Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time
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Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time
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He, lucidly and beautifully, got to the essence of writing, carrying a theme all the way to the decadence of contemporary pornagraphy. You have the Biggies like Hitler and Stalin but you get the people down the line like French collaborators and (Sartre was poseur compared to Camus. It's a pity that he seems to have felt it was inappropriate, because when it does emerge, in his lighter moments, the sentences can really come alive. After all, Latin “declined” into Dante’s Italian (which James elsewhere exhorts us to learn) and Valery’s French, didn’t it? The book is a series of essays on 106 people James has been fascinated by, most of them from the 20th century.
Hegel, when he said that we can learn little from history, forgot about Hegel, author of the best thing about history that has ever yet been said. I am currently a little over halfway through reading this book, and already it has had me reaching for more and more information. 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.The usual division is to treat our daily job as the adventure and our cultural diversions as a mere mechanism of renewal and repose. Generally, however, humanism refers to a perspective that affirms some notion of a "human nature" (sometimes contrasted with antihumanism). The format is of fairly concise biographical essays around key historical and cultural characters of modern history and weaving meaningful stories and historical, literary and philosophical insights around them. Under the guiding hand of Meghan O’Rourke, the first excerpt appeared in the afternoon of February 5 EST, marked with the name of the subject, the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. It is a continual concern of the book to demand what moral responsibilities an intellectual should have when faced with totalitarianism.
It is refreshing to discover some unusual figures in history that have escaped broader attention yet still had a measurable impact, for good or ill. more excerpts followed — a sumptuous aggregate which still represents only a small fraction of a large book. A poorly formatted but serviceable web page includes the table of contents for Cultural Amnesia, in case any of you would like to review the vast array of people profiled by James: http://catdir. Of course these moments are rendered in the usual 21st century aw-shucks self-deprecatory way, but this doesn’t really fool anybody anymore, does it? We are all doomed to be actors, in the sense that our abilities and deficiencies will guide us, in certain ways if not in others, to becoming active participants in a productive society, whether we like that society or not.
This much, however, I do know: it would not be a mind at all if its owner had allowed his multiplicity of interests to be restricted by a formula. The mind is the one collectivity that the free individual can thrive in: which is lucky, because live in it he must. James attempts to lard them with so much inner irony and “surface” paradox, that this reader was stopped dead in his tracks, fruitlessly attempting to decipher what James is saying, and over and over failing to understand what it is that he is so damned pleased about.
Thinking otherwise, we doom ourselves to spinning fantasies, which might well be fluent, but could equally be lethal. not the actual achievement of science, but the language of science, which, clumsily imitated by the proponents of Cultural Studies, has helped to make real culture unapproachable for exactly those students who might otherwise have been most attracted to it, and has simultaneously furthered the emergence and consolidation of an international cargo cult whose witch doctors have nothing in mind beyond their own advancement. It has always been part of the definition of humanism that true learning has no end in view except its own furtherance. 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.Staying on topic, bragging: James allows himself a great deal of freedom in his discussions, which is fine so long as he holds a reader’s interest. Thomas Mann, with the family poodle snuffling petulantly at his knee, would rather not talk to Brecht, and Sartre is keen to avoid Solzhenitsyn. Older but even more ambitious, I had the temerity to define prose in the same way: a prose work of whatever length should be dependent, in each part, on every other part of what was included, and so respect the importance even of what had been left out.
The idea that humanism has no immediately ascertainable use at all, and is invaluable for precisely that reason, is a hard sell in an age when the word “invaluable,” simply by the way it looks, is begging to be construed as “valueless” even by the sophisticated. For one thing, even if you managed to read only two or three of its entries a day, it would still take a satisfying few weeks to finish, and then you'd be able to start again ~ or simply dip in and browse ~ knowing much of it would still be new enough and of a consistently high quality to give limitless pleasure for the stranded months ahead. He says that, if he has done his work in assembling this volume properly, “themes will emerge from the apparent randomness and make this work intelligible.Sophie, given a chance (maybe) to recant her mistaken ways, refused, and was guillotined by the Nazis. What is a “perfectly managed autocracy” and when has said entity even existed, let alone prevented the decline of language? And if individual essays are often exceptional, the way they fit together in the book as a whole has problems. James proves himself not only to be in possession of a towering intellect, but a singular ability to communicate his passions. One of the great beauties of the seventeenth-century Spanish world, Juana Inés is a ringer for Isabella Rossellini.
- Fruugo ID: 258392218-563234582
- EAN: 764486781913
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