I carried this book around for a while, and there's so much to agree and argue with in it, that it was a lot like lugging a very knowledgeable if ocassionally myopic friend. James encyclopedically comments on the historical and/or artistic legacies of, well, a whole bunch of people! Some of his little essays are masterpieces of intellectual digression. (Let's talk about Coco Chanel! But really let's talk about the oddities of fashion, and how fashion affects pop culture, and my tweed jacket could certainly use some mussing up. Oh, yes, Coco Chanel.)
What James pointedly comes back to throughout these essays is that there's a certain awful intellectual willingness to forgive the horrors of the left while attacking the terrors of the right. "Les extremes se touchent"- yes. (Although why he feels the need to bring up Stalin in the essay about Beatrix Potter still evades me!) But, yes, I felt incredibly comforted to know that a liberal humanist of his caliber (who hails from Australia, no less) can accurately expose Che Guevara T-shirt wearers with a line like: "apparently off-shore Castro sympathizers can read the simple minds of those happy, salsa-loving Cubans from miles away." James actually spent time in Cuba and has as accurate a take as anyone can expect from someone who clearly spends most of his time in a tower bricked with books.
One huge problem with "Cultural Amnesia"? The typos.
I don't think I've ever seen a big serious book with so many of them- seriously, some proofreader at Norton books was hitting the juice during lunchtime, because there's one every other page, which is a problem in a book that specifically criticizes OTHER books for misusing commas and semicolons and the such- (book-kettle calling the book-pot black much?)
Wonderful and smart as James is, some of his lines can smack you with their pompous assumptions. One that really hit me was in an essay about Walter Benjamin:
"The essay by Walter Benjamin that everyone knows something about is 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.'"
SCREECHING HALT!!!
I was reading that on a bus to work that goes through Biscayne in downtown Miami and I had to look up from the book. Now, *I* didn't know who Walter Benjamin was until I read the essay. This is Walter Benjamin, by the way:
I looked at the faces of the unwashed masses I travel with and I was willing to bet a million bucks that:
a) not only had no one in that bus read the essay
or b) heard of Walter Benjamin
or c) be even remotely interested in the essay if it was presented to them
but d) even if they were forced to read they wouldn't have the tools to make heads or tails of the darned thing.
So, no, not EVERYONE knows something about "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."
Maybe they SHOULD, but thassa-one for anutha day.
3 comments:
They probably, as it seems you now know, should. But yeah, James can be a twit.
I surmise from your scan of the cover that you're reading the UK edition--I don't recall being distracted by typos in the US edition.
The line you quote is not the only one in the book which evidences that James thinks by writing, and lets the thought process show through--which can be a good thing.
But I enjoyed the book; as often as I disagreed with him, I still found him, most of the time, worth disagreeing with.
Re: both.
Both right. It's like being with a well educated friend who sometimes forgets that that's the exception and not the norm. But yes, even as some of his pieces misfire or seem not as edited as they should be, he's a keen intellect one loves arguing with- and just great, necessary company!
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