Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories From History And The Arts (2007) - Plot & Excerpts
The estimable James, novelist, poet, and critic, has an opinion on everything having to do with culture and the arts, and with Cultural Amnesia , an alphabetized collection of essays on the artists, poets, musicians, writers and film makers he feels we should be conversant in, lest we forget, get lazy, or simply stop giving a good goddamn of what brilliant men and women are trying to do. James does give a damn, fortunate for us, and sallies forth with learned and nuanced barbs, jibes, praise, and digressions that evince a mind that will not stay in one place long. His range is impressive, though some of his views are questionable, given to subjectively defined absolutes, such as his long essay on jazz composer and band leader Duke Ellington; James does an insightful reading of the master's body of work, but goes beyond his kiln expressing his dislike of the modernism that caught up with jazz improvisation, claiming, in effect, that the faster, more bracing innovations of Charlie Parker, Coltrane and Miles Davis destroyed the form. Rather than admit that any vibrant art changes with the younger stalwarts who take up it's practice, James would rather that his beloved idea of jazz, rhythmic, melodic, and danceable, was "dead". This is rather typical of the book, where one enters what they think is a discussion of an intriguing personality only to find that James has a grievance he wants to address, a score to settle. He goes off topic with the topic he selects.A mind as expansive as James' seems to be wouldn't make such closed-source claim, and one gets the feeling as they progress through his pieces on painting, film, literature and the like that rather than attempt synthesis with his tastes, he's formed a template on each of his subjects, a prepared statement that he can repeat time and again, on command. Elsewhere, he shows a knack for leaving his ostensible subject altogether to consider a tangent that makes for a mystifying transition; his essay on film director Michael Mann turns into a muddied meditation on terrorism and relative morality of fighting the scourge with clandestine means. It's something worth discussing, I suppose, but one feels cheated at these times in not getting what James promised he'd discuss. There are other subjects one puzzles over, such as his inclusion and other wise bright essay on talk show host Dick Cavett; the issues he takes up in Cultural Amnesia’s alphabetized format is to have readers be confronted with cultural figure who are truly crucial in the advancing (or retardation) in the 20th century, but one wonders whether Cavett, despite his wit and skill as an interviewer, is among those who contributions mattered to the degree that James immortalizes him further. Cavett himself might well be embarrassed by the critic’s lavishing. A particular annoyance is his habit of showing his rather narrow take on some of the arts he covers, especially in his remarks concerning the respective bodies of work from jazz composer and band leader Duke Ellington and saxophonist John Coltrane.Reliably erudite and graced with a bracingly quick with, ,the goal for the Australian born, British based James is not just to inform the uninitiated to new persons and their ideas, but also to provoke (or incite) a loud conversation, more likely a quarrel among the cognoscenti and lesser species of autodidacts that read collected essays.He is out to make his points, not reaffirm things a reader already holds firmly onto. He does this effectively on a recent excerpt on Duke Ellington; the essay reads well and describes the composer's particular genius for writing three minute swing masterpieces, not a point of contention. He then takes the dimmer view of Ellington's later work, when he was composing and performing longer concert pieces, a denser, less swinging arrangements of colors and moods. James is not happy with The Duke's efforts:This isn't an unusual position, since critic Gary Giddins has written at length about why he considers Ellington's legacy resting not on denser, mature work in later years, but instead on the sheer wealth of shorter dance tunes he brought to light; all the invention one might wish in notation and sound are found in the work Ellington performed to keep America dancing. Yet Giddins admits the originality and greatness of much of the larger work, while James is harbors a resentment against the post-swing developments of Bebop complexity and post-Bop envelope-tearing improvisation of John Coltrane. Pretty much implying that one of the greatest betrayals against art was that of a younger generation of improvisers seeking ot expand jazz's lexicon, James cites with endearing relish the great Ben Webster's magical tenor work for Ellington against the wild man arrogance of a younger John Coltrane:There