“It is so immense, I have no words for it” was T.S. Eliot’s reaction to Wyndham Lewis’s The Apes of God. Old Tom was possibly just relieved that he had escaped being skewered on Lewis’s satirical blade, unlike virtually everyone else in the precious hothouse world of the London literary scene in the twenties. I had a similarly awed response when reading Clive James’s magnum opus (which it is, in every sense) Cultural Amnesia. The avid reader (there must be one) of this blog will know of my admiration for Clive, founded initially on his lyrics to Pete Atkin’s music. He has been, away from the TV screen, one of the most important cultural critics of our times, and his post -TV career seems dedicated to cementing that position. Recent books of essays, such as EvenAs We Speak, seem to me to represent all that is best in the critic’s art. The autobiographical work is just hugely enjoyable, and the poetry at its best is playfully serious, formally adventurous, thought-provoking and beautifully observed. It’s not surprising that the jacket of Cultural Amnesia repeats the oft-quoted New Yorker assessment “Clive James is a brilliant bunch of guys” to point out the breadth of his achievements, but really that isn’t adequate to characterise this latest volume. I know from the estimable Pete Atkin website run by Steve Birkill that the original title for the book was “Alone in the Cafe” and that gives a clue to the process of composition. The author says that the book is based on his reading during time off (often in cafes) from all the other activities for which he’s known over the last forty years; his marginal notes form the germ of these pieces. The eventual title refers to the necessity to resist the “cultural amnesia” which, in the era of increasing homogenisation, forgets that complex and vibrant mental world of twentieth century creative life. The book is organised as a series of essays, alphabetically arranged according to the author of the quotation around which each essay is constructed. The focus is on those who shaped our culture in the twentieth century, so some names are the ones you might expect: Wittgenstein, Proust, Freud. And because James is concerned with those who had a negative effect, it’s not really surprising to see Hitler, Goebbels and Mao there too. But would you have expected Beatrix Potter, Terry Gilliam and W.C. Fields? Probably not. There’s a noticeably European (and non-English flavour) to the figures chosen, too. Starting with the cafe culture of old Vienna, James is not shy of advancing the claims of some figures many of us might not have heard of. Would you recognise Peter Altenberg, Karl Tschuppik or Miguel de Unamuno? No, thought not. Yet James makes a very convincing case for the importance of these figures. He isn’t shy of using non-twentieth century characters either- so Tacitus, Sir Thomas Browne and John Keats are all in there. The essays are not, though, biographical, and are not, quite often, about the person whose name appears at the top of the page. Rather, the essays are about the issues raised by a particular quotation of that writer. Thus, the Thomas Browne chapter is largely about using quotations as titles; the Arthur Schnitzler chapter is, hilariously, mostly about Richard Burton’s hairstyle in Where Eagles Dare; and the Terry Gilliam chapter is about state-sponsored torture. At the heart of the book, and infusing every line, is the passionate desire to assert the value of humanism, as it has been developed by the thinkers and artists of Western civilisation. The alphabetical arrangement makes for a serendipitous juxtapositioning of disparate figures- Michael Mann is sandwiched between Heinrich and Thomas Mann, and Tony Curtis rubs shoulders with Benedetto Croce. The emphasis on the Jewish writers of mittel-Europa is entirely justified by James’s advocacy of these (to me, at any rate) little-known figures. I now have a growing “to-read” list starting with Egon Friedell, and then Ernst Curtius, Alfred Polgar, Stefan Zweig and … and… Clive James is nothing if not opinionated, and I was pleased to see some of the darlings of Theory brushed aside: Lacan, Kristeva and Baudrillard are described as “artistes in the flouncing kick-line of the post-modern intellectual cabaret.” A couple of quibbles: for a book that acknowledges the work of two editors, and a copy-editor, there are too many typos. Clive James is a stickler for accuracy, so the reader winces at incorrect spellings of German words, “English” rendered with a lower-case e, and other infelicities. There’s also some repetition, understandable considering the piecemeal creative process, but avoidable if the editors were doing their job. A good joke about the special bullets used in films, which miraculously avoid hitting the hero, is not improved by being repeated. And there is some contentiousness about the often rather brutal moral judgements. ‘Er indoors (sorry: Doctor ‘Er Indoors) thought the assessment of Ernst Jünger was harsh, for instance. But these are minor blemishes on a very important work. The old Everyman editions used to quote Edmund Gosse: “A cosmic convulsion might utterly destroy all printed works in the world, and still if a complete set of Everyman’s Library floated upon the waters enough would be preserved to carry on the unbroken tradition of literature.” I think that if Cultural Amnesia, and all the books mentioned therein, were to survive, we could make a similar claim. Spend that Christmas book token on this.
In a heartwarming Christmas story, Will Smith, an actor (and therefore someone on whose every word we should hang, especially as he has said he wants to be president one day) says that Hitler was essentially a good person. In other news, the Pope suggests that Lucifer wasn’t such a bad guy really, and George Bush says maybe he never did get the hang of this politics thing…
I enjoyed reading this reissue of a 1938 novel, now published in Persephone’s smart grey livery. It’s a tale of one day, but isn’t a Mrs Dalloway or Ulysses. The eponymous Miss P is a timid, dowdy failed governess who finds herself by accident plunged into a demi-monde of bright young things, night-clubs and all night parties, presided over by the deliciously named Delysia LaFosse. She immediately becomes a Jeeves-like guru to the madcap women of this circle, averting disaster in their complex love lives by producing last minute solutions. She is an idiot-savant version of Jeeves, though- her plans are not the careful product of a highly developed brain, but the instincts she has when she allows herself to be be bold for the first time in her life. The short chapters, each detailing a few hours in the day, show Miss Pettigrew at the centre of a maelstrom of social activity as she pilots Miss LaFosse and her friend Edythe DuBarrry towards the safe havens of marriage with suitable young men, and incidentally finds a beau for herself. We are in the world of Waugh’s Vile Bodies here, but without the vitriol. The villain of the piece, the caddish Nick, has an inexplicable power over women. This is explained in a disarmingly frank piece of racism by the fact that he has some Italian ancestry. More startlingly, Miss Pettigrew instinctively knows he isn’t right because “he has a little Jew in him”. These jarring notes aside – and Miss Pettigrew’s eventual conquest is clearly Jewish – the novel is delightful, and to criticise it would be, as someone said of Wodehouse, like taking a spade to a souffle. Indeed, there’s much of a Wodehousian nature here, and it’s interesting to read from the introduction that Winifred Watson, who died as recently as 2002, was the daughter of a Newcastle shopkeeper, with no direct knowledge of the London scene she described. She stopped writing during the war, having written some historical fiction, a murder mystery and this little gem. Persephone Books is an excellent enterprise. Their reprints of obscure twentieth century classics are stylish and robust, printed on good paper with beautiful endpapers based on contemporary designs. An extra delight in Miss Pettigrew is the illustrations, which are very evocative of that hedonistic pre-war period. This particular publication is obviously a winner, as I see it is about to become a film. That will doubtless bring it to a larger audience, and that can’t be bad. The film trailer is here.
Thanks to Francessa for pointing this out to me. I don’t feel like a genius, and Stephen Fry makes me feel inadequate, Anonymous, but this woman- who is some sort of celebrity in the US apparently- plumbs new depths of dumbness.
On the shared items bit, there’s an article from John’s blog about the blog readability thing. It points out that the code you enter to get the badge also contains a link to a cash advance site, thus helping that site to rise up the Google ratings. I had actually spotted that, so I removed it when I pasted the code. On reflection though, I think I’ll just take the silly badge off altogether. Here’s the tip: “Another fiendish way to make money on the web | Technology | Guardian Unlimited December 7th, 2007 by John
I’ve been wondering about this since I saw people linking to the original post earlier in the week and, like them, submitted my site to the “readability test” offered. The thing that attracted my attention was the traditional badge that appeared with HTML code for you to copy and paste onto your site. Displayed prominently in the box under the badge was code to link to a cash advance site. I decided this was somewhat fishy and didn’t go any further. However Charles Arthur on The Guardian site did take it further and has a fascinating analysis of what does indeed look like a clever attempt to boost the ranking of the cash advance site. In the article Another fiendish way to make money on the web he says of the process that:
Anyway, once you’ve input your blog’s URL, you’ll quickly get a graphic showing your blog’s “readability” by school age – elementary school, high school, undergraduate, postgraduate, genius and so on. It seems to happen really fast, given the sort of linguistic analysis that must be needed, but computers are fast these days, aren’t they?
Then you have an image, which you can – if you’ve got the time and energy – copy, upload to your blog, and display; or a bit of HTML, which is much simpler, to paste in your page or profile. No muss, no fuss.
I was looking at this when I started wondering about the HTML. It has an image link…
All well and good. But then there’s the ALT tag – remember, the stuff that search engines actually index: alt=”cash advance” Get a Cash Advance”.
And that phrase “cash advance” has a link to an entirely different site…
Now, what happens when happy bloggers – or MySpacers, or Facebookers, or whatever, laughing over their blog’s or profile’s readability or lack of it, paste the code on their site? Search engines index their site and find a link from them pointing to “cash advance” and that site. Well, that sounds like a recommendation for the site, the search engines decide.
It’s a fascinating analysis of something that appears to boil down to a form of search engine optimisation, verging on blog link spam. It’s a piece of detective work that’s well worth a read – especially if you’re tempted to boast of the readability of your blog!”
In the continuing fiasco about the lost data, HMRC has now offered a reward of £20,000 for the return of the missing discs. This after police searched municipal waste dumps to find them. In other news, the discs brought by a mechanic from Maclaren’s formula 1 team to his new employers Renualt “have been returned”. Well, isn’t the whole point about computer discs that you can copy them? And wouldn’t anybody who had such valuable data make a copy immediately?
I discovered the Blog Readability test via John Naughton, and had to do it of course. Gratifying, if baffling, to come out at Genius. Anyway, it means I can post a nice banner over there—-> showing a brain.
I frequently share in the “shared items” section over there —-> Ben Goldacre’s “Bad Science” column. It’s unfailingly interesting, frequently funny, and often features some jaw-droppingly appalling manipulation of science by self-declared experts who are exposed by Ben as complete charlatans. The equally admirable David Colquhoun does a similar job on his website. On World Aids day, I thought a proper post might be in order to highlight two instances of pseudo-scientific quackery, as reported by Ben today. Both are about treatment for Aids. The antagonism of the South African government to properly researched Aids treatments is well-known. What I didn’t know was this: “(President) Mbeki pursued his own investigations on Aids therapies, resulting in government endorsement of Virodene, a home grown South African drug. Medical treatment for Aids cost $1,200 a month, but Virodene cost $6, “medicine developed in Africa for Africa”. Virodene was in fact based on the industrial solvent dimethylformamide, which is toxic, potentially lethal, and with – bizarrely – no proof of efficacy against HIV.” Unbelievable! But then, the crazy world of homoeopathy can trump that. The Society of Homoeopaths are having a conference. One of the presenters has a novel way of dealing with Aids. Here’s Ben’s report: ‘Before you feel smug and superior, the Society of Homoeopaths are holding a conference in London today featuring the work of Peter Chappell, who also claims he can make an immediate impact on the Aids epidemic using music encoded with his Aids remedies. “Right now,” he says, “Aids in Africa could be significantly ameliorated by a simple tune played on the radio.” Damningly, contemptibly, not one single person from the homeopathy community has spoken out to criticise this lunacy.’ Well, yes. Just remind me which century we are in, please.
