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Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts | 
 enlarge | Author: Clive James
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Category: Book
List Price: $17.95
Buy New: $10.25
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Rating:  40 reviews
Sales Rank: 20491
Media: Paperback
Edition: Reprint
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 912
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.9
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.5 x 1.8
ISBN: 039333354X
Dewey Decimal Number: 808
EAN: 9780393333541
ASIN: 039333354X
Publication Date: September 2, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
"I can't remember when I've learned as much from something I've read—or laughed as much while doing it."—Jacob Weisberg, Slate
Finally in paperback after six hardcover printings, this international bestseller is an encyclopedic A-Z masterpiece—the perfect introduction to the very core of Western humanism. Clive James rescues, or occasionally destroys, the careers of many of the greatest thinkers, humanists, musicians, artists, and philosophers of the twentieth century. Soaring to Montaigne-like heights, Cultural Amnesia is precisely the book to burnish these memories of a Western civilization that James fears is nearly lost.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 35 more reviews...
 Necessary Reading November 16, 2008
If one has any doubt that liberal democracies are still relevant in the world one must read Cultural Amnesia. Mr. James defines the underlying principles of the inviolate rights of human beings through the lives of men and women who have sacrificed for these principles, and contrasts them to the oppressors and charlatans who would have it otherwise.
Some of the names will be familiar and others one will come to cherish. It is not a paean to courage or repeats the over used cliches of tenacity. As both critic and historian, Mr. James never wavers in a just portrayal of the lives and works of artists and monsters. Often he demonstrates where that line is crossed in an individual. James has the power to stun a reader into putting the book down to fully appreciate the pogniant and the profound.
In is an enviable talent to be able to keep our attention to what many wish not to be reminded of: all of us cannot escape from our lives or responsibility. James also has the gift of a nearly lost talent, eloquence without calling attention to itself. What it inspires is the insight and humilility necessary for the reader to get on with one's life.
Find out what you didnt know you could know! October 19, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
How do you define your humanity, your worth and the meaning of the good life? Did the last book you read, the last poem heard, the choir on Classic FM, the last serious piece of reportage in the newspaper make you think, widen the space for thought, help you engage more as a citizen? Did you make a note of the words that hit a spot? Remember to look that book up when next in the library, wonder what that old book of essays would be like you came across in the second hand bookshop. Perhaps as you get older do you see a pattern in what moves you in music, what is good writing and which political ideas increases the possibility of greater freedom of expression and those that close the creative spaces down?
One way to describe this book is to see it as Clive James 40 years exploration to make sense himself, his work and the world around him through works of the well-known, forgotten, cut-short or bogus mainly western intelligentsia. These are over but not confined the past 150 years. He also throws in 20th century film stars, fashion designers, TV broadcasters, jazz musicians and reporters. The format is over 100 individual pen-sketches grouped in alphabetical order of individuals that have aroused his interest with as sentence, comment, or thought and been inked over the years in his journal. From these seeds grows an essay that critically reveals more about the idea or the character or the context but done in his usually witty light foxtrot prose. Knowing that nothing worse then a judgement on writing style not seem here are three extracts.
Pierre Drieu La Rochelle (p.177)
`And above all, I am not interested enough in politics to let them encumber my last days'
On the face of it, Drieu's valedictory testament was absurd. It was 1944, after the liberation of Paris; he had never made any secret of collaborating with the ***; his deeds were done and his time had run out. And his entire personal disaster had been because of his interest in politics. Already resolved to suicide, he was attributing a deficiency to himself in the very area where he had been most obsessed.
Chares De Gaulle (p.258)
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 20 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 it hints at what he had so often felt...For us, that overhear the last gasp of a long agony, there is a additional poignancy of recognising that the Man of Destiny lived every day with an heavenly dispensation he could not control. But to be faced from day to day with a quirk of fate not amenable to human will is sometimes the point of sanity for a man who lives by imposing his personality-the point of salvation, the redeeming weakness.
Miguel De Unamuno (p771)
The eternal, not the modern, is what I love: the modern will be antiquated and grotesque in ten years, when the fashion passes.
The quoted passage makes more sense when we trace what he meant by eternismo, the eternal. He didn't mean an appeal to transcendental values: he meant attention to the profane reality that is always there. On the same page...he wrote the universal is in the guts of the local and circumscribe, and that the eternal is the guts of the temporal and evanescent ... (memo to myself and younger readers: all guesses about tone in a foreign language should be checked with someone who speaks it for a living).
If you have gone... "er never heard of them" then that's a major theme of this book which examines the fate of those intellectuals and their works in the fall out of the Red and Fascist terrors of the 20th centuries as well as the South American dictatorships. Voices lost as they are swept away to death camps, or corrupted to stay on the right side of the prevailing political winds. Books left as floating corpses as the Saloon life of St Peters, Vienna and Paris sank and burned in the 20's and 30's:a tradition with roots in a different form of Jewish prejudice. Another theme is the cant and empty postures by usually left wing intellectuals during the Cold War that would have resulted in a long death in the countries they claim to admire.
