Posts Tagged ‘clive james’
“Here is a book so dull that a whirling dervish could read himself to sleep with it. If you were to recite even a single page in the open air, birds would fall out of the sky and dogs drop dead”*…
Mark Frauenfelder surfaces a 1978 review from the marvelous Clive James…
In 1978, Clive James reviewed the official biography of Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev (General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1964 to 1982) by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, CPSU Central Committee. “I read the whole thing from start to finish, waiting for the inevitable slip-up which would result in a living sentence. It never happened.”…
… Here’s an excerpt from the biography:
The plenum once again proved convincingly the CPSU’s monolithic unity, its stand on Leninist principles, and its political maturity. It demonstrated the fidelity of the Party and its Central Committee to Marxism-Leninism and expressed the unswerving determination of Communists to adhere to and develop steadfastly the Leninist standards of Party life and the principles of Party leadership, notably that of collective leadership, and boldly and resolutely to set aside every impediment to the creative work of Party and people...
“A review of the most boring book in the world,” from @boingboing.net.
And for the masochists among us: the full text of the biography.
* Clive James, from the review
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As we tackle tedium, we might spare a thought for a spiritual forebearer of James: Samuel Johnson; he was born on this date in 1709. A poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor, and lexicographer, Johnson’s best-known work was surely A Dictionary of the English Language, which he published in 1755, after nine years work– and which served as the standard for 150 years (until the completion of the Oxford English Dictionary [see the almanac entry in the “Clive James” link above]). That said, Dr. Johnson, as he was known, is probably best remembered as the subject of what Walter Jackson Bate called “the most famous single work of biographical art in the whole of literature”: James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson.
But Johnson was, in his time, also a famous aphorist– the very opposite of a man he described to Boswell in 1784: “He is not only dull himself, but the cause of dullness in others”– a role he often played as an influential critic…
“What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.”
“Worth seeing, yes; but not worth going to see.”
“A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.”
“I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.”
“A man who uses a great many words to express his meaning is like a bad marksman who, instead of aiming a single stone at an object, takes up a handful and throws at it in hopes he may hit.
Joshua Reynolds’ portrait of Dr. Johnson
“A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing”*…
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s pumped body was like “a brown condom full of walnuts”. Damon Hill’s Formula 1 car was “a modern sculpture propelled by burning money.” Television was “the haunted fish tank”, a sense of humour was merely “common sense, dancing” and a luxury liner was nothing but “a bad play surrounded by water.” Sydney’s Opera House looked like “a portable typewriter full of oyster shells”… and the romantic novelist Barbara Cartland’s maquillage became the most famous make-up in town: “Twin miracles of mascara, her eyes looked like the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff.”
You didn’t need to read Clive James’s books or poems to feel the impact he made on the English language. You only had to watch television or read the papers…
No other writer could capture the popular imagination like this. But this generous, glittering shrapnel of unforgettable imagery all fell outside the realms of Clive’s formal literary career, leaving him with an unfair reputation as a brilliant lightweight who never quite fulfilled his dazzling potential.
The antidote to this is simple. Forget the image; read his work. If Clive James had not been such a popular and familiar figure, it would be even clearer now that we should be mourning the loss, a year ago, of a literary giant…
An appreciation of a late, lamented literary treasure: “The Enduring Prose and Poetry of Clive James.”
Your correspondent heartily recommends James’ remarkable Cultural Amnesia, richly entertaining and deeply enlightening…
This was an 850-page blockbuster, consisting of 106 brief essays, arranged in alphabetical order, on the characters he felt had determined the course of Western culture and liberal democracy’s fight for survival in the twentieth century. Most of those featured were Clive’s heroes—from Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig, by way of Camus and Dick Cavett, Fellini and W.C. Fields, Egon Friedell and Terry Gilliam, Kafka and Keats, Beatrix Potter and Marcel Proust, Tacitus, Waugh and Wittgenstein. Others were his villains—Hitler, Goebbels and Mao, but also Sartre (Stalin’s apologist, “a devil’s advocate worse than the devil himself, because the advocate was smarter”), Edward “Decline and Fall” Gibbon, Alexandra Kollontai and the “dismaying” Walter Benjamin…
See also Adam Gopnik’s appreciation of James, “Clive James Got It Right” (source of the image above).
* Clive James
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As we trip the light fantastic, we might recall that it was on this date in 1884 that the first installment of the first edition of The Oxford English Dictionary was published. Edited by James Murray (“The Professor” in Simon Winchester’s wonderful The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary), it was originally a project of the Philological Society of London, devoted to cataloging the English words that had evaded inclusion in then-current dictionaries. The first edition had the benefit of 27 years of work, by dozens of contributors; the first installment, the full title of which was A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles; Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by The Philological Society, ran to 352-pages, covered the words from A to ant, and cost 12s 6d (or about $668 at current rates). The total sales were only 4,000 copies.
James Murray in the Scriptorium, the home of the OED,
on Banbury Road in Oxford (source)
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