Cultural Amnesia – Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

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James became, then, a paradox: at once a high-minded litterateur who taught himself Russian because he “could no longer bear not to know something about how Pushkin sounded” and an avuncular TV bloke known for showing us clips of sadistic Japanese game shows. He came not to praise telly, nor to bury it like some fastidious antipodean approximation of George Steiner, but rather to revel in its absurdity, vulgarity and occasional charm. Among the other slips: "The Germans have a word for it: Todgeschweigen" (330) -- no, they don't: the word they have (in this form) is totgeschwiegen. Elsewhere he mentions that a custom-made suit he bought in Italy was from the same tailor used by Gorbachev; said tailor mentioned James and Gorbachev share the exact same measurements (thank God we weren’t informed as to whether both gentlemen “dressed” to the same trouser leg). A letter written to James by Philip Larkin is mentioned, apparently so James can note that said letter is preserved in the National State Royal Archives of the New South Wales Repository for Fossils and Culture or some such place.

I was reminded of this many times while reading Clive James's new and enormous book of biographical essays, Cultural Amnesia, because Bond's breezy insouciance is something Clive James seems constantly trying to pull off. Of the hundred-plus figures James writes about, fewer than twenty-five worked in English. Some of the others don't even exist in translation yet, but that's all right because James has read every single one of them in the original, and he's going to make damn sure you know about it. Clive James with his book Cultural Amnesia, 2007, a collection of biographical essays. Photograph: Shannon Stapleton/Reutersgoal, and in different contexts the attention paid to Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalinthe latter not given a separate essay, but more frequently cited in the index than either Goebbels or Maois similarly indicative of an antitotalitarian agenda that does not always blend well with James’s redemptive treatment of figures of primarily cultural significance. He betrayed his wife by having an eight-year affair with a former model, Leanne Edelsten. When Shaw discovered the affair, in 2012, she threw him out of their Cambridge home, and he moved to a London flat. “I am a reprehensible character,” he told one interviewer. “I deserve everything that has happened to me.” And some of these even a literate English speaker should have caught -- like the claim that: "In the original German, The Tin Drum is Der Blechtrommel" (81), when, of course, it is Die Blechtrommel.

He was appointed CBE in 2012 and AO in 2013. In 2008 he was awarded a George Orwell special prize for writing and broadcasting, and in 2015 he received a special award from Bafta for his contribution to television. Reviewing the book for The Atlantic, Christopher Hitchens argued that James tries "to glamorize the uninspiring - tries to show how tough and shapely were the common sense formulations of Raymond Aron for example, when set against the seductive, panoptic bloviations of Jean Paul Sartre" and that he "succeeds in it by trying to comb out all centrist clichés and by caring almost as much about language as it is possible to do." Additionally, Hitchens noted that "a unifying principle of the collection is its feminism" and that "one of James's charms as a critic is that he genuinely seems to enjoy praising people." [3] Contents [ edit ] But it gets worse. The section on Sophie Scholl (the German college student who was executed for protesting the Nazi regime) was somewhat more on topic, but took a far stranger turn when James embarked on speculating who should play Scholl in the talkies, speculation that then took him on a long dewy-eyed bout of incontinent praise directed towards actress Natalie Portman. Whether you agree with him or not about Portman, in James’ ardor, poor old guillotined Sophie Scholl gets lost in the Hollywood gush and semi-amateur movie casting. To make matters worse, James dedicates the whole book to Scholl, and yet he spills five times more ink on Tony Curtis.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. 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." urn:lcp:culturalamnesian00jame:epub:5ba8e8c8-e67a-4fa0-8c5a-2035d813422f Extramarc Duke University Libraries Foldoutcount 0 Identifier culturalamnesian00jame Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t88h2mv8x Invoice 1213 Isbn 9780393061161

I told fairly good stories. They got better as the years went on. I'm still doing it now, I suppose.But James can be quite good sometimes (which is why the sloppy, dashed-off parts are particularly disappointing). In a lucid, mostly on-topic discussion of political deep thinking guy Manes Sperber (no, I never heard of him either), James talks about those ideologues who come to see the errors of their ways, but never, it seems, completely so: And in the end, the names themselves are just jumping-off points for James to write essays, often brilliant ones, about the intellectual concerns thrown up by the last century. 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. As a prose stylist I can't think of anyone to touch him. He admires efficiency of expression in others, and this has made him one of the most aphoristic, quotable writers:

I thought the essay could go everywhere, and I still think so. I think the essay is the really powerful literary form of today, even more so than the novel." The bigger picture 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. 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. 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." Aphoristic and acutely provocative: a crash course in civilization' – J. M. Coetzee, author of DisgraceSome made great claims for his literary talents. Writing under the headline As Good as Heaney in 2009, Julian Gough in Prospect magazine championed two volumes of James’s collected verse. But how could one take seriously a TV critic who wrote satirical verse epics such as The Fate of Felicity Fark in the Land of the Media: A Moral Poem (1975) or Peregrine Prykke’s Pilgrimage Through the London Literary World (1976), still less compare them to the Nobel laureate’s?