When asked "What are you reading now" people seem to get disappointed by "The news" as an answer, yet the unexciting truth is that the majority of my reading is the news. I always start with Google News, although I have to admit to configuring it so that science and tech news is the main part of it, then there is arts news, world news, and after that I have had enough.
I also find myself in encyclopedias and dictionaries every day, far more than I am reading books, I like to "look things up". I put it down to rampant curiosity. Other people, being polite say "inquisitive" when they and I both know they mean "a bit mad". It is okay, artists carry the cloak of madness with honor. Where the hint of insanity is problematic for most other professions, artists enjoy the notoriety.
Next come podcasts. Podcasts are my magazines, how I get the light forms of reading that are more about pleasure than anything else. My favorites are the scientific American podcast and This Week In Tech, usually called TWIT.
Last comes books, although I use the term loosely as all my "reading these days is done either in my computer, or in audible form on my iPod. My current book is on the iPod, it is called Cultural Amnesia by Clive James.
Cultural Amnesia is not a little book. In print it is 800 pages long. It is the musings of an astute autodidact who spent 40 years making notes in the margins of the books he was reading. The essays in Cultural Amnesia are the summation of these underlinings of ideas, and like notes in a margin it tends to be morsels of thoughts linked only by the great river of words that James loves.
He has always presented on television as a showman of words both humorous and insightful and the book has much of that, but unlike the smaller stage of a television format, in this book James allows a fuller expression of his philosophy, in particular his revulsion of the way totalitarianism and its kin have subverted art and artists. He eloquently argues a defense of humanism while illuminating the contradictions of fashionable socialism among the intelligentsia of the West during much of the 20th century. Stalin and Hitler cast long shadows throughout this book as prime symbols of political murder and terrorism that strikes at our cultural roots as much as it does at the individuals who were the victims 
or artist-apologists in the West like Pablo Neruda.
I am loving the book. It is perfect for an inquisitive person like myself for the book causes the reader to continually jot down names of books and writers as James's infectious enthusiasm excites a desire to read more. In it's audible format the reader is Clive James himself, and his voice, so used to entertaining over the years, conveys a real sense of what he was feeling as he wrote this bit or that.
An excellent book that is highly recommendable.
Hi again Tony,
I didn't mean to get caught up in your web sites, but they're pretty good! I attended Sydney Technical High School together with Clive James, the school was in Albion Street Paddington, buildings now used by the art school, Clive was extremely clever with words even then.
Regards Keith
Posted by: Keith Sherwood | July 29, 2008 at 02:28 PM