is nothing to be gained by trying to evoke the full, face-freezing, gut-churning hideosity of all the things Coltrane does that Webster doesn't. But there might be some value in pointing out what Coltrane doesn't do that Webster does. Coltrane's instrument is likewise a tenor sax, but there the resemblance ends. In fact, it is only recognizable as a tenor because it can't be a bass or a soprano: It has a tenor's range but nothing of the voice that Hawkins discovered for it and Webster focused and deepened. There is not a phrase that asks to be remembered except as a lesion to the inner ear, and the only purpose of the repetitions is to prove that what might have been charitably dismissed as an accident was actually meant. Shapelessness and incoherence are treated as ideals. Above all, and beyond all, there is no end to it. There is no reason except imminent death for the cacophonous parade to stop. The impressiveness of the feat depends entirely on the air it conveys that the perpetrator has devoted his life to making this discovery: Supreme mastery of technique has led him to this charmless demonstration of what he can do that nobody else can. The likelihood that nobody else would want to is not considered. Jazz ought to have stood still. The most noticeable element of this essay is Clive James' resentment that people and things change over time. Eloquent as he is about Ellington's great early period, there is less a convincing argument for the superiority of swing over more experimental strains of jazz than it is a barely contained lament for lost, youthful elan. As has been said already, the rhythms of the world changed after WW2, and the kids were taken with rock and roll's back beat rather than what was going on with jazz. Being able to swing was besides the point; the children of the Ellington era audience wanted to rock. The jubilation at the Ellington "comeback" concert was a good and great thing--good art should always cause excitement--but it didn't translate into the fabled return of the Big Band/Swing era. It's doubtful Ellington himself would have desired a return to the Golden Days, as he was far too interested in the new music he was composing and performing with his Orchestra. For such a bright fellow, Clive James has the queer notion that art, jazz in this instance, must not progress some vague peak of expression; band leaders should keep their writing chops focused on producing limitless three minute dance tunes, and soloists have to remain sweet, lyrical, and brief. Art is only interesting in that it evolves with successive generations of players, and it would be a strange and stale reading world if novelists adhered to perceived rules from the eighteenth and nineteenth century, or if film makers eschewed sound and color. Jazz would be a predictable shtick rather than a creative act.The truth of this is that audiences were turning away from jazz in general.Dispite whatever historicist arguements advanced pitting traditionalists against experimenters in order to explain jazz's declining audience,both Ellington and Coltrane were both playing to diminished fan bases;the record buying public had gotten younger and leaned towards a simpler rhythm and blues style. This was true among black audiences, whose generational switch to Ray Charles, and Rufus Thomas influenced white audiences, resulting in the eventual rise of rock and roll. Everything gets displaced from the center. Clive James objects to both Ellington's widening ambition with his composing, recording and performance of longer concert pieces and to Coltrane's redefining what jazz improvisation could sound like. He seeks to locate the cause and the instance when jazz ceased being the world's all purpose sound track, and for as sweetly as he writes, seeks to attach blame. He forgets a crucial fact of being alive; things changeJames is at his best when he finds the clay feet of cultural icon and then wields a sure hammer to smash some other wise sensitive toes, especially in the case of German Communist playwright Bertolt Brecht. Supported by the government to write his plays and poetry in furtherance of the revolution, James takes delight in detailing the jarring contrast between the man’s image, that as an artist who was “of the people”, and his lifestyle” which, as he describes it, was as bourgeois as any cigar chomping capitalist he might excoriate in his art. Brecht, though, was mindful to keep up appearances; he apparently had the tailor who made his silk shirts manufacture them so that they looked like the rough textured denim that was the requisite dress of proletariat intellectuals. As for Brecht’s art, which was considerable and deserving of analysis on it’s own terms, James skirts the issue altogether with summary dismissals worthy of Paul Johnson (Intellectuals) and dwells on the gossip, the dirt. In that regard, Cultural Amnesia is deep dish indeed.
