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Jeremy
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Re: Clive's Cultural Amnesia.
« Reply #120: 09.07.07 at 15:42 »
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Thanks mostly to Kevin's tireless trumpeting of the arrival of CJ's CA in here, I was well prepared for its release in the UK and could heavily suggest its suitability as a Father's Day gift to my daughter.  I've been reading it off and on since that happy day, and it's more than lived up to my expectations: the breadth and depth of his references, his enthusiasm and his tireless, but always interesting, declaration of his political viewpoint.  
 
I can't add anything to the learned reviews which have already been collected here, but I thought I might shine a light on a tiny point which I don't think has been picked up to date.  On p 498, in the article on Eugenio Montale, there is a set of memory tests, ranging across an alarmingly wide variety of books.  I have no idea about the answers to most of these, but the penultimate one caught my eye:
 
Is it "Sergeant X" or "For Esme-With Love And Squalor" that features [a Dostoevsky quotation]?
 
Having been a JD Salinger fan from an early age, I was pretty sure about the answer: it's "For Esme-With Love And Squalor".  More interestingly, I think there's a mistake here: there's no such story as "Sergeant X" - instead, he's a character in "For Esme...".  To be pedantic, the quotation appears in a story within "For Esme..."; that story doesn't have a title (but, in fact, "Sergeant X" would be a very good one).  
 
I'm not quite sure if CJ's being deliberately tricky in posing this question, or if he wasn't recalling the titles correctly.  If the latter, then it's a neat illustration of the larger point that he's making with this clever-dick quiz: our failure to remember things necessitates the constant refreshment of our memory, which, far from being a burden, is a good thing: "a polishing of the pipe, like El Dorado's throat", in his characteristically memorable phrase.
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Re: Clive's Cultural Amnesia.
« Reply #121: 18.07.07 at 14:27 »
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Fredrick Raphael has mounted a terrifically robust defence of Clive and Cultural Amnesia in  the July issue of Prospect
 
 

=============================================================
The essence of Cliveness
Clive James's compendium of short essays shows him at his most democratic, irreverent and dazzling. Even the flaws seem to be there for a purpose—to make the reader feel slightly less ignorant
Frederic Raphael
________________________________________
 
Cultural Amnesia, by Clive James  
(Picador, £25)
 
Halfway through this monumental catalogue raisonné of the writings in Clive James's life, and library, I inadvertently broke protocol and read a chunk of what another reviewer had said about it. In a spasm of reheated little Englandism, AN Wilson cosied up to his public by assuring them that he had never heard of Witold Gombrowicz, who, he jeered, sounded fictional. Letting philistines off the hook of their monoglot complacency is a speciality of parochial critics, from FR Leavis to Kingsley Amis and on down. No surprise to discover that Wilson regarded as wearisome old hat James's long obsession with the somewhat parallel histories of Nazism and communism. Trailing along with the prevailing cant, Wilson concluded that today's American cultural domination was much more alarming than what was done, ages ago now, by one set of people with funny foreign names to a capsized raft of others—Friedell, Kraus, Schnitzler, Freud—whose work Clive James presents as of lasting importance. You don't have to be a working paranoiac to suspect, in today's anti-Americanism, a mutation of the old Nazi charge of...

=============================================================
 
This is a far as the reader can go without suscribing to either the magazine or the article. I'm sure that some readers will probably think that £2.00 is hardly too big a price to pay for this and another article. Those who do may like to try the local library for Prospect. Some libraries do have it on their periodical shelves.
 
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Re: Clive's Cultural Amnesia.
« Reply #122: 18.07.07 at 20:15 »
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My apologies to Frederic Raphael for subtracting an"e" adding a "k" when writing his christian name in todays posting.  
 
Put it down to the fact that I was probably conflating the character played by Geoffrey Keen in a handful of the James Bond movies - sometimes listed as the Minister of Defence and sometimes as Fredrick Gray - with a spelling I came across in a reference to in the credits for the TV sitcom Of Mycenae And Men.  
 
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Re: Clive's Cultural Amnesia.
« Reply #123: 06.08.07 at 08:31 »
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The prize-winning American journalist and commentator Bill Moyers has interviewed Clive for his highly influential Bill Moyers Journal, the weekly interview and news programme that, after a twenty-five year hiatus, recently returned as part of PBS *programming.  
 
I've not had an opportunity to watch the broadcast yet, so I cannot comment on it.
 
