Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time

Product Information

Humanism was a particularized but unconfined concern with all the high-quality products of the creative impulse, which could be distinguished from the destructive one by its propensity to increase the variety of the created world rather than reduce it. He condenses his thoughts into linguistic firework displays, arresting, crackling, beautiful and provocative. He was well aware that he was surrounded by the kind of people whose only ambition was to cut off the electricity. He, lucidly and beautifully, got to the essence of writing, carrying a theme all the way to the decadence of contemporary pornagraphy. The tales are legion of him sweating over some beautifully-printed tome in the original German, French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese (!

Gresham’s law, that the bad drives out the good, has acquired a counter-law, that the bad draws in the good: there are British football hooligans who can sing Puccini’s “Nessun dorma. The book teems with famous names: villains like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao Zedong—and the gullible intellectuals who admired them; heroes like Albert Camus, who was never tempted away from liberal ideals by the illusions of power. On the other hand, it is a great relief to read his scathing remarks about that old unrepentant Stalinist Jean-Paul Sartre, and a delight to come across his lovely and unexpected encomium of Beatrix Potter, while his essay on Proust, whom he quite obviously reveres, will send you straight to the man himself. I loved his essay on Duke Ellington, for instance, because I've danced to his music for years and knew only a small amount of the peripheral knowledge of the time that James has to offer.

A number of articles published in Australian papers earlier in March 2013 featured interviews with his daughters and some examples of his recent poetry.

Young readers will find some of that story here, and try to convince themselves that they would have behaved differently. 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. The essays taken as themselves are wonderfully stimulating, not only fascinating in their subject matter but also a sheer joy to read because of the quality of his writing. James is a genius - a master of both the low-brow AND the high-brow - and a man who understands what true freedom is. It has always been part of the definition of humanism that true learning has no end in view except its own furtherance.The phrase that sends him off on the long discussion that frames the entire piece is “Was ist so nur?

The meaning of the term humanism has fluctuated, according to the successive intellectual movements which have identified with it. Camus, Hitler, Tony Curtis, Zweig, Coco Chanel, Said - the breadth is epic - though much of what he goes into ultimately comes down to the cruelty of man and our inner urges - particularly the banal pull of Totalitarianism. 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. The British title, published by MacMillan, is Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time, while the American title, published by W. What makes these bouts of bad writing particularly grating is James’ propensity to complain about our oh so low contemporary standards, a barbarians at the gate sort of woefulness one often finds in elderly intellectuals’ memoirs and interviews.Learned books are published by the thousand, yet learning was never less trusted as something to be pursued for its own sake. Then a bone tossed: “This is a book about a world that men made, and it taught plenty of us to wish that women had made it instead. If I was determined on avoiding those broad divisions that I thought not only artificial but actively inimical to my view, the question was bound to keep on arising of where the book’s unity was to come from. 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. James seems overjoyed that English is now the universal language, owing to “the American international cultural hegemony”, which he apparently feels much at ease with.