Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time

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Cultural Amnesia, with its encyclopedic length and organization and the intense jostle of its ideas, is to be dipped into over weeks and months. Just because he has an incurable knack of making himself sound arrogant shouldn't deafen us to the truth of his humility.

By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. How will we know if our earthly paradise is coming to pieces, if we don’t know how it was put together? I guess for James, the horrible wars of the twentieth century were mainly a result of scientific knowledge. I CAN’T IMAGINE being brave enough to copy the way Egon Friedell made an exit, but there was something about the way he made an entrance that could be a model for us all. It was an essay by James, in another of his collections, that got me addicted to The West Wing, the DVD box set of which I've watched all the way through three times {so far} and for that alone I'm eternally grateful.The tales are legion of him sweating over some beautifully-printed tome in the original German, French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese (! I can't help thinking that Clive James {still with us at 78, despite a long illness} is quite simply the finest living essayist in English.

It would help if the world's large supply of anti-American commentators could decide on which America we are supposed to be in thrall to: the Machiavellian America that can manipulate any country's destiny, or the naïve America that can't find it on the map. Because, as a journalist and television presenter, I travelled professionally for more than twenty years on end, the café was in many different cities: Sydney, London, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Florence, Rome, Venice, Paris, Biarritz, Cannes, Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Moscow, Madrid, Tokyo, Kyoto, Hiroshima, Bombay, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Cairo, Jerusalem, Valletta, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Miami, Mexico City, Havana, Rio, Buenos Aires, Auckland, Wellington, Perth, Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane and Sydney again. Said wrote after the attack on the World Trade Center, Western humanism is not enough: we need a universal humanism. As they never were in life, we can imagine the speakers all gathered in some vast room, wearing name tags in case they don’t recognize each other (although some recognize each other all too well, and avoid contact). But even as I stumbled through with the dictionary ever present, I could tell that I was on to something.The reader will recognize some of their names: Albert Camus, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka. Born to speak it, we can view the whole world as a dubbed movie, and not even have to bother with subtitles. While the women ‘can earn millions for spending a couple of hours a day wrapping themselves around an oaf’. Even James himself admits that organization is weakness of his, joking that he has lost personal assistants in the morass of his desk. This is linguistic pecksniffian stuff you used to find in the back of The Atlantic Monthly where people reported quarrelling bitterly with their spouses over the use of “hopefully.

It also suggests what I have failed to learn, and now will probably never learn, because it is getting late. Clichés, weird bête noires and general sloppiness: James says somewhere he spent 3 years writing this book, and that he considers it if not his magnum opus, at least his summing up. But devorante gives it savour, because the consuming energy of the deafness to art that goes into a critical system is always one of its distinguishing features – distinguishing it, that is, from the decently reticent poise of a sensitive response.I loved his essay on Duke Ellington, for instance, because I've danced to his music for years and knew only a small amount of the peripheral knowledge of the time that James has to offer.

But there were always annotations that struck me as not fitting any scheme except a much larger one, to be attempted far in the future, probably towards the end of my life. Answering that question over and over in the course of long days and longer nights, I had to intensify a faith that I had always kept throughout my writing life: the faith that the unity would come from the style. If you're one of those people that does find him arrogant, this book will doubtless give you plenty of ammunition to back up the theory. Not yet, anyway’, or reminisces that ‘There was a time when I could fairly fluently read Russian, and get through a simple article in Japanese’ – but these self-criticisms are decidedly self-serving. 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.At best, they’re little more than personal views, uttered as if they’re revealed wisdom, for the humble “student” to take on faith. It is a continual concern of the book to demand what moral responsibilities an intellectual should have when faced with totalitarianism. Should we wish, we can even savour the tang of alien tongues: a translation will be provided on a separate page, to be dialled up at a touch.