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*Public Broadcasting Service (America)
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Re: Clive's Cultural Amnesia.
« Reply #124: 11.08.07 at 18:54 »
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on 06.08.07 at 08:31, Kevin Cryan wrote:
The prize-winning American journalist and commentator Bill Moyers has interviewed Clive for his highly influential Bill Moyers Journal, the weekly interview and news programme that, after a twenty-five year hiatus, recently returned as part of PBS *programming. .......................
 
Kevin Cryan
 
*Public Broadcasting Service (America)
 

 
There is a full transcript of that evening's broadcast here
 
Kevin Cryan
 
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Re: Clive's Cultural Amnesia.
« Reply #125: 13.08.07 at 11:41 »
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At the beginning of what turns out to be a favourable review of Cultural Amnesia, written for the current issue of the independent (and not-for-profit) magazine, Australian Book Review, the Australian academic and commentator Morag Frazer has this to say:
 
Conversation is the raison d’être of this monumental monologue. But you might not think so if you read only the reviews. Splenetic, green-sick criticism – and there has been plenty of it – insists that what Clive James has built out of a life’s voracious reading and careful noticing – his ‘notes in the margin’ – is a platform for his ego. Not so. But how ruthlessly we skin our own.
 
Cultural Amnesia, as I read it, is a book of invitation, not dictation. Yes, it is daunting in length and ambition: a digressive, eccentric articulation of a profoundly held credo of humanism (‘our best reason for having minds at all’). It is a prodigious amateur’s scan of the culture and politics of the twentieth century, a century made even more terrible than the calamitous fourteenth, with its plagues and wars, because our modern science and technology enabled mass murder, and because a coincidence of evil gave us human monsters avid in the systematic annihilation of their own kind. And yes, because James writes about what he most loves, hates and fears rather than about his academic or professional specialism (though there is an impressive quantity of the latter in the anatomising of writing and performance), the volume of conversation is sometimes turned up so high you can’t hear your own voice. Verbal shot put takes over from Viennese café conversation. But not for long, and not for keeps. The dominie* impulse in James is more the reflex of an impassioned teacher than the edict of a megalomaniac. He wants to show you the whole world, not take it away from you, or take you out of it…………

 
This is a sympathetic review that is worth reading in its entirety, and more than once.
 
Kevin Cryan
 
* (school)mastering is as close a I can get to interpreting adjective. (K.C)
 
Concise Oxford Dictionary
dominie // n. Sc.  
 
a schoolmaster.
[later spelling of domine ‘sir’, vocative of Latin dominus ‘lord’]
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Re: Clive's Cultural Amnesia.
« Reply #126: 03.09.07 at 19:44 »
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A lengthy feature about Clive and the genesis of Cultural Amnesia, written by Diana Wichtel, appears in the September 8th to 14th print edition of the New Zealand Listener.  
 
A full transcript of the piece will be available (free?) online on the 22-Sep-2007.
 
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Re: Clive's Cultural Amnesia.
« Reply #127: 06.09.07 at 10:29 »
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It's good to see that Cultural Amnesia continues to be read and taken seriously by its  America readers. In today's edition of Washington Times the paper's Cultural Briefs columnist quotes with obvious approval from blogger Richard John Neuhaus:
 
Rhetorical gas
 
"I have mentioned before Clive James' book of mini-essays on intellectuals of the last hundred years, Cultural Amnesia. He really does not like Jean-Paul Sartre, who was lionized by so many for so long. James blames Sartre's prewar period in Berlin, and especially the influence of Heidegger.
 
" 'In Sartre's style of argument, German metaphysics met French sophistry in a kind of European Coal and Steel Community producing nothing but rhetorical gas.' But wait, he is just warming up. '[Sartre] might have known that he was debarred by nature from telling the truth for long about anything that mattered, because telling the truth was something that ordinary men did, and his urge to be extraordinary was, for him, more of a motive force than merely to see the world as it was.' ...
 
'Working by a sure instinct for bogus language, a non-philosopher like George Orwell could call Sartre's political writings a heap of beans, but there were few professional thinkers anywhere who found it advisable to dismiss Sartre's air of intelligence: There was too great a risk of being called unintelligent themselves.' "
 
— Richard John Neuhaus, writing on the Public Square blog at First Things

 
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Re: Clive's Cultural Amnesia.
« Reply #128: 11.09.07 at 06:59 »
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"Just in time for today’s anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, critic Clive James has arrived with a book that reminds us of what the West is fighting to preserve" says today's Opinion column of the Louisiana newspaper The Advocate
 
James is a native of Australia, resident of London and a man of the world whose work is respected on both sides of the Atlantic. He’s written widely on politics, theater, television, film, music and literature, all with a keen eye toward what the arts say about the larger culture.
 
