Culture from the cheap seats

Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.
-Clive James

Lately, I’ve been reading Clive James’ Cultural Amnesia. It’s what I’ve been reading while I wait for baby E to cry it out and go to sleep. The fact that I can maintain any connection with its subject while my daughter is howling less than five feet away tells you something about what kind of a book it is.

Unfortunately, that’s about as much as I can tell you about what the book is about. Clive admits as much in the introduction; the book is neither easy to follow, nor well-organized. Given his choice of subject matter – quotations from cultural icons that have interested him over the course of his life – it’s pretty clear that the book’s hopscotch format was unavoidable. You cannot organize content that is truly chaotic. At least, you can’t without altering the content.

His book has established beyond any doubt that I will never be cultured or well read. It has also made me doubt my use of words. Reading his turns of phrase, it is easy to believe that you are discovering a new and better way to use English. Clive James dishes out the barbs (e.g. his comment that a particular French philosopher drew followers away from Sartre, “when people realized there was an alternative to getting absolutely everything wrong.”) and heaps praise on clever turns of phrase (the woman accusing her lover that their relationship was “only sex,” and he replies “What’s so only?”) - wherever he happens to find them.

It’s easy to get caught up in his admiration for this and that, but the inescapable result of reading his book is to be shown an entire universe of things that I haven’t heard even a whisper about. This is no real surprise, of course there are countless things I don’t know. The jolt is seeing them paraded in front of you in page after page. One page had a series of cultural and political references that I didn’t have the first idea what they were or even when they were. They could have been WWII era, or they could have happened last week. Hadn’t the foggiest, and since Clive can read nine languages he will make references using them that only serve to send you back into the page to sift out some meaning in the context.

With other writers, this would be pretentious – but this is Clive James and he’s just being who he is.

I don’t have a lot of use for the café bound philosopher/writer, and I while I enjoyed what little philosophy I did study- there’s no way I would ever persevere to be a truly “deep” thinker. Many of the people James discusses in this book were, and had all the vices and weaknesses common to their species. They did not have happy lives, were riddled with insecurities, and several even committed suicide. People like Anna Akhmatova, Egon Friedell, and Paul Celan.

Were I to meet any of these people, there would be instant and mutual distain. Somehow James manages to present these people in their element. He proudly shows you their moment of greatness – no matter how brief – or damns them for their failings, no matter their reputation.

Somehow, in James’ hands, these people are always interesting.

…

Oh – and anyone who thinks that James is just another snob should read more of his writings.

Like this one:

Windows Is Shutting Down

Windows is shutting down, and grammar are
On their last leg. So what am we to do?
A letter of complaint go just so far,
Proving the only one in step are you.

Better, perhaps, to simply let it goes.
A sentence have to be screwed pretty bad
Before they gets to where you doesnt knows
The meaning what it must of meant to had.

The meteor have hit. Extinction spread,
But evolution do not stop for that.
A mutant languages rise from the dead
And all them rules is suddenly old hat.

Too bad for we, us what has had so long
The best seat from the only game in town.
But there it am, and whom can say its wrong?
Those are the break. Windows is shutting down.