in another direction entirely. Learned books are published by the thousand, yet learning was never less trusted as something to be pursued for its own sake. With their clothes off and their virile members contractually erect, they are merely competitors in some sort of international caber-tossing competition in which they are not allowed to use their hands.

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. But if you're interested in learning something of what he's picked up from a lifetime's reading – not least about the art of writing a brilliant sentence – then Cultural Amnesia is a whole rich continent waiting to be explored.He was well aware that he was surrounded by the kind of people whose only ambition was to cut off the electricity. The only answer comes from faith: faith that the rule of decency – which at last, and against all the odds, looks as if it might prevail – began in humanism, and can’t long continue without it. 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. 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. As a journalist and critic, a premature post-modernist, I was often criticized in my turn for talking about the construction of a poem and of a Grand Prix racing car in the same breath, or of treating gymnasts and high divers (in my daydreams, I astonish the Olympic medalist Greg Louganis) as if they were practising the art of sculpture.

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. With fascinating essays on artists from Louis Armstrong to Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud to Franz Kafka and Beatrix Potter to Marcel Proust, Cultural Amnesia is one of the crowning achievements in Clive James's illustrious career as a critic. He starts from a position of their purpose, their intention and works back to his own criteria of the aesthetic, which he then frequently modifies based on his quite remarkable empathy. Those advocates will need a memory, and part of that memory will need to be of an age in which they were not yet alive.Overture and all the individual essays, may be accessed via the menu column to the left of this page. In the job we can have a profile written about us, and be summed up: all the profiles will be the same, and all the summaries add up to the same thing.