“Cultural Amnesia” is James’ great summing up of what’s he’s learned in more than 40 years as a professional observer of popular culture.
His book is an antidote to the ominous suggestion of the title — that we in the West might be in danger of forgetting the great cultural traditions which stand at the center of who we are.
 
But as James quickly points out, the way we think and live in a free society can’t be summarized too neatly, and that’s exactly what scares the kind of fundamental extremists who decided, as James puts it, “to fly our own airliners into towers of commerce.”
 
James has this to say about our enemies and the best way to fight them:
“What they hate is the bewildering complexity of civilized life, which we will find hard to defend if we share the same aversion. We shouldn’t. There is too much to appreciate. If it can’t be sorted into satisfactory categories, that should make us take heart: it wouldn’t be the work of human beings if it could.”
 
James notes that while the age of the totalitarian state seems to be on the wane, totalitarianism, “however, is not over. It survives as residues, some of them all the more virulent because they are no longer hemmed in by borders; and some of them are within our own borders ... democracy deserved, and still deserves, to prevail.”
That is a timely message to keep in mind today as the world pauses to remember the villainy of what happened to our country on Sept. 11, 2001.
-30-

 
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Re: Clive's Cultural Amnesia.
« Reply #129: 13.09.07 at 21:31 »
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Cultural Amnesia is reviewed in this week's TLS by Adam Bresnick; an admiring, but not uncritical notice.
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Re: Clive's Cultural Amnesia.
« Reply #130: 13.09.07 at 23:31 »
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And, for the time being, that TLS review is available without your having to go through a pay wall.
 
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Re: Clive's Cultural Amnesia.
« Reply #131: 14.09.07 at 09:10 »
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on 13.09.07 at 21:31, Tiny_Montgomery wrote:
Cultural Amnesia is reviewed in this week's TLS by Adam Bresnick; an admiring, but not uncritical notice.
 

 
Here are a few notes which may help those who are even less familiar with Montaigne's work than I am read the rather opaque opening paragraph of Adam Bresnick's otherwise thoughtful and admirable TLS essay.
 
QUOTE
"In 1576, having sought refuge from public life and taken up residence in the library of his family estate near Bordeaux, Michel de Montaigne gave instructions for an engraved medal to be placed on a wall above his writing desk: Que sais-je?* This admonishment to be sceptical in the face of received knowledge was to be Montaigne’s motto during the composition of the Essais, the great record of his mind over the last two decades of his life. “Ainsi, lecteur, je suis moi-même la matière de mon livre”, cautions Montaigne; “ce n’est pas raison que tu employes ton loisir en un subject si frivole et si vain.”** A finer example of what the rhetoricians call praeteritio*** could hardly be found, as Montaigne’s winking warning invites the reader to accompany him on a kind of holiday journey as he embarks on the thrilling endeavour of sketching the intellectual terrain of Renaissance humanism. "
 
NOTES
 
*     What am I?
 
**   Thus, reader, I am myself the matter of my book: it is not reasonable that you employ your leisure on a subject so frivolous and vain.
 
***pretended omission for rhetorical effect.  
 
Example 1
 
That part of our history detailing the military achievements which gave us our several possessions ... is a theme too familiar to my listeners for me to dilate on, and I shall therefore pass it by. Thucydides, "Funeral Oration"
 
Example 2
 
Let us make no judgment on the events of Chappaquiddick, since the facts are not yet all in. A political opponent of Senator Edward Kennedy
 
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Re: Clive's Cultural Amnesia.
« Reply #132: 17.09.07 at 10:38 »
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I personally find it heartening when I see that people who main interest in life is not literature, or the arts in general, are willing to show that they are widely read and are not afraid of saying so to anyone who will listen. So when, for instance, Jesse Cohen, a science writer and editor of some repute, posts this recommendation to his The Gramophone and Typewriter Company online diary, I am inclined to pay a little more attention to what he has to say than I would to what someone whose prime interest is the liberal arts has to say.  
 

Sunday, September 16, 2007
 
On Clive James
 
Adam Bresnick is a legendary English teacher at New York's Collegiate School (my alma mater, although he started teaching after I had been graduated). His take on Clive James in the Times Literary Supplement is perceptive and keen--and worth a read.
 
