Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time

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It might seem a pity to break pieces off their finished work, but I think the integrity of their concentrated effort can only stand revealed more clearly. 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. In this marvellous book you'll find a penetrating peon of praise to jazz aristocrat Duke Ellington, and you might also have good, if frustrating, fun arguing with James's blanket condemnation of the freer forms of jazz {he's really got it in for John Coltrane} on the perfectly sensible basis that it doesn't swing. And let’s make “media” an interchangeable singular-plural the way “deer” is so all the schoolmarms of the English-speaking world can quit harping about it.

What this book then proposes—what it embodies, I hope—is something difficult enough to be satisfactory for an age in which to be presented with nothing except reassurance is ceasing to be tolerable.The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

We can cocoon ourselves, if we wish, in a new provincialism more powerful than any of the past empires. Zweig was one of the foremost proponents of the liberal humanism, the internationalism, the commitment to freedom through culture, that James strongly advocates. What is a “perfectly managed autocracy” and when has said entity even existed, let alone prevented the decline of language?Not long after I began marking passages for future consideration, I also began keeping notes in the margin beside the markings, and then longer notes on the endpapers. Let me hasten to add that I am not one of those self-proclaimed Enemies of Cliché – clichés can be quite handy sometimes. George Orwell thought, and said, that the bourgeoisie was the enemy of the proletariat, until the practical evidence persuaded him that anyone who believed the two classes could not be reconciled was the deadly enemy of both. From Louis Armstrong to Ludwig Wittgenstein, via Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust, this is a a illuminating and fascinating work of remarkable erudition. 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.