This is not a work for reading quickly. Unless you're an "Oxbridge" grad, in which case, you might not need it at all. In the form of alphabetically-arranged biographical sketches, the Australian social and media critic James offers the short course on both the literary canon (remember that?) and political themes of the last 150 years. As other reviewers noted, reading "Cultural Amnesia" is sure to expand your TBR list--but also to enhance your stock of bon mots. Copious notes are compulsorily -- after all, James provides a wonderful (yes, sometimes windy) substitute for all those University courses you skipped for wine, women and song."Could there be anything less astonishing than to work day and night on Wall Street to make the millions that will buy the Picasso that will hang on the wall of our Upper East Side apartment to help convince us and our guests that we are lucky to know each other? I have been in that apartment, and admired the Picasso, and envied its owner; I especially envied him his third wife, who had the same eyes as Picasso's second mistress, although they were on different sides of her nose.""From the French viewpoint, liberalism had been able to do so little in staving off the kind of Nazi brand of totalitarianism, it was thought that only another brand of absolute power--the Soviet Union--could fill the vacuum." Discussing the late 70s/early 80s deployment of intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe: "While whole generations of intellectuals on the left exhausted their thin talents in an effort to say something that Kate Bush couldn't sing--she, too, daringly believed that a nuclear war was an offense against love and peace--[French writer Raymond] Aron occupied himself with the more careful task of examining the peace that finally had come to Europe. . . European countries wanted American atomic bombs on their soil, not just to fulfill their NATO obligations, but because the weapons were accompanied by American personnel. A Soviet strike against the weapons would thus constitute an attack against the United States, which would be unable to remain uninvolved in the conflict.""Ezra Pound famously said that culture begins when you forget what book it came from.""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.""The1940-1941 band was [Duke] Ellington's apotheosis, and as a consequence maintained the materials of its own destruction, because all those star soloists wanted bands of their own. . . The new boys had to go somewhere. Ellington was too generous not to realize that one of the reasons they went was because of him, so he was careful not to criticize them too hard. He made a joke of it: it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing. But the joke was true, bad by extension for all arts.""There are commenters who can't get interested in Caravaggio until they find out that he killed someone. They are only one step from believing that every killer is Caravaggio.""Late-twentieth-century feminism put a lot of effort into arguing that a cult of female beauty had been imposed by a consumer society. But presumably a consumer society was not imposing anything on the Greeks when they made Helen's beauty the ignition point for the war that dropped the topless towers of Ilium down in flames.""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."Quoting Joseph Goebbels,January 25, 1944: "Since Stalingrad, even the smallest military success has been denied us. On the other hand, our political chances have hugely increased, as you know.""If we seek reassurance about human dignity instead of mere acceptance of human weakness, we must face up to [late 19th/first-half 20th Century German humanist writer Ricarda Huch], and try to remember why Judas found it so hard to look into the face of Christ--not because the divine serenity that was there, because of the self-seeking calculation that was not.""It might help if the world's very 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.""In the Gulag Archipelago, there is a great moment where prisoners are sweltering in a Black Maria while Jean-Paul Sartre is standing a few feet away on the footpath proclaiming the wonders of the Soviet Union."Aleksandr Zinoviev "tellingly" defined the Constitution of the Soviet Union "as a document published in order to find out who agreed with it, so that they could be dealt with.""Stalin's obduracy was the historical fact that defeats imagination. Given his intransigence, no other scenario than armed confrontation was really possible. The idea that the United States chose to fight the Cold War can be discussed, but only in the context of the reality that it could not have chosen to call it off.""The literary world turns the café into a campus, with conversation as a permanent seminar.""After the liberation of Paris in 1944 [Sartre] called, in his capacity as a Resistance fighter, for punishment to be vented on those among his fellow literati who had collaborated with the Nazis. The question of how much Resistance fighting he had actually done did not impede his post-war climb to prominence.""In the year when Senator John Kerry challenged President George W. Bush, the question of why Bush pretended to be able to speak English was never as interesting as why Kerry pretended not to speak French."
What do You think about Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories From History And The Arts (2007)?
I didn't read this book. I read the 30+ pages of introduction. Man, James really loves to talk about himself, doesn't he? You'd think he'd have gotten that out of his system with those multiple volumes of autobiography. There is also something old curmudgeonly about the tone. "Kids today, no cultural, end of society as we know it, blah blah." Which, I'm in a way sympathetic because yeah, most people are alarming ill-educated and uncultured. But I think they always were. The kind of culture James' is talking about has always been the purview of small elite. Anyway, the book: It is a collection of comments on a large number of extraordinary cultural figures, beginning with Anna Ahkmatova and ending with Stefan Zweig. Yes, it's in alphabetical order. Because, why not, I guess. (Even James himself admits that organization is weakness of his, joking that he has lost personal assistants in the morass of his desk. Just so we all know he is important and well-off enough to have a PA.)
