However, having stated this, the idea of utilising certain personalities is actually a false illusion as to what the vignette is about: a scatter gun approach that is rarely illuminating about said individual, more reflective of the writer's modus operandi of confusion and chaos to progress his digressive account.

Book Review: Cultural Amnesia - The New York Times Book Review: Cultural Amnesia - The New York Times

There is an account of traveling in the American South ("My Red-State Odyssey"), a region where "all politics is yokel," and where, if you consider yourself a Southerner, you're likely to "come from a large family . . . have a family connection to the military or to the military-industrial complex, more likely to have some relationship — however twisted — with a personal savior, and more likely to take a 'screw you' attitude to the federal government." The sociology is at least plausible, but more to the point is the colloquial tone spiced with a bit of regional rancor. When I’d given up on the book, I decided to read the essays about women that I hadn’t yet. Here they are.With their clothes off and their virile members contractually erect, they are merely competitors in some sort of international caber-tossing competition in which they are not allowed to use their hands. So what is this dreaded field ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural... )? It was initiated by “British academics in the late 1950s, 60s and 70s” 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. 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. A lifetime's reading has gone into this doorstop of a book. But I have to ask: What was James thinking ? (...) But alphabet soup a la James left me with indigestion." - Matthew Price, The Los Angeles Times

Clive James obituary | Clive James | The Guardian Clive James obituary | Clive James | The Guardian

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James was born in Kogarah, a suburb of Sydney, Australia. His mother, Minora (nee Darke), named her only child Vivian, after the male star of the 1938 Australian Davis cup team. It could have been worse. There was, James noted in Unreliable Memoirs (1979), a famous Australian boy whose father named him after his campaigns across the Western Desert: he was called William Bardia Escarpment Qattara Depression Mersa Matruh El Alamein Benghazi Tripoli Harris. So he not only pays tribute to Sophie Scholl but dedicates the book to her memory (along with three others) -- and it's one of the few portraits where he really gets carried away, for example quoting without questioning that: "The chief executioner later testified that he had never seen anyone dies so bravely as Sophie Scholl". 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 (book) - Wikipedia

Borges' silence in totalitarian Argentina troubles him, while he seems to have little more than contempt for Saramago.Over the course of many, many essays, the format is about the same: it's a cultural figure (mainly from the 1900s, but with some extreme exceptions), there's a little biographical sketch, and then Uncle Clive tells you a story. A great deal of the time, this story has something to do with what seems to be the loose theme of the book--how intellectuals reacted to (or failed to react to) the dual threats of Nazism and Stalinism, which destroyed a certain beautiful strain of humanism best exemplified by turn-of-the-century Vienna, and how we should not believe we are beyond such evil now. 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.”

Cultural Amnesia by Clive James | Waterstones Cultural Amnesia by Clive James | Waterstones

And that last sentence, in all its awkwardness and so-preachy exposition, its scornful lecturing to the students who cannot by themselves see the amazingly suave wit of Revel’s “wristy flourish”, is so typical of James. He aches for that “wristy flourish” himself, and simply produces a messy ejaculation. Indeed, Cultural Amnesia is less a collection of great figures than of great sentences. Each entry begins with a thumbnail sketch of the individual in question but mainly consists of James's commentary on one or more quotations drawn from his or her writing. Sometimes the commentary concerns its author, sometimes not. No matter what it concerns -- pornography, movie dialogue, the politics of literary exile, the problem of high seriousness in modern art -- it is invariably absorbing. Reading the book feels like having a conversation with the most interesting person in the world: You're not saying much, but you just want to keep listening anyway. The reason James is such a good talker, though, is that he's such a good listener." - William Deresiewicz, The Nation Boston Globe [A] fabulously gifted, enviably well-read, generously inclusive, and always commonsensical writer 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. And if individual essays are often exceptional, the way they fit together in the book as a whole has problems. The main one being that there is almost a theme to the book, but not quite. The theme which looms largest is the way in which the twentieth century can be characterised as a clash between two forms of totalitarianism, left and right. But to really make this work, about a quarter of the essays, the ones which don't bear on this subject, would need to be cut. Alternatively if it's just going to be a random collection of biographies, a different quarter should be cut, namely some of those which do concern totalitarianism. As it is, we are left halfway between, not sure if the book is darting around with general curiosity, or if it's trying to build some kind of cumulative argument.

At times like this I was practically dancing around my room with pleasure. Still, there is sometimes a sense that his veneration of clarity, while refreshing, can be misleading. Although it's obviously essential in an essay or in philosophy, there is at least an argument that in the arts a complexity of expression can be a pleasure in itself. Certainly this would be one defence of Miles Davis (whose abstruseness James dislikes) or of Thomas Pynchon (he doesn't get a mention, but I suspect James would disapprove). Note that last CliveJamesian sentence – hyperbole combined with a too-easy conclusion combined with some punctuation and grammar I am not sure I understand, with a near-cliché closer (“strains the meaning of the word”). As for the rest, I’m no military genius myself, but destroying “communications” in the Soviet Union was not, I think, the key to success for Hitler. Stalin had already dismantled and moved beyond the Urals much of the USSR’s industrial capacity. Horrible winter weather, massive Soviet armies, and thousands upon thousands of T-34 tanks would overcome Nazi-occupied Moscow and a disrupted “communications centre.” Anybody who dismisses Hitler as stupid (or for that matter “a monster”) is in fact detaching Hitler from history, not engaging him. All of this is far too easy and its been done a thousand time before. 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: