Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time

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In a somewhat similar vein, antipodean James was perhaps getting his seasons mixed up when he stated that in Vienna: "in spring you can drink Heurige Wein in the gardens" (5). James goes on to imply that something flowing out of this ill-defined (on his part) “field” has resulted in humanism being hard to find nowadays, because it has “no immediately ascertainable use” … but again his argument so cluttered with odd constructions and needlessly complex sentences that it almost approached Foucault, though without the latter’s inarticulate words and phrases.

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After a life of misery, Anne de Gaulle, who had a severe case of Down's syndrome, died choking in her father's arms. She was twenty years old. At her funeral, de Gaulle is reputed to have said, 'Now she is like the others.' The awful beauty of that remark lies in how in how it hints at what he so often felt. Wanting her to be like the others . . . must have been the dearest wish of his private life." I bought it in Cambridge in 1967. It was one of the first books in French I ever read to the end. It helped that the text was very short. But even as I stumbled through with the dictionary ever present, I could tell that I was on to something. I underlined things, put stars in the margin, added knowing comments about the provenance of Valery’s ideas (“Croce was here!”). It was a book I loved, and I love it still…” (p. 787). A major theme of the book is: doing the right thing, and James is pretty hard on several authors who he feels didn't.I had a tough decision in deciding to read this seemingly inspiring, knowledgeable essays by Clive James since I have never read him before; however, I made sure to be familiar with his writing style by reading his Unreliable Memoirs (Pan Books 1981) first as a supporting strategy and I found it arguably and challengingly readable. Before starting reading this hefty hardcover, I hoped I could make it from my self-motivation after reading this interesting recommendation:

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From Lichtenberg's Sudelbücher to Valéry's notebook (with so many volumes to it that James notes that: "Even in French it has been published only in facsimile") and the coffee-house-writers of Vienna, he seems drawn to the attempts that gather in as much as possible, if not always as neatly as possible. Cultural Amnesia is one of the best works of non-fiction I’ve read ever. It is thoroughly enjoyable (funny, thoughtful, incisive, generous in many senses of the word), even when it is pondering the recent century’s most awful evils. It is an illuminating read on topics familiar and unknown.

Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time

A lifetime in the making and containing over one hundred essays, this is a definitive guide to twentieth-century culture. James catalogues and explores the careers of many of the century's greatest thinkers, humanists, musicians, artists and philosophers, with illuminating excursions into the minds of those historical figures – from Sir Thomas Browne to Montesquieu – who paved the way. Altogether, it is an illuminating work of extraordinary erudition. 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. Plenty enough comments about this one--and after reading through it with a couple of reading friends, I feel like I've said all I want to say about it already. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the cultural history of the 20th Century, James' point in all these essays is to raise ideas that, if we are not careful, could be forgotten as Liberal Democracy moves forward into the 21st Century. Some of the figures that James focuses on will be unfamiliar to the common reader (close to half of the names were unknown to me before reading, and of those I did know of, many were just a name I'd heard), but the personalities whose names stand as titles for the essays often have little to do with the essay itself: instead, they provide a quote which James then uses to expound on nearly any subject imaginable--but one which James doesn't want us to forget. Thus, many of the subjects deal with the uncomfortable reality of the past, and an attempt to debunk any romanticizing myths; to realistically look at the choices people had during the era of the Nazis and the Stalinists, and to examine why people chose as they did; and, not least, to give us examples that might help us as we face the future.

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There are clusters of interest, specifically from Vienna's coffee-house culture (Altenberg, Friedell, Polgar) as well as the larger circle of Viennese intellectuals from the first half of the 20th century (Freud, Kraus, Schnitzler, Wittgenstein, Zweig, etc.) and a variety of French intellectuals.

Borges' silence in totalitarian Argentina troubles him, while he seems to have little more than contempt for Saramago. strikes me as meaningless: what does he mean by an inimical “language of science”? Who are the “proponents of Cultural Studies”, and how do they “clumsily imitate” this mysterious language? What does it mean to put the humanities to “careerist use”? Is this some kind of debate within academe that we are being subjected to?

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While the women ‘can earn millions for spending a couple of hours a day wrapping themselves around an oaf’. Sometimes, but too rarely, this kind of wit is indeed brought to bear on political issues: he points out how outrageous it is that no one in the West finds the idea of the Kirov Ballet objectionable (though it has long been renamed in Russia), and wonders how people would react to the Himmler Youth Orchestra or the Pol Pot Academy for Creative Writing. 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.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.