Cultural Amnesia

I love this book because it’s a collection of mini-biographies of contemporary writers, musicians, and artists from the 20th century, some I’d heard of and some I hadn’t, but they’re all weird.

Like, as I’m writing this, I just flipped to a random page and there’s a section on Michael Mann, who once owned the apartment I’m writing this in. And then I flip a little more and get five succinct and totally bizarre pages about Mao.

I love how random his book is!

A collection of biographical essays, from Louis Armstrong and Jorge Luis Borges to Isoroku Yamamoto and Stefan Zweig.

Written with James’s distinctive wit and verve, each essay distills features specific to an individual and also characteristic of the long twentieth century. James is anti-ideological and so are his heroes—Nadezhda Mandelstam, Albert Camus, Duke Ellington, among others.

They tolerated ambiguity and resisted certainty even in the midst of unimaginable violence and shocking injustices. (He includes many of his “intellectual bêtes noires”—Edward Said, Bertold Brecht, Mao Zedong.) This deeply personal collection constitutes James’s battering ram against the walls erected by willful… show more.

Clive James will probably be remembered in this country for his moving poem Red Maple, and for a decade’s worth of wry commentary talking about the Japanese Gameshow, ‘Endurance’ on TV, but his essays and literary criticism were every bit as significant (and often just as funny). Cultural Amnesia is a peculiar collection of short essays on important literary, cultural, and historical figures of the past, which James compiled over the course of his life. Many of the subjects will be familiar to everyone: Charlie Chaplin, Coco Chanel, Adolf Hitler, but many will not (but should be): Egon Friedell… show more.