Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time

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It is an interesting and appealingly mixed assemblage (it's hard not to approve when he even throws Dubravka Ugresic into the mix), and there are good points made by these examples.

Cultural Amnesia – Necessary Memories from History and the

I guess for James, the horrible wars of the twentieth century were mainly a result of scientific knowledge. A few missing Umlauts might pass (though there are many, many), but at a certain point one has to wonder why Norton didn't hire the services of a German-speaker to go through the few dozen pages where James uses German terminology or mentions titles.

On the whole, the portraits are thoughtful and entertaining; James takes pains to season them with piquant details and memorable aphorisms to hold the interest of learned, jaded palates. The disproportion of gravy to beef makes Cultural Amnesia a wonderful book for a long afternoon in a left-bank cafe, or a transatlantic plane ride, but perverse and sometimes baffling to fans who might have been hoping for a Jamesian summation. James's potted lives are sincere attempts to convey ideas that shaped this civilization, but perhaps the snap, crackle, and pop approach instilled by a career in television accounts for his habit of miniaturizing figures he disagrees with and hyperinflating his personal heroes. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2012-12-19 18:04:17 Bookplateleaf 0004 Boxid IA1343704 Boxid_2 CH120820 City New York, NY [u.

Cultural Amnesia by Clive James - Pan Macmillan

In April 2007, Cultural Amnesia was published in the USA, and since May 2007 it has been available in the UK, Australia and the Republic of Ireland. In the rich tradition of French aphorists” he committed suicide when faced with the guillotine in 1794. He’s not shy about saying, in his Note on the Text, I have stuck with the traditional masculine dominance of the indeterminate gender … (and) the European tradition by which sufficiently distinguished females … referred to by their first names … Female readers can put all this down to unreconstructed chauvinism if they wish [he doesn’t care], but (their representatives in the book are not slighted) ‘merely outnumbered’. In the M's, I spent some time with Heinrich Mann and Thomas Mann, after which I segued to Mao Zedong. As for the stuff on Fuentes, I presume James deliberately changed Keat’s quote about poets being legislators from “unacknowledged” to “acknowledged” but the fact that Llosa ran unsuccessfully for President of Peru rather diminishes the effect here since he too, as a failed candidate, must remain in the ranks of the unacknowledged.And I take it that this is what he wants us to do with the contents of Cultural Amnesia - talk exuberantly about the wealth which is there for the taking. It's this approach which has led to James's much commented-on demonization of Jean-Paul Sartre, who is ‘a devil's advocate to be despised more than the devil’, ‘the most conspicuous example in the twentieth century of a fully qualified intellectual aiding and abetting the opponents of civilization’. There is a moment in the Bond film You Only Live Twice where Moneypenny throws Sean Connery a teach-yourself-Japanese book before he leaves for a mission in Tokyo. 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.