Unforgetting with Clive James - TLS Highlights - Times Online
 
....................................
Posted by Jesse at 3:17 PM
 
Labels: Clive James

 

 
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Re: Clive's Cultural Amnesia.
« Reply #133: 22.09.07 at 13:30 »
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on 13.09.07 at 21:31, Tiny_Montgomery wrote:
Cultural Amnesia is reviewed in this week's TLS by Adam Bresnick; an admiring, but not uncritical notice.

 
This is an interesting way of reading, or should I say of not reading, Cultural Amnesia.
 
CULTURAL AMNESIA: ADAM BRESNICK ON CLIVE JAMES
by Thomas Riggins
 
Clive James' "Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the margin of my time" is 896 pages long and made up of 106 essays ranging over the cultural and historical debris of the 20th century. It is reviewed by Adam Bresnick in the TLS for 9-14-2007.  
 
In a busy world with zillions of books should you invest your time in reading this gigantic tome? If the review is any indication of the contents of the book I would say both yes and no. It depends on your intellectual commitments. Clive is supposedly a "humanist" and opposes the hoary and meaningless abstraction of "totalitarianism." He appears, from the review, to be merely a conservative pro-imperialist intellectual snob. If you like that kind of writing this is the book for you.
 
You will learn that "Soviet communism and Nazi fascism are obverse sides of the same murderous coin." History doesn't appear to be one of James' strong points. He should read Isaac Deutscher's "Stalin" to find out the differences between a system dedicated to war, conquest and genocide and one that ended up brutal and backwards due to trying to improve the world without the material and moral means of doing so. The Catholic Church produced both St. Francis* and Torquemada*. The Soviet system produced its share of both but the Nazi's were Torquemada down the line.
 
James writes the following idiotic observation (based on reading cold war hacks such as Raymond Aron), "The liberal believes in the permanence of humanity's imperfection; he resigns himself to a regime in which the good will be the result of numberless actions, and never the result of conscious choice." So, I won't join the the Society for the Abolition of Slavery because I would be making a conscious choice and should rather rely on the numberless actions, presumedly of "good" masters, to bring about some improvements in the imperfection of humanity. James may have a great "style" but he has a sponge for a brain.
 
Even Bresnick, who approves of the book and this way of thinking is forced to admit that "Jamie's literary and musical sensibility may be problematically conservative" [tastewise that is] and that sometimes he "gets carried away with himself [phrase making]" and also at times it is difficult "to take James seriously" (he seems not to have understood "Paradise Lost").
 
All in all this seems to be a book by a gifted stylist and intellectual narcissist whose understanding of the world is warped by ruling class cold war ideology masquerading as a profound understanding of reality. Don't waste your time on this one.

 
It’ll come as no surprise at this point that Thomas Riggins, the author of this piece, leans somewhat to the left. If the attempted apologia for what happened in the Soviet Union did not tip the reader off, then the  “this seems to be a book by a gifted stylist and intellectual narcissist whose understanding of the world is warped by ruling class cold war ideology masquerading as a profound understanding of reality” sentence gives the whole game away. Nor will it come as much of a surprise to the reader to find that he is in fact of the editors of the American online Marxist magazine Political Affairs.***
 
Kevin Cryan
 
*St. Francis of Assisi
 
**Tomás de Torquemada
 
***Political Affairs - A Marxist Monthly
Political Affairs is a monthly magazine of ideology, politics, and culture. Our mission is to go beyond simply giving an account of events to providing analysis and investigating what is new and changing in our world -- from a working-class point of view.  
 
In the pages of PA we start from the most basic fact of life: the ongoing struggle between the working class and the capitalist class. This conflict happens in the workplace, in the government, the courts, on the streets, but also in the realm of ideas. We publish stories on the struggle to defeat George W. Bush and his gang of far-right thugs, the labor movement, the battle for racial justice, the end to war and imperialism, women's equality, the fight against homophobia, and working-class views of popular culture and mass media.  
 
While we are partisan, Marxism is not the private property of any person or group. We print a wide variety of views in our quest for truth. Discussion and debate are the only ways to develop better and more useful ideas to defeat the far right, strengthen working people, and build democracy. Political Affairs is a publication of the Communist Party, USA.
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Re: Clive's Cultural Amnesia.
« Reply #134: 23.09.07 at 06:35 »
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Code:
Don't waste your time on this one.

 
Well, fair enough, I suppose.  It's clear that Riggins didn't waste any of his...
 