I have sympathy with this augment having seen at first hand the middle class student Trotskyites who saw the working class as the ideal except when meeting the wider trade unions membership and ordinary people. Who naturally were seduced by the media to not grasp the wisdom of their leaders in waiting. I was one of those who joined the Communists in the 80's but had no illusions of what they were doing in Russia and China. I saw the dedication and faith that the little band of activists in wanting to change things by active mobilisation rather then electoral engagement alone. Of course we would have all been the first to vanish in any of the systems that we were assuming the UK to be. But read the book and you don't see the poverty and lack of opportunity and social justice that creates the Left. I still see politics of changing the agenda more important then the politics of elections and would tackle the illusion of liberal democracy not with the charge that they are not democratic but that they see democracy stopping at the gates of the factory or school. Other notions such as Social Capital and Environmental Justice movements show currents shaking off traditional notions of Electoral Socialism.
These are minor quibbles for what is timely reminder what we are losing in this country with an Education system that fetishes churning out workers and not enabling citizens. Clive James reads many of the books he discusses in their original language, has a lively interest in how films, TV, poetry are creating our cultural life. He can judge and put into context what the writer or performer is offering. Can you? Would you try? See what you lose if you don't try.
In a conversation on Picasso's Guernica Matthews asked his students to...look at their inner response...what sound do you hear from the painting?... the room exploded in howls of pain and rage. The door flew open and two students from the hallway stuck their heads in, their expressions resembling the faces in the painting itself.
Said one participant, `Suddenly I saw that these art forms were making a claim on me. They were saying, "Wake up! Live your real life."
Stanfield, R.B. (2000) The Art of Focused Conversation p.2
An Eschatological Laundry List by a Sophisticated Cosmopolitan Iconoclast September 21, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is an Eschatological laundry list by a sophisticated cosmopolitan iconoclast who does not mind speaking his mind, and one who has a rich history of experience and a big mind with which to speak.
The only part that distressed me, in addition to seeing two of my favorites heroes gored, Miles Davis and Jean Paul Sartre, is that Clive James still remains stuck in the anti-Communist post war world. Don't get me wrong: there are still plenty of lessons to learn from the tyranny of that era. However, James seems to have completely failed to see that it is those very same champions of anti-Communism who have now become the main threats to the same kind of tyranny against which they, and he, rail.
Despite this, his comments are always fresh, profoundly honest, and uncensored: What a breeze of fresh air in this era where every idea is culturally, ethnically or ideologically censored.
Still five stars
A Welcome Review July 29, 2008
"A Cultural Amnesia" isn't quite a thesis on forgetting Western Civilization, but it does retrieve some remarkable wit and wisdom from some forgotten sages. It probably will not appeal to the reader who has not learned some history, but I read it for me and it's worth five stars. Some of the quotes were so pithy that I prepared a cheat sheet to use them on apropriate occasions.
 Get a Brow Lift from He Whose Mighty Intellect Towers Above All! July 22, 2008
11 out of 15 found this review helpful
Although intended as a work of literature, "Cultural Amnesia" has more in common with your local phone directory -- except that the phone directory contains more information. Like the phone directory, this book is a list of names in alphabetical order, but then, unlike the phone directory, a plethora of other names are thrown-in at random, often with no explanation of their significance. The conceit of the book is, of course, that if you are unfamiliar with these names, usually obscure Viennese Jewish writers of the last century, your erudition is too puny, and you have no business reading this book in the first place.
For instance, an early chapter (remember, like the phone directory, it's in alphabetical order) is supposed to be about Jorge Luis Borges. And what does Herr Professor von James have to say about the celebrated old man? Nothing, because as with the rest of the book --zoom!-- he immediately veers off on a tangent. Reading the tortured prose of Professor von James is like watching an old-fashioned pinball machine, because from the starting-point of Jorge Luis Borges we are immediately bounced over to a discourse on Moby-Dick, quickly followed by "One of my exemplars, Witold Gombrowicz," and from there to Thomas Mann, Igor Stravinsky, Sigmind Freud, Billy Wilder, Marlene Dietrich, Milos Foreman, Vaclav Havel, Eratosthenes, Erasmus, and Victoria Ocampo. All this on a single page! (p.66) Does any of it manage to make any sense? No, it's simply a mess of names dropped together. In speech, such word-salad would be diagnosed as hebephrenia, but here it is to be admired as the crowning achievement of one of . . . nay! THE World's Greatest Intellect.
Similarly, the chapter on Alfred Einstein contains no information whatsoever on Alfred Einstein. If you don't already know who Alfred Einstein was, you're not gong to find out here. Instead, we are treated to ruminations about that old, old question, What immortal masterpieces would poor Schubert and Mozart have written had they not both died so young? It's a question usually posed to impress bored freshmen in music appreciation courses, but here, Herr Doktor von James gives it a new twist: not what would poor Schubert have written had he lived to a ripe old age, but what would he have written had he lived to be as old as Mozart was when he died? If you are left wondering what the possible significance of such an imponderable might be, it shows how shallow your thought is.
