Cultural Amnesia – Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

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He planned a sixth and last volume of memoirs, “the final chapter of which”, he told one interviewer, “will be dictated while I have an oxygen tent over my head. I wouldn’t like to spare the public my conclusions.” But even this sort of ideal-worship comes with its cleverly presented twist, as James (convincingly) makes the case for why Natalie Portman should play Scholl in a film version. Clearly James has only chosen subjects that had an impact on him -- there isn't a single piece in the book that reads as if it was written out of an obligation to relevance. That's a plus, as it makes every selection seem vibrant. (...) One of the things that distinguishes Cultural Amnesia from the finger-pointing, eat-your-bean-sprouts tomes about canons and multiculturalism is that James doesn't make you feel guilty, he makes you feel hungry." - Allen Barra, Salon

World History armchair generaling: In contrast to the arts sections of the book, throughout the history bits I too often felt myself under assault by Professor Obvious or puzzled as to why some of these intellectual heroes are really worth bothering with now (especially if I have to bother in the original Polish). As for the obvious, again and again, no doubt in his efforts to thwart “cultural amnesia” James tells us how bad Hitler, Mao, and Stalin were. This is fine, except that nothing particularly original gets brought up and the details are mostly in support of horrors the culture is already pretty aware of. The death camps and the gulag are indeed unspeakably awful. What lesson we need to draw from them is not that they are intrinsically awful (a glance at a photo of Dachau will convince everybody this side of the lunatic fringe), but how the death camps came about in the first place and how those processes of institutional and political erosion and failure apply to our culture today. I’m not saying James never hits on these things, but it is all a scatter, with nothing emerging that is particularly coherent. 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." The section on the 2nd half of xvii is hard to summarize. He doesn’t define exactly what he means by humanism, hence I must assume he means the most common definition. 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. 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.James had strange views about women ( Cultural Amnesia performs its own act of selective forgetting, including only a handful of women in its 100 entries) and cranky ones about climate change. But the public largely forgave him, while Germaine Greer – who arrived in the UK at about the same time as James and who changed the world and how we live in it more profoundly than he or Miller – has not been treated so tolerantly. Women are not so easily excused when they behave foolishly or make mistakes; usually, they are not excused at all.

I've been trying to make up for it ever since, I suppose. As I get older, I've become more and more aware of what a tragedy it was for my mother and, of course, for him. I feel more and more that it's the impulse behind my work. In some ways, it's a gift from heaven because it's an education in reality, but in other ways it does feel like a curse. But work makes up for it. Borges' silence in totalitarian Argentina troubles him, while he seems to have little more than contempt for Saramago. For those for whom the majority or all are more or less familiar it's harder to see quite as much to it, and while the individual pieces are almost all worthwhile the sum doesn't add up quite as convincingly. The1940-1941 band was [Duke] Ellington's apotheosis, and as a consequence maintained the materials of its own destruction, because all those star soloists wanted bands of their own. . . The new boys had to go somewhere. Ellington was too generous not to realize that one of the reasons they went was because of him, so he was careful not to criticize them too hard. He made a joke of it: it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing. But the joke was true, bad by extension for all arts." His frustration is perhaps best summed-up in his attempts to explain his issues with Brecht (who doesn't rate an entry of his own).

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This book should come with a warning label on it. If you are anything like me, reading it will make your to-read shelf grow tremendously. An Indian summer of writing was just beginning, long after the valedictory interviews were done. He wrote a translation of Dante’s The Divine Comedy (2013), a collection of essays, Poetry Notebook: 2006-2014 (2014) and an analysis of the radical change in TV viewing habits, Play All: A Bingewatcher’s Notebook (2016). the resulting story made Eleanor Roosevelt, whose idea the GI Bill was, into the most effective woman in the history of world culture up until that time, and continues to make her name a radiant touchstone for those who believe, as I do, that the potential liberation of the feminine principle is currently the decisive factor lending an element of constructive hope to the seething tumult within the world’s vast Muslim hegemony, and within the Arab world in particular." in the West, someone obsessed with material things is correctly thought to be a fool. In the East [meaning pre-1991 Eastern Europe and USSR], everyone was obsessed with material things."

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." 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 is designed to be dipped into casually, but it can be read from beginning to end if you want to set your scalp on fire. (...) Although he takes aim at literary theory, academic obscurantism, racism, reverse-racism and intellectual dishonesty of every stripe, Mr. James’ recurrent theme is the danger of political ideologies. Signing onto an ideology entails ignoring all evidence to the contrary. It’s a mind-shutting maneuver. (...) Mr. James’ tone ranges from confiding to bombastic, and he’s entertaining at either extreme. His conclusions are brilliantly reasoned, but his relentless focus on World War II, the Holocaust, Stalin’s purges and extreme authoritarianism is enough to convince you that there were no hula hoops, no soap operas, no cupcakes in the 20th century -- in fact, that intellectual seriousness demands that there be no cupcakes." - Regina Marler, The New York Observer Well, okay. An interesting experiment, and required by James’ aversion to doing the work himself. But of course the narrative threads are no more going to appear by “magic” than James is going to write totally unfocused essays in each individual portrait. NOTE: Cultural studies is an innovative interdisciplinary field of research and teaching that investigates the ways in which “culture” creates and transforms individual experiences, everyday life, social relations and power.Lccn 2006036398 Ocr ABBYY FineReader 11.0 (Extended OCR) Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.11 Ocr_module_version 0.0.14 Openlibrary OL7452101M Openlibrary_edition

James died from leukemia in 2019 at age 80. In the nine years following his terminal diagnosis, he wrote movingly about his illness — including in his 2015 poetry collection, Sentenced to Life.One stupendous starburst of wild brilliance' – Simon Schama, historian and author of The Power of Art