—Miriam
Oh, what a book.James (who I'd never heard of before) summarizes a lifetime of reading, and note-taking, and it's essay-sized fireworks for 800+ pages. He usually starts off with a mini-biography of the essay's namesake, only then to go wherever the links take him - reading these essays feels like talking to someone who's in love with his work. 'This guy wrote some of the greatest essays ever, oh by the way if you like him there's this half-forgotten contemporary artist whose arias you should listen to, did I tell you I once met his cousin and we had the most wonderful discussion of Aristotle?' - this breathless love is how most of the essays are structured.The essays are ordered alphabetically, James writes that this order is arbitrary, yet I can't help but think that it's no coincidence that the book ends with the essay on Stefan Zweig. The Austrian Kaffeehaus-culture of liberal humanism under the roof of the arts is one of the major themes of all essays. The destruction of the Austrian culture by the Austria's Anschluß (the word Anschluß appears at least 50 times) and the scattering of Paris' intellectuals during the German invasion, is heavily implied to be the worst thing to have happened to the European intellectual life in the last 100 years, and most of the essays focus on that particular group of people. It's a joy to read his takedown of Sartre, and his love for such greats as Polar, Camus, Chamfort, Croce, Kafka, Friedell, Reich-Ranicki (as a German, that made me happy) is gigantic and jumps off the pages, infecting you. I've underlined so many books, it's going to be a minor chore to add them to my to-read shelf.Luckily, James is also a funny writer:Lysenko preached the kind of biological theories that Stalin could understand: i.e., they were poppycock.Some of the essays are rather strange, in these, James just goes off the track too far. The essay on Sophie Scholl quickly morphs into one about Natalie Portman (and Portman gets way more pages, weirdly enough), the essay on Charlie Chaplin immediately turns into a lacklustre discussion of art vs. science (and I've read better things about that particular 'conflict'), one essay is a bit about how the 'degeneration' of English is bad: as a biologist, I firmly believe that people who hold beliefs like that would have stood on shore while the first reptile crawled on land, telling the reptile to 'stop degenerating'. The essay on Heinrich Heine is just an overlong negative rant about autograph seekers.The worst essay is also the most Australian one, in which he rants for pages on pages on how the Afghani asylum seekers on board the Tampa bound to Australia in 2001 are just 'illegal immigrants' and 'queue jumpers', who should have just stayed in their home country until their application would have been accepted. It's especially worse because James, at that point, has spent 400 pages being in love with WW2-era intellectuals who've done nothing but 'jump queues' when they've escaped their home-country - can you imagine Einstein just sitting in Germany while the Gestapo is kicking down doors, waiting for his letter of invitation? Thomas Mann, too, was allowed into the USA without any papers, and Czechoslovakia even offered him citizenship so that he could formally immigrate.Sometimes, his own character comes through too much, I think this is best exemplified by this sentence:When filming in Rome, I had a jacket made by the celebrated tailor Littrico, and found out that I had the same measurements as Gorbachev: they were on file in Littrico's office.To which I can only say: so what?But these Rohrkrepierer-essays are in the tiny minority. I'd love to see a book like this on the life and work of scientists (if I remember correctly, only one of the 'good' essays has to do with science).Recommended for: People who can't get enough stuff into their brain.Not recommended for: People who, if they go on travelling to a beautiful country, get angry if there's a detour.
—Philipp
Cultural Amnesia is one of the best works of non-fiction I’ve read ever. It is thoroughly enjoyable (funny, thoughtful, incisive, generous in many senses of the word), even when it is pondering the recent century’s most awful evils. It is an illuminating read on topics familiar and unknown.James wrote Cultural Amnesia as a defense of liberal democracy, humanism, and art and culture that supports freedom, tolerance, and understanding. Organized as an alphabetized series of thematic essays, each of which ranges in length from two pages or less to over a dozen pages, Cultural Amnesia works despite the peculiar organization and it works both as a collection of essays that will ever more be dipped into and as a sustained single argument. Each of the essays is the name of a person, literally from Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig, with many strange sandwiches between: Dick Cavett is between Albert Camus and Paul Celan; Terry Gilliam falls between slices of Edward Gibbon and Josef Goebbels, Sophie Scholl between Arthur Schnitzler and Wolf Jobst Siedler. The Family of Mann is here together in a way they never were in life: Golo, Heinrich, Michael, and Thomas. Tony Curtis, Adolf Hitler, Czeslaw Milosz, Edward Said, Margaret Thatcher, and Admiral Yamamoto get essays. So do Miles Davis and Duke Ellington, Charles Chaplin and W.C. Fields, Octavio Paz and Mario Vargas Llosa. Alfred Einstein does, but not Albert. Kafka but not Joyce or Woolf.What rescues the imperfection of any inclusion or exclusion is that the essays are not about the person named but move straightaway into a consideration of a topic sparked by a quote from that person. Essays are about fame, about freedom, about grammar, about memory, about hypocrisy, terrorism, courage, humanity, and more.James has his biases. He is, for example, no fan of Sartre, who not only gets an essay but gets slammed frequently in other essays. Not even Sartre, he says at one point early on, can be wrong all the time, though he tries. He is no fan of multi-culturalism or other simplifications that remove nuance from truth. But mostly his biases add to the book’s pleasure and argument, rather than distract or diminish. He is a graceful, engaging writer and the book a pleasure for mind and soul. He’s added writers to my list to read, music to listen to, films to see. Kindly, he has removed some as well and made others not necessary. He bolsters our commitment to liberal democracy and to humanism and helps us to feel better about our prospects, moving further from one troubled century and deeper into another.
—Rick