Throughout the book, Herr Professor von James takes pains to mention his lofty academic achievements and how many languages in which he is fluent. It all makes me guess that because his advancement was so rapid, he skipped past the sixth grade, in which one is taught how to write a coherent paragraph or an essay on a single topic. But not only is this book a disorganized mess, the quality of writing is vile. The salient trademark of a hack writer is the overwrought metaphor or rancid simile -- such as, "Lending him almost irresistible force as a thinker was the riverine flow and clarity of his prose style . . ." (p.145) ("Prose style"? Why not just prose? Or style?) James continually uses "impact" in place of "effect." He uses such trite redundancies as "first and foremost" and "part and parcel," and I'm certain that if I keep slogging through this mess I'll find "at this point in time," too. In addition, there are numerous errors, maladroit punctuation and patently defective sentences throughout the book, and I suspect that even the proofreaders at W. W. Norton couldn't slog through this mess with out having their Eyes Glaze Over.
How ironic that in this book, which has more mistakes than any other book I've seen, Professor James spends a chapter nit-picking over the writing of others, and he proclaims, "Competent writers always examine what they have put down. . . . Bad writers never examine anything." Like a schoolmarm, he criticizes (p.382) someone for saying, "'the hoi polloi,' when we should leave off the 'the' because 'the' is what 'hoi' means." But both Dryden and Byron wrote "the hoi polloi," and in Act I of ''Iolanthe,'' W. S. Gilbert wrote, "Twould fill with joy, And madness stark / the hoi polloi (a Greek remark)?'' Obviously those are inferior writers who need correction from The Great Clive James, and I assume that, if he is so persnickety about not using "the" with hoi polloi, he likewise refrains from using an article with other borrowed words such as "algebra" or "alcohol."
A book like this one (certainly not this one, but one like this one) is supposed to entertain you with interesting facts and insight, but "Cultural Amnesia" is amazingly bereft of either. Instead, there's an abundance of mere opinion. Another reviewer here (likely from the camarilla of Objectivists) is irate that Herr Doktor von James has dismissed the novels of Ayn Rand as ". . . certainly among the worst books ever to be taken seriously." O.k., maybe Ms. Rand's books are awful, and maybe they aren't. But does Herr Doktor von James provide us with any reason for his dismissal? No. Apparently when you operate on such a lofty intellectual plane, it is only necessary for him to pronounce his verdict, and surely you must agree with him and perhaps apply yellow highlighter to the passage. This book consists of 25% name-dropping and 25% of such summary judgments, some of which --such as "Without a capacity for blaming the sterile, there can be no capacity for praising the vital" (p.127)-- are supposed to leave you stroking your whiskers, but other pronouncements are merely banal:
"Carly Simon, who was brought up as a privileged child . . . no doubt took genuine satisfaction out of making money by herself."
Duke Ellington's orchestra "could create its own world, and the truest statement ever made about Ellington's supremacy was that his orchestra was his instrument."
"Ben Webster, I thought, was much possessed by Melody's incestuous love affair with her brother Rhythm." (Is that a banal sentence, or what?)
Other such arbitrary proclamations (which Herr Doktor von James terms "detachable judgments") are not only inane, but they are wrong. "If the most brilliant mathematicians and computer engineers of 1945 could be brought here now and shown an ordinary laptop . . . they would have no idea of how it worked." (p.117) This statement reveals a profound ignorance of the subject. Other than, I suppose, the optical drive, computers have actually changed little over the years, other than the obvious fact that they have grown much smaller, and even Charles Babbage (1791-1871) would know that no matter how the trick was performed, the laptop was basically no more than a processor, memory and storage.
In addition to the name dropping and baseless declarations, the most common tangent that Professor Dr. James veers of to is the Nazi genocide. Well . . . (clearing of throat) . . . yes, that is a very serious topic, and perhaps it is impossible to say enough about it, so the good professor dwells at length on the subject, and the book (even the chapter on Terry Gilliam) returns again and again to ruminate on the Nazis. Very well, but what new insight does Mr. Dr. James bring to the subject? His assessment of Hitler is thus: "He didn't know he was sick. He thought he was well." Throughout the book, he seems to be trying to convince us that the Holocaust was a bad idea. In another chapter (the one on Flaubert, naturally) he goes off on a tangent about how it would be a good thing if Islam were more tolerant of infidels. Do you really need this old windbag to tell you any of that?
Now, if you are reading this, if you are interested in this tome, it may be that you aspire to become a top-drawer intellectual or at least appear to be one. That's nice, but do you really think that reading his panegyric to Tony Curtis or his analysis of the movie "Titanic" will help you achieve your goal? Will reading about his preference for David Letterman over Jay Leno or the junk about Carly Simon put you atop the brain heap? Don't spend $15 on this shallow book. Instead, go to the library and borrow the works of Oswald Spengler, and show everyone that's what you're reading. Then, spend the money you saved on a bottle of Pernod and a pince-nez.
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