Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time

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as a riposte to a young woman who complained “that his interest in her was based only (nur) on sexual attraction”. He mentions in passing early on how ridiculous Richard Burton’s haircut was in the WWII movie Where Eagles Dare.

sneer from the late Christopher Hitchens Some holiday sneer from the late Christopher Hitchens

Even though he likes Thanksgiving, in contrast to the despised Christmas season, he lets us know he doesn't like turkey and that the worst meal he's ever eaten consisted in "what was quite possibly turkey, but which certainly involved processed cranberry and pumpkin" — this feast consumed in a US Army position in the desert on the Iraq frontier. The most amazing thing is that James appreciates them all, even when he criticizes their mistakes and excesses.Our resources are crucial for knowledge lovers everywhere—so if you find all these bits and bytes useful, please pitch in. For a more detailed critique of the Introduction: James tells us that throughout his reading and writing career, he made “annotations” which seemed to be beyond a narrow subject, belonging to a “scheme” which could perhaps be approached far in the future, perhaps near the end of his life. He came not to praise telly, nor to bury it like some fastidious antipodean approximation of George Steiner, but rather to revel in its absurdity, vulgarity and occasional charm. The sociology is at least plausible, but more to the point is the colloquial tone spiced with a bit of regional rancor.

Cultural Amnesia - Pan Macmillan AU Cultural Amnesia - Pan Macmillan AU

The meaning of the term humanism has fluctuated, according to the successive intellectual movements which have identified with it.

If you could not or would not care to imagine what conditions were like in 1905 or 1917, then it might be best if you kept your virginal judgments to yourself. One of the things that distinguishes Cultural Amnesia from the finger-pointing, eat-your-bean-sprouts tomes about canons and multiculturalism is that James doesn't make you feel guilty, he makes you feel hungry. James, on the other hand, comes across a scold, and his “untranslatable beauties of the German (or French or Italian) tongue” mini lectures are off-the-shelf, the kind of stuff you read in Learn French in 30 Days ads in the New Yorker. Each time this scene is set, he then tells the reader that he really should learn the language of the original work.