Brainiac Summer Reading -- Part 2 of 5

Included among the large pile of books I've put aside to read over the summer are five reissued fiction and nonfiction classics and/or new anthologies of classic texts.

Check 'em out.

Click here for Part 1 of this series: NEW FICTION.

Click here for Part 2 of this series: REISSUED CLASSICS
Click here for Part 3 of this series: COMICS

"Uncle Cleans Up" (New York Review Books), by J.P. Martin. When NYRB reissued the first "Uncle" book last year, I described the series like so:

Written by J.P. Martin, an elderly English clergyman, and not published until shortly before and immediately after his death in 1966, these fun stories concern the adventures of Uncle, a distracted millionaire elephant who puts up eccentric friends in his enormous skyscraper-castle (I've seen it described as "half Gormenghast and half Disneyland"), and who must ceaselessly defend against Flabskin, Oily Joe, Isidore Hitmouse, Hootman, Jellytussle, and other lowbrow, Blue Meanie-like enemies.

In this second installment, Uncle faces not an external enemy, but infiltration. Homeward, his labyrinthine castle, which houses a multitude, is being sabotaged. The waterworks are tainted with vinegar, the Dwarftown Railway is overcrowded, and The Badfort News is full of lies about Uncle. He must take decisive action!

"The Lathe of Heaven" (Scribner), by Ursula K. LeGuin. Originally published in 1971, this is LeGuin's most Philip K. Dick-like novel, I think. Set in a Portland, Oregon of the near future (2002 or so), greenhouse warming and overpopulation have led to famine, urban blight, and constant rain. There is also a major war going on in the Middle East. A draftsman named George, who claims that he has the power to dream "effectively" (i.e., whatever he dreams comes true), is manipulated by an ambitious psychiatrist who plugs him into an Augmentor that makes his dreams come true on a grand scale. Only with unexpected consequences: Instructed to dream of a world without racism, George turns the skin of everyone on the planet a uniform gray; instructed to dream of a world where overpopulation is no longer a problem, George conjures up a devastating plague, etc.

"On What Cannot Be Said: Apophatic Discourses in Philosophy, Religion, Literature, and the Arts" (Notre Dame), 2 vols., edited and introduced by William Franke. From "negative theology" through deconstruction, Franke gathers classic, modern, and contemporary examples of Western culture's attempts to probe the limits of language, to express that which exceeds all possibilities of expression whatsoever, to bring silence into speech. "For apophatic thinking," Franke explains, "before and behind anything that language is saying, there is something that it is not saying and perhaps cannot say, something that nevertheless bears decisively on any possibilities whatsoever of saying and of making sense." Includes writings from: Plato, Paul's 2d letter to the Corinthians, the Corpus Hermeticum, Augustine, Moses Maimonides, the Kabbalah, Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Teresa of Avila, Holderlin, Kierkegaard, Kafka, Heidegger, Simone Weil, Adorno, John Cage, Beckett, Levinas, Blanchot, and Derrida. Indispensable.

"The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media" (Harvard), by Walter Benjamin. Edited by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin; translated by Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eiland, and others. This volume gathers 45 of Benjamin's essays on the production, reproduction, and reception of art (the title essay, in particular, but also "Theory of Distraction," "Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century," and others); on film (e.g., "Chaplin," "Mickey Mouse," "The Formula in Which the Dialectical Structure of Film Finds Expression"), the publishing industry and radio (e.g., "Journalism," "A Critique of the Publishing Industry," "Reflections on Radio"), and photography (e.g., "News About Flowers," "Little History of Photography"); and on the modern transformations of painting ("A Glimpse into the World of Children's Books" is one of my favorite Benjamin essays). Benjamin had hoped to come up with a comprehensive theory of modern media, but he didn't have time; think of this collection, then, as a Benjaminian constellation of ideas. As in: intriguingly, productively unfinished.

"A Coney Island of the Mind: 50th Anniversary Signed and Limited Edition (with CD)" (New Directions), by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. When I was a college sophomore, in the late 1980s, I discovered an LP of Ferlinghetti reading these poems in the library, and took it out almost every week, for a while. ("I am waiting for my case to come up and I am waiting/for a rebirth of wonder/and I am waiting for someone to really discover America.") They demand to be listened to! I'm looking forward to doing so again, soon.