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Re: Clive's Cultural Amnesia.
« Reply #135: 26.09.07 at 22:03 »
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And oddly, for an avowed Philip Larkin fan, Clive James wrongly hyphenates Church Going in Cultural Amnesia.
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Re: Clive's Cultural Amnesia.
« Reply #136: 26.09.07 at 23:08 »
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"It was very, very hard to write and very difficult to edit – and we're still editing it."  
"It's got misprints in six languages. It's been very hard work....."
Clive James to The Dominion Post
 
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Re: Clive's Cultural Amnesia.
« Reply #137: 03.10.07 at 22:04 »
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I’m not certain that I should approve of this, but an Italian blog, Editoriali & altro...* has reprinted an article about the publication of Cultural Amnesia which the original publisher Corriere Della Sera, is releasing willing to pay a small fee of € 5,00..
 
The writer does appear to have read the book and has certainly done homework on Clive.  
 
I do rather like how, in the last paragraph, without feeling any way superior, or without making apologies, the writer accepts what he or she thinks Clive is saying.
 
“Appassionato lettore di Croce, chiude il capitolo a lui intitolato con un’acuta notazione sulla differenza che separa noi italiani dagli anglosassoni. "In Italia c’è sempre un filosofo da leggere prima di leggere qualsiasi altra cosa, perfino il manuale di istruzioni di un nuovo modello di lavatrice".
 
(A Passionate reader of Croce, he (Clive) closes the chapter on him with note that what separates us Italians from the Anglo-Saxon is that "In Italy Croce is always a philosopher to read before we read any other thing, even the instruction manual for a new model of washing machine".)

  
 
Kevin Cryan  
 
*Editorials & other things...
 
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Re: Clive's Cultural Amnesia.
« Reply #138: 25.11.07 at 14:46 »
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Cultural Amnesiahas made on to only one newspaper's recommended Christmas reading list I've seen so far, that which appeared in online edition of The Telegraph yesterday.
 
Christmas books: Letters and essays
 
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 24/11/2007
 
Helen Brown curls up with the revealing correspondence and inspiring essays of the great and the good
 
While resting solid on tummies full of all the trimmings, collections of letters and essays are perfect Christmas reading. When you tire of your own family squabbles, you can comfort yourself with the bickerings of the great and the good.
 
The two heftiest collections this year - John Updike's Due Considerations (Hamish Hamilton, £30, T £26) and Clive James's Cultural Amnesia (Picador, £25, T £23) - begin with endearing apologies for their physical and intellectual breadth.
 
"I had hoped," writes Updike, "that, thanks to the dwindling powers of old age, the bulk would be significantly smaller than that of the two previous assemblages, Odd Jobs (1991) and More Matter (1999)."  
 
But he found there was "no escaping the accumulated weight of my daily exertions". Lucky for us. This marvellously smart collection of musings on cars, poker and sex, and essays on English and American literature, let me get to know one of my favourite authors on his own account.
 
Those who know Clive James best as a TV funny man might find themselves struck by the grandiose tone he takes in his doorstopping Cultural Amnesia.
 
At times, the Australian is at pains to prove his academic credentials. These "Notes in the Margin of my Time" are arranged alphabetically. He begins with a cursory essay on the Russian poet and "broken-nosed beauty" Anna Akhmatova and ends with a heartfelt re-evaluation of the Viennese writer Stefan Zweig.  
 
In between, he writes on Einstein, Freud, Kafka, Mailer, the Manns (Heinrich, Thomas and Michael), Trotsky and Vargas Llosa, the last of whom he regards as the writer who "best exemplified the course of the relationship between literature and politics in the late 20th-century".....[link]
 
 

 
Kevin Cryan
 
PS. My fellow countryman, and onetime Observer TV critic, John Nauguton, in his blog, freqyently refers to The Telegraph as The Torygraph. It's rather a neat way of saying just what he thinks of the paper.
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Re: Clive's Cultural Amnesia.
« Reply #139: 28.11.07 at 22:14 »
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Clive's Cultural Amnesia  essay on Karl Kraus, the turn-of-the-century Viennese coffee-house wit who died in 1936 and was therefore spared the horrors of World War II, is one of the 27 essays included in The Best Australian Essays 2007, edited by Drusilla Modjeska and published by Black Inc.
 
....the often unexpected arguments and wide-ranging subjects of these essays do indeed seem to merit the reckless superlative of the title.

eurekastreet.com.au
 

 
 
 
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