Pure Writerly Moments 2 (Short Stories, Essays, Book Reviews, and More)

Book Review - Cultural Amnesia

Book Review: Cultural Amnesia by Clive James

Who is Clive James? I didn't know until one of my friends casually passed me this book and suggested that I might enjoy it. It was a big hardcover brick of a book, not the sort of book that is usually passed on casually. But the short chapters and privy, hip, highly cultured measure of James's prose helped to hook me in quickly. Halfway through the book though I still didn't have a clear picture of the man, and I put off looking up some of his commentary and interviews on Youtube as a friend suggested I should. I wanted to get deeper into the book. The book, after all, was the thing.

The profiles are a way of interrogating difficult questions regarding humanism, culture, civilization, and progress. The profiles are a starting point for digressions that are exploratory, wistful, productive, but oftentimes also dead ends. I didn't realize it until I started writing this review, but the subtitle is "Notes in the Marin of my Time" – and it does seem that this book was composed entirely of notes written in the margins of pages. At one point, I think he even mentions that one particularly substantial tome served as a workbench for his thinking. There is nothing wrong with that. The notion even seems romantic. (Perhaps one day I too will venture out into the world with a suitcase full of books and just write a book of commentary entirely in the margins.) At the same time, one shouldn't be surprised if the thoughts seem random, choppy, wistful, disconnected at times...like a man dreaming out loud or a person on a therapist's couch working through significant problems. (These problems just happen to be the larger problems of humanity and humanism.)

What is the sampling method for James's quasi-biopic, exploratory essays? Does he choose only the forgotten cultural figures? No. Does he choose people only from the modern era? No. Does he try to choose an approximate number for each letter? No.

I believe his method of choosing is this: What figures interest me? What figures will help me grapple with the big questions I am interested in? Also, how can I come at these questions indirectly?

What is humanism?

What are its strengths and weaknesses?

Why do the culturally literate among us usually suffer from moral cowardice?

To what degree do anti-humanists (dictators, tyrants, autocrats, and their enablers) embrace traits that we assume to be uniquely humanist?

Minor questions include: How did scholars and other figures get suckered in by communism? What is the nature of complicity, compromise, appeasement, and collaboration with evil?

What answers are implicitly given in the book?

It is a shame that the coffee house culture of Vienna is a thing of the past. This culture of constant conversation in communal places by learned people should be brought back.

A la Nichola Nassim Taleb – "skin in the game": Do more than you say and put your skin where your values are. If you are a humanist, then be willing to suffer for your fellow humans (not just your art). Those most cherished by James were people who not only wrote their values but took courageous actions to stand up to tyranny.

There are also hesitations...these hesitations...in order to stand up to illiberal tyrants, you might need other illiberal tyrants (or at least to make alliances with them). This is Clive James, perhaps, reluctantly moving from core-value humanism to what IR specialists call realism.

Perhaps my favorite profile is of the Vienna coffee house bum who didn't write much, but hung around a lot, was known for his verbal witticism, and slept with a lot of girls...the name?...I had to look it up: Peter Altenberg. Well, at least he got his own Wikipedia page, which means he was not completely forgotten.

Oh yeah, that is the other theme of this book – memory. We must endeavor not to forget the past and to learn from it, even when those lessons may be murky.