Begin Your Journey With Cultural Cohesion: The Essential Essays Planned By Clive James Accessible As Digital Format

years after the muchheralded publication of Cultural Amnesia, Clive James presents his “prequel”fortynine essays that he has selected as the best of his halfcentury career.
Originally appearing as As of This Writing, Cultural Cohesion examines the twisted cultural terrain of the twentieth century in one of the most accessible and cohesive volumes available.
Divided into four sections“Poetry,” “Fiction and Literature,” “Culture and Criticism,” and “Visual Images”James comments on poets like W, H. Auden and Phillip Larkin, novelists like D, H. Lawrence and Raymond Chandler not to mention Judith Krantz!, and filmmakers like Fellini and Bogdanovich, Throughout, James delights his readers with his manic energy and critical aplomb, This volume, featuring a new introduction, is a onevolume cultural education that few recent books can rival, Wise and illuminating stories from cultural nooks and crannies worth revisiting, For my first Clive James book I chose this over "Cultural Amnesia" because the short, accessible essays in "Amnesia" came off in my bookstore browsing as imperious, even glib I like nonfiction that has some depth.
As a result I was often out of my own, James is the exceedingly rare polymath critic who seems to know everything important about every field of art, and he writes for readers who are already familiar with his subjects.
This means that James's essays aren't the place to be introduced to new writers, poets, and media their purpose is to throw new light on what you've already thought about.
So the firstpages, about poets, were a struggleI know less about poetry than about almost any other art form, and lack even the vocabulary to discuss it intelligently.
The next section, on fiction and literature, was better going, with essays on Chandler, Le Carré, Primo Levi, Mark Twain, and Casanova, The final two parts, on culture and media, were the best, I enjoyed more articles than I can list, and particularly loved the short piece on Peter Bogdanovich, a far more interesting figure than I'd known,

This writing originally appeared in various periodicals from thes through thes, and James updates each with a postscript putting it in context and adding thoughts that were unformed or left unexpressed at the time.
His postscript to the Twain essay astonishingly becomes a thought piece on the societal impact of holding politicians to wishful ideals of how private life should be managed, with the Bill Clinton scandal as an example, and he makes some excellent points that I have not seen made by another commentator inyears.
Brilliant pieces like these, so unexpected, make the book well worth the weeks I spent plowing dutifully through thousands of words above my intellectual pay grade, Someone who's more given to skimming might find them faster, Can't do better than the New Yorker's description: "Clive James is a brilliant bunch of guys, "

Here is the consummate guide to both high and low culture and everything in between, James is brilliant company and a colossal intellect, He's funny He famously described Arnold Schwartzenegger as looking like "a brown condom full of walnuts", intuitive and conversational but always precise and never sloppy in either his language or his reasoning.
He has a mind like a steel encyclopedia and his brain workings are as entertaining as they are formidable in their depth and scope, This book is a collection of James's best essays fromtoand serves as the prequel to his landmark book "Cultural Amnesia, " Highly recommendedAny time spent considering the cultural landscape with Clive James is time well spent, Despite the title, however, there are no real similarities, other than sensibility and wit, between Cultural Cohesion and Jamess masterwork Cultural Amnesia so the two works are not comparable.
I dont begrudge James for going with the marketing idea of leveraging the success of Cultural Amnesia to repackage these essays, but they are not what Cultural Amnesia was: an artfully conceived and created book of essays making a considered argument.
Cultural Cohesion is a repackaged anthology of essays, It is the difference, say, between Sgt, Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band and One, the Beatles collection of greatest hits, Both are worthy but only one is a masterpiece,

Originally published at the turn of the millennium as As of This Writing, The Essential Essays,, the volume also includes postscript commentaries on many of the gathered essays, some of which are charming or informative, others hardly necessary.
The essays are organized by genre or a topic, "Poetry" Auden, Heaney, Lowell, Larkin, Jarrell, Murray, and others, "Fiction and Literature" Lawrence, Agee, Chandler, Conan Doyle, Solzhenitsyn, Orwell, Twain, Levi and others, "Culture and Criticism" Hellman, Mailer and Marilyn, Germaine Geer, Bertrand Russell, books about Nazis, Montale as a music critic, and others, and "Visual Images" paintings, movies, photography.


This little summary gives you an idea of the range of interests and here are some samples of what makes him so rewarding to read:

regarding Gore Vidal he observes, “He sounds like an oracle even when he is wrong: the drawback of oracles.
” On fame, “but even if the wrong people sometimes get famous, it is generally true that only the right ones stay that way, ” On the criticism of Wayne Booth, “But nowadays you can build an impregnable career out of a polite waffle, ” On criticism generally, “Criticism is not indispensable to art, It is indispensable to civilizationa more inclusive thing, ”

That last phrase, though not fully necessary would have been a good title for the collection, A More Inclusive Thing, Its an inclusive and generous intelligence that James brings to the party, which is comprised of him and any and all readers, He waves the flag for Australian literature, world literature, logic and accurate information, civilization, and thoughtful humanity, Cultural Cohesion is an entertaining and rewarding collection of essays, It introduced me to some new artists and made me think freshly about things familiar, validated a few minority opinions of my own and challenged others, All in all, a good and beneficial reading experience that is also reliably entertaining, What a blast! Minor James, The writing is still exquisite, the criticism sharp as ever, but the subjects he chooses are either not worthy of his time or so narrow as to be incomprehensible to all but the most studied devotees.
Always witty, never waggish, "Cultural Cohesion"is a sophisticated book from the author of the most sophisticated recently published book in cultural history, "Cultural Amnesia", Thought as prequel more than a sequel to themasterpiece it is a reedition to "As of this writing",, "Cultural Cohesion" worths every page even though the former the latter achieved such a high standard.
The effect, it may be said, is that readers face a unconfortable position: as Paris audiences after the breathtaking Rite of the Spring première, knowing it would be impossible, even to Stravinsky, surpass the supreme, but longing for more.
The reading is charming and engagging, as James' style style is man himself, said the russian composer proves that critical view and moral judgment may not be siamese twins, as well as intelligence and high calibrated sense of humour must always be good fellows the "friends for life" kind.
Themes are less relevant nonetheless, as they are more circunscribed to anglophone culture aussie poetry, american and british literary critics, good and bad translations, . . but Yeats and Orwell, along with some review to scholarship on general matters, as well, A delightful book. Librarian Note: There is than one author in the GoodReads database with this name, sitelink See this thread for information, An expatriate Australian broadcast personality and author of cultural criticism, memoir, fiction, travelogue and poetry, Translator of Dante. Librarian Note: There is than one author in the GoodReads database with this name, sitelink See this thread for information, An expatriate Australian broadcast personality and author of cultural criticism, memoir, fiction, travelogue and poetry, Translator of Dante. sitelink.