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Some highlights from Clive James\u2019s recent fascinating Cultural Amnesia <\/em> . <\/p>\n Speaking of the lack of adventure in today\u2019s successful careers: \u201cCould there be anything less astonishing than to work day and night on Wall Street to make the millions that will buy the Picasso that will hang on the wall of our Upper East Side apartment to help convince us and our guests that we are lucky to know each other? I have been in that apartment, and admired the PIcass, and envied the owner: I especially envied him his third wife, who had the same eyes as Picasso\u2019s second mistress, although they were on different sides of her nose.\u201d <\/p>\n On dinner with Jay Leno, who fired off one joke after another: \u201cI did my best to come back at him, but it wasn\u2019t a conversation: more like mouth-to-mouth assassination.\u201d <\/p>\n On Wittgenstein: \u201cHis philosophical position was like a defensive aesthetic strategy by which a poet hopes to write poetry in which there is nothing that can be criticized for its looseness: every line a Maginot line.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Some highlights from Clive James\u2019s recent fascinating Cultural Amnesia . Speaking of the lack of adventure in today\u2019s successful careers: \u201cCould there be anything less astonishing than to work day and night on Wall Street to make the millions that will buy the Picasso that will hang on the wall of our Upper East Side […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous"],"yoast_head":"\n